"Tomasky is a through and through liberal but is being cast as a villain simply for not being further left."
That's a tweet by Thomas Chatterton Williams, quoted in a Substack piece John Ganz titled "The Dumbest Tweet I Have Ever Seen/Not Really, but C'mon."
Ganz writes:
Is there a political aspect to the disappointment with the situation at The New Republic? Certainly. Have some of the things written online about Michael Tomasky been uncharitable to him, not even giving him a chance before he gets started? Also, certainly. But the reality of the situation is not some grand ideological clash, the constant invocation of which is growing monotonous, to say the least. The fact is, first of all, people are worried about their jobs. It’s that simple. Some are having an emotional reaction, which might appear excessive, but it’s ultimately about their livelihoods, after all....
What was happening at TNR is exactly what anti-woke culture warriors say they miss in media and magazines: ideological and perspectival diversity.... [F]rom my perspective, the attitude in that Tweet is just an example of anti-intellectualism, a total lack of interest in the world, an unwillingness to care about or engage with anything but one’s pet issues, myopia, laziness, hopeless decadence and corruption of the mind etc. Whatever you want to call it, it’s just bullshit. I’m getting pretty tired of it.
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47 comments:
Wait, white people are still getting hired?
How is that even possible?
Hey, everyone, don't waste your time reading the article at the link.
There too, the issue is not explained.
How is that even possible?
Inertia?
None are pure enough for woke, all shall be punished for their sins. And to ask is to sin.
Abase yourself, sinful unWoke filth.
There was an uproar about Michael Tomasky's hiring at TNR.
Beyond that, nothing is told or explained here or there.
@Althouse, do you not see that this is a world you helped to create? As remorse goes, this post is pretty paltry.
From the link:
"TNR gave a cover to Bernie and A.O.C., but it also gave the cover to Warren and Biden, and still features quite friendly coverage of the latter from Walter Shapiro"
Also! That's presented as a mark of diversity. I kid you not.
Pray tell, what is the difference between Biden and Bernie these days?
Gee and I thought that Michael Tomasky--whose lefy mewlings in the Guardian are pretty far gone would be a perfect fit at The New Repulic--a magazine which never met a lefty it didn't like.
Ann Althouse - ..."the attitude in that Tweet is just an example of anti-intellectualism, a total lack of interest in the world, an unwillingness to care about or engage with anything but one’s pet issues, myopia, laziness, hopeless decadence and corruption of the mind etc. Whatever you want to call it, it’s just bullshit. I’m getting pretty tired of it."
Ann, you have reach. As a former Professor of Law, (emeritus? I don't remember) You find yourself with all your power stripped away. Words on a page.
"...one’s pet issues, myopia, laziness, hopeless decadence and corruption of the mind etc."
"I’m getting pretty tired of it."
No woman dies in the Country she was born in.
Uproar?
Who are Ganz and Tomasky and Chatterton?
Who cares?
But lets throw in some "right-wnger" bashing just to be safe.
I remember John McLaughlin always called TNR "that schizophrenic rag." I am genuinely surprised to hear they are still in business.
Don't care.
Fuck the woke.
Fuck liberals.
Ganz really doesn't rebut Williams' assertion that "any institution that isn’t explicitly right wing now faces enormous pressure to go 'woke,'" does he?
Williams' simple point seems be even if the initial "uproar" passes and Tomasky survives, he's already got "strike one," and therefore will be under the "pressure" to conform to "wokeness."
That's the entire point of inflicting an early "strike one" on a newcomer.
Because everyone knows only the truly lucky survive to get two strikes in the woke home run derby.
the new republic used to be run by michael straight, a whitney heir who was a soviet agent, but tomasky is the definition of a hack leftist, martin peretz brought back to some degree of respectability in the 80s, but lost in the 90s,
Ganz said...
The fact is, first of all, people are worried about their jobs. It’s that simple.
Hence, the "pressure."
Ganz is a dolt.
Woke and drowsy. Diversity dogma is a progressive condition: one step forward, two steps backward. It's a Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice society.
Wait, white people are still getting hired?
How is that even possible?
Some people of white are actually brown, others black, others yellow, and some are orange. White-white people are being hunted, judged, and cancelled. An imperfect prism processing inclusive exclusion. That said, take a knee. Beg. Good girl. Ashli Babbitt refused.
You are deemed unworthy of capital, career, family, life, inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide... and subject to abortion... cancellation.... denial of life, again, and again, and again. That said, they still don't have the numbers, so irregularities, fraud, and intimidation are to be expected as they establish the democratic/dictatorial duality.
From what I read TNR is moving from NYC to DC where Democrats now control Executive and Legislative branches and the owner wants an editor running a magazine they will read when making decisions. In other words, a threat to the current staff, which was hired to do that. Nothing to do with woke
But I'm progressive, then the socialists came and cancelled the socialists in a woke haze.
