The Death of a Nation

I’m often rattled by manifestations of my own intellectual impotence. A conversation with a professor who mentions whole genres of literature I’m unfamiliar with. An acknowledgment that I’ve been mispronouncing Die Linke and pronouncing Alexander Cockburn’s name a bit too correctly for a good year and a half. That stretch after reading Sula when I thought Toni Morrison was a guy. The feeling I get when I try to deceiver Postone’s notion of abstract time… sobering, but undoubtedly healthy for a 20-year-old.

Thumbing through “the flagship of the left” lends itself to a very different sensation. Though not quite on a fast track to The New Republic levels of noxiousness, the deterioration of The Nation into a vapid, politically complacent mouthpiece of the establishment has been marked to any candid observer. Large tracts of the magazine are now indistinguishable from that of The Huffington Post.

It was not always so. The first issue of Dissent in 1954, a year a bit too devoid of red-baiting for their tastes, featured an editorial that lambasted the publication for being soft on Stalinism. A decade later The Nation published Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s plot to bring about the End Times. Amid the rancor of the Cold War and the neoliberal reaction that followed, editor Victor Navasky ran regular columns from two radicals in their prime: then Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens and—a follower of his own inchoate brand of a leftism—Alexander Cockburn. Navasky even gave exposure to Marxist economist and former Soviet agent Victor Perlo and named a young(er) Doug Henwood contributing editor a scant few years after the launch of Left Business Observer. Though never aspiring to be The New Masses, the magazine was described by Navasky as a debating ground between liberals and radicals.

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