You're looking pretty good for a "a certain kind of older person (probably 60+)." In all seriousness, I subscribed to Liberties from the first issue. I think that the journal is, at its simplest, not a matter of nostalgia for Partisan Review-ish stuff, but a recognition that there is a gap in sustained intellectual writing that is neither too academic nor too laissez-faire.
Good lord, the Greenberg piece is nonsensical. It simply doesn't do to call an opinion wrongheaded and then attempt to debunk it by pointing to personal vibes while ignoring concrete policies.
Ronald Reagan indeed resembles Bill Clinton (and vice versa) because they did exactly the same thing. Did either one provide new public services, such as healthcare? No. Did they both cut taxes to the rich? Yes.
In Europe we don't get confused, as Greenberg clearly does, about what 'neoliberalism' means - red or blue can (and do) practice it. Though of course that's the whole point of using the term - that 'liberal' and 'conservative' are just wings of the same neoliberal machine serving the wealthy. Understanding that means moving beyond both of these empty vibe-packets towards concrete policies that reverse the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal movement.
This is false. Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31% to 39.6%, added a 36% tax bracket, raised corporate taxes, increased taxes on higher earning social security recipients, and made a number of other changes.
"Did either one provide new public services, such as healthcare?"
In the case of Clinton, it wasn't for lack of trying - his healthcare plan ("Hillarycare") couldn't make it through congress (his bill to raise taxes was 50-50, with Al Gore casting the tiebreaking vote). After 1994, the republican wave, there was a R majority in both the house and the senate.
Clinton did manage to pass a bill increasing healthcare portability (HIPAA) and a bill increasing child healthcare coverage (CHIP).
But I find it just bizarre to pretend to see no difference between Reagan and Clinton. Or to conflate Clinton's inability to pass healthcare legislation with a lack of desire to pass healthcare legislation.
Obama was only able to pass Obamacare by one vote in the senate, and did it just before *he* lost his D majority in Congress.
I don’t pretend to see no difference between Reagan and Clinton - I literally cannot see a difference between them. Though you indeed point to a tax increase for the wealthy, I’m not certain how that was implemented, with what cut-outs and so on. I imagine with Larry Summers at the helm there were plenty of exemptions.
The bottom line is that during Clinton’s admin, income inequality increased by 12%. The rigorous balanced-budget constraint meant that social spending was down overall in this period.
This is replicated in all the G7 and European countries where similar neoliberal policies prevailed in the post-Reagan/Thatcher era.
Income inequality continued to rise, and marginalized communities often found themselves left behind. The welfare reforms implemented during his presidency have faced scrutiny for exacerbating poverty and limiting access to necessary social services.
As for “wanting” to pass healthcare legislation but failing to do so, by now we are very familiar with how Democrats use a stooge or two to sabotage their own social spending bills and point at the scapegoat as the problem, rather than the lack of will in their own party to provide services.
The same goes with the massive watering-down that was the Obamacare ACA, they “had to” reduce the scope of the plan because of opposition. The fact is, if Democrats had the will to pass comprehensive healthcare legislation, they would have done so, just as they overcome budgetary limitations to vote for massive military spending for the US and Israel.
I think Obama and Clinton both perceived themselves as governing during the Reagan era, with its skepticism of government spending. Given this limitation, they were reluctant to pursue big social spending because they thought it would be unpopular. You can declare that these limitations were actually self-imposed, but I don't find such a declaration convincing. I think Obama and Clinton had a pretty good feel for what they could get away with.
Trump seems like a somewhat era-ending president. It will be interesting to see what comes after him. My guess is that there will be more room for social spending.
Sigh. I'm glad to see some pushback with some actual facts. Yes, of course, Clinton 'moved to the center' (like Obama). And, like every president I've vote for, he did things that I wish he hadn't done . . . or is that he had to do things that I wish he didn't have to do? But, because I was an adult throughout both of those administrations, my mind is blown that anyone, as the next post states, "literally cannot see a difference between" Reagan and Clinton. One of the things that I've learned, as someone who has lived in the Bay Area since 1976 and been a Spanish-bilingual teacher and school psychologist in the Oakland, Berkeley, and other school districts, is that - like George W. Bush - the more committed progressives, including my closest friends and family members, don't do nuance. Which makes me scratch my head as to why they are reading Woman of Letters, because Naomi is pretty much all nuance.
