Martin Peretz, who sold the New Republic to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, says he can’t recognize the magazine anymore because it has “abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation.”
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Peretz, the editor in chief from 1974 to 2011, criticized a provocative cover story about racism in the Republican Party that accompanied its recent redesign. He said the story contained “gross oversimplifications [that] hardly reflected the intellectual traditions of a journal of ideas.”
“That was hardly the fate I expected for the magazine,” he wrote.