Marty Peretz and The New Republic cast a long shadow over American liberalism in the last quarter of the 20th century. Raised in the Bronx, educated at Brandeis and Harvard, wedded not once but twice to wealthy heiresses, a friend, and mentor, and sometime confidante to Jim Cramer, Antony Blinken, Al Gore, and Andrew Sullivan (among others), Peretz charted a swift path through almost every political fad of Cold War America. In the 1950s, he knew Irving Howe and Herbert Marcuse. In the 1960s, he helped fund Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign and became a vocal supporter of the New Left. In the 1970s, he purchased The New Republic and began his march rightward, embracing the politics of austerity and neoliberalism that was then becoming popular, as well as a more hawkish interventionism. Reviewing his memoir, The Controversialist, Jeet Heer tracks these twists and turns in Peretz’s career and that of the magazine he owned for more than a quarter-century, finding that in Peretz’s story we can also locate a larger one about liberalism in general. “Time and again,” Peretz and TNR took a stance that became increasingly the politics of the Democratic Party in general: They “advocated for a stingy and winnowed-down welfare state, expanded policing, and a militaristic foreign policy.” Because of this, Heer argues, Peretz’s memoir serves as a gift even to his critics. For it “clarifies how a powerful segment of the ruling class thinks and operates”: It “offers a portrait not just of Peretz’s own ideological and social trajectory but also…of a politics, and an elite, that has never quite been able to come to terms with its culpability for triggering the ever-widening crises of the 21st century.” Read “Marty Peretz and the Travails of American Liberalism”