The death of contrarianism: the New Republic returns to its Progressive roots as a cheerleader for state power.

• Author: Welch, Matt

IN THE SPRING of 2007, two era-defining liberal opinion journalists-up-and-coming self-styled "wonk" Ezra Klein, then just 22 years old, and "neoliberalism" godfather Charles Peters, already on the wrong side of 80--met for a discussion swollen with meaning about a magazine neither worked for, The New Republic.

Klein, then at The American Prospect, a progressive D.C. opinion magazine founded in 1990, wanted Peters, founder (in 1969) of The Washington Monthly, to answer for the way neoliberalism had degenerated into lefty-on-lefty contrarianism. "What has happened, at least to some younger folks like me," Klein said, "is that at times this appears to have become not an honest critique, but a positioning device. The idea that it's not about the quality of the argument, but the display: You show honesty by attacking Democrats, you show independence by attacking liberals. At times I think that has been a damaging impulse on our side?'

Peters, already speaking in the past tense about Washington Monthly-style neoliberalism, wanted to make one key difference clear: "We were not Marty Peretz, Peter Beinart, and Michael Kelly."

Those three men were, respectively, the owner of The New Republic (TNR) for most of 1974 to 2011, the editor of TNR from 1999 to 2006, and the (conservative) editor of Progressivism's flagship magazine from 1996 to 1997. Under Peretz's tenure, The New Republic gobbled up a series of bright young journalists first groomed by Peters at The Washington Monthly-Michael Kinsley, Mickey Kaus, Gregg Easterbrook--and launched a series of lefty-infuriating journalistic crusades against Lyndon Johnson's welfare policies and Hillary Clinton's health care reforms, and in favor of the forcible overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The New Republic's full-throated support for the Iraq war (Beinart wrote a rallying cover story that became a book entitled The Good Fight) became the last straw for a new breed of left-of-center commentators who a generation before would have been lining up to work for what was once referred to as "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. "The likes of Ezra Klein mocked TVR's reliable hawkishness as "mercilessly frivolous"; Peretz returned the favor by describing Klein as one of those "cold Jews or almost Jews or non-Jews who cannot stomach Zionism because it is of this world."

The magazine's circulation plummeted an estimated 40 percent during George W. Bush's presidency, triggering a series of staff cuts and ownership shuffles. Its brand of progressive-tweaking contrarianism seemed dangerously out of step with the rising tide of earnest, activist-government Obamaism. Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the popular liberal netroots site The Daily Kos, spoke for many when he declared in 2006 that "TNR'S defection to the Right is now complete."

Well, those days are now gone. In March 2012, Peretz sold the magazine to baby-faced Facebook billionaire and Obama social media guru Chris Hughes. After nearly a year of hiring, expanding, and reorganizing, Hughes (who, like Peretz, gave himself the titular role of "editor in chief") unveiled a redesigned New Republic, featuring on the cover a laughably softball interview that Hughes and TNR Editor Franklin Foer conducted with President Barack Obama. (Sample question: "You spoke last summer about your election potentially breaking the fever of the Republicans. The hope being that, once you were reelected, they would seek to do more than just block your presidency. Do you feel that you've made headway on that?")

The second redesigned issue featured a cover concept as fresh as a Ronnie Ray-gun joke: Against an all-white background a small headline read, "The Republicans: The Party of White People." Another headline tease above the masthead...