Stop letting Marty write the editorials!
I fear for what's going to happen to The New Republic once Martin Peretz retires and hands it off to Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt. I get a lot of liberals' frustration with the magazine, but as a combination of readability and substance, I still think it's the best thing out there. Who wants to read something you agree with all the time, that doesn't challenge your convictions, even if the challenge only strengthens them? It probably helps that I was too young to experience the Sullivan and Kelly years, but to be fair, Marty Peretz wasn't the only person to make the Kelly mistake. Something about Kelly really resonated with the self-loathing aspect of liberalism -- at the Atlantic and the New Yorker as well, not to mention the WaPo op-ed page.
Selling the mag to the right, though, even to the sanish, New York right, was a betrayal of American liberalism I can't forgive (especially since there were alternatives). Neoliberals challenged liberalism where it was weak and ineffective. Neoconservatives became disgusted with and rejected liberalism out of hand. Peretz, while his liberalism survived the 60s and 70s that turned a lot of the neocons, is clearly now the latter, and it's a tragedy that The New Republic is going to be another victim of that kind of soured liberalism, the same, I would say, that has gradually destroyed the neoliberal movement. While neoliberalism's contributions to American political discourse have mainly devolved into either spiteful nihilism (see Mickey Kaus or Al From) or comfortable, milquetoast conformity (where, sadly, I'd put the current Washington Monthly or James Fallows' devolution -- along with Josh Green -- into the Atlantic's anti-muckraker), TNR has always avoided being milquetoasty. Even when it's wrong -- like on the War -- it's never milquetoasy. That, I think, is the biggest secret of its success. (People who say it's opinion is increasingly irrelevent on the left are wrong; it was the major reason why the 2005 version of the bankruptcy bill became the liberal cause it did, and its recent "hackocracy" issue was the toast of the liberal net for days. If it's less influential in Washington these days, that's probably because, like everybody, it's a lot more partisan than it used to be, which takes it out of the current Admin's orbit.) Rather than adopt the neoliberal third way, TNR has balanced itself, with varying degrees of success, between liberal and neoconservative, which makes for more interesting, outside-the-box analysis. But how much longer is that going to last? One is left in the position of hoping Peretz sticks around as long as possible, even while we resent him, for fear of what he's chosen to follow him.
At least when they don't let him write the editorials. This week's is a case in point, a convoluted, pretentious, resentful, stream-of-conciousness mess. (They're not always like this, but this one is pure Marty. It's usually easy to tell when he's the author; here's another example.) It's also unbelievably bad timing, given this new article from The American Prospect's Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, to which TNR, as one of the bastions of liberal hawkery eloquently attacked in the article, owes a pretty serious response. To put it mildly, Peretz' latest isn't it.
Just to wade a little into the muck, Peretz begins with the standard self-righteous tut-tutting of the evil pacifist left:
Too many people speak of the insurgency in Iraq not just as a security problem and an obstacle to political progress, but intent on stealing sovereignty from its rightful owners. The insurgency in Iraq is not just a practical problem. It is the new expression of the old hostility to freedom.
This doesn't even make sense. Presumably, those people "speaking...as if the Sunni jihadists and their Baathist comrades of convenience constitute a legitimate resistance to some brutal [colonial/imperial] tyranny" aren't arguing the insurgency is just a "pratical problem". Talk about setting up one strawman and knocking down another.
Peretz, having dissed those who blame-America-first for bigfooting, then goes on to... blame Iraq's ugly history on Western meddling:
Some count this barbarous regime back 30-odd years before the toppling of the tyrant's bronze statue in a Baghdad square. But, in truth, it was Great Britain and the League of Nations that launched Iraq after World War I, pasting it together from three previously unrelated Ottoman provinces, under a Sunni king they imported from the Hijaz--a descendant of the prophet, no less--as a consolation prize for losing Arabia to the marauding house of Saud (and for the French having cut short his reign as king of Syria). There begins the modern history of Mesopotamia, a fiendish one that ended only in 2003.
Nice history lesson, but doesn't that just lend credence to those who complain that the Americans in Iraq are acting like neo-imperialists? Afterall, it's happened before, right down to the importing and propping up of a West-approved ruler. If anything, Peretz is just fortifying his first strawman (which remains a strawman since America-haters aren't seriously informing the debate and aren't TNR's audience even if they were. People who openly root for chaos in Iraq can be safely ignored. Those who might do so privately should, liberally, be given the benefit of the doubt.)
The illogic keeps coming:
The intervening years have been, to say the least, marked by chaos and difficulty--over which many mischievous critics have gloated. But even those who still have hope for Iraq after Saddam Hussein must acknowledge that the Bush administration bears some responsibility for the torments of recent years.
