By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
The pitchforks are out again — are they ever really put
away, anymore? — and this time the mob is calling for the head of the editor of
The New Republic, who turns out to be Chris Lehmann, a name that
requires a little looking around to find, editor of The New Republic
being a rather more low-profile position today than it was in the days of
Andrew Sullivan or Michael Kelly.
The offense is the magazine’s decision to publish “My
Mayor Pete Problem,” a sophomoric essay by Dale Peck, a gay writer who finds
the gay mayor of godforsaken South Bend, Ind., not quite gay enough. Pete,
sniffs Peck, never had a proper gay adolescence, publicly acknowledged his
homosexuality only a few years ago, and — angels and ministers of grace defend
us! — got married without acquiring a very long or varied curriculum
venereae. How could such a man ever hope to shoulder the burdens of leading
the free world? The author suggested that “Mary Pete” be adopted as the
homosexual answer to “Uncle Tom.”
Not exactly Montesquieu — or even Andrew Sullivan.
The usual rabble threw the usual tantrum, and The New
Republic — the diminished, attenuated thing that still calls itself “The
New Republic” — bent south, erasing the column from its website and replacing
it with a terse editor’s note acknowledging that the article had been excised
“in response to criticism of the piece’s inappropriate and invasive content.”
And there was almost an apology: “We regret its publication.” The editor tried
to magic away the controversy by claiming that the essay had been intended as
satire, an obvious lie.
Win McCormack, the feckless Oregon gazillionaire
Democratic sugar daddy who bought The New Republic from the feckless
California gazillionaire Democratic sugar daddy who ruined it — these
billionaire dilettantes presenting themselves today as the saviors of
journalism will be the death of it — made the usual craven noises.
“Inappropriate and offensive,” he called it. “A mistake.” But an apology will
not do where a blood sacrifice is demanded. Sponsors pulled out of a
climate-policy conference the magazine had helped to organize. Writer Emily
Atkin lamented the cancelation of “my presidential climate forum” and declared
herself “so devastated.” Critics raged that “every single editor who signed off
on it should be fired,” and that the magazine could only begin to redeem itself
by publicly blackballing Peck for his naughtyspeak.
The New Republic is itself an enthusiastic leader
of these mob scenes — its contributors helped to lead the campaign to have me
fired from The Atlantic — but we ought not allow pettiness to draw us
into stupidity. Not that I believe that The New Republic in its current
form can be rescued from its stupidity — it has the stink of intellectual death
on it — but we might here find an instructive example.
Should The New Republic fire its editor(s) and
blacklist Peck and other contributors who irritate the gentle sensibilities of
the Twelve Angry Caitlyns who through Twitter leave such an outsized footprint
in our political discourse? That depends on what you think The New Republic
is for.
The New Republic, like every other magazine of its
kind (including this one), must decide what it is or suffer from a crippling
crisis of identity. Is it a magazine (in print and digital form) and hence
dedicated to publishing writing that is useful, interesting, and delightful? Or
is it a political faction — a committee of the Democratic party that produces a
very, very expensive newsletter? If its main business is political activism,
then, of course, it cannot afford to be offensive: Politics means building
coalitions, servicing constituencies, flattering and courting interest groups,
etc. But if its main business is to be journalism, then it will — inevitably —
publish material that offends and irritates, that is controversial, that defies
convention, that shocks polite society, etc. It will also publish material that
runs counter to the political preferences of its readers: Rolling Stone
was a pretty left-wing magazine that published such conservative writers as Tom
Wolfe and P. J. O’Rourke; Playboy was no hothouse of conservatism when
William F. Buckley Jr. contributed to it; the readers of the New York Times
were not exactly universal in their admiration for William Safire. And if the
pissant scolds and hall monitors of the soul had been in power a generation
ago, we’d have been deprived of everything from the novels of Norman Mailer to
the journalism of Hunter S. Thompson to the songs of Leonard Cohen. I prefer a
world with the songs of Leonard Cohen in it even if it outrages every witless
“I can’t even!” po-faced Caitlyn on the masthead of The New Republic,
which really ought to try to acquire the nerve to stand up for itself if it is
going to keep the name.
And you don’t get Leonard Cohen without getting a lot of
Dale Peck, too. It’s a package deal.
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