I’ll just leave it to someone much better versed than myself in the history of neoliberalism, David Harvey, whose A Brief History of Neoliberalism is a recommended read if you want to go beyond vibes to actual policies and material effects:
It was, therefore, Clinton and then Blair who, from the centre-left, did the most to consolidate the role of neoliberalism both at home and internationally.
Essentially, if you look at it not from the ‘liberal’ perspective of who makes the nicest noises about human rights, but from the class perspective of who has done what for working people, there literally isn’t a whisker of difference between Reagan and Clinton/Obama or between Thatcher and Blair.
Not everything is manner and tone - material conditions are real. The fact that I live in a European country with public pensions and healthcare, and the US does not have either of those things at a national level, says everything about what the liberal consensus actually means to working people.
Interesting to think about whether what the cost/benefit would be if they were willing to try harder to plug into the digital/social space -- make more essays free, try to get traction on social, etc. Would that cost them their soul, in some indefinable way? Would it work even if they tried? It does feel to me like a noble but doomed endeavor but maybe would lose its nobility if it tried too hard not to be doomed?
Yes I agree with these points you’re trying to make. I honestly feel like it makes sense for them to just hope that print comes back. They don’t need to sell that many subscriptions in order to seem successful. And the average quality of the journal is so high! They put an immense amount of care into putting it together and editing the pieces and making it work cohesively. Maybe readers will appreciate that and tell people about it (as I have). I don’t know that they would be better off pandering for clicks.
But the balance is that they could also just recruit some younger and hungrier contributors. Someone like Sorondo or Begler. People with a following online, and then you kinda count on them to promote the journal.
It strikes me that if they are fully funded to put out something interesting for a select audience, then they don't have to worry about cost/benefits. They can just do what they do. Chasing those digital/social audiences would interfere with that mission. And I have to say, I like that. I just love the idea of giving money to artists/creators to do cool things and seeing what happens. Sometimes it works out (Sense8, season 1), sometimes it doesn't (Sense8, season 2).
Excellent article, thank you. I’m a huge fan of Liberties (yes, I’m 63), a magazine I was introduced to by a friend three years ago. That friend is a year older than I am, so yes, it does seem to attract mostly older readers. Wieseltier recently led an intellectually stimulating eight-week Zoom seminar on Maimonides, which required weekly readings from The Guide for the Perplexed; the final session was this past Sunday. Among the attendees were David Remnick, Mark Lilla, and many other public intellectuals, cultural critics, and religious scholars.
One interesting and ironic note about Celeste Marcus—who, in my view, is a very good writer and is meant to be a draw for younger readers. She accused the writer and podcaster Yascha Mounk of raping her, and he was subsequently fired from The Atlantic, the same magazine that fired Wieseltier. I’m not sure whether the rape accusations were dismissed; she had been Mounk’s girlfriend and was in bed with him when the alleged rape occurred. There is an interesting article about the case in Quillette: https://quillette.com/2024/03/20/toward-ruin-or-recovery-celeste-marcus-liberties-journal-yascha-mounk-feminist-metoo/.
This incident was why I stopped subscribing to Liberties. I obviously wasn’t there and don’t know what happened but based on what second hand understanding I tried as responsibly as I could to glean, the accusation stunk. I’m not sure I want to comment more than that because it might understandably annoy the owner of this Substack.
I've been enjoying the series on different intellectual magazines, what prompted the exploration?
For a few years I subscribed to the London Review of Books, which is generally excellent. I stopped when I realised I wasn't taking the time with them and the unread copies were accumulating.
Awhile back I wrote about effortposting (posting long in depth pieces on substack) and several people wrote posts defending these intellectual journals, so I decided to see what was in them. It’s been so fascinating! I am seeing if there is anything I can learn here, that I can use to improve Woman of Letters.
At the end of your research, will you tell us how you're adapting what you've discovered to your newsletter? I enjoy fantasizing that the internet loops us back around to the one-person magazine of the 18th century, the Tatlers, Ramblers, Spectators, and so on. It seemed like blogs were going that way, once, but then all the best bloggers seemed to either get combined into the online verticals of traditional magazines, dissipated into short form social media, or screwed by the death of organic search traffic. Will substack go the same way, ultimately? I hope not. I love that you consciously think of your project here as a kind of magazine. It's certainly substantial enough (in volume and in, like, density of thought) to be considered that way.
