THE WEEKLY STANDARD WAS WRONG ABOUT ALMOST EVERYTHING: But it was wrong for the right reasons.

AuthorMangu-Ward, Katherine
PositionMEDIA

ON DECEMBER 14, the staffers of The Weekly Standard were called into a meeting and told that the issue they'd just put to bed would be their last. Writers and editors, many of whom had been with the magazine since it was launched 23 years earlier, were ordered to clean out their offices by the end of the day. They were not given boxes.

By Reason's lights, the editors of The Weekly Standard were consistently wrong about almost everything: the advisability of foreign military adventurism, the ethics of bioengineering and reproductive technology, the prospects for a John McCain presidency, and how many biographies of Lionel Trilling any sane human being could possibly be expected to care about, just to name a few.

For The Weekly Standard, the fundamental unit was the nation, not the individual. The magazine's signal achievement was making the case for the Iraq War, and in the wake of 9/11 the editors unreservedly endorsed classical notions of martial valor, civic duty, and traditional masculinity. They stuck by drug prohibition and straights-only marriage even as the nation left those notions behind.

And yet.

Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, Steve Hayes, and the rest of the gang put together a magazine every single week because they thought that by doing so they could make the world a better place. And the very act of publishing the magazine was actually a small step toward that end, because the world is a better place when the people with whom you disagree offer the very best versions of their arguments. It's better still if they do so in a carefully curated package on a regular basis.

When The Weekly Standard tweaked its opponents, it did so lightly and in a spirit of fun. When it attacked, it did so advisedly, because it thought a great deal was at stake. And when its writers argued in earnest, as they did most of the time, they did so with the benefit of historical literacy, occasional insider information, and ruthless copy editing and fact checking.

MY FIRST FULL-TIME job in journalism was at The Weekly Standard, so I am far from a disinterested observer. I was an uneasy fit from the beginning. They indulged me as a kind of domesticated pet libertarian--harmless enough, but not ultimately consequential. Which was fair.

Still, the Standard was, in many ways, a home for ideological and partisan misfits. The flagship journal of neoconser-vatism housed more than one anti-war senior editor. Kristol himself, who stepped sideways into journalism from...

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