Alfred Kazin on The New Republic in 1989: Parvenu Smugness, Post-Liberal Bitterness, and Town Gossips
Writing in The New Republic in November 1989, on the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, the literary critic Alfred Kazin, who had served as the magazine’s literary editor for a time, had this to say:
What I read in the front of the book is informative, saucy, in tone terribly sure of itself. It gives me no general enlightenment on the moral and intellectual critic underlying the crisis of the week, above all no inspiration. There is no discernible social ideal behind all the clever counter-punching. Washington is more beautiful and imposing than it has ever been, is a wonderful town to look at—if you overlook Anacostia and Shaw. It always looks like Sunday; it can be a relief after openly decadent, bleeding New York. But like all company towns, it is parochial, and TNR reflects that, is too much occupied by and with town gossips. Except for government scientists, no real ideas ever start here. The many clever people in and out of government are not “intellectuals” in the old sense—thinkers with a sense of prophecy—but “experts,” no-nonsense minds that can chill me. When I read in TNR that homeless people are invariably mental cases in need of treatment, I realize that economic frustration and hopelessness, the real bottom line, are to some privileged folks never a condition but, as Gertrude Himmelfarb put in the title of her book on poverty, “an idea.”
I wish I could think of TNR as moving beyond post-leftist crowing—beyond a certain parvenu smugness, an excessive familiarity with the inside track and the inside dope, and, above all, beyond that devouring interest in other journalists that confines so many commentaries out of Washington to triviality. I wish I could think of TNR as moving beyond the bristling, snappy, reactive common sense of the disenchanted liberal. There are worlds within worlds, even in Washington, that are apparent more to writers—confined wherever they may be—than to the wearily clever, easily exasperated, heirs and guardians of the liberal democracy that is the one tradition we seem to have left.
This is the magazine of ideas whose death we are now meant to be mourning.
As he was writing this, Kazin had this to say in his private journals:
Peretz’s leadership has been too strident, too irritated with the “Marxist” and “Woodstock” elements among the young whom he is aware of as a Harvard teacher in his spare jours. All the earmarks of the parvenu…the post-liberal bitterness.