I am not sure exactly what I have learned that’s relevant for my own purposes yet. I am still in the stage where I am trying to figure out what’s actually in these magazines. I definitely think of myself as a competitor, in some sense, to these magazines. I have the same readers they want, and my readers sort of interact w me in the same way (ie many of them subscribe to me but don’t read most of my posts, just the same way many people subscribe to these journals without reading them).
I have a feeling that I will ultimately learn more from doing these magazine reviews than from the magazines themselves—there is a lot of power that comes from writing about something that people don’t ordinarily write about.
Liberties published two articles I think about all the time: one called Against Translation, by Benjamin Moser; and another called Sanctimony Literature, by Becca Rothfeld, which does discuss 21st-century literature.
Using “blunderbuss” is substituting a cool word for thoughtful analysis.
The reason we (the loathers of neoliberalism) elude Clinton into Bush and Reagan is that, on many critical issues, they are deeply aligned. You are too young to have experienced Reagan, but some of us did, and there is very little breathing room between Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” and Clinton’s Sister Soulja. They are not the same, but suffice to say they dance to the same rhythm.
Obama grew the Bush surveillance state wildly, murdered by drone at a level that would have beggared Reagan, and fought for a healthcare policy proposed by a Republican governor.
Hilary Clinton was a driver of the bankruptcy bill, a deeply pro-banker, anti-human act, and aided in the slaughter of a leader with no less relish than any conservative.
Obviously there are gradations, but on what matters, the explosion of PE, weaponizing the dollar, forcing capital’s view on the world, they are indistinguishable.
I've found that as I grow older it's harder to find any media, let alone a journal, that represents my politics. Liberties is not it but I still enjoyed this installment in your ongoing survey of American intellectual journals. I had seen copies at B&N and liked the barebones presentation but never looked any further. I assume that it's entirely subsidized and that, much like other intellectual journals, it doesn't turn a profit, it's utility measured more by its mission than how many copies it sells. I can't imagine its collaborators aren't compensated decently (or even way above market, given the likely subsidized nature of the publication) or that Wieselter himself lives a Spartan lifestyle.
Wieselter strikes me as a windbag whose undeniable talent is being able to make these initiatives reality (no small feat) and attracting suitable talent, more than being an intellectual light himself. There's no point in me objecting to Liberties' political orientation although having read the Beinart book referenced here I think it's odd to call its viewpoint "calcified" while defending the most calcified and by now manifestly useless policy stance on that particular issue.
One of the reasons I've cut back on subscriptions over the years is the amount of reading to be found online (and Substack hasn't made it easier) and the fact that I don't want to pay for a subscription or $10-$20 per issue if I'm going to read 1-2 articles per issue at the most and then never going back to them. I still get journals that I barely even crack open. Like you, I also enjoy reading publications to see what is being discussed in other parts of the political spectrum. One journal that doesn't represent my politics but that I enjoy is American Affairs. It's purely focused on policy but its articles tend to tackle issues from unorthodox stances, at least when compared to the Washington consensus you describe (I also worked in DC for about a decade and while that consensus was starting to crumble, there are things that won't change.) From that side of the political spectrum, I also used to check out Chronicles (but it's steadily declined) and The American Conservative, which veered from paleocon ideology and pieces by interesting writers like Bill Kaufmann to a mix of listless and crackpot, such as Rod Dreher's columns. Dreher is probably more famous these days because of how often he's ridiculed in Chapo Trap House.
Speaking of Chapo, I understand they were one of the influences for The Drift. When I looked at a few issues, it struck me as closer to N+1 than as a full-fledged socialist journal, which is how you describe it in an earlier piece (and perhaps that's how they describe themselves as well but I don't know.) Some of the pieces looked interesting, others not so much, but I ultimately passed for the same reason I always do: too much to read at home. Other journals that I think are worth a look are The Baffler (which also publishes fiction,) The New Left Review (one may not share Perry Anderson's Western Marxist outlook, but the writing is solid, erudite, and compelling,) and N+1 (which I believe you may eventually cover.) I also want to take a second look at Volume O. A cursory glance at one issue didn't pique my interest but I want to try another one with a new slate of fiction writers.
