Life Among the Lefties

By Romesh Ratnesar

In the offices of the Nation, the weekly magazine of leftist opinion, staff members like to joke that "if it's bad for the country, it's good for the Nation." In a political age dominated by bloggers, conservatives and cable news, the Nation delivers a regular helping of unfashionably liberal journalism printed on gray butcher paper, lightened only by pencil drawings and the mordant poetry of Calvin Trillin. The formula is working: since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, its circulation has soared 96%, to 184,000; in 2004 the magazine enjoyed its best year ever, reversing years of losses to turn a profit of $251,000. If it's true that the fortunes of the Nation are inversely proportional to those of the nation, then things must be pretty bleak for the rest of us.

Some of the secrets of the magazine's success can be found in A Matter of Opinion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 458 pages), Victor Navasky's hefty memoir of a quarter-century at the Nation--first as its editor and, since 1994, its publisher and part owner. In tracing the colorful path of his career, which included founding the opinion journal the Monocle and stints as a writer and an editor at the New York Times, Navasky defends the relevance of ideological magazines across the political spectrum. "To me the problem is too little opinion, not too much," he writes, arguing that some periodicals need to provide perspectives often slighted by the mainstream media's fixation on "official" news. Navasky brings a clear-eyed candor to discussing the lengths to which his magazine has gone to maintain its viability: he admits to appearing on Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor--a frequent target of the Nation's jeremiads--solely to boost circulation.

Navasky gets so caught up in the Nation's financial success that parts of the book read like a Harvard Business School case study--which isn't surprising, since Navasky enrolled there part time after buying the magazine in 1994. Navasky, whose previous book, Naming Names, was an acclaimed history of the Hollywood blacklist, is far more effective and entertaining in chronicling the brawls "between liberals and radicals" during the cold war, when the magazine's writers would spar over the major issues of the day: race, sex and communism. In recent years, the Nation has drifted toward ideological orthodoxy, which has cheered its liberal base but driven out such lively writers as Christopher Hitchens, who quit to protest the magazine's shrill contempt for the Bush Administration's foreign policy. Navasky's book is a reminder of a time when magazines served as forums for "moral and political argument, rational deliberation, critical analysis of the problem." Those are qualities that are missing in American political life right now, and not just on the left. --By Romesh Ratnesar