After this, I promise to shut my trap about TNR (for a while): It is important to recognize that nothing about TNRs idealistically hawkish approach to foreign affairs was especially conservative. On the contrary, it was also the outlook of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson — card-carrying liberals all. After the Vietnam debacle and the rise of skepticism among Democrats about armed intervention abroad, many supporters of Cold War liberalism decamped to the Republican Party, voting for Ronald Reagan, supporting his strong stand against the Soviet Union, endorsing supply-side economics, allying with religious conservatives, embracing populist demagoguery. These were and are the neocons. The New Republic, by contrast, was a magazine by Cold War liberals who remained liberals — who didnt jump ship to the conservative movement and the Republican Party, who dissented from some aspects of Great Society liberalism but not others, who didnt become neocons. That made TNR somewhat more conservative on some issues than mainstream liberal opinion, but on most issues far more liberal than National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and the other leading journals of the right. It also made TNR by far the most interesting, unpredictable, ideologically heterodox, and intellectually stimulating magazine in the country for years on end — provided that one was willing to be provoked and goaded into thought by smart, sharp, passionate argument.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 13:44:52 +0000
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