The New Republic is coming to an end. And the autopsies have begun. So have the critiques. But the real problem with the New Republic is not that it was racist, though it was. It’s not that it was filled with warmongers, though it was. It’s not that it punched hippies, though it did. No, the real problem with the New Republic is that for the last three decades, it has had no energy. It has had no real project.

The last time the New Republic had a project was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was in the journalistic vanguard of what was then called neoliberalism (not what we now call neoliberalism). That is what a great magazine of politics and culture does: it creates a project, it fashions a sensibility. The Spectator did it in the early eighteenth century, Partisan Review in the 1930s did it, Dissent in the 1950s did it, and the New Republic in the 1970s and 80s did it.