When a rich person buys a news outlet, it’s often hard to understand why. Tech oligarch Jeff Bezos’s decision to purchase the Washington Post is still a head-scratcher, while the motivation of financial raiders scooping up local newspapers and blogs seems to be some strange combination of cruelty, greed and ego.
But Win McCormack, the Portland- and New York-based writer, editor, publisher and political donor, is neither a shiny-headed Machiavelli nor a millennial Patrick Bateman. He is essentially a bookish, politically minded, nerdy multimillionaire, and like many other bookish, political nerds, he was troubled by Facebook-adjacent mogul Chris Hughes’s ownership of the storied New Republic magazine circa 2015. He saw impending doom as TNR lost most of its staff, plummeted in influence, and struggled to meet the demands of its young, techie owner. But unlike most of his fellow highbrows, McCormack could actually do something about it. When Hughes eventually got bored and decided to sell, McCormack got the chance of lifetime: to buy, and perhaps save, in his words, “a great American institution.”
“The first reason to acquire [TNR] was to salvage it, a rescue operation,” McCormack said.
But the indie publishing mogul and longtime Democratic donor also saw the publication as a place to advance his political vision, and he isn’t afraid to admit it.
“I realized I actually had a political axe to grind. I had been studying civic republicanism and progressivism, and I developed my own sense of what politics should be,” McCormack said. “And I thought, yeah, well, this would be a chance for me to promulgate my view of things.”
In other words, McCormack did not buy the magazine just to get walled off from publishing decisions by his editors.
“There’s people who think an owner of a magazine has no right to interfere with the editorial,” McCormack said. “You can argue about that, but the fact is I’m also an experienced editor and writer.”
McCormack’s vision for liberalism is heavily influenced by the traditions of civic republicanism and communitarianism, believing that society has a duty to its citizens, but that citizens have an equal, if not greater, duty to actively engage with society. His politics, often expressed in columns for the magazine, emphasize mass civic participation to build high levels of social cohesion and mutual care, balanced with individual liberty and a healthy resistance to oligarchy. But McCormack is no radical. He regularly donates five- and six-figure gifts to establishment Democratic campaigns and PACs across the ideological spectrum.
Under Hughes, the magazine was already drifting away from the hawkish, austere liberalism it cultivated under longtime owner Marty Peretz, but McCormack has supercharged this ideological break. His most recent choice to steer the ship is former Baffler editor Chris Lehmann, who, in just under two years, has built a masthead and stable of freelancers more left-wing than just about any other legacy outlet. Lehmann’s current staff includes famous-for-Twitter lefties like Osita Nwanevu, Kate Aronoff and Alex Pareene, joined by new columnists like Adolph Reed Jr. and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, as well as frequent contributors like Daniel Bessner and Kate Wagner. He also hired the since-departed leftist writers Libby Watson (now on Substack) and Jen Pan (now at Jacobin—yes, even the liberal New Republic is sending writers to the Marxist press these days).
Journalist Steven Perlberg noted this shift in a profile on Lehmann and the magazine in 2019, writing that Lehmann “has solidified his version of TNR around a decidedly left voice deeply skeptical of the Democratic establishment.” Apparently, this was news to McCormack.
“There’s some guy who wrote an article, I’d never heard of him before and I don’t remember his name, and he wrote it for some obscure, presumably website, it was several months ago, and he basically started out by lauding Chris for all the great changes he was making in the magazine,” said McCormack. In an interview with Blue Tent this summer, where he was joined by Lehmann, McCormack went on to express his irritation that Perlberg had presumed it was TNR’s populist editor, not its wealthy Democratic owner, who was responsible for the magazine’s leftward drift.
At Win McCormack’s New Republic, the writers churn out consistently left-wing content, but do it for an owner who wanted to see a Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ticket way back in the start of the 2020 Democratic primaries. TNR became largely irrelevant during the Chris Hughes years, and it has continued to start and stop under McCormack ever since, struggling to assert itself in a crowded progressive media ecosystem. McCormack must now also contend with a brash, unionized staff filled with writers and editors who aren’t satisfied leaving their ideals—about work, about racial equity, about editorial independence—merely on the page.