Thanks for this comment. Yes I don’t necessarily understand what makes something a socialist journal or not a socialist journal. I would say n+1 is socialist too!
Thanks for these other recs. Always nice to hear your thoughts :)
I'm not so interested in the political content, but the cultural/literary coverage is spot on for me. The fact that they don't publish about new literature is a selling point. I'm always -- at a minimum -- fifty years or so behind the times, and I'm looking for current discussions of old books. Jackpot!
Yes I am torn. As a reader I feel like the focus on older stuff works for me. But I also feel like writing about newer stuff gives the journal the ability to draw new readers.
What about new readers interested in old things? Surely there is a market for that. Substack is full of people freshly discovering Wittgenstein and Sebald (in your own case) and wanting to engage with those texts, and again the success of your newsletter is proof of the hunger for this sort of resurrection. I think it's probably a failure of marketing rather than an absence of a market.
Thank you. You have just elucidated to me something about DC, politics, and how I think about politics that I have not ever quite grasped in all my fifty years.
To be clear, I am one of those people who uses the word neoliberalism and thinks it is evil but also very, very, very much an all politics is local person who thinks you should care more about your city and county government than you do about the feds.
Although I doubt I will rush out to subscribe to Liberties, I do increasingly miss the analog world, and the particular kind of magazine reading that you describe that belonged to it.
This is a very interesting observation: "the magazine decides what is important, and you just sit down and read it, even if you’re not interested in the topic," that's provoking many thoughts.
liberties attracts a crowd of bloviating would-be intellectuals with zero convictions who love to hear themselves talk, which DC has in spades
If I still lived in DC, I would surely hate Liberties. But the view from SF is more charming.
Neoliberalism, liberal Zionism, and decent culture writing, yeah, seems like Marty Peretz era New Republic.
Wondered where all the liberal supporters of the Iraq war went and looking at the list of contributors found most of them!
Ewww gross like omg Regina
*Marty Perez vibes intensify*
It certainly doesn't attract readers incapable of forming coherent thoughts. That's old world for you.
proving my point
You're looking pretty good for a "a certain kind of older person (probably 60+)." In all seriousness, I subscribed to Liberties from the first issue. I think that the journal is, at its simplest, not a matter of nostalgia for Partisan Review-ish stuff, but a recognition that there is a gap in sustained intellectual writing that is neither too academic nor too laissez-faire.
Glad to see another fan!
Good lord, the Greenberg piece is nonsensical. It simply doesn't do to call an opinion wrongheaded and then attempt to debunk it by pointing to personal vibes while ignoring concrete policies.
Ronald Reagan indeed resembles Bill Clinton (and vice versa) because they did exactly the same thing. Did either one provide new public services, such as healthcare? No. Did they both cut taxes to the rich? Yes.
In Europe we don't get confused, as Greenberg clearly does, about what 'neoliberalism' means - red or blue can (and do) practice it. Though of course that's the whole point of using the term - that 'liberal' and 'conservative' are just wings of the same neoliberal machine serving the wealthy. Understanding that means moving beyond both of these empty vibe-packets towards concrete policies that reverse the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal movement.
"Did they both cut taxes to the rich? Yes."
This is false. Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31% to 39.6%, added a 36% tax bracket, raised corporate taxes, increased taxes on higher earning social security recipients, and made a number of other changes.
"Did either one provide new public services, such as healthcare?"
In the case of Clinton, it wasn't for lack of trying - his healthcare plan ("Hillarycare") couldn't make it through congress (his bill to raise taxes was 50-50, with Al Gore casting the tiebreaking vote). After 1994, the republican wave, there was a R majority in both the house and the senate.
Clinton did manage to pass a bill increasing healthcare portability (HIPAA) and a bill increasing child healthcare coverage (CHIP).
But I find it just bizarre to pretend to see no difference between Reagan and Clinton. Or to conflate Clinton's inability to pass healthcare legislation with a lack of desire to pass healthcare legislation.
Obama was only able to pass Obamacare by one vote in the senate, and did it just before *he* lost his D majority in Congress.
I don’t pretend to see no difference between Reagan and Clinton - I literally cannot see a difference between them. Though you indeed point to a tax increase for the wealthy, I’m not certain how that was implemented, with what cut-outs and so on. I imagine with Larry Summers at the helm there were plenty of exemptions.
