Kristol Clear #184: Philly Does It

And yet, these struggling, money-losing, quarrelsome, small-circulation constructions of pixels and paper do, sometimes, manage to affect the course of history. “It’s a mysterious process, and if you were Nate Silver trying to come up with some big-data proof of it you could never do it,” says [John] Podhoretz, of Commentary, circulation 26,000. In the 1970s, he notes, Time magazine had several million subscribers. “But nothing Time did then had any enduring value or effect, whereas the publication of “Dictatorships & Double Standards” by Jeane Kirkpatrick in this magazine in 1979 arguably had an enormous effect on American political history. So how does that work?”
 
In fact, the wilderness can be helpful. When Kirkpatrick wrote her essay, she was a Christian and Democrat dissenting from the policies of Jimmy Carter in the pages of a conservative Jewish monthly, arguably as far from immediate influence as someone in her position could be. But periods of alienation from power are when creative political thought seems to thrive, like wildflower seeds planted in winter. Kirkpatrick’s article gained the attention of Ronald Reagan, who later made her his U.N. ambassador.
 
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Now that Donald Trump has made such conversations, and many others, unavoidable, conservative magazines have become oddly vital once more. While Sean Hannity and Breitbart News carry water for Trump, and many liberal publications dodge introspection in favor of anti-Trump primal screams, right-of-center magazines have been debating and reassessing the soul of their political philosophy. Trumpism has torn down the conservative house and broken it up for parts. Conservative magazines are working to bring a plausible intellectual order to this new reality — and figure out what comes next.
 
Stephen F. Hayes, editor of the Weekly Standard since Kristol stepped down in December 2016, is hard on himself for underestimating Trump, whom he’d hoped and expected would lose. “It is humbling,” he told me, “and ought to be humbling, to lose a big argument like that.”
 
The Standard, located about half a mile north of the White House, shares a quiet full-floor space with the conservative Washington Examiner. Both are owned by MediaDC, part of the empire of billionaire Phil Anschutz, who acquired the Standard from Rupert Murdoch in 2009.
 
Hayes, 47 — wearing jeans and a blue fleece over a button-down shirt on the day we met — came to Washington in 1993, right after graduating from DePauw University in Indiana. Too broke to lodge himself anywhere but in a tent at a rural campsite in Virginia, he ruined his lone suit, a tan number, when a pen exploded in his vest pocket. For job interviews, therefore, “I went with the jacket over my arm.”
 
Hayes landed a long-desired job at the Weekly Standard in early 2001 and began focusing on national security after Sept. 11 — gaining notice as an especially strong proponent of the argument that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had ties that ran deeper than most believed. Eventually he published a book on the subject that received skeptical but respectful reviews. Like his magazine, Hayes is strongly interventionist.
 
Trump has repeatedly tangled with Hayes, calling him a “failed writer” and “a joke”; Hayes said that the episodes of being under attack from Trump’s multitudes have been “challenging,” but he left it at that. “I don’t want to whine about it,” he told me. What bothers him more is a sense that ordinary approaches to debate are imperiled. “I’ve been a big critic of mainstream-media ideological blinders and biases, and I still am,” he said. “But we also have a president who lies aggressively, who lies casually, who lies about things that matter in huge ways and about things that don’t matter at all.”
 
In response, Hayes has increased the magazine’s focus on reporting, he said, less for the purpose of winning debates than to rescue a sense of shared premises. “We thought it was important to focus on reporting and facts and try to determine what the facts are, so that we can have a big debate about policies we should pursue as a country based on a common understanding of those facts,” he said. Hayes hopes that when a reader of the liberal magazine the Nation or a watcher of MSNBC seeks out an “intellectually honest conservative take,” that person will go to the Weekly Standard.
 
The bulk of a typical issue of the Weekly Standard is still devoted to analysis and essays, as these are the specialties of many of its most prominent writers, such as Andrew Ferguson and Christopher Caldwell. But reporting appears to be a growing share of the magazine’s content. The past year has seen the hiring of veteran reporters Peter J. Boyer and Tony Mecia, the latter of whom has penned cover stories on topics ranging from Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations to telemarketing abuses. Longtime writers at the magazine have also been making waves through their reporting, such as when Matt Labash followed a group of free-speech demonstrators in Berkeley, Calif., only to see them beaten up by antifa rioters and arrested instead of protected by the police. The shift to reporting has been even more pronounced on the magazine’s website, which now reliably offers a half dozen reported articles daily.
 
A day after speaking to Hayes, I met his predecessor, Bill Kristol, at the Jefferson hotel’s bar, Quill. Kristol, who remains staunchly anti-Trump, attracts extremes of enmity and admiration that are foreign to most of humanity: enmity because he is partisan, sometimes flip, and supportive of all manner of military intervention, most notoriously in Iraq; admiration because he is given to self-deprecating humor and, as a rule, civility to ideological foes….
 
I shared with Kristol my impression that the rise of Trump, which left the Standard out in the cold, had made the magazine more interesting. Perhaps out of consideration to his successor, Kristol said he was reluctant to assess the present-day magazine as a whole, but he agreed that such a change was possible. “I feel now like I was unconsciously constraining the ways I was thinking,” he said. “You had friends. You had allies. You didn’t want to look too closely at the less savory parts of them.”
 
As we talked, two women caught sight of Kristol from outside and walked in to greet him. The older turned out to be Juleanna Glover, an early Weekly Standard employee who is now a prominent political strategist, and the younger was Shoshana Weissmann, a recent Weekly Standard alum now at a libertarian think tank.
 
“We were literally just talking about why we love Bill Kristol,” said Glover, who knelt down next to Kristol’s chair to chat.
 
I asked her to elaborate.
 
“He’s one of the most noble, principled, thoughtful, brave —”
 
“Check’s in the mail,” Kristol broke in.
 
As Glover and Kristol caught up, Weissmann, whose hair had a wide purple streak, told me that she had worked for the Weekly Standard for a year and become a big Kristol fan. “I’m a libertarian, so it was a little different, but he’s become like my grandpa, and I love him and he’s adorable,” she said, adding, “I will love you forever if you quote me saying he’s adorable.”
 
Moments like this can be a reminder of how echo chambers form. But Weissmann’s perspective on Kristol points to another reality as well: While the Weekly Standard has generally reflected a conventionally hawkish Republican worldview, it has also been willing to entertain varying political outlooks, with its writers landing in different places on Trump and many other matters. Labash, for instance, never hid his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s a magazine, not a cult,” he says. “You’re free to think freely.”