“Gee, I wish I had the money to do that”
Winthrop Laflin McCormack came by his money the way one might expect: He inherited it, mostly from a family banking fortune on his mother’s side. Growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, McCormack attended Andover and then Harvard College, where he lived in Kirkland House, the same dormitory from which Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates Dustin Maskovitz and Chris Hughes launched Facebook some four decades later.
McCormack pursued literary interests and politics for most of his life, first moving west to obtain his MFA. McCormack has been a major figure in the West Coast publishing world since the 1970s, when he helped found Mother Jones and began publishing niche and Oregon-centric magazines. He also authored two books, including one on the infamous Rajneesh cult, subject of the recent Netflix documentary “Wild Wild Country.” In 2009, reporter Jeff Mapes described McCormack as “a rumpled and diffident professorial type, more at home poring through a stack of political magazines and books than moving in a world of big money.”
McCormack’s wealth and status brought him into the orbit of other Oregon bigwigs, including Neil Goldschmidt, the former mayor of Portland and Governor of Oregon from 1987-1991. Goldschmidt oddly declined to run for a second term, and more than a decade later, reporting in Willamette Week revealed that he was trying to cover up his statutory rape of a 14-year old girl over a three-year period in the 1970s. When the story came out, McCormack admitted to hearing about Goldschmidt’s real reason for leaving office years earlier, but had declined to share the information or use any of his journalism or political connections to pursue the allegations.
In response to questions about his knowledge of the Goldschmidt’s crimes and decision not to act, McCormack told Blue Tent that he did not know the woman’s name (she was by then an adult) and that as far as he understood things, she did not want the story publicized. He believes that he did not err in declining to pursue the matter.
“I had little or nothing to take to the Oregonian newspaper if I wanted to, and as it turned out a number of people with much more information than I possessed had taken it to them, and to other media outlets in Portland, and they had all declined to pursue it,” McCormack wrote in an email. “It would have been a waste of time and a dead end. And I don't know if you realize this, but the statute of limitations relating to Neil's behavior had expired years before.”
Ever interested in politics, McCormack also spent a fair amount of his time and fortune over the years fundraising for Democratic campaigns across the country, serving on the Oregon steering committee for Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign, as well as on the Oregon finance committee for Barack Obama in 2008. He’s been a consistent donor to the party, and openly mused in 2009 about serving on the National Endowment for the Humanities or as an ambassador under Obama. His partner, Carol Butler, is a longtime Democratic political consultant who has worked on campaigns for Sens. Ron Wyden and Debbie Stabenow, among others. The couple held fundraisers for both Joe Biden and Cory Booker at their Portland home during the 2020 Democratic primaries.
In 1999, McCormack founded the literary magazine Tin House, which he spun off into book publishing and literary workshops, and has been a major donor to The Baffler, a left-wing journal, where his son Noah, also a major donor, has served as publisher since 2015.
But The New Republic has held a special place in McCormack’s heart ever since his college years; he calls it his “favorite political magazine” and “possibly my favorite magazine, period.” During those same years, McCormack took a class with a young Harvard lecturer named Marty Peretz (“back when he was promulgating Marxism,” McCormack said), who would purchase TNR in 1974.
“I had the thought, gee, I wish I had the money to do that, to buy that magazine, I love that magazine,” McCormack recalls thinking at the time.
Learning from his mentor, but charting an even older path
After announcing the purchase of TNR in 2016, McCormack was phoned up by his former instructor. The two shared a friendly dinner, where they talked shop and “crossed swords a couple of times” when discussing the Middle East, on which Peretz is notoriously hawkish. McCormack called Peretz a “great teacher” whose New Republic had its ups and downs.
“I think his New Republic was obviously very mixed, but I always say he kept the basic faith, that it remained fundamentally, still, a liberal magazine, except maybe when Andrew Sullivan was editing it,” McCormack said. “But other than that, he hired mostly or all liberal editors, liberal to some extent, very liberal in [longtime TNR and New Yorker journalist Hendrik Hertzberg]’s case.”
