The New Republic is not a political magazine, it’s a nostalgia machine. The recent angst-fest and mass staff resignations, sparked by editorial changes at the magazine at the behest of its millionaire owner Chris Hughes, make sense only if we understand that the magazine’s peculiar politics — as crystallized under previous owner Martin Peretz — involve a heavy libidinal investment in generating and storing narratives about an idealized past.

Since 1974, the New Republic has been the home and haven of an undying Cold War liberalism, an ideology that tried, in the era that ran from Richard Nixon to Obama, to recreate the intellectual milieu of the Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower years.

In a touching memoir, Deborah Friedel, who once worked as assistant to New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, records that her boss was happiest in his office:  “You see out there it’s 2004, but in this office it’s 1954,” Wieseltier told her (a line he lifted from The Sopranos, a charming subversion of Wieseltier’s own reputation as a Brahmin scold).