Donate to Reason! Because Jesus Christ, We Sure Aren’t The New Republic!

The
self-reverential media universe has been going bananas since last
night at the
news that The New Republic, progressivism’s
century-old flagship magazine, is
changing chief editors, cutting publication frequency in half,
becoming a “vertically
integrated digital media company,” staffing up an office in New
York, experiencing an angry
exodus of staff and contributors (including its Dance Editor!),
and bouncing the
loved/hated
Leon Wieseltier (pictured) from a culture-editor slot he has
occupied since the Grover Cleveland administration.

What does this have to do with Reason’s annual Webathon, you
ask? Plenty.

First, as I
mentioned when baby-faced Facebook cajillionaire Chris Hughes
bought The New Republic two years ago,

Political magazines, which as a rule do not cover expenses
through subscriptions and advertising, have two basic ownership
models: Get an ideologically and/or culturally sympatico rich
person (or “vanity
mogul,” in Jack Shafer’s memorable phrasing) to subsidize the
losses, or just organize as a nonprofit (Reason chose
the latter road decades
ago).

There are plusses and minuses to both–as Shafer points out,
“Hughes should be able to sustain the magazine’s annual losses —
which Anne Peretz, the ex-wife of former owner Martin Peretz put at
$3 million a year — for a couple of hundred years after his
death”–but one aspect I certainly enjoy about the Reason
way is that it is literally impossible for a single person
(let alone a single person with deep political connections to the
sitting U.S. president) to impose his or her will on the editorial
decisions of a normally configured nonprofit publication. The basic
editorial thrust is therefore much more resilient and consistent in
the long term, much less subject to the temporal whims and temper
tantrums of a lone deep-pocketed journalistic novice.

When you donate
to Reason right the hell now, you are adding to the resilience
and stability of an institution you value. The more donors we have,
at whatever giving level, the better able we are to withstand and
avoid tumult.

There’s another way in which the whiplashed fortunes of Herbert Croly’s
brainchild should cause you to reflect on your relationship
with this here humble mag & website. From its beginnings in the
bosom of Teddy Roosevelt to its recent
100^th anniversary gala headlined by Bill Clinton and
attended by Nancy Pelosi and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, The New
Republic has been the ultimate journalistic handmaiden to
power and the northeastern liberal elite. As I wrote last year in
an essay
about the magazine,

The reformist urge to cross-examine Democratic policy ideas has
fizzled out precisely at the time when those ideas are both
ascendant and as questionable as ever. Progressivism has reverted
to a form that would have been recognizable to Herbert Croly and
Walter Lippmann when they founded The New
Republic a century ago: an intellectual collaborator in
the “responsible” exercise of state power. […]

Then as now, the magazine represented a marriage between New
York literary ambitions and Washington power politics. Judge
Learned Hand mingled in its pages with critic Edmund Wilson and
economist John Maynard Keynes. Lippmann, on his way to becoming the
most popular public policy intellectual in the country, developed
into a horse-whisperer for politicians, transferring his fealty
from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson so quickly and thoroughly
that he was already writing speeches for the president by 1916 and
working full-time for his war cabinet the following year.

Reason was not founded by some Harvard
wunderkind with his tongue on the earlobes of power; it
was started by a
Boston University undergrad no one had ever heard of. Our galas
will not be attended by presidents, our editors will not be writing
war speeches, our
headquarters will remain several thousand miles from the Acela
corridor, and if we are the “In-flight
magazine” of anything, it will be SpaceShipTwo.

We’re
outsiders, baby, and that’s why we’re built to last. We’ve been
a “digital media company” (minus the vertical integration) since
Chris Hughes was 8 years old. And we critique power instead of
collaborating with it. So donate to Reason right the
hell now!