McCormack is being generous. Peretz’s own political writings were often racist and crude, and his stewardship of TNR was generally rocky, if influential. He was famously elitist in hiring, recruiting almost exclusively white men from elite schools. During his three-decade-plus reign, the ostensibly liberal magazine also regularly handed out coveted staff jobs and cover stories to right-wing scholars and writers. Peretz was indeed responsible for promoting a few slightly more left-of-center voices, often hiring more liberal top editors like Hertzberg and Peter Beinart. But TNR mostly built a reputation as the flagship journal of neoliberalism, railing against welfare, banging the drum on foreign intervention, flubbing or inventing stories to attack Black people, and publishing scholarly essays advocating social Darwinism and outright racism.
McCormack, like Peretz, typically hires top editors more liberal than himself, and like Peretz, he has run through them like wildfire; Lehmann is the third new editor he has hired in his five years owning the magazine, and easily the most far left. But during its century-plus existence, Lehmann and McCormack noted, TNR has often staked out more liberal or even left-wing positions relative to the times, and they want to continue the magazine’s tradition of viewing liberalism as an “experimental creed.” TNR was pushing for “progressivism” (McCormack loathes the term’s broader, modern usage) back when it was still a Republican ideology and, as McCormack pointed out, even criticized the New Deal in the 1930s from the Stalinist left.
“I guess you can say that’s an example of being a little too experimental,” Lehmann quipped.
An old liberalism for “a crisis moment”
During their joint interview, McCormack and Lehmann laid out a shared vision of the publication, discussing their mutual admiration of civic republicanism, their disgust with Donald Trump and their hope for a more vigorous liberalism to guide the Democratic Party. Both men feel it’s The New Republic’s duty to guide the liberal world, and both prefer to harken back beyond the Peretz years to the TNR of McCormack’s youth, or even earlier.
“People think of liberalism in our age as sort of a brittle orthodoxy that’s resistant to change. And I think it’s one of the many reasons I do feel passionate about carrying on the founding tradition of this magazine,” Lehmann said. “Because I think right now, we’re obviously in a crisis moment, not only for the liberal tradition, but for American democracy, and we have to marshall creative and imaginative responses. Much more is at stake than the narrowly defined legacies of [TNR founders] Herbert Croley or Walter Lippman.”
Lehmann’s canned line is “it may not be your father’s New Republic, but it might be your great grandfather’s.” But those old traditions haven’t stopped some TNR alumni from feeling a certain weariness now that much of TNR’s young staff are cheering democratic socialism the way they once hailed entitlement reform.
“For 20 years, we on the left side of the aisle criticized the Republican party for hurtling further and further to the right, to the point where we wound up with Trump,” said David Greenberg, a TNR writer, editor and contributor throughout the 1990s and 2000s. “Now, instead of criticizing that, a lot of people on the left are trying to emulate it, and they want to take the Democratic Party further and further to the left. And there’s even an unwillingness to talk to, appear on the same panel with, publish an op-ed by, engage in a dialogue with people who are not of like mind.”
Greenberg, now a journalism and history professor at Rutgers, took aim at Lehmann in particular, describing him as a political “nihilist” who imported the Baffler’s “snarky,” “cynical,” “we hate everything” ideology. Greenberg added that he nonetheless has the utmost admiration for McCormack, with whom he is friendly.
“I feel like every couple years, someone does a story about how TNR is moving to the left,” said Laura Marsh, the magazine’s literary editor. Marsh feels that the only reason people seem to obsess over TNR’s leftward trajectory is because of its previously more moderate, almost center-right ideology, and she notes that the publication’s move left goes back much further.
TNR’s current crop of mostly young, left-wing writers and the stories they’re producing are indeed embracing the new-new left even more enthusiastically. But according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former TNR staffers, the embrace of change on the outside is not always reflected internally.
