Right-wingers, that's who:
As if starting a daily newspaper in the only American city that still has three of them weren't enough, two of The New York Sun's 11 key financial angels have also bought two-thirds of The New Republic, at a cost that one of them suggests could approach several million dollars a year in subsidies. For starters, you'd have to conclude that Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt are very rich men. And they are. They're two of New York's most successful high-end money managers, and though neither is listed on the Forbes 400, which bottoms out at $600 million, they're probably not far off that pace. There's no fear they'll go broke doing this.
But the question of what they want out of these investments has ramifications that go well beyond two men's bank balances and into the realm of political discourse, in both the nation's capital and its most important city. Why would Steinhardt, a Democrat who essentially seeded and watered the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank appendage of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), want to finance a newspaper that will have the Sun's conservative politics? Why would Hertog, a man of the right and chairman of the Manhattan Institute, the prominent conservative think tank, want a piece of the liberal (more than not, anyway) New Republic? Why, aside from the obvious relief of financial stress, would TNR owner Martin Peretz reduce himself to a minority interest in the magazine he's supported for 28 years?
The answer may be best expressed not by Hertog, Steinhardt, or Peretz, but by Seth Lipsky, editor of the Sun and a man whose decade-long dream of starting a new New York daily is finally coming to fruition. "The right wing of the Democratic Party," Lipsky told me recently, "is a depressed stock." Interesting that it took a journalist to produce the apposite business metaphor. And though the reference to party label shouldn't be taken too literally, Lipsky is describing both the certain ideological niche of the Sun and a likely trajectory of the Hertog-Steinhardt New Republic with some precision. It's exactly on the right-most edge of the Democratic cliff -- where the DLC begins to morph into, say, the American Enterprise Institute; where neoliberalism and neoconservatism, each of which is a vestigial presence now in the twenty-first century, collapse into some new entity that doesn't yet have a fully formed identity, or a name -- that these four men meet, despite having arrived by vastly different paths.
Unlike the progressive netroots, which is primarily a network of independently owned and operated websites and email lists, The New Republic is owned by wealthy right-wingers. One quit the DLC in 1996 because he thought Bill Clinton was too liberal (seriously). The other is the chairman of a right-wing think tank. I can only imagine that because those two men probably know every rich Republican in the country, that everything The New Republic writes should be considered Astroturf from now on.
