The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Hughes’s TNR Makeover Is The Obama Administration In Miniature

Posted on | December 6, 2014 | 60 Comments

by Smitty

Emphasis mine:

“Assuming Chris really does plan to dumb it down in the name of clicks, what’s maddening is the way he has betrayed the premise on which he bought it. It’s like buying a historic Victorian mansion with the promise of preserving it — and then carving it into condos two years later,” one former longtime TNR staffer told POLITICO.

“I hope Chris realizes how much intellectual firepower he’s losing here — and how hard it is to fake intellectual substance,” the former staffer said.

I just love it when these Progressives get all emotional about the destruction of institutions. Given that this has been their stock in trade since the Summer of Love, culminating in six years of #OccupyResoluteDesk making a total cock-up of the Presidency, one is left to wonder why the Lefties can’t just enjoy their liberation from “intellectual substance”. This is another suck-is-the-new-cool call from the manor house down to the the peasants working the fields. Dig it, lackeys.

Progressivism is not a creative movement. It is the combustion of traditional, positive, moral values in a propaganda machine for the production of political power. Once all of the moral values of the culture have been burned, Progress will generally collapse into the kind of thuggery most recently seen in Ferguson, MO.

via Hot Air

Category: Democrats

Comments

60 Responses to “Hughes’s TNR Makeover Is The Obama Administration In Miniature”

  1. Wombat_socho
    December 6th, 2014 @ 11:04 am

    “Intellectual substance”? From TNR? They haven’t had much – if any – of that in quite a while.

  2. It Had To Be Said
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:07 pm

    how hard it is to fake intellectual substance

    Isn’t this, really, the story of Barack Obama?

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:08 pm

    This article sums up the navel glazing at TNR well…

  4. GlendaleGreyBeard
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:09 pm

    Well hell as far as “faking intellectual substance” goes, these clown’s hero is none other than Barack Lightweight Obama, who has made a career of faking intellectual substance. Not that these dildos could detect that fact.

  5. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:10 pm

    I must criticize your post because you unfairly malign dildos.

  6. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:31 pm

    Martin Peretz, who was proprietor, managing partner, chief executive, or minority partner for the entire period running fron 1974 to 2012 (and longer than any other who’ve owned the magazine) said not long after the sale that Hughes was ruining the publication in a particularly obtrusive way by turning it into a Democratic Party whore. TNR‘s signature during the period running from 1975 to 1991 was its critical distance from the Democratic Party and from some of the main currents in portside opinion journalism.

    Leon Wieseltier has long been such a publicly humorless and pretentious character (and one suffused with malice now and again) that it’s an effort to feel sympathetic regarding his professional misfortunes. At age 62, he’s about a year short of when most people have retired.

  7. Adobe_Walls
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:35 pm

    They could at least, articulate what the left is thinking, as opposed to the merely screeching, which is useful to know.

  8. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:37 pm

    I cancelled my subscription in 1993, because Andrew Sullivan had made the publication silly. They later went all-in for Albert Gore, Jr., with Peretz firing his deputy for criticizing Gore for unethical conduct in 1997 and thence to the point of flagrantly mendacious commentary on the 2000 ballot counting mess. The Stephen Glass and Scott Beauchamp business amounted to comic relief. Whatever Peretz says about Hughes, the magazine’s decay was well advanced when Hughes was still in high school.

  9. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 12:44 pm

    Back in the day, you might have called them ‘dissident portside’. The red haze publications were contemptuous of them.

    People forget that in the late Cold War period, portside outlets commonly favored the other side, usually through the stratagem of advocacy for Latin American reds and babble about nuclear disarmament. The guilty parties included the Village Voice, Mother Jones, The Nation, and, in a more attenuated way, The Progressive, as well as Anthony Lewis and Mary McGrory (at the Times and Post respectively). The New Republic and Dissent were the most insistent and astringent in taking these people apart.

  10. GlendaleGreyBeard
    December 6th, 2014 @ 1:04 pm

    Oh I don’t know. Like dildos these geniuses at TNR are sort of plastic and hard in the head.

    People who believe they are smarter than everybody else are most often mistaken in that belief. Folks who are really smart usually know there is someone just over the next block who are in fact smarter than they are. I’m highly educated; all that means is that in my working lifetime, I’ve met more than a passel of educated fools. Credentials and IQ scores impress me not one whit.

  11. Esau's Message
    December 6th, 2014 @ 1:06 pm

    May I suggest that we not use the term “total c0ck up” and “suck-is-the-new-cool” in criticizing Chris Hughes? Let us just suggest that he has more money than he knows what to do with and is jejune and callow in equal measure, and leave it at that.

  12. Esau's Message
    December 6th, 2014 @ 1:07 pm

    It’s regularly compared against The Nation, so it seems to have intellectual substance. It ain’t what it was during the 1980s.

  13. mail.comSam Spade
    December 6th, 2014 @ 1:33 pm

    Intellectuals now all get their news on twitter, facebook and you tube!

    WE have experts in DC, working for Obama like Gruber to help us believe! He is, after all and educated expert of note!