Putting the political vision to a personal test
TNR writers first asked for union recognition in April of 2018. The union vote came less than six months after Hamilton Fish, a longtime McCormack friend and then the magazine’s publisher, resigned over allegations of inappropriate behavior at TNR. He also faced a long string of sexual harassment allegations from his time at the Nation Institute. Interviews with multiple current and former TNR writers and editors also pointed to the publication’s lack of diversity as a main driver of the union organization, in addition to a generally chaotic and often difficult workplace during the short tenure of editor John Gould.
“It was a difficult time at The New Republic, coming out of some turbulent years too,” said Gould, who began dealing with the allegations against Fish one month into his tenure. Gould also took over briefly as publisher after Fish’s resignation. “The challenges piled up fast. But ultimately, TNR and I just weren’t a fit.”
“Such a shit show, man,” said one former TNR staffer, describing the work environment in the months leading up to and around the union push. “That’s the fuckin’ story, that was a mess.”
The former staffer, who asked to remain anonymous, described McCormack as relatively receptive to the unionization process, though said it took many hours of thorough negotiation to convince him of specific demands. In his interview with Blue Tent, McCormack was blunt about his views regarding the unionization.
“Long before that, I was in the habit of saying, as a general principal, no business, no matter what their political orientation, likes to be unionized. It always imposes restrictions, good or bad, on things you can do. So nobody actually welcomes being unionized, but I wasn’t opposed to it,” McCormack said. He also told Blue Tent that he sees the destruction of unions across the board as engendering economic inequality, and that he thinks the TNR union has been a net positive thus far.
But McCormack also argued that the main point of a union, in his view, is to make sure profits are fairly distributed to workers. Since TNR is unlikely to make a profit, he says, “it does raise a question about what is the purpose of the union.”
So why not turn TNR into a nonprofit?
In part, McCormack sees little financial benefit, as he’s footing the bill either way, and says he wouldn’t see much tax relief. It would also interfere with some future plans.
“I had some conversations about that, but my son is opposed to that,” McCormack said, laughing. “He wants to inherit it.”
While the contract negotiation was successful, certain problems continued to fester. TNR, despite its long history, has never had a woman or person of color as its top editor, and until recently, rarely had any nonwhite writers or editors at all. This is not unique among legacy political and literary magazines; in their combined 260 years of existence, the New Yorker and The Atlantic have had a grand total of one top female editor, with none who were people of color.
“TNR has a serious diversity problem, as does the entire industry,” said Carson Brown, a former editor.
Before he was brought on full time, Lehmann was a consultant for TNR, where one of his main tasks was gathering the names of potential editors following Gould’s departure. When he presented his final list of candidates, it was all white men. Lehmann claims he reached out to a number of women and people of color, but they didn’t want the job.
“People had other perches where they were happy and were not poach-able,” he said.
McCormack said the main problem was that the pool of interested candidates was limited, given TNR’s many years of turnover and controversy, and that the best potential hires were quickly scooped up by others.
“As I’ve had to explain to the staffs at The New Republic, and even more to my staff at Tin House Books, out here in Portland, everybody wants to diversify, and there’s a very limited pool of Afro-American candidates out there. And they’re going to be soaked up by the major publications and places that can pay them more money. Anybody you hire like that is going to be hired away, probably,” McCormack said. “We did look. [Former publisher] Ham [Fish] did, on my instructions, comb the bushes to try and find a woman editor. There were a number who had worked at The New Republic who were still around, at the New Yorker and other places. They weren’t interested for various reasons.”
Brown started at TNR as a reporter-researcher, eventually working her way up to assistant managing editor. While at TNR, she was mostly alone on the editorial side as a woman of color, aside from occasional interns and reporter-researchers. While she feels positively about Lehmann’s editorship and credits the union with building strong diversity language into their contract, she was deeply disappointed in McCormack’s choice of yet another white male to lead TNR.
“At what point in more than 100 years of history do we decide that it’s worthwhile to have a voice who is different, or represents a different view from what has historically been TNR?” said Brown.
