An Experiment in Freedom

...That was not the way things were supposed to work out...

...Although the magazine never managed to attract the circulation it deserved, its influence was out of proportion to the number of people who actually bought it...

...So will other contributors, I feel sure...

...Reading such surpassingly excellent cultural critics as John Simon and Reuven Frank issue after issue further educated me in what could be thought and said in a few pages...

...Apart from partial responsibility for the fact that its Congressional majority soon became a minority too, the Clinton Administration had little permanent effect on the problems or self-image of the Democratic Party...

...Bush could be looked back on as an eccentric interlude...

...Second Thoughts An Experiment in Freedom By Christopher Clausen I became aware of The New Leader as a college freshman in 1961, not quite halfway through its life cycle and early in my own...

...the only place where they reliably appeared was in the brief "Between Issues" column that opened every issue...

...In "A Caveat for the Democrats," however, I warned a few weeks later that they remained "a distinctly minority party at the Presidential level" and were severely handicapped by the inept leadership and antiquated ideological positions of their Congressional majority...

...Most academics write gracelessly, verbosely and (outside the physical sciences) imprecisely, so this was exactly the sort of apprenticeship everyone in the humanities or social sciences should have at an early age...

...My first essay for the magazine was a close reading of the supermarket tabloids that suddenly came into their own with the Gennifer Flowers scandal during Bill Clinton's initial campaign for President...

...the appeasement of China's dictatorship that became a depressing constant in U.S...

...At last the 12 interminable years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W...

...Similar to many other journals of opinion, it carried a disclaimer inside the front cover stating, "Signed contributions do not necessarily represent the views of The New Leader...

...Not only did the editors never deny me the right to state my opinion, regardless of how divergent it might be from their own, they also encouraged me to write from time to time on a wide variety of subjects...

...That it never did, at least in my experience, was a tribute both to its editors and to those free but on the whole disciplined spirits who wrote for it...

...That influence will survive not only among those perspicacious souls who did read it, but perhaps above all in the future work of those who had the pleasure of writing for it...

...A week or two after sending it off, I got a phone call from a querulous-sounding man who seemed understandably repelled by the subject I had chosen...

...Besides encouraging me to range widely, the editors taught me, a professor of English literature, a great deal about writing concisely for a bright but unspecialized audience...

...One of the virtues of The New Leader has always been its eclecticism...

...The New Leader, however, soldiered on in a heroic effort to discover what principles a democratic Left might stand for in a world changed beyond recognition, as well as to explore the practical question of how such a movement might conceivably be rebuilt amid the intellectual ruins of both Marxism and New Deal liberalism...

...With more to offer writers, with a bigger staff, with the improved distribution that money can buy, and with the Web site that has recently become essential to every periodical's identity, the NL could have carried out its mission more effectively—that goes without saying...

...It proved to be a comfortable labyrinth filled with books and other signs of intellectual vitality...

...A 1994 piece on the overused concept of "culture" eventually became, through many permutations, the basis of a book entitled Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America, published in 2000...

...My second entry was more in accord with what had, in effect, become the magazine's unacknowledged mission after the fall of Soviet Communism...

...and since 2001, the still unresolved challenge that combating Islamic terrorists poses to a liberalism whose instincts are peaceful and multicultural...

...Indeed, its views were not always easy to ascertain...

...I can't say how much readers profited from this profusion of topics, but I certainly learned a lot...

...Even so, it outlived a host of once celebrated journals of its genre, including such varied publications as the Reporter, Ramparts, I.F Stone's Weekly, Partisan .Review, the Public Interest...

...A precocious friend of mine who was already on the road to becoming a leader of the brand-new New Left hailed it as the magazine that most closely approximated his own beliefs—Democratic Socialist, deeply rooted in New York but international in its focus, resolutely anti-Soviet yet in favor of nuclear disarmament, and (unlike many of its competitors) forthrightly critical of Fidel Castro's new dictatorship...

...In hindsight, that may seem a surprising constellation of positions for a New Leftist to have embraced early in John F. Kennedy's Administration...

...To have experienced The New Leader in the second half of its existence was to deal with an editor who operated with relentless charm and persistence, excellent judgment, and alarmingly little money to offer...

...for most of the '90s, it was an article of faith among pundits that Clinton had changed the party forever and made it once again electable outside the liberal enclaves of the East and West coasts...

...Unlike a good many political magazines Left and Right that I could name, The New Leader really meant it...

...I immediately had the pleasant sense of discovering a new home I did not know about before...

...foreign policy with Richard M. Nixon's Administration...

...The last was the largest hurdle the magazine chronically faced...

...Of course, when I speak of "the editors," I mean primarily Mike Kolatch, with whom I always discussed my columns ahead of time and who, unlike any other editor I have ever dealt with, spent hours with me on the phone copyediting them word by word as they went to press...

...In this quest it was not altogether alone, but it differed from most of its competitors and fellow searchers in its relative absence of taboos about what a new liberalism might look like...

...I guess people should know about this sort ofthing," he finally declared in a tone of utter distaste, and the piece ended up as the cover story in the September 7, 1992 issue...

...It was actually not uncommon, though, before the Vietnam War turned people like my friend decisively anti-American...

...We welcome a variety of opinions consistent with our democratic policy...

...I visited the offices at 275 Seventh Avenue only once...

...That it did as well as it did and survived into the 21 st century is largely due to an editor who continued to seek out new talent and fresh thinking until the end of The New Leader's life cycle...

...The minority status and some of the factors that perpetuate it are evident to far more people today than they were in 1992...

...In a little more than a decade, I published columns about Isaiah Berlin, the millennium, the novels of Patrick O'Brian, prostate disease, the American South, Queen Victoria, Amtrak, and higher education...

...the gradual decline of the "New Democrats" Clinton seemed at first to represent...

...The experience was a bit like that of a university extension student from the sticks who makes a long anticipated journey to campus after fantasizing for years what the place looks like...

...I will miss those conversations, which were the lab sessions of my new education...

...After I began writing the "Second Thoughts" column in 1994,1 returned frequently to the troubles of liberalism...

...By 1992, when I began writing for the magazine, both the Soviet Union and the democratic socialism that had still looked promising three decades earlier were extinct, with Castro the only survivor remaining from the Jurassic age...

...This experiment in apparently unlimited freedom could have resulted in ajournai with no theme or consistency...

...the political significance of competing ideologies, such as libertarianism and the religious Right...

...Following Clinton's 1992 election with 43 per cent of the vote, Democrats and liberals were jubilant...