    So go on welfare and riot for bigger checks!

    Obama looks highly on social agitation!

  14. JoeyBagels
    December 6th, 2014 @ 2:04 pm

    The New Republic is lefty alright, but it used to be worth reading because it articulated a progressive point of view separate from the Democrat Party–and often at odds with it. It also featured literary essays and book reviews that were often insightful and thought-provoking.

  15. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 3:56 pm

    It also featured literary essays and book reviews that were often insightful and thought-provoking.

    When Jack Beatty was the literary editor. When Wieseltier took over, it seemed like the back of the book was clogged with reviews of literary biographies. I thought if I saw one more review of a work with a title like “Thomas Pynchon: A Life”, I was going to lose my lunch. I suspect Wieseltier had a lot of untenured english professors in his circle of friends.

  16. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 4:02 pm

    It did not occur to me at the time I was an avid reader, but that was not only the problem at TNR, but with all opinion journalism. Thomas Sowell keeps pointing out intelligence is not expertise and articulateness is not intelligence. Sometimes they hit their target (Henry Kissinger has said publicly that one of the best treatments of the dilemmas of maintaining a nuclear arsenal was written by Leon Wieseltier), but usually no.

    Still, there is also an art to putting out an opinion magazine. If you saw Newsweek in its terminal phase, you saw how magazine reporters with their truncated imaginations performed when trying to do what the Peretz crew did every week. The result was repulsive. The problem is that the art is not enough.

  17. MichaelKennedy
    December 6th, 2014 @ 4:03 pm

    I quit after the Gore fiasco.

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  19. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 4:15 pm

    From 1939 to 1951 and from 1977 forward, The Nation was part of the red haze. Not sure about the intervening years.

    The owner Victor Navasky’s big intellectual and emotional investment has been in propagating the idea that Alger Hiss was framed. That’s been an untenable idea for nearly twenty years now, but his circle is still at it. It was one of Navasky’s proteges (Kai Bird) who managed to place a nutty article in The American Scholar a few years back arguing that the ALES of the Venona transcripts was actually a press officer named Wilder Foote. Foote’s grandchildren were not amused at this posthumous libel.

    Ca. 1983, The New Republic had double The Nation‘s subscribers. Twenty-odd years later, those proportions were reversed and then some. I do not think that says anything kind about consumers of portside opinion journalism. Back in the day, The Nation was unreadable birdcage liner.

  20. Esau's Message
    December 6th, 2014 @ 5:02 pm

    Katrina Van Den Heuvel has been the owner of The Nation for some three decades. She has gathered around her the filthiest liars in the business (e.g., David Corn). The Nation is one of the most disreputable publications extant. Yet the New Republic simply cannot measure up, in readership or subscriptions. Look at what has happened to the intellectual Left since the 1970s.

  21. richard mcenroe
    December 6th, 2014 @ 5:15 pm

    TNR has gone from championing Mussolini to Stalin to Occupy. Why should it be missed?

  22. Zohydro
    December 6th, 2014 @ 5:51 pm

    Navel glazing? Sounds painful…

  23. Adjoran
    December 6th, 2014 @ 6:08 pm

    Exactly. The substance started making for the exits in the Reagan era. Andrew Sullivan was the last interesting writer/editor, back before the lesions on his brain made him go insane over gay marriage (he was already certifiable by the time he started the ridiculous ‘Trig truther’ junk).

  24. Adjoran
    December 6th, 2014 @ 6:09 pm

    True, but the left doesn’t really think anymore, just screech, mainly.

  25. Adjoran
    December 6th, 2014 @ 6:12 pm

    It’s part of a leftist ritual. Since they never repent of their sins, they need something over which to gnash their teeth and rend their garments. It’s like a catharsis, so they can get back to propaganda as usual.

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  27. K-Bob
    December 6th, 2014 @ 8:00 pm

    I thought TNR was gone years ago. Their massive audience moved to salon. And by massive, I mean “all 67 of them”

  28. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:08 pm

    I meant navel gazing, but progressives are into sick things, especially in Washington DC!

  29. Matt_SE
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:13 pm

    Don’t worry. We’re equal opportunity H8ers here.

  30. Matt_SE
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:19 pm

    It almost makes one long for the days of the Soviet Union, when the opposition had heft.

  31. Matt_SE
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:21 pm

    When the left dumbed down the schools, did they think the splatter was only going to hit the right?

  32. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:47 pm

    She’s the editor. The owner has variously been Navasky, Arthur Carter, and a partnership put together by Navasky. It used to be worse that it is.

  33. Zohydro
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:52 pm

    +2 for “jejune” and “callow”…

  34. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:53 pm

    During the period running from 1977 to 1991, the editor’s chair alternated back and forth between Michael Kinsley (an engaging and eccentric chap if not altogether straight-up thinker) and Hendrick Hertzberg (a hack). Peretz supposedly worked there 30% time and the magazine was animated by his spirit. I think he cut back later on, because Sullivan was able to bounce at least one editor who’d been there for years and the content of the publication changed noticeably. Michael Kelly was someone to respect, but he only lasted seven months before Peretz fired him (in 1997).

