Neo-centrist nostalgia politics (what I once called the ancien regime resistance) is being underserved. Lots of people think like that, maybe enough to make Joe Biden president. I just don't think it'll make for an interesting magazine.
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The Atlantic could do well as the Joe Biden of magazines: broadly popular and hated on Twitter. a good model
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The journalistic problem is even if Biden becomes president (quite possible) the old American consensus won't return
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Even if Biden is elected, the old consensus won't return: the neo-liberal/neo-conservative consensus of 1988-2008 was destroyed by the Iraq War, the financial meltdown & the racist backlash (already evident in Palin's rhetoric) to Obama. Even Obama couldn't bring it back.
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Even if Biden is elected, all the forces driving fragmentation & polarization (the climate crisis & the policy imperatives it demands, inequality, the increasingly vocal racism on the right) will continue. So the project of a centrist revival is DOA.
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Because the old consensus can't be revived, I question the journalistic wisdom of trying to recreate that consensus in virtual reality form (as a magazine or op ed page).
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As the saying goes, we have to be as radical as reality itself. That's good advice for a magazine editor. Journalistically I think the interesting work is being done by magazines that are not creating a new center but trying to grapple with emergent politics of the moment
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Replying to @HeerJeet
A mild dissent: I think a lot of interesting work on the right is being done by magazines that do envision a new center, or at least a new center-right, as precisely what the emergent politics of the moment might make possible.
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Replying to @DouthatNYT @HeerJeet
Meaning that the would-be populist and nationalist intellectuals are arguably closer to *a* center (as, on the campaign trail at least, was Trump) than were the conservative scribblers of 2012 or so.
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Replying to @DouthatNYT @HeerJeet
And it might (might) be a weakness of left-wing discourse that it's so focused on defeating Bidenism and the ghost of Clintonism that it doesn't even want to conceptualize a new center.
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In some ways defeating Biden might be the necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for conceptualizing a new center left just as Trump defeating Jeb! was the necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for reformation on the right.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @DouthatNYT
What reformation? Even Romney obeys trump.
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