The conundrums of an editor-in-chief owner
When McCormack purchased TNR, he chose to retain the title of editor-in-chief, a choice Hughes also made, despite warnings from then-editor Richard Just. According to the New Yorker, Just told Hughes that taking the title could lead readers to see the magazine as “a rich guy’s plaything” and cited Peretz, who also took the title, as a cautionary tale. Peretz was notorious for infusing TNR with his hardline views on Israel, his hatred of Arabs and Muslims, his paternalistic attitude towards Black people, and his vindictive temper when dealing with editors. Hughes declined to reconsider, and like his predecessor, he famously caused major headaches for his editorial team, embodying a stuck-up, Silicon Valley dilettantism that hoped to remake TNR into a combination of the New York Review of Books and Buzzfeed.
The consensus on McCormack, according to current and former TNR staffers, is that his editorial involvement is comparably limited. He attends editorial and business meetings, contributing when he has thoughts or ideas, but not being “heavy-handed.”
“I’m doing my job here without interference,” said Executive Editor Ryan Kearney, whose feelings were echoed by others.
“My experience as an editor at this magazine has been exceptionally free from any kind of conflict or interference politically,” said Marsh, the literary editor.
McCormack writes a regular column, “Res Publica,” along with longer meditations on books and ideas. Sometimes, a single issue of TNR will contain multiple McCormack bylines, in which he discusses dustier topics of history and political theory (think: essays with oil paintings as accompanying art). According to conversations with reporters and editors, he communicates mostly through Lehmann, who told Blue Tent that they talk daily. McCormack maintains a strong interest in his publication, Lehmann said, especially the print product, but his involvement is in no way “Peretzian.”
“He’s genuinely collaborative. He’s not giving me marching orders or blowing up every time he sees something he takes issue with,” Lehmann said.
Most of the publication’s editorial staff haven’t had much direct interaction with McCormack, if any—especially since COVID shut down TNR’s offices in New York and D.C. Staff writer Walter Shapiro, a journeyman reporter and columnist who first contributed to TNR more than four decades ago, has dined with McCormack a handful of times, and the two crossed paths during the Democratic primary. The longtime political correspondent had one word to describe McCormack’s stewardship of TNR: “impeccable.”
“The fact that TNR, as near as I know, got through the worst imaginable situation—a pandemic—just as the magazine and the website was trying to get sea legs, without cutbacks, without staff furloughs, without layoffs, while still going forward with web redesigns, putting out the magazine on a regular schedule, I think it’s a great tribute to what Win has done,” he said.
Despite his position as a major Democratic donor and fundraiser, McCormack does not adhere to a strict separation of “church and state” at TNR, even if his position could raise ethical questions. McCormack says that he never intended to run things day-to-day, but has explicitly told all of his editors that he retains final and absolute authority. He recalled with some humor telling Eric Bates, the editor he hired after he purchased TNR, that he bought the magazine to express his political views. Bates “went nuts,” McCormack said, “thinking that was something an owner had no right to do.” (Bates could not be reached for comment.) Lehmann is less troubled by the arrangement.
“I know from other publications there sometimes are good reasons to have a firm division between ownership and editorial, and I understand that,” Lehmann said. “If we were owned by Rupert Murdoch, then that would be a strong case to strike a more confrontational posture.”
In conversations with TNR’s leadership and writers, most could not recall any instances where McCormack directed, altered or killed stories for political reasons. Both Lehmann and publisher Kerrie Gillis alluded to editorial conflicts, common at any publication, but declined to provide details. Other current and former staffers discussed rumors of inappropriate interventions by McCormack (he and Lehmann both deny any instances of wrongful meddling) but Blue Tent could not confirm specific allegations. Other current and former staffers pointed to a particular, well-known incident in 2019.
In July of that year, TNR published a lengthy essay by provocative literary critic Dale Peck, interrogating the LGBTQ identity and politics of Pete Buttigieg. The essay, which referred to Buttigieg as “Mary Pete” (Peck’s term for “the gay equivalent of Uncle Tom”) drew widespread criticism and outrage, both online and within TNR. McCormack made the choice to retract the article in its entirety, a decision with which a number of TNR staffers disagreed. He apologized to Buttigieg (he also donated $2,800 to Buttigieg’s Win the Era PAC in 2020). Lehmann declined to comment on the controversy.
