The New Plutocracy
Many of us are deeply grieved by the recent events surrounding The New Republic, where Chris Hughes, its current publisher, having rejected the magazine's time-honored intellectual purpose in favor of a profitable new web initiative, effectively caused the demise of a respected hundred-year-old institution. The new ownership, responding to the relatively low circulation of the magazine, and the five million dollar annual subsidy that it provoked, has radically changed its purpose, causing the entire staff to resign, following Editor-in-Chief, Franklin Foer, and Literary Editor, Leon Wieseltier.
No doubt sensing that something historic and unprecedented was happening, these sad events have been widely covered by the media, through editorials, interviews, letters, and web sites, with almost universal agreement that Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook with his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerman, has made a serious misstep.
I was TNR's drama critic over a period of forty-seven years on and off, from 1959 until 2006, until the editors, sensing the readership's lack of interest in theatre, dropped the position altogether. Given the distinguished history of drama criticism at the magazine -- Stark Young, Eric Bentley, Richard Gilman, Stanley Kauffmann, among others -- this was a radical move that somehow prefigured the current situation, where circulation numbers were being allowed to determine editorial decisions.
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In short, what was once The New Republic has become The New Plutocracy, and I am not just referring to the late-lamented magazine. What elsewhere I called "Dumbocracy in America" has triumphed. Art and intellect has lost most of their respect, pushed aside in favor of the most opportunistic forms of survival. We are laboring under the tyrannous regime of the majority.
Robert Brustein is a veteran of World War II, a former Professor of English at Harvard University, former drama critic for The New Republic and former Dean of the Yale Drama School. He is now a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University.
He was the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre and served for 20 years as Artistic Director during which time he founded the ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard. Having retired from that post in 2002, he now serves as Founding Director. He is the author of eighteen books (including The Theatre of Revolt), twelve adaptations (Including the Klezmer musical Shlemiel The First), and eight plays (including a trilogy about Shakespeare). He is presently working on a new Klezmer musical with Hankus Netsky called King of the Schnorrers. His latest book is Rants and Raves: Opinions, Tributes, and Elegies; and his most recent play is The Last Will. He has been inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame, and was awarded the 2010 Medal of Arts by President Obama at the White House.