Beyond that, nothing is told or explained here or there.
This has been in progress since time immemorial. One liberal sect seeking to cancel members of another liberal sect. There can be only one by number or force in left-wing ideology. All's fair in lust and abortion.
was not hired
...an unwillingness to care about or engage with anything but one’s pet issues, myopia, laziness, hopeless decadence and corruption of the mind etc
Don't forget sapping and impurifying all our precious bodily fluids
What a glorious fight this is!
People brag about their flu vaccinations. They lust after credentials to prove they are the good people. Mask-up. Identify the non-masking individuals in our midst who deny 'Science'.
This world is about those who go along, to get along. You can be rich! You might be able to keep your riches...if you go along to get along. Ask Jack Ma.
If you were wondering, Jesus said Satan rules this world. You will be hard pressed to find a 'Christian' Church in the USA that teaches that. Scares the old women. They want happy, happy, love, love. That's not what this world is about.
We're here for a short time. Be Bold. God loves a fighter. Either side. Winnowing.
I've always found Tomasky's columns immensely useful because he's always 100% wrong. He's like a compass that only points South. Whatever he recommends, do the opposite.
Sebastian said...
...
Pray tell, what is the difference between Biden and Bernie these days?
Bernie remembers where all of his mansions are.
@Hercules
The indented material is a quote.
Don’t make it seem as though I wrote that.
I should delete your comment.
O'Sullivan's First Law describes the leftward drift of many politicians, leaders, and organizations. First coined by John O'Sullivan in 1989, it states: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."
All that has changed is the velocity of the leftward drift.
how can there be an uproar when no one cares?
readering said...
From what I read TNR is moving from NYC to DC where Democrats now control Executive and Legislative branches and the owner wants an editor running a magazine they will read when making decisions.
Yeah, it's just so time consuming and expensive driving all of those newspapers 3-1/2 hrs. from NYC to WDC that no bureaucrats in DC would be able to find one to read... it has nothing whatsoever to do with internal politics.
(The internet? What is that???)
The New Republic was a great magazine a couple of decades ago, with Fred Barnes, Mickey Kaus, Michael Kinsley, Morton Kondracke. Very smart, very interesting. They had a mosh pit of amazing writers mixed in with idiots.
from Wikipedia...
In the 1980s, the magazine generally supported President Ronald Reagan's anticommunist foreign policy, including his provision of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. The magazine's editors also supported both the Gulf War and the Iraq War and, reflecting its belief in the moral efficacy of American power, intervention in "humanitarian" crises, such as those in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo during the Yugoslav Wars.
It was widely considered a "must read" across the political spectrum. An article in Vanity Fair judged it "the smartest, most impudent weekly in the country" and the "most entertaining and intellectually agile magazine in the country." According to Alterman, the magazine's prose could sparkle and the contrasting views in its pages were "genuinely exciting." He added, "The magazine unarguably set the terms of debate for insider political elites during the Reagan era."
The magazine won the respect of many conservative opinion leaders. Twenty copies were sent by messenger to the Reagan White House each Thursday afternoon. Norman Podhoretz called the magazine "indispensable," and George Will called it "currently the nation's most interesting and most important political journal." National Review described it as "one of the most interesting magazines in the United States."
The New Republic published a 10,000 word article from Charles Murray about The Bell Curve, along with many responses and critiques. They published lots of stuff from Camille Paglia. Overall it was a highly interesting magazine for a couple of decades.
It's been utter shit for a while, so the announcement that Tomasky wants to go backwards to the way the New Republic used to be might make it interesting again. This is a magazine that used to publish Richard Posner, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, the list goes on and on.
Privileged White man (Ganz) questioning a Black man's (Williams) intellect is highly problematic and yet another example of the systemic racism that permeates our corrupt society.
This cannot stand. Ganz cannot be allowed to continue in the writing profession.
The New Republic was a great magazine a couple of decades ago, with Fred Barnes, Mickey Kaus, Michael Kinsley, Morton Kondracke. Very smart, very interesting. They had a mosh pit of amazing writers mixed in with idiots.
I am so old I used to subscribe and read it The publisher, Marty Peretz, ran a pretty good, if left center, magazine. I wrote to him after I thought he went overboard for Gore in 2000, but it was still viable until:
On March 9, 2012, Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, was introduced as the New Republic's majority owner and Editor-in-Chief.[29] Under Hughes, the magazine became less focused on "The Beltway," with more cultural coverage and attention to visuals. It stopped running an editorial in every issue. Media observers noted a less uniformly pro-Israel tone in the magazine's coverage than its editorial stance during Peretz's ownership.
It became a toy like The Atlantic for Steve Jobs' widow. Useless.
