The Nation: Out of the Stalinist ghetto?
By DAN KENNEDY
Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel brought The Nation an unaccustomed quality -- glamour -- when she was named one of Esquire's "Women We Love." Photograph by Darryl Estrine/Esquire.
The Nation is going for the mainstream. For decades the 131-year-old left-wing journal of opinion has conjured up images of beret-wearing, geriatric Stalinists debating the guilt of Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg over chess in Greenwich Village. But with new owners, a new look, a new editor, and a vibrant new-media presence, the publication is suddenly forcing people to take notice.
Its best recent hit came this spring, when freelancers Joe Conason and Murray Waas weighed in with a hard-hitting piece on Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr. They reported that Starr was digging for dirt on the federal Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) at the same time that the RTC was probing the questionable savings-and-loan dealings of Starr's law firm. Dan Rather waved a copy of the Nation on the CBS Evening News, and a New York Times editorial cited the story in a recent call for Starr to step aside.
The changes at the magazine began in 1995, when the magazine was bought by a group of investors led by longtime editor Victor Navasky and including actor Paul Newman. Navasky often quips that the secret to the Nation's longevity is that it's lost money every year since its founding, and that's not likely to change. Nevertheless, the owners immediately set to work sprucing up the magazine, infusing it with a new sense of energy that no doubt stems from Navasky's excitement over finally having control of the publication.
Navasky promoted himself to publisher and editorial director. The new editor is Katrina vanden Heuvel, a thirtysomething expert on Russia (and a Nation investor) who brought the magazine an unaccustomed quality -- glamour -- when she was named one of Esquire's "Women We Love."
The redesign, unveiled in January, features more color and a lighter, more contemporary typeface, though it maintains an air of seriousness. Certainly no one's going to confuse it with Ray Gun.
Perhaps most important, the Nation has been reaching out in innovative ways, from a coast-to-coast "NationMobile" tour to boost bookstore and newsstand distribution, to an ambitious, still-evolving Web site that will soon include the magazine's one-hour radio show, Radio Nation, in RealAudio.
"I think it's a moment of great opportunity for the magazine," says vanden Heuvel. "We have a monopoly on weekly progressive journalism in this country, and we need to take advantage of that."
The biggest challenge facing the magazine has been the collapse of the left. Nation editorial-board member Richard Parker, a senior fellow at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy (and an Oxford roommate of Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens), says the magazine must find a way to "sketch out a vision of American society that's both plausible and attractive."
Vanden Heuvel agrees. She's already unveiled a feature called "Rethinking," which debuted with an essay by Harvard theologian Harvey Cox calling for a revival of the religious left -- controversial territory for a publication that prides itself on rigid secularism. Vanden Heuvel also wants to emphasize more-aggressive reporting, such as the Starr piece and a recent Robert Sherrill takedown of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
Vanden Heuvel likes to think of the Nation's being a place where liberals and radicals can converse. She's the sort of left-liberal who's willing to tolerate Bill Clinton as the lesser of two evils, which puts her well to the right of star columnists Hitchens, Katha Pollitt, and Alexander Cockburn, dedicated Clinton-bashers all. She hasn't tried to stifle anyone, although there was a bit of controversy last summer after she and Navasky sent a memo to Hitchens and Cockburn asking them to stop sniping at each other, an edict they chose to ignore. Instead, she's supplemented their hard-core leftism by adding liberal columnists such as Eric Alterman and a rotating corps of media critics such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, Ralph Nader, and New York University "civic journalism" guru Jay Rosen.
At the same time, though, vanden Heuvel says it's unrealistic to expect the Nation to solve the left's crisis all by itself. She and Navasky both see considerable intellectual ferment on the left. The pages of the Nation, they say, will reflect that ferment.
"It's nice to think that there's some great thinker out there, a 1990s Tom Paine or Karl Marx or whatever, who can put it in one place," says Navasky. "And if one does emerge," he adds puckishly, "I think the Nation will be the one to publish her." Although the Nation's circulation (97,680, up nearly 10,000 over a year ago) is at an all-time high, the magazine is rarely thought of as playing the same kind of role in the national conversation as, say, the centrist New Republic, whose circulation is only slightly higher. That's true even though the New Republic is widely seen as having lost some of its relevance under departing editor Andrew Sullivan, who was more interested in culture than in politics.
Hitchens attributes the Nation's outsider status to its refusal to choose between "right-wing Republicans and right-wing Democrats" -- to join in the debate, as he puts it, over "what are we going to do about all these niggers who are breeding."
Fair enough. But with Newtonian Republicanism running out of steam, this is the perfect moment for a truly progressive alternative both to the Republicans and to Bill Clinton's moderate mush. That moment could belong to the Nation.
Dan Kennedy (dkennedy@shore.net) is the media reporter for the Boston Phoenix.