  35. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:58 pm

    They had 97,000 subscribers at their peak ca, . 1983, about as many as National Review and more than just about any other publication with that precise format. I’m not sure whether Mother Jones, The Atlantic, or the New York Review of Books had the largest circulation on the portside at that time, though I’m pretty sure the last of these was the only one which was securely profitable.

  36. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 9:59 pm

    Has Richard Lowry been able to recruit anyone worth reading in the last dozen years? He’s recruited Jason Lee Steorts, Robert ver Bruggen, and Daniel Foster. Things are not looking up in that quarter.

  37. Art Deco
    December 6th, 2014 @ 10:02 pm

    TNR ca. 1983 was pretty explicit about repudiating its red haze past (Hendrick Hertzberg referring to its editorial line in 1947 as ‘outright buffoonery’). Come to think of it, Henry Wallace ca. 1952 wrote mea culpas about what he had been advocating in 1948. The refusal to reconsider dates from a later era.

  38. VictorErimita
    December 7th, 2014 @ 12:33 am

    She is one of the investors put together by Navasky to buy it. She inherited the money.

  39. VictorErimita
    December 7th, 2014 @ 12:38 am

    They respect each others’ fakery. Especially a truly gifted intellectual fake. Hence, the appeal of Obama to the culture of mutual fakery.

  40. Adjoran
    December 7th, 2014 @ 3:47 am

    Kinsley always seemed the sort of fellow who believed he could out-debate you even with weak arguments, but could never concede defeat. He could be witty at times, but not worth the time overall.

    Peretz was an original thinker in some ways, and worth reading more often than not.

    Sullivan was clever and original in his youth. Certainly a change for the magazine, but I was not a regular and didn’t care.

  41. Adjoran
    December 7th, 2014 @ 3:53 am

    But he’s no Buckley or Sullivan by any stretch of imagination. You can recruit a little above your level, but not much. The bar has been lowered (as pretty much everywhere).

  42. K-Bob
    December 7th, 2014 @ 4:06 am

    Well, Obama has definitely faked substance. He just talks like he understands things, and people believe whatever stupid claim he makes, no matter how absurd.

  43. FOAF
    December 7th, 2014 @ 6:18 am

    I’m enjoying the meltdown of TNR but it’s nowhere near as important as the fake UVA rape story. It’s been a long time since TNR was relevant. Hopefully this foreshadows a similar crumbling at other leftist media outposts.

  44. Quartermaster
    December 7th, 2014 @ 9:58 am

    Who in their right mind would want to be Sullivan? Rich Lowry is also a coward.

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  46. Art Deco
    December 7th, 2014 @ 12:29 pm

    There was only one Buckley at the time. None of his peers as editors had his broadcast gig (bar Lewis Lapham, quite briefly) and very few wrote more than one original monograph (Lewis Lapham, Barbara Ehrenreich, Norman Podhoretz, and Norman Cousins (IIRC) wrote some books, but nowhere near the dozens that Buckley penned, and with nowhere near the range of genres).

    Lowry was able in his initial years as editor to place talent in his magazine, some as staff editors, some as contributors. That includes Mackubin Thomas Owens, Victor Davis Hanson, Stanley Kurtz, Jonah Goldberg, and Cathy Seipp. Then it came to a dead stop. The three men named produce work that is pathetic and you have to wonder if the applicant pool has evaporated in the last dozen years.

  47. Art Deco
    December 7th, 2014 @ 12:37 pm

    Sullivan was a philiosphy student who unaccountably did not seek an academic career, though one might have been open to him with degrees from Harvard and Oxford and the option to work either in the United States or Britain. He was never an ace producer of topical commentary. His work in his early years always had these funny lacunae and odd digressions and subsequent thereto he grew increasing obsessed in print with homosexuality – his own and others’.

    He also proved to be troublesome as an editor, to the point where Wieseltier sliced him up publicly as a bad boss (“He has been responsible for a great deal of personal and professional unhappiness”). The content of the magazine came to be littered with such gems as the cover story with the title “Are Rush Limbaugh and David Letterman the Same Person” and the memoir which had two men at an air base in the Canadian maritimes ca. 1950 buggering each other in a barracks full of men and no one billeted there thinking anything of it in the morning. Editorial criticism had collapsed when Sullivan was on his favorite subject.

  48. Wombat_socho
    December 7th, 2014 @ 3:34 pm

    The gutting of the humanities in academia hasn’t just hurt the left.

  49. Quartermaster
    December 7th, 2014 @ 5:04 pm

    Sullivan’s favorite subject is Sullivan. Next is homosexuality. Third is whatever he’s obsessed with today.

    I was never a fan of TNR, but it did have some good articles in the 80s about the denigration of the Military, particularly equipment. After that period passed, they were unreadable and went down the same road the NYT, and Washington Post had blazed.

  50. Quartermaster
    December 7th, 2014 @ 5:09 pm

    Kinsley is a preening idiot. He made Crossfire unwatchable all by himself. Like most lefties, he has a wildly overinflated view of himself.