The New Republic, good riddance!

The allegedly venerable "liberal" magazine, The New Republic, was recently bought by a young, super-rich internet mogul. After a couple of years he decided that it wasn't going anywhere: continuing to lose money, not reaching a newer, more digitally hip audience and fired the editor. Then in reaction to this most of the staff quit.

Establishment talking heads bemoaned this travesty. A serious, thoughtful magazine that published deep thinkers has been ruined! Now it will be a heavily commercialized e-zine that appeals to air-head video gamers and shallow people obsessed with fashion...or sport cars, or whatever.

To this I say "great!" The non-existence of TNR is a step forward for humanity. It was in fact, for decades, a rotten, racist, neo-con, neo-lib (yes, it can be both) warmongering, zionist rag.

The question one might ask is how could it have been deemed to be "liberal?"

The answer would be that is shows the deterioration of American liberalism. Liberalism used to mean support for social equality in terms of race and gender and in terms of elimination of economic barriers to education and employment. It used to mean support for free speech and opposition to militarism. Or, so I thought, when I was in high school in the 1950s Hoosier capital. At age 16 I was viewed as a Soviet agent for liking Hubert Humphrey and being against the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. As I grew up and the 1960s came along a rift opened up between those who wanted to pursue those supposedly liberal goals and those who backslid into "pragmatic" support for US cold war policies and "national security" priorities.

On the domestic scene, these cold war liberals, as we called them (and there was also the term "state department socialists" for those who styled themselves social-democrats from groups like the old Norman Thomas Socialist Party, the League for Industrial Democracy (the unwitting parent of Students for a Democratic Society, and some AFL-CIO leaders)quickly found objections to the battle for racial equality once it moved beyond demands for ending Jim Crow laws.

With the advent of the Clinton era establishment liberalism moved further to the right. Clinton and Gore helped establish The Democratic Leadership Conference which was a vehicle to de-Jesse Jackson the Democratic Party. They wanted to make the Democratic Party a safe place for an average white man.

This is the heritage of The New Republic, and it got progressively worse as time went by. At the time of its happy demise it had the added vile aspect of being a sounding board for mono-ethnic, racist, Jewish reactionaries who spread vitriol and slander against anyone who questioned the supreme virtue of Israel and whatever policies it pursued.

Hooray! The wicked witch is dead.