Skitching for Dollars

 Prestigious 21st Century Sport

Every Newgen seems to have one. Racketball was easy Squash, Pickleball is easy Tennis or 

a jumped up version of Ping Pong, and Elite Mag-Skitching is easy Highbrow Politicating.

I promise I’ll explain the relevance of the new sport I’ve referenced above, but I have learned through many many years of following matters highbrow that the best guide to writing about it appropriately is the original New Yorker magazine. You don’t give away your conclusion or even your intended purpose in writing any article without a slightly off-tangent opening. Which I will give you now.

People are suddenly very concerned about old age. When it comes to people, one can almost understand. 80 seems very old in a man, given how dumb they all are to start with (Kidding. Woke joke for the young’uns.) This kind of suspicion spreads rapidly to institutions. Bad enough that the ancient Ivy League has entered a PR downturn of sorts; how much worse that even the venerable New York Times paper of record has run smack dab into the same kind of ageist bias:

At Breitbart News today. Wittiest head there ever.

But as writers very much older than I (71 and counting backwards or trying) have observed too many times before, there are always “wheels within wheels.” Which is, finally what our highly literary post today concerns.

There is a magazine called the New Republic. It has a long and well documented history beginning in 1914 and is much beloved by its well educated following in the member units of the CHYOS Society.

You can kind of see what they were focused on in 2013, a century after their founding.

The Wiki overview, however, doesn’t convey the full depth and subtlety of the magazine’s intricate history. Why it’s time to take a look at the magazine’s past through the perspective of minds who have known and exemplified it best. 

Very eminent literary journal, the Claremont. As darn close to truly intellectual as California has ever produced in this nation. And we’re not taking any chances here. These are direct quotes from a longer essay you can find here. The reason for not giving you just a link is that you never read anything that doesn’t have breakout quotes, bullet points, or boldfaced passages that shorten the reading time. The boldface here was added by me. Feel free to read the rest of the text too. I’m a highbrow that way myself…

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FTA: <<Herbert Croly, author of a progressive manifesto much admired by Teddy Roosevelt, founded the magazine in 1914. As future contributor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said, it was a year that “marked the high noon of American progressivism.”

On the eve of the First World War, the editors’ recognition that American isolation had ended only intensified their hopes for the spread of liberal ideas. They argued for “benevolent neutrality” in favor of the Allies, and insisted on “peace without victory”—a settlement that would neither impose vengeful terms on the vanquished nor exclude Germany as a full and equal party to the peace.

The Versailles settlement at war’s end dashed their faith both in Woodrow Wilson (with whom the magazine had enjoyed especially close relations after the election of 1916) and in the scientific approach to politics. In “consenting to a vindictive Treaty,” Croly wrote in the magazine in 1920, Wilson had both “rendered future inter-class and international wars inevitable” and “shattered what was left of American progressivism as a coherent body of conviction.”

* * *

After Croly’s death in 1930 the magazine, in pursuit of a new coherence, swerved harder to the left. Foer concedes that between the wars the magazine “willfully glanced past the horrors of the Soviet Union,” and too often apologized for its show trials and purges. (Foer devotes only 19 pages of the anthology to the 1930s, compared to 124 pages for the 1990s.)

Longtime contributor Irving Howe noted in Literature and Liberalism (1976), yet another New Republic anthology, that during the 1930s “the passions of politics became the obsessions of literature.” The “back of the book,” devoted to literary and cultural criticism, reflected just such a sensibility: literature as sublimated politics.

Under the influence of literary editor Edmund Wilson, the back of the New Republic had helped introduce modernist writing to America. But with the arrival at the magazine of Malcolm Cowley three weeks before the Wall Street crash, the tone shifts. Cowley, a Communist fellow-traveler, believed that political and literary radicalism were two forms of the same hybrid commitment. The magazine had earlier backed the Russian Revolution. An April 1918 editorial defended the revolution on liberal grounds and anticipated that it would result in “an incalculable improvement in the chances of human progress.” But as his successor, Alfred Kazin, said, Cowley now bent the trajectory of the magazine “in the direction of a sophisticated literary Stalinism.”

The magazine’s batting average would not improve much against the fascist threats to human progress. In early 1933, it dispatched CBS radio commentator H.V. Kaltenborn to Germany. He offered readers this assessment of Hitler: “He is sworn to obey the Constitution and is likely to do so. The time for a Fascist coup d’état is past. Hitler himself had definitely lost prestige and power before he won the chancellorship.” Bruce Bliven (Croly’s successor) later noted that “the old liberal tradition in America had been isolationist and pacifist, and the editorial board of that day [the late 1930s] suffered from a cultural inertia that made its members slow to recognize the world changes which necessitated a new approach.” During the Second World War, Foer says, the New Republic “devoted more pages to the impending doom of European Jewry than almost every other American publication.” He includes here Kazin’s bracing piece from January 1944 excoriating those “who think that you can dump three million helpless Jews into your furnace, and sigh in the genuine impotence of your undeniable regret, and then build your Europe back again.”

