A Place for Ideas That Won’t Fit on a Bumper Sticker

When the winter issue of New Perspectives Quarterly comes out next month, the young publication will mark a significant milestone--its merger with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara.

The event, however, will pass unnoticed in most of America, as has the emergence of the quarterly itself four years ago, and each edition issued thereafter. But the people at New Perspectives don’t much care. Becoming a household word is not on the agenda. They are much more ambitious than that.

Its publisher, wealthy liberal Stanley Sheinbaum, and editor Nathan Gardels say the Los Angeles-based journal of social and political thought is not slated to become a regional or national magazine but a world-class act with the major thinkers, politicians and activists as its readers and contributors.

“Our readers range from the Soviet Central Committee, to members of the CIA, Oliver Stone, Mario Cuomo, to journalists like Tom Wicker on the left and David Gergen on the right, Francois Mitterrand,” Gardels said recently in his West Los Angeles office. “They’re thoughtful people in positions of influence. We don’t want more than 50,000 subscribers.”

Definitions for the Future

What they have thus far is a circulation of 7,500. With the acquisition of the Center, they pick up another 8,000 former subscribers to the Center magazine.

But, as one reader and admirer, Sidney Blumenthal, a writer for the Washington Post and author of “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment,” said recently, “The power of ideas begins usually with a very small group of people. . . . (NPQ) is engaging new realities. It’s providing definitions for the emerging future. We’ll see what happens. It’s beginning.”

They are putting out a journal that consciously avoids being aridly academic or tritely popular (“Today you have to reduce it to fit on a bumper sticker,” Sheinbaum says of the latter tendency). Their method is to focus on one theme per edition and present what amounts to a dialogue on it. Whenever possible they go to “first sources,” as Gardels says, or “key actors in the debate” as Sheinbaum calls them, rather than journalists or other secondary sources. It presents essays, one-on-one interviews, adaptations of discussions, and some analysis of its own material.

As it so happened, the fall issue was devoted to “the four debts of the apocalypse,” the four debts being the federal deficit, the nation’s trade and balance of payments deficit, private debt and the Latin American debt. Warning about the “mythological thrall of postwar preeminence,” and offering no quick fixes, Gardels introduced the debate on the four debts and a way out of them with the prediction that “the day of reckoning must inevitably come.”

The magazine came out in late September. The apocalypse came to pass just three weeks later on Oct. 19, when the stock market came crashing down.

Coincidence or prescience, it was an attention-getter. Newspapers and magazines reprinted articles offered by NPQ’s syndication service; a special subscription solicitation went out over Sheinbaum’s signature drawing attention to it. And, in his In the Nation column in the New York Times, Tom Wicker quoted extensively from two of the pieces, those of Japanese economist Masahiro Sakamoto and American Walter Russell Mead. Wicker and Mead both report numerous calls from people wanting to know about the magazine, and Mead said Harper’s is reprinting his piece in the January issue.

“With any West Coast publication, I apologize to say, it’s difficult to move back East,” Wicker said. “It takes a while to get around, but if the quality remains as good as that fall issue, I imagine it will happen soon.”

When New Perspectives started in 1983, it was a thin newsletter put out by the Institute for National Strategy, a think tank founded by former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and directed by Gardels.

For the most part, Gardels, 34, said recently, the institute concentrated on foreign policy, with Brown and Gardels “traveling the world meeting leaders of the next generation.”

The newsletter that grew out of it, he said, was a response to the fact “the debate was so dominated by the right wing. The liberal agenda had such difficulties. Our aim was to stop spouting old stuff and that required joining the debate with those who were dominating it.”

Period of Transition

Thus, for example, a 1985 issue on politics and culture had an extensive interview with liberal Mario Cuomo running side by side an equally extensive interview with conservative Jack Kemp. The institute and newsletter went through a prolonged period of transition, Gardels said, with Brown “drifting off to do other things,” Bill Meis, recently on board and now managing editor, pushing for a real magazine, and Sheinbaum expressing mild interest.

