The news that The New Republic is going bi-weekly has got to be good news all ’round. To begin with, the magazine has always been in the vanguard of the War Party: it heralded the onset of World War I, agitated for U.S. intervention in the world’s second great calamity, supported the Vietnam war, emerging as the “liberal” wing of the cold war crusaders, and — true to form — was in the forefront of the pro-Iraq war forces. Although the editors have since seen fit to apologize for their zeal to invade Iraq, the decidedly antiwar tilt of public opinion has exacted a high price in the marketplace.
While political magazines are not exactly moneymakers, and have traditionally been subsidized by rich ideologues with an axe to grind, the decline of TNR’s circulation has been precipitous: from 110,000 down to 50,000 and dropping. Sold to CanWest Communications, a Canadian conglomerate, and shorn of editor Peter Beinart, TNR is positioning itself as the left-wing of the possible. In 2004, when the editor of the magazine published a mea culpa, of sorts, on their support for the war, they entitled it “Were We Wrong?” Back then, they weren’t so sure, but today Foer insists: “The question mark is gone.”
The war wasn’t the only thing Foer & Co. were wrong about, however: Foer wrote a piece for TNR gleefully predicting the swift demise of The American Conservative — a magazine which took the opposite stance from TNR’s on the war — which he referred to as “Buchanan’s surefire flop.” Yet the really big flop is TNR and its Scoop Jackson-Harry Trumanesque brand of “muscular” liberal interventionism, which is today indistinguishable from neoconservatism. Back in ’02, Foer exulted:
Over time it has become clear that on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn’t boosted the isolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of America Firstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that has virtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood and treasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced an unprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support for Israel. … In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn’t have chosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right. … no one on the right is listening anymore. A CBS News” poll from last month shows that 94 percent of Republicans approve of the president’s handling of the war.
Those poll numbers have turned around — with a vengeance. TAC editor Scott McConnell was convinced, as Foer noted at the time, that public opinion, including conservative opinion, would do a turnaround on the war — and he was right. Foer, who opined that, “over time,” the TAC-Buchanan analysis would prove irrelevant, has been proved spectacularly wrong. TAC is on the way up, and not just in terms of circulation: TNR, on the other hand, is on the way down. The magazine’s efforts to re-position itself to blend in to the generally anti-interventionist consensus on the left, is a “surefire flop.” In order to pull it off, they’d, for one, have to get rid of Marty Peretz and his embarrassingly racist screeds, which describe Arabs (and all Muslims) as little more than savages, and they’ll have to do a lot more than re-design their website to make their tired politics palatable.
TNR — wrong about the war, wrong about TAC, and wrong about nearly everything.