New Republic's neoliberalism comes back to haunt it

Zaid Jilani, Alternet - The irony is that while a cast of scribes clamor about a Silicon Valley uber-capitalist’s rapacious ways, the [New Republic] has itself promoted neoliberal economics for decades, castigating those who worried about the unleashing of market forces that created widespread job insecurity. With the Hughes-Snyder makeover, in ways its staff refuses to acknowledge, TNR is getting a dose of its own medicine.

Contributing editor Jonathan Chait, who no longer regularly writes for the magazine but has a perch at New York Magazine, was one of those who asked TNR to remove his name from the masthead. Chait was offended by the idea of upending TNR's tradition to turn to Internet-based profitability, though he never showed such regard for other workers facing off with neoliberal tradition.

In 2008, he wrote a TNR review of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein’s book explains how neoliberal economic policies like downsizing, deregulating and mergers are implemented beneath a cover of political crisis and reform, or what is known as disaster capitalism. To Chait, the book was evidence of a “Dead Left” that was tied to a “classic Marxist-materialist analysis.” He chided Klein for castigating right-wing planners for exploiting tragedies, writing that she “repeatedly implies that there is something immoral about using crises to advance the right-wing agenda without explaining why this is so.” He mocks the idea of the corporate accountability left-wing that protests business outrages, declaring with contempt that it once believed “the most sinister force on the planet...was Nike.” To Chait, the idea of disaster capitalism was just a “conspiracy theory” that “lacks internal logic.”

Chait mocked critics of the Facebook economy in a 2011 post at New York Magazine, writing that there “is a reason the movement is called 'Occupy Wall Street,' not 'Occupy Main Street' or 'Occupy Silicon Valley.' It is no doubt because most of the participants, or sympathizers, understand that Wall Street is not the same thing as free enterprise — that it is one element that, unlike Apple, poses a unique threat to the functioning of the free marketplace. If you define the problem as 'corporations,' then you lose the capacity to make these distinctions.”

The case of former TNR editor Peter Beinart is similar. Back when he was on the fast-track to being TNR’s senior editor, a handpicked acolyte of publisher Marty Peretz, Beinart denigrated opponents of “free trade” agreements and global trade rules that expanded corporate rights as the “flat earth and black helicopter crowd.” Beinart said “the anti-globalization movement” was motivated by hatred of the United States” and promoted neoliberal trade policy as necessary for human betterment....

The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza was the first of the contributing editors to ask for his name to be removed from the masthead. He was also behind a 1999 hit piece in TNR that attempted to link free-trade critics to South Carolina textile magnate Roger Milliken, arguing that the movement was really about enhancing Milliken's profits as a textile importer, not about genuine opposition to a project that would produce record-level inequality and hollow out the middle class.