Its current manifestation was crystallized, as Gardels recalls it rather romantically, over a beer in Koloniki Square, the hangout in Athens where intellectuals and members of the resistance whiled away the days of the colonels when the junta ran Greece. Gardels and Sheinbaum had gone to Athens to interview Andreas Papandreau, the prime minister and Sheinbaum’s old economics colleague, about NATO.

Sheinbaum, according to Gardels, began reminiscing about the heyday of Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a time when he had been a senior fellow in economics there and when Robert Maynard Hutchins, its legendary founder, was still the guiding light. He lamented that moments such as those when the great thinkers came to “the table,” i.e. the conference table, for dialogue were not happening any more.

“ ‘But Stanley, we really do the same thing, but instead of bringing them together under one roof, it’s one cover,’ ” Gardels recalls saying, jumping to the future tense as he presented full blown the germ of what they were doing: “We’ll do it, not by bringing the heavies to Santa Barbara--we’ll go talk to them. It will be a center without walls where we’ll link politics and ideas. The world will be our conference table.”

After that, he said as an afterthought, “Stanley got very involved.”

Sheinbaum proceeded to get so involved, in fact, that he and his wife, Betty, auctioned off a De Kooning painting for $3.3 million, the proceeds of which are financing the quarterly.

From Koloniki Square to a carpeted suite in a bank building off the San Diego Freeway. The newsletter has become a well-produced quarterly with perfect binding, an attractive layout and sophisticated graphics--an exercise in desk-top publishing. The small staff’s supply of office Apples do everything but spit out the bound copies.

Not many people can claim the world for their conference table without sounding preposterous or arrogant. Coming from Gardels, however, his face well-lit from within, it sounded more like Mickey Rooney getting one of his bright ideas to put on a show.

A Kid in a Candy Store

He described what New Perspectives does one recent morning, in between last-minute runs to the computer screen and telephone as the January issue was readied for the printer, giving off that same enthusiasm.

“It’s great: ‘I think I’ll go to “x” and talk to what’s his name,’ ” Gardels, said of his job, grinning at his good fortune, and offering a few examples. It’s candy to him, and here’s a kid in a candy store:

“One of the most important things going on is trade with Japan, but what do we know of the Japanese world view? There’s this guy, Shuichi Kato, he’s the main interpreter of Japanese culture--totally famous in Japan, but virtually unknown here. Let’s go talk to him.” (Kato is in the fall issue)

“And Abdullahi An-Na’im (a law professor from Sudan who recently taught at UCLA). He’s a great figure in the history of Islam, one of the intellectual fathers of the reformation of Islam.” (He appeared in last spring’s issue, in an ongoing debate New Perspectives is running on tradition and modernity.)

Depending on the subject, Gardels goes either alone or with Sheinbaum to conduct the interviews, focusing their subjects on an issue, collaborating with them, Gardels said, until they have the essence of their thought on the subject.

“There are people with a lot of very important ideas in the world who are not good at articulating them or at least not good at doing that in an American context. So we have to focus them. Then we’ll go back to them with an edit.”

Obviously, he said, there are instances, such as interviews with heads of state, that are not collaborations. And, they do invite those who are good writers to do essays.

To this day, neither Sheinbaum nor Gardels, both liberals, want the quarterly labeled as such, although they are resigned to that inevitability. They admit to a liberal perspective, but say they provide a forum for all points of view.

Missing the Point

“They have the right idea about politics,” Sidney Blumenthal said. “There are a proliferation of magazines on tactics and mechanics--the money, personalities, media. They miss the central driving heart of politics and what gives it its purpose . . . (whereas) this is actual thought. This (approach) is actually trying to grope for answers. It’s not looking for ideological advantage, or smoothing over rough edges, assuming a collective voice it hasn’t earned. It’s genuinely intellectual in that everything is open to examination.”

At 67, Sheinbaum may not be a kid in a candy store, but he is no less enthusiastic about the magazine. At the offices the other day, where he does not come daily, he described his degree of involvement as varied, depending on the issue.

He sees the quarterly as a continuation of the tradition and process he so admired at the Center in Santa Barbara, going out to the thinkers rather than bringing them to the table.