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The New New Republic Grapples With, Embraces History of Stalinism

Chris Hughes (AP)
February 6, 2015

Under the leadership of Chris Hughes, Guy Vidra, and Gabriel Snyder, the new New Republic has decided to chart a bold new course for the storied magazine. And part of that New Course Charting includes a recounting of the storied magazine's storied history.

It's worth noting, of course, that for a time the New Republic was a commie rag run by an actual Stalinist—not just a Stalinist, but a spy for the Soviet Union. (Don't take my word for it: take Frank Foer's!) So it's been somewhat impressive to watch the new New Republic wrestle with, and embrace, its past Stalinism. Not by writing some treacly retrospective, mind you, but by actually putting into practice Stalinist techniques in their pages.

First, the new New Republic made a whole bunch of people disappear. An entire cohort of contributing editors, gone from the masthead in the blink of an eye. This sort of mass disappearance—the official removal of people from documents and newspapers—was, of course, rather commonplace during Stalin's iron-fisted reign.

The mass disappearance was followed up by a purge. Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier were pushed out the door when they refused to bow to the new regime's diktats—namely, the push to become a "vertically integrated digital media company." Many of the mag's staffers snickered at the new boss' use of goopy corporate jargon. They too were soon to exit.

The purge complete, the New Republic announced that it was going to be bringing on board a new group of writers. A more diverse, more ideologically pure group of writers. And one of the first major pieces of writing turned in by this new cadre was a ritual denunciation of the magazine's past digressions from the current party line. Not for its dalliances with Stlainism, of course, but for its very bad no good super gross history of the dread racism. Communists of all stripes, naturally, will be familiar with this type of "self"* criticism.

And, finally, there is the Stalinist impulse to control the arts, to ensure their ideological purity in the hopes that they will teach the proletariat the correct ways to think. We've seen this in the saga of Dennis C. Jett and the New Republic's attempt to judge American Sniper only by its usefulness in pushing an anti-Iraq War line. A similar piece was published last night: It is now considered Extremely Problematic for white people to joke about white people. Such jokes are an ideological problem, because ... I don't know, actually. Because white people should feel nothing but shame about their status as oppressors, I guess. The point, though, is that the central committee has handed down its ruling: laughing at what is funny is far less important than laughing at what is properly funny.

So, kudos to you, new New Republic! Owning up to your heritage of Stalinist thinking is a very worthwhile endeavor! Bonus points for the creative way in which you are doing so.

*As Ross Douthat has noted, it's quite rich to pretend that Jeet Heer's essay is some sort of internal reckoning about the New Republic's past "sins." There is no cultural memory left at the magazine; the purge has been quite successful at removing all of that. It'd be like Markos Moulitsas buying the Weekly Standard, firing everyone who worked there, penning an essay about how it got the war on terror "wrong," and the chattering classes saying, "Oh, look at the bravery of the Standard, dealing with its legacy of evil warmongering." That's just dumb.