Influence

Stipulating that even the most influential political magazine with a circulation below 100,000 is generally only influential on the margins, and that the wrath it inspires from its enemies is probably outsize to its actual impact, Matt Zeitlin misses a few key things here:

If Stephen, Kathy G and many other liberal bloggers are correct that, as Brian Beutler puts it, “The New Republic ’s readers are center-lefters, center-righters, Very Serious People, and delusional neo-conservatives,” then shouldn’t their enthusiastic support for more left wing causes that don’t have much broad based institutional and media support have a similar effect as their support for the occasional right wing cause?

In ascending order of importance.

First--and this has become a bit less true at TNR in the last year or so--when a magazine devotes a small minority of its copy to promoting liberal causes and a large minority to advancing neo-conservative ideas and then uses its stance on those liberal causes to advance its reputation as a center-left magazine, it is to a much larger extent promoting conservative ideas to liberal people than the other way around.

Second, Matt forgets that none other than Michael Kinsley very recently wrote this:

At The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the editor, we used to joke about changing our name to “Even the Liberal New Republic,” because that was how we were referred to whenever we took a conservative position on something, which was often. Then came the day when we took a liberal position on something and we were referred to as “Even the Conservative New Republic.”

As this example illustrates, among writers about politics, the surprise technique usually means starting left and turning right.

Third--and related--when a magazine (relatively speaking) echos the rolling thunder of an idea that's on the ascent, its visibility and credibility and influence (both real and perceived) go through the roof. This is not a coincidence. Even if it had convinced a great percentage of it's, say, 10,000 anti-war readers to support the war, nothing The New Republic did made the war in Iraq happen. What The New Republic actually did was allow its good reputation to be used by people on the right who hoped to advance the idea that good liberals support war. If TNR had cultivated its image over the years as a magazine of the center-right, then its support for things like universal health care might more significantly help that cause. But under those circumstances its support for the war would have seemed totally mundane.