So where exactly is the line between mischievous "gloating" and fulfilling our duty to "acknowledge the Bush administration bears some responsibility" for the failure in Iraq? Who exactly, among people who might read a TNR editorial doesn't do the latter? And note the passive-aggressive suggestion that anyone who gloats has no hope for Iraq. What crap.
It gets even worse:
It has been axiomatic from the beginning that the Sunnis (and, some insisted, even the Baathists) needed to be brought into the post-Saddam political process. Otherwise, Iraq could not return to normality. But Iraq was never normal. The problem apparently is that, to many Iraqi Sunnis, normality is dominance. It has become their habit, a habit reinforced by the Saudis and Egyptians intrusively proclaiming a Shia victory in Iraq an apostate menace to the entire Muslim world...
Good God. This is so convoluted it's hard to tell what he means. Either he's contradicting himself -- yes the Sunnis have to be accomodated, but no, they're not actually worth accomodating (compared, I suppose, to the Shia. Is Peretz arguing that Mubarak's Egypt and Saudi monarchy are qualitatively worse than the Iranian ruling class?) Or he's implicitly arguing that the Sunnis should just be stomped because they're... well, pretty evil. If that's what he's getting at, why this later bit?: "The lull in violence surrounding the election may even demonstrate that Sunni political groups that urged their followers to vote, like the Sunni Endowment and the Iraqi Islamic Party, are gaining on the jihadis. (The Sunnis, after all, are not monolithic.)"
At best, this is poorly thought out mawkishness, exactly the sort of disconnected, irresponsible hawkery Rosenfeld and Yglesias are talking about. At worst, it's an expression of knee-jerk tribal racism... hardly a stereotype Peretz wants to be confirming for himself or his magazine or for hawks in general. And for all the praise Peretz heaps on democracy at the end (before swinging off on a weird concluding tangent about Saddam's trial), he's pretty blase about the rather credible evidence of vote fraud in the Sunni province of Ninevah.
It's bad enough when Peretz writes in his own voice for the magazine, invariably nursing his obsessive Israel-related grievances. When he writes as "The Editors", things really go downhill. If only there was some reason to wish for a better tomorrow at the magazine. Alas, there's almost certainly not.
Update: I've pissed off at least one of the journalists mentioned above. I don't want to change the post at this point, but, as I wrote in the comments, it was unfair, and bad blogger ethics, to make the sort of drive-by condemnations of specific writers' entire outputs that I did in the second paragraph, without giving any specifics. It would have been better to leave the second half of that paragraph out of the post.
Selling the mag to the right, though, even to the sanish, New York right, was a betrayal of American liberalism I can't forgive (especially since there were alternatives). Neoliberals challenged liberalism where it was weak and ineffective. Neoconservatives became disgusted with and rejected liberalism out of hand. Peretz, while his liberalism survived the 60s and 70s that turned a lot of the neocons, is clearly now the latter, and it's a tragedy that The New Republic is going to be another victim of that kind of soured liberalism, the same, I would say, that has gradually destroyed the neoliberal movement. While neoliberalism's contributions to American political discourse have mainly devolved into either spiteful nihilism (see Mickey Kaus or Al From) or comfortable, milquetoast conformity (where, sadly, I'd put the current Washington Monthly or James Fallows' devolution -- along with Josh Green -- into the Atlantic's anti-muckraker), TNR has always avoided being milquetoasty. Even when it's wrong -- like on the War -- it's never milquetoasy. That, I think, is the biggest secret of its success. (People who say it's opinion is increasingly irrelevent on the left are wrong; it was the major reason why the 2005 version of the bankruptcy bill became the liberal cause it did, and its recent "hackocracy" issue was the toast of the liberal net for days. If it's less influential in Washington these days, that's probably because, like everybody, it's a lot more partisan than it used to be, which takes it out of the current Admin's orbit.) Rather than adopt the neoliberal third way, TNR has balanced itself, with varying degrees of success, between liberal and neoconservative, which makes for more interesting, outside-the-box analysis. But how much longer is that going to last? One is left in the position of hoping Peretz sticks around as long as possible, even while we resent him, for fear of what he's chosen to follow him.
At least when they don't let him write the editorials. This week's is a case in point, a convoluted, pretentious, resentful, stream-of-conciousness mess. (They're not always like this, but this one is pure Marty. It's usually easy to tell when he's the author; here's another example.) It's also unbelievably bad timing, given this new article from The American Prospect's Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, to which TNR, as one of the bastions of liberal hawkery eloquently attacked in the article, owes a pretty serious response. To put it mildly, Peretz' latest isn't it.
