Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Make The New Republic Liberal Again

So The New Republic is up for sale. Again. The Facebook exec gave up on it, apparently after first the staff and then the readers gave up on it.

My suggestion? Someone buy it and make it a liberal magazine again. And I mean "liberal" in the real sense — a magazine where ideas are debated and argued and investigated.

Current owner Chris Hughes made it into a magazine that all too often was filled with the same leftwing conventional wisdom that comforts the people who already believe it but doesn't do anything to convince those who aren't already believers. Liberalism doesn't exist without vigorous debate; for all the "old" New Republic's failings (diversity certainly one of them), it was a platform for intelligent people to try to come up with the best way to address the country's (and sometimes the world's) problems through the process of thinking, researching, arguing, and reconsidering. The magazine's editorial offices were famous for the sometimes heated arguments.

Liberalism isn't about party lines and trigger warnings and microaggressions and political correctness. Those are for people who don't want to think. Liberalism is about the sloppy workings of a republic; sometimes it isn't pretty, it's often very noisy, but it is the best way we have of sifting out the good ideas from the bad, of exposing the fraud and the lies, and being sure we're as close to truth as possible.

Any buyers out there who still care about such things? Any readers till care about such things?