Liberalism's flagship adrift at sea.

• Author: Blow, Richard
• Position: Decline of liberal magazine 'The New Republic'

For the past eight decades, The New Republic has considered itself the foremost political journal of left-leaning intellectual thought. And, at various times during that period, a not insubstantial portion of the Washington establishment has agreed. But for the past several years, TNR has been falling apart. It has lost its mandate, its vision, and numerous editors. It has become smug and cynical -- the embodiment of much that is wrong with political journalism today.

In the most recent chapter of The New Republic's saga, this fall, editor Michael Kelly was unceremoniously canned, becoming the magazine's fourth editor in the past eight years to exit the scene. The departures are not only getting more frequent, they are getting uglier. When Michael Kinsley bid TNR goodbye in January of 1996 (having stayed on as a writer after vacating the editorship), the magazine wrote that "we wish him well, very well" Things had been slightly less loveydovey when editor Hendrik Hertzberg, Kinsley's successor, decamped in 1991; he later recalled leaving TNR because he was fired of being a [liberal] frontman" for the more conservative magazine. When Andrew Sullivan departed abruptly in April 1996, things were tenser still. It's unclear whether Sullivan was fired or quit, but his subsequent disclosure that he was HIV-positive only exacerbated the drama. Literary editor Leon Wieseltier, widely considered one of the forces behind Sullivan's fall from grace, told The Washington Post, "I wish Andrew a long and fruitful life, but he has changed the subject. The problems around this office were not medical problems. He was responsible for an extraordinary amount of personal and political unhappiness"

For the next seven months, through the heart of the 1996 elections, TNR went editorless. (Wieseltier's remark gave fair warning to job candidates -- a number of whom reportedly turned down the prestigious post -- that the magazine's office politics were perhaps more fiercely argued than the politics in its pages) Then in November of last year, and with huzzahs and smiles all round, Kelly was named Sullivan's replacement. TNR's owner, Marty Peretz, called him "my best hire ever." And for some months all seemed well, despite grumblings about Kelly's fixation on the White House's ethical shortcomings at a time when Peretz, a former teacher and current intimate of Al Gore, seemed fixated on Gore 2000. Then, in September, the guillotine dropped, reportedly because Kelly refused to print an item making light of the scandals swirling around Gore. Regarding Kelly's farewell, TNR had not a kind word. A short "Notebook" item read only that "as you may have learned from the newspaper, with this issue Charles Lane succeeds Michael Kelly ... " Lane, the Peretz-penned squib continued, "represents continuity with the deepest traditions of this journal: political independence, intellectual seriousness, good writing, and decency toward those with whom one disagrees" "Outside of TNR's pages, Peretz was even more direct, telling the magazine I work for, George, that Michael Kelly couldn't recognize a big idea if it hit him in the face" That "decency toward those with whom one disagrees" didn't last long.

And so a new editor, Charles Lane, takes the stage, and one can only wonder how long it will be before the curtain falls on him. Will he last through 1998? It would be a surprise. Because these days, The New Republic spins in a cycle of irrelevance and cynicism that spits out some staffers while causing others to flee. The magazine advocates virtually nothing, but finds fault everywhere. Here's TNR's "Notebook" section on U. S. News's "20 Ways to Save the World" issue: "These are not solutions to problems; these are problems shalowly considered by people who mistake earnestness for seriousness..."; on a Time magazine anecdote in which former GOP speechwriter Peggy Noonan offers to keep an eye on one young mother's baby during a Dole rally: "The pampered columnist as babysitting everywoman: let's hear it for civic journalism!"; on journalist Sydney Blumenthal's joining the Clinton administration: "With any luck ... he'll get his back pay." The magazine's features have proven no less vitriolic, a prime example being Hanna Rosin's May 19 piece on this springs volunteerism conference. Focusing resolutely on the pointlessness and phoniness of the gathering, Rosin reduced it all to a self-indulgent gab fest -- thus the piece's title, "Blah-blah" Blah-blah indeed.

But in attacking everything, the magazine has grown confused. What does it stand for? Not truly conservative, certainly not liberal, The New Republic has become increasingly marginal in its own city. One struggles to think of the recent New Republic article that is widely discussed or debated -- in other words, influential. And the examples that come to mind do so for less than sterling reasons: Because they're influential but wrong (Betsy McCaughey Ross's attack on the Clinton health care plan); or wrong and not influential (the excerpt from Charles Murray's The Bell Curve).

TNR, frankly, has grown toxic. As it skitters from one end of the ideological spectrum to another, it falls to radiate the sense of a magazine with a purpose, that wonderful feeling the best magazines provide when you open their covers, of having entered a community with common interests and goals. Too often these days, reading The New Republic leaves one with a bad taste in the mouth.

Which is both an awkward and a sad thing for me to say. Sad, because as a young man I worked at TNR as a...