An elegy for THE NATION

Katrina Van den Heuvel recently commemorated the 25th anniversary of becoming editor of the leftist magazine The Nation.  I'm sorry to say that she's ruined it. (At least she took longer than Tina Brown, who reduced The New Yorker to trendy, weaselly mediocrity well before the end of her six-year tenure.)

Back in the 1990s The Nation was required reading for people like me, in contrast to the wonkish Beltway neoliberalism of The New Republic, which Martin Peretz ruined in his own time.  For me, that magazine's defining moment came in 1986 when they came out in favor of Congress funding Reagan's contra campaign against Nicaragua--for them, anticommunism ultimately trumped their much-vaunted disapproval of terrorism!

But I digress, of course.  Back in the '90s The Nation had two great columnists in Christopher Hitchens (before he became the Pentagon's useful idiot after 9/11--sigh) and Alexander Cockburn.  And Katha Pollitt was also very readable, at least in her early years.  True, there were bores like Jonathan Schell, Daniel Singer and William S. Greider, but better too wide a range of views than too narrow. (I'm looking at you, The Daily Beast!)

What happened next?  Around 2001, The Nation came to represent the "play it safe" left. It goes back to the 2000 election, when Ralph Nader became the scapegoat for Bill Clinton and Al Gore's ineptness, with The Nation's press columnist Eric Alterman leading the charge. 

And I definitely do consider Nader a scapegoat:  Gore might well have lost without Nader on the ballot, and he might well have succeeded with him.  As far as I'm concerned, the real story about the 2000 election is that the left overwhelmingly stayed loyal to the Democrats, even in non-swing states where their support clearly wasn't needed, and realized the worst of both worlds.  If they weren't quite as unanimous as the Democratic Party needed them to be, the latter have themselves to blame.  Wishing, "If only we'd been a bit more unanimous!" is very, very lame.  And more importantly, such scapegoating has made it easier for the Democrats to continue to make the same mistakes and fail again and again.

But The Nation was now in the "play it safe" business.  In 2004 they published an article by an African-American minister appealing to Nader not to run again, urging him to "take back the party" instead. (The power of wishful thinking...) Then the editors  themselves called on Nader not to run again.  But Nader did run again, voters on the left voted Democrat again, and George W. Bush succeeded again.

Pragmatism is a slippery slope.  Consider the 2016 election.  Right after the final California primary (the one where they didn't dare run an exit poll), there was a report in The Nation insisting that the primary hadn't been "rigged" against Bernie Sanders.  And in October they ran a whole slew of articles clearly intended to get out the vote for Hillary.  I actually felt sorry for them!

And now the Clintonites are blaming Sanders for their heroine's embarrassing failure. "If only Bernie hadn't said so many Mean Things about Hillary, everyone would have been happy with her!" (A truly "pragmatic" view would suggest that a candidate who couldn't quite survive being the subject of Mean Things in the primary was a poor choice for the nomination.) The "pragmatists" have gone from scapegoating to killing the messenger.

Which brings us to the 2020 campaign.  Alterman recently wrote an article in The Nation insisting that Sanders represented "too big a risk" for the party! (If Alterman were any more unreadable, he'd be illegible.) Back in 2016, some Democrats convinced themselves that Hillary was a "safer" choice than Bernie, and I suppose they'll back affectionate Joe Biden now...

There's a new leftist magazine with the title Jacobin, which represents what The Nation used to be before drinking the prudence koolaid. They recently published an amusing putdown of Alterman's article by Luke Savage, and a Liza Featherstone article putting down Pete Buttigieg.  And now the latest issue of The Nation has an article disapproving of the "takedown" tone in both articles.  Progressives mustn't say Mean Things, you see.

This article, by one Jeffrey Isaacs, has the ineffable title "For Agonistic Respect on the Left." (I had to look up "agonistic," of course.) Isaacs' admirers call him "thoughtful," but I'd have to say that Savage and Featherstone have more thoughtfulness in their little fingers than in all of Isaacs' semi-educated head!  It ends with the line, "And too much is at stake to risk failure." So don't you dare attack the Democratic Party strategy that's largely produced one defeat after another for the last generation or two...

Here we see The Nation adhering to the "play it safe" mentality that blames the 2016 loss on leftists who didn't know their place saying Mean Things.  And they have some nerve putting down Jacobin for exhibiting the qualities that used to distinguish their own magazine.  The Nation has crossed the line from tragedy into farce.