The bottom line is that during Clinton’s admin, income inequality increased by 12%. The rigorous balanced-budget constraint meant that social spending was down overall in this period.
This is replicated in all the G7 and European countries where similar neoliberal policies prevailed in the post-Reagan/Thatcher era.
Income inequality continued to rise, and marginalized communities often found themselves left behind. The welfare reforms implemented during his presidency have faced scrutiny for exacerbating poverty and limiting access to necessary social services.
As for “wanting” to pass healthcare legislation but failing to do so, by now we are very familiar with how Democrats use a stooge or two to sabotage their own social spending bills and point at the scapegoat as the problem, rather than the lack of will in their own party to provide services.
The same goes with the massive watering-down that was the Obamacare ACA, they “had to” reduce the scope of the plan because of opposition. The fact is, if Democrats had the will to pass comprehensive healthcare legislation, they would have done so, just as they overcome budgetary limitations to vote for massive military spending for the US and Israel.
https://worldhistoryjournal.com/2025/10/21/bill-clinton-presidency/#Fiscal_Policies_and_Budget_Surpluses
As my father, a Republican put it, "Clinton is the best Republican I didn't vote for." I've finally started to see that he was right.
I think Obama and Clinton both perceived themselves as governing during the Reagan era, with its skepticism of government spending. Given this limitation, they were reluctant to pursue big social spending because they thought it would be unpopular. You can declare that these limitations were actually self-imposed, but I don't find such a declaration convincing. I think Obama and Clinton had a pretty good feel for what they could get away with.
Trump seems like a somewhat era-ending president. It will be interesting to see what comes after him. My guess is that there will be more room for social spending.
Sigh. I'm glad to see some pushback with some actual facts. Yes, of course, Clinton 'moved to the center' (like Obama). And, like every president I've vote for, he did things that I wish he hadn't done . . . or is that he had to do things that I wish he didn't have to do? But, because I was an adult throughout both of those administrations, my mind is blown that anyone, as the next post states, "literally cannot see a difference between" Reagan and Clinton. One of the things that I've learned, as someone who has lived in the Bay Area since 1976 and been a Spanish-bilingual teacher and school psychologist in the Oakland, Berkeley, and other school districts, is that - like George W. Bush - the more committed progressives, including my closest friends and family members, don't do nuance. Which makes me scratch my head as to why they are reading Woman of Letters, because Naomi is pretty much all nuance.
I’ll just leave it to someone much better versed than myself in the history of neoliberalism, David Harvey, whose A Brief History of Neoliberalism is a recommended read if you want to go beyond vibes to actual policies and material effects:
It was, therefore, Clinton and then Blair who, from the centre-left, did the most to consolidate the role of neoliberalism both at home and internationally.
Essentially, if you look at it not from the ‘liberal’ perspective of who makes the nicest noises about human rights, but from the class perspective of who has done what for working people, there literally isn’t a whisker of difference between Reagan and Clinton/Obama or between Thatcher and Blair.
Not everything is manner and tone - material conditions are real. The fact that I live in a European country with public pensions and healthcare, and the US does not have either of those things at a national level, says everything about what the liberal consensus actually means to working people.
Interesting to think about whether what the cost/benefit would be if they were willing to try harder to plug into the digital/social space -- make more essays free, try to get traction on social, etc. Would that cost them their soul, in some indefinable way? Would it work even if they tried? It does feel to me like a noble but doomed endeavor but maybe would lose its nobility if it tried too hard not to be doomed?
Yes I agree with these points you’re trying to make. I honestly feel like it makes sense for them to just hope that print comes back. They don’t need to sell that many subscriptions in order to seem successful. And the average quality of the journal is so high! They put an immense amount of care into putting it together and editing the pieces and making it work cohesively. Maybe readers will appreciate that and tell people about it (as I have). I don’t know that they would be better off pandering for clicks.
But the balance is that they could also just recruit some younger and hungrier contributors. Someone like Sorondo or Begler. People with a following online, and then you kinda count on them to promote the journal.
It strikes me that if they are fully funded to put out something interesting for a select audience, then they don't have to worry about cost/benefits. They can just do what they do. Chasing those digital/social audiences would interfere with that mission. And I have to say, I like that. I just love the idea of giving money to artists/creators to do cool things and seeing what happens. Sometimes it works out (Sense8, season 1), sometimes it doesn't (Sense8, season 2).
