Magazines draw their lines in sand

Like America, the Democratic Party is once again a house divided. The resulting social and political fractures run in all directions, but the breaking point clearly is Iraq.

That fissure is particularly clear on the pages of the country’s leading journals of opinion. Like the nation, they are evenly split: Two -- National Review and the Weekly Standard -- have conservative politics and generally serve Republican readers; two -- the Nation and the New Republic -- describe themselves as liberal and are generally aimed at Democratic readers. But while the conservative journals forthrightly support the war against Saddam Hussein and the subsequent occupation of Iraq, the Nation and the New Republic are divided on the question, as are the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates.

In this week’s issue, for example, the Nation’s lead editorial, “Bush’s Credibility Gap,” alleges that, “From the beginning, Bush has not been straight with the public -- not just about the reasons for war and occupation but about the challenges and the reality on the ground.”

A subsequent “Comment” piece by William Greider, the magazine’s national correspondent, argues that the administration’s entire program of occupation in Iraq violates the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which was drafted to proscribe the sort of occupying regimes imposed by the Nazis.

International law, Greider writes, “is likely to ensnare and possibly crumple the American conqueror’s grandiose plans to transform the nation it now occupies.”

The New Republic’s lead editorial, by contrast, contends that “the United States shouldn’t be drawing down its troop levels in Iraq; it should be building them up.” The editorial goes on to argue for calling up more reserve and National Guard units and for deploying additional Marines to Iraq. The Army’s overall size, it says, may have to grow if the war in Iraq is not to be lost.

On a facing page, the magazine’s editor, Peter Beinart, warns in his TRB column that the drift on this issue among all the Democratic presidential candidates, except Sen. Joseph Lieberman -- the administration’s strongest supporter in that group -- risks making Rep. Dennis Kucinich the party’s spokesman on Iraq: “If we’re wrong to be there, as I believe we are, we should get our troops out.”

While it would be misleading to attribute differences in the four journals’ circulation to their stands on a single issue -- even one of Iraq’s magnitude -- it also is worth considering whether their differing approaches to the war and occupation have had an impact on readership at least at the margin.

The trend appears instructive: Over the past 12 months, the firmly antiwar Nation’s audited circulation has climbed to 158,810, pushing it past the field’s longtime leader, the National Review, which has 157,616 paid subscribers. The New Republic has made a business decision to allow its rate base -- the number of subscribers a publication promises its advertisers -- to shrink from an inflated 85,000 to a core readership of about 60,000. As a consequence and, perhaps, in some measure because of the magazine’s stand on the war, audited circulation is now 61,723. The Weekly Standard has a readership of 55,000.

“The Nation, the Weekly Standard and the National Review are all terrific magazines,” said Stephanie Sandberg, the New Republic’s publisher, “but they are causes in a way. They carry the banner for a group of people with a certain set of political values. The New Republic is an interesting magazine, but we are not a cause. We tend to write articles that are iconoclastic politically.”

Among the increasing number of Americans who the polls say now regard themselves as adherents to a cause, “it’s all about Iraq these days,” said CNN political analyst William Schneider, a longtime scholar of public opinion. “We’re seeing that in politics and on the best-seller lists, where authors like Al Franken and Ann Coulter are stars, and we’re seeing it in the magazines of opinion.

“We are seeing an anger and vitriol on the left that we haven’t seen since the 1960s. George W. Bush has turned out to be just as polarizing a president as Bill Clinton. Bush is the most right-wing president ever, and that has made the left apoplectic. Its contempt for Bush was brought to a head by the war. Preventive war goes against everything people on the left believe. They are energized in way they have not been since 1972, and they have found a candidate in Howard Dean and a voice in the Nation.” (Dean opposed the use of force in Iraq but does not endorse an immediate pullout of U.S. troops.)

Victor Navasky, who as publisher and editorial director has presided over the Nation’s growth from 18,000 readers in 1978 to its current level, says, “People are looking for an articulation of their own deep reservations about this nation and its culture. They want to know they are not alone in refusing to join the national consensus -- and that their dissent does not make them disloyal.”

Like Sandberg, Navasky nonetheless credits much of the circulation gap that has opened between the two leading Democratic journals to factors other than ideological ones. Among them he cites the highly successful tenure of editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and a much admired online edition that, last year alone, secured 15,000 new paid subscribers for the Nation in print.

The New Republic’s Beinart says that, whatever their views on the war, readers come to his magazine “because they don’t expect to agree with everything they find. We believe there are a range of perspectives from which to define liberalism. Nobody should be surprised, for example, by our hawkishness when it comes to confronting tyranny. That has been true for decades. Our sympathy for extending democracy -- even at the point of gun -- goes back to the Reagan years.”

Paradoxically, it is ideological consistency and intellectual surprise that usually make a journal of opinion worth reading. And, as the nation sinks more deeply into a culture dominated by passion and faction, there is a vital role to be played by those with the wit and courage to recognize that, day by day, the country’s politics more closely resemble those John Dryden described 322 years ago this week, when he published his great satire “Absalom and Achitophel”: “Some truth there was, but dash’d and brew’d with lies; To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise.”