Dining on discourses of the intellectual elite

Having lived nearly three-quarters of a century, Victor S. Navasky has held strong opinions for a long time. More significant, having begun his editing career in college with the Phoenix at Swarthmore and the Monocle at Yale, he has been perpetually in a position to express them in a voice that resonated in high places. He has worked for the New York Times, written for virtually every important American publication and taught at Princeton, Harvard and Columbia. He won a National Book Award in 1982 (for “Naming Names,” a book on McCarthyism). But his crowning achievement is that as the editor of the Nation for the last 27 years and its publisher for the last 10, he has been primarily responsible for the survival and current vigor of America’s leading journal of radical leftist opinion.

Among liberal elite intellectuals, Navasky is well beloved for the consistent direction of his moral compass on the great litmus-test issues of race, war, feminism, the environment and human rights. But among the practitioners of his craft -- opinionated, muckraking journalists like myself -- he is most admired for getting rich capitalists to subsidize independent journals of opinion over which they have no control and for attracting as contributors the best leftist writers and thinkers, who are for the most part uncontrollable even by him. Simply putting up with, say, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn and some of their maniacally egotistical brethren is sufficient to have earned Navasky his status as an American icon.

It does not necessarily follow, however, that just because Navasky is a great editor he always writes great books. In “Naming Names,” he clearly did, but whether he has done it again is -- well, a matter of opinion. You may indeed think so if you are Navasky’s “ideal reader,” the one for whom he writes -- a habit he has indulged with great success in editing the magazine and did not break for this memoir.

Basically a history of Navasky’s professional life covering 50 years of charming encounters with other members of the country’s intellectual elite, it naturally evolves into an orgy of name-dropping. When your friends include Calvin “Bud” Trillin and I.F. “Izzy” Stone, your literary agent is Lynn Nesbit and your opponent is William F. Buckley, how can this be avoided? In pursuit of independent voices for democracy, Navasky takes you to strategy sessions with E.L. Doctorow and a young Ralph Nader, to Martha’s Vineyard with the great New York Times labor reporter Abe Raskin, to a money-raising dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

After a couple of hundred pages, it’s hard to believe there is a prominent author, journalist, leftist or philanthropist between Georgetown and Beacon Hill with whom Navasky missed having at least one meaningful and entertaining contact. It’s easy to imagine dinner parties in Cambridge or entire weekends in the Hamptons being ruined by the discovery that your name is missing from the index of Vic’s book.

Fortunately, Navasky started out as a satirist, savaging the pretentiousness of Yale, and there always lurks the redeeming possibility that he has lost neither the skill nor the inclination. Clearly, he has not lost the passion for his longest held and strongest opinion: that the survival of democracy depends on the survival of independent opinion -- preferably in print journals like his own, which he believes are being marginalized in the postmodern world of giant media companies and a repressively pervasive communications culture.

Basically, his argument is this: Most of the talent and financial resources best able to carry out the traditional function of the free press are concentrated in the hands of corporate owners, who see their mission as audience attraction and return on equity rather than public service. The “public voice” that James Madison believed necessary for effective self-government is thus drowned out by the noise of capitalistic profiteering in the media, which now forms the economic underpinning of the marketplace of democracy.

Like the good journalist that he is, Navasky lets others make his case, even tracking down the elusive intellectual Jurgen Habermas in Frankfurt, who maintains that print -- which he calls “the Gutenberg medium” -- is still the key to vital public education in the new Information Age. “[T]exts, rather than oral presentations, ... put certain healthy restraints on the processes of the mind,” Habermas explains, and texts remain the sources from which other media obtain their substance, whatever there is left of it. “A world without print -- imagine it,” he continues. “Articulation and analysis would be left to drown. Print is a necessary source for maintaining the public sphere.”

Hardly anyone whose linear mind developed through reading will disagree, certainly not those whose minds are as old as Navasky’s, Habermas’ and mine. But tell that to today’s journalism students, like those in a recent University of Michigan “column-writing” class who could not name a single columnist (newspaper, magazine or online) whom they read on a regular basis. “My generation grew up watching MTV,” one offered. “We’re used to short spurts of words, lots of images.” Imagine trying to get them interested in the kind of stuff Navasky’s magazine and its conservative counterparts thrive on -- such as a nasty set-to between Christopher Hitchens and Norman “Poddy” Podhoretz over American imperialism or (more commonly) who is most loyal to Israel.

Throughout the history of this democracy and others, independent opinion journals such as the Nation, the American Spectator and the National Review have been a major influence on both the public voice and public policy. New ones, like the Weekly Standard and the American Prospect (which has published my own work), are constantly being spawned, for the simple reason that they are the brains of the ruling class, whose members can’t get enough of one another. Without such organs, how could today’s politicians -- left or right -- know what to think or say? One hopes that despite the dominance of multinational corporations and the “moronization” (a recent Russian coinage) of public discourse, the mission to which Navasky has devoted his life will continue.

And well it may. Cable television and the blog-ridden Internet have even proved to be something of a blessing, their reach as big a boon to the Nation’s circulation and revenue stream as were the two elections of George W. Bush. The Nation had been losing money for more than a century when Navasky (using someone else’s funds as usual) bought it from his longtime benefactor, Arthur Carter, 10 years ago. Since then, both circulation -- which, at 185,000, has nearly doubled -- and revenue have grown steadily, thanks to Web marketing and the increased visibility of the magazine’s editors and writers on cable TV news.

The fact remains, however, that while leftist journals have been preoccupied with their own navels and those of their right-wing antagonists, the boorish anti-intellectual counterelitists -- Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Roger Ailes and the like -- have stolen Madison’s “public voice” for themselves. As far as the last two presidential elections (the most important democratic exercises of all) are concerned, the venerable Navasky and his doughty magazine might as well have been just another blog. *