Excellent article, thank you. I’m a huge fan of Liberties (yes, I’m 63), a magazine I was introduced to by a friend three years ago. That friend is a year older than I am, so yes, it does seem to attract mostly older readers. Wieseltier recently led an intellectually stimulating eight-week Zoom seminar on Maimonides, which required weekly readings from The Guide for the Perplexed; the final session was this past Sunday. Among the attendees were David Remnick, Mark Lilla, and many other public intellectuals, cultural critics, and religious scholars.
One interesting and ironic note about Celeste Marcus—who, in my view, is a very good writer and is meant to be a draw for younger readers. She accused the writer and podcaster Yascha Mounk of raping her, and he was subsequently fired from The Atlantic, the same magazine that fired Wieseltier. I’m not sure whether the rape accusations were dismissed; she had been Mounk’s girlfriend and was in bed with him when the alleged rape occurred. There is an interesting article about the case in Quillette: https://quillette.com/2024/03/20/toward-ruin-or-recovery-celeste-marcus-liberties-journal-yascha-mounk-feminist-metoo/.
Keep up the good work!
This incident was why I stopped subscribing to Liberties. I obviously wasn’t there and don’t know what happened but based on what second hand understanding I tried as responsibly as I could to glean, the accusation stunk. I’m not sure I want to comment more than that because it might understandably annoy the owner of this Substack.
I've been enjoying the series on different intellectual magazines, what prompted the exploration?
For a few years I subscribed to the London Review of Books, which is generally excellent. I stopped when I realised I wasn't taking the time with them and the unread copies were accumulating.
Awhile back I wrote about effortposting (posting long in depth pieces on substack) and several people wrote posts defending these intellectual journals, so I decided to see what was in them. It’s been so fascinating! I am seeing if there is anything I can learn here, that I can use to improve Woman of Letters.
At the end of your research, will you tell us how you're adapting what you've discovered to your newsletter? I enjoy fantasizing that the internet loops us back around to the one-person magazine of the 18th century, the Tatlers, Ramblers, Spectators, and so on. It seemed like blogs were going that way, once, but then all the best bloggers seemed to either get combined into the online verticals of traditional magazines, dissipated into short form social media, or screwed by the death of organic search traffic. Will substack go the same way, ultimately? I hope not. I love that you consciously think of your project here as a kind of magazine. It's certainly substantial enough (in volume and in, like, density of thought) to be considered that way.
I am not sure exactly what I have learned that’s relevant for my own purposes yet. I am still in the stage where I am trying to figure out what’s actually in these magazines. I definitely think of myself as a competitor, in some sense, to these magazines. I have the same readers they want, and my readers sort of interact w me in the same way (ie many of them subscribe to me but don’t read most of my posts, just the same way many people subscribe to these journals without reading them).
I have a feeling that I will ultimately learn more from doing these magazine reviews than from the magazines themselves—there is a lot of power that comes from writing about something that people don’t ordinarily write about.
happens to the best of us
I love Liberties! One of the best—if not the best—magazines for commentary and light intellectual history
Liberties published two articles I think about all the time: one called Against Translation, by Benjamin Moser; and another called Sanctimony Literature, by Becca Rothfeld, which does discuss 21st-century literature.
Using “blunderbuss” is substituting a cool word for thoughtful analysis.
The reason we (the loathers of neoliberalism) elude Clinton into Bush and Reagan is that, on many critical issues, they are deeply aligned. You are too young to have experienced Reagan, but some of us did, and there is very little breathing room between Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” and Clinton’s Sister Soulja. They are not the same, but suffice to say they dance to the same rhythm.
Obama grew the Bush surveillance state wildly, murdered by drone at a level that would have beggared Reagan, and fought for a healthcare policy proposed by a Republican governor.
Hilary Clinton was a driver of the bankruptcy bill, a deeply pro-banker, anti-human act, and aided in the slaughter of a leader with no less relish than any conservative.
Obviously there are gradations, but on what matters, the explosion of PE, weaponizing the dollar, forcing capital’s view on the world, they are indistinguishable.