* * *

After the war, the New Republic was taken over by Michael Whitney Straight, a son of the magazine’s genteel early funders. During his student days at Cambridge University in the mid-’30s, Straight had been recruited as a Soviet agent alongside Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, and Kim Philby. (When he learned in 1963 that President Kennedy wished to nominate him as chairman of the newly formed Advisory Council on the Arts, Straight unburdened himself to the FBI and MI-5, but his role was kept from the public until 1981.) Incredibly, in 1957 and 1958 the magazine would commission Philby to write nine pieces about the Middle East.

In 1950—the year Lionel Trilling said that “in the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition”—Straight moved the magazine from New York to Washington. There it adopted the confident “inside the beltway” style that has marked its pages ever since. Not that the New Republic had much suffered from a sense of alienation from political power. At one time or another, the magazine’s editors had cozied up to Woodrow Wilson and to Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president and TNR editor from 1946 to 1948, as they later would to Eugene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, and Al Gore. But under Gilbert A. Harrison, owner and editor from 1953 to 1974, the early sense of being on the periphery entirely gave way.

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Martin Peretz, a Harvard lecturer married to an heiress of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, bought the magazine in 1974. Over the next decades Peretz displayed a talent for mentoring bright young men like Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, Charles Krauthammer, Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kelly, Peter Beinart, and Franklin Foer. Under their editorships, the magazine swung toward liberal interventionism in Bosnia and Kosovo, and then in Iraq, and toward a liberal hawkishness on behalf of Israel. (To demonstrate that the magazine’s Zionist credentials predate Peretz, Foer includes a 1957 essay by Reinhold Niebuhr called “Our Stake in the State of Israel.”)

The autonomous “back of the book,” long since liberated from its Stalinist fetters, meanwhile flourished. Foer’s judicious selection includes superb pieces of literary criticism (James Wood on Norman Mailer); art criticism (Jed Perl on Gerhard Richter); and film criticism (by Stanley Kauffmann, who reviewed movies for the magazine for more than a half-century).

But several of Foer’s selections from the front of the magazine illustrate a more recent tone of liberal sneering: animus for Ronald Reagan (Hendrik Hertzberg’s diatribe “The Child Monarch”) and for George W. Bush (Jonathan Chait’s piece “Mad About You: The Case for Bush Hatred”).

In 2012, Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, bought the financially imperiled publication. (He contributes a bland afterword to Insurrections of the Mind.) Shortly thereafter, Peretz wrote that he no longer recognized the magazine he ran for 35 years: “The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation.”>>

Now, a 110 years after its founding, the magazine has indisputably published writings by highly educated and talented members of the nation’s academic and literary elite. In the course of that time they have praised and defended all manner of political extremists, from Hitler to Stalin abroad and from Wilson to FDR and Henry Wallace at home. The Claremont history would like us to believe this is a natural by-product of far-seeing minds who sometimes pick the wrong horses to carry their utopian hopes. You know. People learn through time. The heirs of the originals are more sophisticated than the forebears. More experience to be guided by. That kind of thing.

But recently, mere weeks ago, they published this:

How droll, derivative, and dull.

Time to discuss “Skitching,” I think. We’ve seen the end of a lot of revered and even fabled print publications in recent years. They go out of business entirely, they become Internet shadows of their former glory, they reinvent themselves in eccentric ways in an effort to attract a new audience, they whore themselves out to the politically correct causes of the day, and they become finally empty, a mere name to which uneducated and unworthy pretenders attach themselves. Which Grewt and small publishing institutions have been thus affected, diminished, made irrelevant? The New York Times and the Washington Post on the left. The National Review and the Weekly Standard on the right. Somewhere in between, Newsweek and Time Magazine, not on the newsstand anymore. Less strictly or overtly political but still affected, the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue (which never put the most beautiful and magnificently dressed First Lady ever on a cover) in favor of this…

And I know there are publications I ceased looking for or following news of decades ago, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Readers Digest, TV Guide, even outliers like Ms. magazine, Penthouse and Hustler… No idea if they exist at all anymore. I’m old, not in touch. I can tell People still exists at some level because they have TV shows on the streaming services, usually in the true celebrity/crime category. 

But what if you’re one of the old names? The ones that still look like American d’Artagnans, aristocrats reduced to rags and beating rather than paying the domestics. That’s a special category. National Review, the Nation, and the Free Republic. And Time and Newsweek of course. Aaaand, I’m guessing, all the once-influential newspapers in the land, including NYT, WAPO, WSJ, LAT, Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun and Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, DesMoines Register, and all the other onetime eminences now he’ll-and-gone. Because they’re all staffed by Skitchers.

Who are these new professional athletes? They find a slow-moving mass media vehicle long past its prime in competence and ethics and hitch a ride with their tiny, nimble, powerless skateboards, do some fancy moves on the street behind the aching editorial numbnuts at the wheel, and build a ride to stardom. Why are they so confident that they can Skitch their way onto the cover or front page? Because no one is paying attention or holding anyone accountable. They learn early that if well fastened to the bumper of a rattly old Cadillac, nobody will notice their acrobatic maneuvers until they’re outrageous enough to require defending by management. Kewl.

Big headlines bring in readers, even if the headlines are all salacious lies. And the Skitchers know they can just imitate bad stories from the past nobody in management wants to talk about to get published. A new sport is born. You don’t need to be accomplished to be a star at National Review or the New Republic. You just have to be attached to the ass end of a very old sputtering vehicle.