Brown, the former editor, was then still at TNR, and described being out to dinner with friends at the time, ignoring a tidal wave of notifications on her phone. When she finally checked her messages a couple of hours later, she saw that the essay had been taken down and Chris had apologized to the staff in an all-hands meeting. Brown, who identifies as queer, saw the controversy as a consequence of TNR’s failure to adequately address its problems with diversity and inclusion, including in the editorial process.
“Without those actual, meaningful conversations about what the content of the website is going to be, things like this are going to happen. And I think that’s just the point the union was trying to make,” Brown said.
Lehmann declined to comment on the Buttigieg essay directly, but reaffirmed that he is conscious of TNR’s “past diversity issues” and is “working in conjunction with the TNR union to make sure we address them going forward.”
“Any shortfall TNR might have with diversity would have no logical relation to the despicable Buttigieg hit job by the deservedly notorious Dale Peck that I can think of,” said McCormack in response to Brown’s critiques. He said the idea makes no sense and that if TNR is lacking in diverse views politically, “it is more on the conservative side of the spectrum that the other.”
By TNR, for TNR
The dawn of the Biden administration is giving TNR a chance to return to form, as the shallow left-of-center unity around opposition to Trump recedes and Democrats attempt to hammer out their internal differences while rebuilding a broken government. McCormack has invested heavily in his magazine’s future, his money going to a new wave of online opinion writers and cultural critics, as well as established reporters and editors.
During the 2020 campaign, Shapiro, the veteran reporter, led TNR’s coverage of Biden, producing reliably insightful, if conventional, columns and longform pieces on the soon-to-be president. He also frequently contributed dispatches to their biweekly podcast, The Politics of Everything. Marsh, who co-hosts the podcast, has likewise reinvigorated the publication’s cultural criticism, regularly commissioning fresh voices for TNR’s famously erudite back of the book. In January of last year, then-freelancer Jen Pan authored a thoughtful if scathing piece critiquing the hollowness of Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and the accompanying “diversity industry,” doing so months before either became a social media phenomenon.
“Thoughtful if scathing” criticism is perhaps one of The New Republic’s clearest throughlines over the past 50 years, especially if that criticism is aimed at liberals. But unlike the 1980s and 1990s, the critiques today are coming largely from the left, and at a frenetic pace. In recent months, for example, Alex Shephard has written on the scourge of Biden’s desire for a bipartisan commission on judicial reform, while Melissa Gira Grant penned a comprehensive takedown of the bipartisan alliance opposing sex work. TNR is able to meet online demand with several dozen web articles every week, but still assembles a strong, monthly print magazine with a relatively tiny staff.
One other significant bridge between the McCormack and Peretz eras, and what might help power this skeleton crew, is the presence of at least a few TNR obsessives on the masthead. Perhaps more than any other magazine, the people writing for and editing The New Republic have often previously been some of its most devoted and maniacal readers. In a 2014 essay, New York columnist Jonathan Chait detailed his discovery of TNR in college, where he would read back issues of the magazine at the library in order to “warm up” before studying. It was a habit he shared with author and journalist Michael Lewis, who got a job at TNR in the 1990s after regularly plunging into the magazine’s archives at the London School of Economics. Lehmann had a similar ritual in graduate school.
“When I would get kind of cross-eyed reading in the stacks, I would go to our seminar room and read back issues of The New Republic, and think ‘wow, this is the stuff I want to be doing,’” said Lehmann.
Current Literary Editor Laura Marsh likewise was (and still is) a TNR devotee, as is staff writer Osita Nwanevu, who casually mentioned that one could find tape of a TNR editorial meeting from the 1980s online at CSPAN (were one to be so curious about TNR’s history to go looking for such a thing). And then, of course, there’s McCormack, who fantasized about buying The New Republic nearly a half-century ago.
Steering the ship of liberalism, with an heir apparent
McCormack and Lehmann hope the Biden years will be a time for the magazine to reclaim its place as the cutting edge of liberal politics, where a vision is forged through bold writers and thinkers from across the left-of-center spectrum.
