It’s subtitled “A historical reflection,” but there’s not much reflection in Jeet Heer’s survey of race in The New Republic. Instead, “The New Republic’s Legacy on Race” is for the most part an enumeration of racial demerits, along with a shorter list of racial merits. It’s telling that the editors of the relaunched magazine decided to put this thin piece on the cover of the relaunched magazine.
The first sin was original. The magazine’s founders preferred Booker T. Washington’s meliorism to W. E. B. Du Bois’ demands for full civil rights. Heer finds N-word quotes for the early decades to show the depths of the original sin. Guilt is reduced somewhat by the fact that The New Republic opposed the white violence against blacks that became especially deadly in the 1920s. The magazine also published some of the most important black writers of the mid-twentieth century. But this meritorious inclusion is compromised by the fact that no black women authors were published (a failure mitigated, in turn, by the occasional review of women black authors—Heer is careful to keep score accurately).
In general, then, the first decades of The New Republic represented a white progressivism judged wanting by today’s standards. Then comes Martin Peretz, “a neoliberal owner of a liberal magazine.” He sins mightily. By Heer’s account, Peretz turned The New Republic into a bastion of white male privilege that actively contributed to the lack of diversity in the mainstream media for two decades. Although he never published the N-word, Peretz expressed racist views of Arabs and Mexicans. And then there’s affirmative action, which the neoliberalism of the 1980s questioned. Furthermore, the magazine failed to denounce The Bell Curve, the 1994 book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that analyzed race and IQ, allowing a discussion of the book’s merits to take place in its pages.
Yes, the magazine published a number of black writers during the Peretz era. But they were the wrong ones: John McWhorter, Juan Williams, Stanley Crouch, Shelby Steele, and Glenn Loury. The right ones were ignored, except for Cornel West, about whom Leon Wieseltier wrote a long and very critical article.
Heer’s summation says it all. “Perhaps the core problem with Peretz’s New Republic was that the imaginary readers were unquestionably white. It was hard to imagine black readers picking up the magazine, let alone dreaming of writing for it, unless, like The New Republic contributor Walter Williams, they were readers who thought the Confederacy has some merit.”
The innuendo is clear. We should be deeply thankful to Chris Hughes for delivering a great American institution from the hands of a cabal of white men from Harvard who are aren’t all that different from Jefferson Davis.
Given the recent unfortunate events at The New Republic, it’s not surprising that the new editors would want to run a hit piece like this. Nothing good was betrayed. On the contrary, it was long past time to put The New Republic on a genuinely progressive footing. “The range of non-white voices in the magazine needs to expand.” It needs writers “who aren’t just talking to an imaginary white audience but are addressing readers who look like the world.”
I have no particular reason to defend or attack Martin Peretz and his era at The New Republic. It was a good magazine, but not indispensable, at least not to me. I was a regular reader during the neoliberal period in the 1980s and into Andrew Sullivan’s tenure as editor in the 1990s. The magazine was an important voice of liberal self-criticism back then. It helped me think some things through. And I was grateful to be treated as a grownup who took books and ideas seriously.
Doubtless Heer would say that his essay continues in that tradition of liberal self-criticism. But his essay reflects some of today’s most superficial and uncritical pieties. First, an approach that parses the good guys from bad guys on the basis of who supported Booker T. Washington is only possible if we assume a position of smug, a-historical moral superiority. In this respect Heer is typical of today’s progressives. They’re very confident in their denunciations.
Second, Heer uses identity politics as a cover for his own ideological convictions. It’s very telling that some black writers don’t count. Why? Because they don’t hold the right views. This happens all the time on the left. Women’s issue are issues of concern for women who hold liberal views. Women who hold conservative views don’t count.
Third, this use of identity politics as a cover for a political agenda necessarily short-circuits substantive discussion of ideas, which is exactly what we see in this essay. Not a single paragraph discusses the ideas about racial justice that Walter Lippman and others promoted, ideas that can only be fully understood in the historical context of early and mid-twentieth century American politics as as whole. The same goes for debates about affirmative action in the 1980s, a debate to which some of the most important and talked about black contributions appeared on the pages of The New Republic. Instead, we get a politically correct score card.
Fourth, the future Heer envisions reflects the managerial elitism of today’s left. Chris Hughes and his team need not nurture ideas or advance convictions. Instead, they need only hire for “diversity.” With writers who “look like the world,” the magazine will automatically be “progressive.” That’s the managerial promise of multiculturalism.
None of this bodes well for the future of The New Republic. Nor for the future of liberalism.
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