Just to wade a little into the muck, Peretz begins with the standard self-righteous tut-tutting of the evil pacifist left:
Too many people speak of the insurgency in Iraq not just as a security problem and an obstacle to political progress, but intent on stealing sovereignty from its rightful owners. The insurgency in Iraq is not just a practical problem. It is the new expression of the old hostility to freedom.
This doesn't even make sense. Presumably, those people "speaking...as if the Sunni jihadists and their Baathist comrades of convenience constitute a legitimate resistance to some brutal [colonial/imperial] tyranny" aren't arguing the insurgency is just a "pratical problem". Talk about setting up one strawman and knocking down another.
Peretz, having dissed those who blame-America-first for bigfooting, then goes on to... blame Iraq's ugly history on Western meddling:
Some count this barbarous regime back 30-odd years before the toppling of the tyrant's bronze statue in a Baghdad square. But, in truth, it was Great Britain and the League of Nations that launched Iraq after World War I, pasting it together from three previously unrelated Ottoman provinces, under a Sunni king they imported from the Hijaz--a descendant of the prophet, no less--as a consolation prize for losing Arabia to the marauding house of Saud (and for the French having cut short his reign as king of Syria). There begins the modern history of Mesopotamia, a fiendish one that ended only in 2003.
Nice history lesson, but doesn't that just lend credence to those who complain that the Americans in Iraq are acting like neo-imperialists? Afterall, it's happened before, right down to the importing and propping up of a West-approved ruler. If anything, Peretz is just fortifying his first strawman (which remains a strawman since America-haters aren't seriously informing the debate and aren't TNR's audience even if they were. People who openly root for chaos in Iraq can be safely ignored. Those who might do so privately should, liberally, be given the benefit of the doubt.)
The illogic keeps coming:
The intervening years have been, to say the least, marked by chaos and difficulty--over which many mischievous critics have gloated. But even those who still have hope for Iraq after Saddam Hussein must acknowledge that the Bush administration bears some responsibility for the torments of recent years.
So where exactly is the line between mischievous "gloating" and fulfilling our duty to "acknowledge the Bush administration bears some responsibility" for the failure in Iraq? Who exactly, among people who might read a TNR editorial doesn't do the latter? And note the passive-aggressive suggestion that anyone who gloats has no hope for Iraq. What crap.
It gets even worse:
It has been axiomatic from the beginning that the Sunnis (and, some insisted, even the Baathists) needed to be brought into the post-Saddam political process. Otherwise, Iraq could not return to normality. But Iraq was never normal. The problem apparently is that, to many Iraqi Sunnis, normality is dominance. It has become their habit, a habit reinforced by the Saudis and Egyptians intrusively proclaiming a Shia victory in Iraq an apostate menace to the entire Muslim world...
Good God. This is so convoluted it's hard to tell what he means. Either he's contradicting himself -- yes the Sunnis have to be accomodated, but no, they're not actually worth accomodating (compared, I suppose, to the Shia. Is Peretz arguing that Mubarak's Egypt and Saudi monarchy are qualitatively worse than the Iranian ruling class?) Or he's implicitly arguing that the Sunnis should just be stomped because they're... well, pretty evil. If that's what he's getting at, why this later bit?: "The lull in violence surrounding the election may even demonstrate that Sunni political groups that urged their followers to vote, like the Sunni Endowment and the Iraqi Islamic Party, are gaining on the jihadis. (The Sunnis, after all, are not monolithic.)"
At best, this is poorly thought out mawkishness, exactly the sort of disconnected, irresponsible hawkery Rosenfeld and Yglesias are talking about. At worst, it's an expression of knee-jerk tribal racism... hardly a stereotype Peretz wants to be confirming for himself or his magazine or for hawks in general. And for all the praise Peretz heaps on democracy at the end (before swinging off on a weird concluding tangent about Saddam's trial), he's pretty blase about the rather credible evidence of vote fraud in the Sunni province of Ninevah.
It's bad enough when Peretz writes in his own voice for the magazine, invariably nursing his obsessive Israel-related grievances. When he writes as "The Editors", things really go downhill. If only there was some reason to wish for a better tomorrow at the magazine. Alas, there's almost certainly not.
Update: I've pissed off at least one of the journalists mentioned above. I don't want to change the post at this point, but, as I wrote in the comments, it was unfair, and bad blogger ethics, to make the sort of drive-by condemnations of specific writers' entire outputs that I did in the second paragraph, without giving any specifics. It would have been better to leave the second half of that paragraph out of the post.
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