Ann Althouse - "Don’t make it seem as though I wrote that."
Yes, I see my error. Mea Culpa.
I feel like TC Williams occupies a similar mildly contrarian perch to the Andrew Sullivan era TNR.
Is this like the 'gamer boy' kerfuffle? I never got that "inside baseball" story either.
I started reading TNR around the time Marty Peretz took over, and kept up until he sold the second time. Did not even realize it had been sold again until a friend recommended an article last year. I think it's too late to try to rekindle the influence of the first 100 years. Deeper pockets occupy the same space.
boatbuilder,
I remember John McLaughlin always called TNR "that schizophrenic rag." I am genuinely surprised to hear they are still in business.
Like others here, TNR was long the zine I went to for political news, always. The lead writers were great, the viewpoints were often unexpected and always interesting, and there was no "standard" position on anything at all. I loved Sullivan's publishing a large chunk of The Bell Curve, and then devoting a whole issue to responses to it. That is what journalism looks like, said I.
And then the zine became skinnier, more meager, less interested in off-kilter views, more interested in supporting a central line, which was absolutely never the case in prior years. I think I finally gave up around 2005, though it had stopped being available on newsstands a long time before that. (Part of that, of course, might be just the general disappearance of real newsstands; I used to walk into Dave's Smoke Shop in Berkeley and pick up everything from TNR to National Review to Commentary to The New Criterion to First Things Fanfare to American Record Guide (I write for them now, but you can only read by subscription) to Gramophone to R/C Modeler to Cook's Illustrated to the Times Literary Supplement. I read an awful lot of zines then. Now you have to subscribe, and I do, to a few of the above.
Anyway, TNR has a very long history; I was stunned to learn of its Stalinist past (no, really) around mid-century. Maybe it will come back.
Isn’t this the same dumbass who went on about Romney being too racist to speak to the NAACP in 2012? And then when Romney did speak at their Convention, he called Romney racist anyway for not pandering to them?
It would be nice to hear exactly what crimes against wokeness Tomasky has committed. As for the New Republic these days it runs the gamut from A to B.
What is an "anti-woke culture warrior"? A person who believes that men have a penis and women have a vagina? That a person should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin?
Let us not falsely equivocate. "Wokeness" is an insane ideology hatched from the fevered brain of academics just a few years ago, and it has spread like wildfire among the liberal bourgeois because they have no defense against it.
Woke White Liberals are eating each other. Need to get more popcorn. What a bunch of idiots, woke til they go broke!!!
Hercules, not that one though: They want happy, happy, love, love. That's not what this world is about.
It's watching some good friends screaming "Let me out!"
Ganz may have a point. Here is a little more about what is going on.
https://defector.com/incoming-tnr-editor-lays-out-boring-vision-for-magazine-in-depressing-meeting-with-staff/
If Tomasky is not lefty enough for TNR, then TNR might as well change its name to The New Marxist.
No big deal, though, because as has been pointed out above it lost what little credibility it had about a decade ago.
Here's the good news: human civilization survived its first ten thousand years without political magazines. I think we'll make it through TNR's identity crisis.
The reaction to the Tweet reminds me of say-nothing scolds: "You, a Law Professor" "You're smarter than this". That kind of thing. It was just a lot longer and less succinct, which is the hallmark of a bad writer.
“I think implicitly, the idea is we’re gonna bring back TNR the way it used to be, minus the racism,” one staffer said.
Um, okay. "The racism."
There's some ambivalence there. The staffers would like to have the prestige of the old magazine, but they want it to take positions that are opposed to those of the Peretz-era magazine.
They claim to admire the old magazine, but they'd like to be the people who cancel and banish the people who wrote for the old magazine. Or maybe they're thinking back behind the Seventies and Eighties to some imagined great, pure past.
There's a strong feeling among liberals and the left that they have been too soft and yielding in the past. It's similar to the feeling Republicans have that it's the Democrats who play hardball.
"max said...
"Ganz may have a point. Here is a little more about what is going on. https://defector.com/incoming-tnr-editor-lays-out-boring-vision-for-magazine-in-depressing-meeting-with-staff/"
Having read the article, I think it's clear the article's author is demonizing Tomasky for non-wokeness, and apparently at least some of the staff.
The other complaints about him are that he may lay some people off, and that he wants to move TNR to Washington, DC. Tomasky hopes to make it more influential among Democratic lawmakers and executive branch members.
The sources for the article claim Tomasky is too close to "centrist Democrats," and the article's author laments that TNR might stop covering issues such as "media, culture, Native issues, gender and inequality, and climate;" a staffer also that TNR used to be racist.
So Mr. Williams appears to be at least half correct, imao. Tomasky is being dumped on for not being woke enough, though there are some non-political issues too.
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