Jeet Heer Reads Ex-"New Republic" Owner Marty Peretz wiþ a Certain Schadenfreude

Learning nothing & forgetting nothing edition: how someone can remain utterly clueless as to who he is...; Peretz still thinks the “mob of thugs” in Harvard Yard was ginned up by Nick Kristof...

Once upon a time now long ago, oh Best Beloved, and for a long time, a guy named Marty Peretz was the owner of a little magazine called the New Republic. While he ran it he spent down his wife’s Singer Sewing Machine fortune—paying its staffers and contributors considerably more than they were likely to be able to get elsewhere, and extending its reach far beyond what a standard cash-strapped little magazine could do.

For people on the train it was a very nice ride—unless and until they got sexually harassed by Marty’s friend Leon Wieseltier (of all Marty’s stable of magazine editors, only Peter Beinart appears to have actually tried to do something), found themselves insufficiently enthusiastic about Marty’s bigotries and prejudices, or ran crosswise of Marty for some other reason.

The magazine’s shticks were:

• to work hard and go the extra mile to find a reason why whatever stupid, cruel, and unlikely-to-succeed things the Republicans were doing that week was actually not in fact so stupid, cruel, and unlikely-to-succeed, but rather clever…

• to try to tilt the Democratic Party to listen less to Blacks, women, unions, Palestinians, etc…

As Peretz’s most talented deputy, Michael Kinsley, put it:

The New Republic got mileage out of being unpredictable. But in my mind, being unpredictable meant being unreliable and inconsistent and lacking a general plan.... They see themselves as being critical from within. But that gets hard to pull off after about 30 years…

Not, mind you, that their “unpredictability” was ever very smart. Thirteen years ago Matthew Yglesias tried to puzzle out why Michael Kinsley was writing in the Atlantic that unemployment at the nadir of the Great Recession was not high enough:

Matthew Yglesias: Kinsley’s Transcendental Deduction of Hyperinflation: ‘Michael Kinsley has a very strange column alleging that we’re soon going to face hyperflation: “When everybody assumes 10 percent, all the forces that produced 10 percent push it to 20 percent, and then 40 percent, and soon people are lugging currency in a wheelbarrow, as in the famous photos from Weimar Germany.”… Kinsley freely acknowledges that “virtually every leading economist across the political spectrum” disagrees with him, and he doesn’t dispute… their analyses. He also acknowledges that while it would be possible for him to make investment decisions that reflect his belief in a coming period of inflation, he’s not doing it “because I lack the courage of my convictions.”…

Kinsley’s column… details the theoretical error Kinsley is making—thinking too moralistically about the economy. He says “on economic matters, I’m a puritan.” And also that “The recession we’ve been going through did not occur for no reason.” He feels, metaphorically speaking, that it was sent by God to punish us for our overindulgence. And that while we’ve had plenty of economic pain over the past 24 months, that’s not enough: “that pain has come from the recession itself, not the cure.” Kinsley’s view is that recovery has to come with some episode of ritual purging and mass suffering over and above the suffering caused directly by the recession…. And so, he deduces, we must be heading for inflation, even though he himself recognizes the reasoning as so specious that he won’t use it as the basis for investment decisions…

How much of a difference did Marty Peretz and his favored stable of contrarian boys make? Some but probably not too much. It certainly, all in all, was a minus.

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Now come Marty Peretz’s memoirs, and Jeet Heer to read them:

Jeet Heer: ‘Imagine being 84 and realizing this is your life's legacy. (From Martin Peretz's memoirs): “And then, a last snapshot. It's eleven years later—the invasion of Iraq, which I backed, is a disaster; the financial system that my friends helped build has crashed; my wife and I are divorced; the New Republic is sold after I feared going bust— and here I am in my white suit walking across Harvard Yard, surrounded by students: ‘Harvard, Harvard shame on you, honoring a racist fool.’ The racist fool is, apparently, me. It's a sodden coda, one I don't quite grasp, or believe…

Richard Yeselson: ‘Worth reading, in its fashion?…

Jeet Heer: ‘Very much so. Like Podhoretz' Making It, MP's memoir has the honesty of shamelessness…

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“Racist fool”…

Peretz thought—and still thinks—the “mob of thugs” in Harvard Yard was ginned up against him by Nick Kristof, that what he said was perhaps overstated but not unreasonable, and that it would never have become an issue if not for Nick Kristof’s pushing back, and that it is on Nick Kristof that moral blame lies:

Marty Peretz: ‘I have a grudge against Kristof…. Anyway, Kristof wrote and a mob of thugs, following him, so to speak, tried to chase me across Harvard Yard, shouting, “Peretz is a racist pig.” Big triumph for Kristof and his sensitive sensibility…

With added “Nick Kristof is an oversensitive sissy” action…

But I think that Nick Kristof did not play a significant role in Marty Peretz’s expressing that he felt profoundly put upon that polite society was forcing him to pretend that Muslim American citizens “are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment”:

Marty Peretz: ‘Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse...

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I had some views on this at the time:

HOISTED FROM ÞE ARCHIVES: Þe Barrington Moore Problematic & Its Discontents

At the time the much-esteemed Michael Walzer himself admonished me (and others), as he came to the defense of his Brandeis roommate, saying that people were out of line who thought that perhaps the Social Studies major should not honor someone who would advocate denying free speech on the basis of a religion test, and laying down a marker that if he ever said Muslims did “deserve” free speech he was only pretending.

We protestors and critics should, Walzer thought, have shut up and sat down:

I wonder if you have undertaken a survey of everything that every present member of the Social Studies faculty has said in postings, in footnotes, in lectures to make sure that nothing they have said is offensive or hurtful or embarrassing. If you are not doing that, well you had better start doing that because you will find a lot of things that you do not like…

13 years later, it is still not clear to me what Michael waltzer thought he was saying here. Was he really saying that everyone else should take care not to exercise their free-speech rights in potential earshot of Marty Peretz if doing so might annoy him?

As Ken White points out, Walzer’s position is at best incoherent as a matter of moral philosophy, and is almost surely best read as one of the doctrines of Thrasymakhos—that “justice” consists of doing good things and favors for my friends and bad things to my enemies:

The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn't like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks "why was it necessary for you to say that" or "what was your motive in saying that" or "did you consider how that would impact someone" to the second person and not the first. It's ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression…

Also:

• The Social Studies Major 50th Anniversary Celebration Party and Bitter Internal Ideological Power Struggle: As one senior member of the faculty said: “Those who came to the party got just what they bargained for: serious engagement with political action and moral responsibility at a rarified intellectual level rarely seen on this green earth…

• The Harvard Social Studies Major's Fiftieth Anniversary Party: Looks like it may be exciting!

• James Fallows: A Harsh Thing I Should Have Said (Martin Peretz Dept) Updated…