“I do think The New Republic has always been a journal of ideas, and it’s sort of incumbent on us to help to find the liberal minds for the 21st century,” Lehmann said.
Nwanevu sees the publication as having moved “a standard deviation or two” to the left since the 1990s, being just as open to debate as the old TNR, but in a much healthier place.
“The debates we’re going to be having are not going to be about race science,” Nwanevu said.
McCormack told Blue Tent that he isn’t running a “monolithic” publication, but he also has no interest in being politically neutral.
“We’re a political magazine, we have political views. It’s not like the position of the Atlantic, where Jeffrey Goldberg says he’s not going to take any position; he wants to consider all points of view, even the point of view that someone wants to hang women,” McCormack said, referencing Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2018 hiring and subsequent dismissal of conservative provocateur Kevin D. Williamson. “No, I’m not gonna be neutral with respect to politics, particularly in the situation we’re in now.”
For the time being, TNR is McCormack’s ship, and Lehmann is his chosen captain. In a media world dominated by consolidation, tech oligarchs, shrinking ad sales and predatory investors, both men may be as good as it gets for a left-leaning opinion magazine traversing the ruins of modern journalism. As a veteran of both establishment news outlets like the Washington Post and indie journals like the Baffler, Lehmann seems uniquely qualified to satisfy TNR’s editorial needs. He has thus far lasted longer than other editors before him, and his demeanor and relationship to McCormack may be key. Having studied civil republicanism while in grad school, Lehmann has a historical and political knowledge that meshes well with his high-minded boss.
“The New Republic represents the only time my graduate education has proved practically useful, which is not something I would have ever foreseen,” Lehmann said.
For McCormack’s part, his best trait as an owner may be another commonality with Peretz: He has no plans of ever making money, and knew that coming in. During their 2016 dinner, Peretz told McCormack that the magazine was rarely able to turn a profit during his nearly four decades of ownership. McCormack was undeterred.
“When you hear that Canadian company [Canwest Global Communications, which purchased TNR in 2007] saying they were going to make it profitable, or you hear Chris Hughes, when he bought it, made a lot of arrogant statements, and one of them was that he was going to make it profitable. I knew right then he didn’t know what he was doing,” said McCormack.
With McCormack’s cash, Lehmann’s editing and Publisher Kerrie Gillis’s leadership on the business side, the magazine’s print circulation has grown to about 42,000, with a six-month average of 2.1 million unique view per month, according to Gillis. Paid online subscriptions have also risen with the implementation of a paywall, Gillis told Blue Tent, and TNR has expanded into newsletters and live events, all while maintaining its staff amidst the COVID crisis.
“Because it’s essentially a philanthropic effort, these things are complicated,” said one TNR staffer. “If you’ve got someone who can spend the money and it’s not too difficult, you accept it.”
McCormack turned 76 in January, and despite the crass description of his son, Noah, “inheriting” the 107-year-old publication, such an arrangement would not necessarily be unwelcome. Noah McCormack was involved in the purchase of the magazine from the beginning, helping convince his father to make an offer, and advising him on the deal. Noah also made the connection with Lehmann, having worked with him at the Baffler. Lehmann says the two remain good friends, talking and texting often. In a 2017 interview, Noah told The Ringer that he believes left-wing views require subsidy, whether that comes from wealthy individuals or foundations, in order to compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Noah declined to comment on his future with The New Republic, saying he has never had a position at the publication. In response to questions about his views on the role of ownership in publishing, Noah told Blue Tent, “I have always been an active publisher while ensuring editorial independence.”
Gillis confirmed the talks that Noah may one day take the helm, and like Lehmann, they have a genial relationship. Gillis said she was uncertain when the “succession plan” was happening, but that she looked forward to working with Noah if and when the handoff occurs.
Until then, Win McCormack will remain head of church and state at The New Republic.
Disclaimer: Blue Tent writers Harry Cheadle and Eoin Higgins have both contributed to The New Republic. Neither was involved in this story’s reporting or editing process.
