Lord of the gadflies; the Nation is pushy and obnoxious. That's why it's so great.

• Author: Alterman, Eric
• Position: Periodical

Lord of the Gadflies

In some ways, The Nation, 1865-1990 (*) is a typical venerable old magazine collection. Its big literary guns of days gone by--Henry James, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, H. L. Mencken--could all be expected to appear in a best of The Atlantic. In fact, they do (see Louise Desaulniers's 119 Years of The Atlantic). The two omnibuses also share a number of America's greatest poets.

So what exactly distinguishes the fiery, self-styled troublemaking weekly from America's oldest and most respectable Boston Brahmin journal? It's not the subject matter; both are dedicated in roughly equal parts to reporting, opinion, and cultural criticism. (The Nation publishes no fiction.) Nor are the two magazines necessarily distinguishable by their writers. Both are dedicated to high-minded, literate, liberalism. The Atlantic tends to lean rightward from liberal solutions while The Nation leans left. Nevertheless, the guts of Robert Reich's recent Atlantic cover story on what's wrong with America could easily have run in The Nation, had Reich wished to forgo a few thousand dollars.

The primary differences, in truth, are the magazines' individual voices. The Atlantic is a dinner party. The Nation is a political rally. Oswald Garrison Villard, The Nation's editor from 1918 to 1934, once remarked that he had "never been able to work happily with men or women who are incapable of hot indignation at something or other. To minimize every evil is to my mind to condone it and in time destroy one's influence." This, more than anything, has been The Nation's credo for the past century. It may also be the reason that the magazine, along with the segment of the electorate it represents, have been so successfully marginalized during the past two decades.

Part of the problem, of course, is ideological. Americans are distinctly uncomfortable with class-based or collectivist-minded rhetoric. This appears to be the case in the 1990s no less than it was in the 1900s. The Nation tries to speak for those who get the rawest deal from society: its poor, its powerless, and its oppressed. These are exactly the folks with whom most law-abiding citizens would like to have nothing whatsoever to do. The political language of solidarity, however much it may be employed on behalf of geopolitical causes comfortably distant from our shores, loses much of its appeal when pitted against individual self-reliance at home.

But the attitude demonstrated by Villard may also...