I've found that as I grow older it's harder to find any media, let alone a journal, that represents my politics. Liberties is not it but I still enjoyed this installment in your ongoing survey of American intellectual journals. I had seen copies at B&N and liked the barebones presentation but never looked any further. I assume that it's entirely subsidized and that, much like other intellectual journals, it doesn't turn a profit, it's utility measured more by its mission than how many copies it sells. I can't imagine its collaborators aren't compensated decently (or even way above market, given the likely subsidized nature of the publication) or that Wieselter himself lives a Spartan lifestyle.
Wieselter strikes me as a windbag whose undeniable talent is being able to make these initiatives reality (no small feat) and attracting suitable talent, more than being an intellectual light himself. There's no point in me objecting to Liberties' political orientation although having read the Beinart book referenced here I think it's odd to call its viewpoint "calcified" while defending the most calcified and by now manifestly useless policy stance on that particular issue.
One of the reasons I've cut back on subscriptions over the years is the amount of reading to be found online (and Substack hasn't made it easier) and the fact that I don't want to pay for a subscription or $10-$20 per issue if I'm going to read 1-2 articles per issue at the most and then never going back to them. I still get journals that I barely even crack open. Like you, I also enjoy reading publications to see what is being discussed in other parts of the political spectrum. One journal that doesn't represent my politics but that I enjoy is American Affairs. It's purely focused on policy but its articles tend to tackle issues from unorthodox stances, at least when compared to the Washington consensus you describe (I also worked in DC for about a decade and while that consensus was starting to crumble, there are things that won't change.) From that side of the political spectrum, I also used to check out Chronicles (but it's steadily declined) and The American Conservative, which veered from paleocon ideology and pieces by interesting writers like Bill Kaufmann to a mix of listless and crackpot, such as Rod Dreher's columns. Dreher is probably more famous these days because of how often he's ridiculed in Chapo Trap House.
Speaking of Chapo, I understand they were one of the influences for The Drift. When I looked at a few issues, it struck me as closer to N+1 than as a full-fledged socialist journal, which is how you describe it in an earlier piece (and perhaps that's how they describe themselves as well but I don't know.) Some of the pieces looked interesting, others not so much, but I ultimately passed for the same reason I always do: too much to read at home. Other journals that I think are worth a look are The Baffler (which also publishes fiction,) The New Left Review (one may not share Perry Anderson's Western Marxist outlook, but the writing is solid, erudite, and compelling,) and N+1 (which I believe you may eventually cover.) I also want to take a second look at Volume O. A cursory glance at one issue didn't pique my interest but I want to try another one with a new slate of fiction writers.
Thanks for this comment. Yes I don’t necessarily understand what makes something a socialist journal or not a socialist journal. I would say n+1 is socialist too!
Thanks for these other recs. Always nice to hear your thoughts :)
I'm not so interested in the political content, but the cultural/literary coverage is spot on for me. The fact that they don't publish about new literature is a selling point. I'm always -- at a minimum -- fifty years or so behind the times, and I'm looking for current discussions of old books. Jackpot!
Yes I am torn. As a reader I feel like the focus on older stuff works for me. But I also feel like writing about newer stuff gives the journal the ability to draw new readers.
What about new readers interested in old things? Surely there is a market for that. Substack is full of people freshly discovering Wittgenstein and Sebald (in your own case) and wanting to engage with those texts, and again the success of your newsletter is proof of the hunger for this sort of resurrection. I think it's probably a failure of marketing rather than an absence of a market.
"The journal is quite barebones: it has the size and heft of a typical trade paperback"
What does this mean? If it's "barebones" shouldn't it compare more with a pamphlet or a broadsheet? What's a "typical trade paperback"?
I just meant it has no images, no fancy layouts. Nothing I typically associate with magazines.
Thank you. You have just elucidated to me something about DC, politics, and how I think about politics that I have not ever quite grasped in all my fifty years.
To be clear, I am one of those people who uses the word neoliberalism and thinks it is evil but also very, very, very much an all politics is local person who thinks you should care more about your city and county government than you do about the feds.
Although I doubt I will rush out to subscribe to Liberties, I do increasingly miss the analog world, and the particular kind of magazine reading that you describe that belonged to it.
This is a very interesting observation: "the magazine decides what is important, and you just sit down and read it, even if you’re not interested in the topic," that's provoking many thoughts.
Congrats on getting in to *BASFF 2026!* I try to snag a copy of that every year, and I'm definitely going to seek out a copy now!
Thank you!