I don’t especially care about the death of New Republic. As I discussed in, New Republic: 1914 – 2014, I mostly associate it with The Bell Curve. But I am interested in Chris Hughes. After all, what did Chris Hughes do in life? His singular claim to fame is that he was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate. In exchange for that chance encounter, Hughes has a half billion dollars. Now I don’t think much of Zuckerberg either. But at least he did something and was a leader of men. Hughes is just a man-child who ought to be a barista at a suburban Starbucks.
So I’m really interested in how this entitled rich boy went from the savior of New Republic to its destroyer. And luckily, Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker has the whole story, Inside the Collapse of the New Republic. Just to give you a little idea of how thoroughly Hughes has managed to destroy the magazine, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke at the hundred year anniversary for the magazine last month. This month, she canceled her subscription. But it may not matter. Because of the mass resignations, New Republic has stopped producing the magazine until February. We’ll see if they manage to grind one out even then. And if they do, I wonder how long it will go on. The two top people are New Republic have no experience doing actual journalism.
But I don’t want to get distracted. My interest is in Chris Hughes and his crybaby act. According to the article, things were great at first. Hughes even went to a conference with the writers and editors and hung out with them late into the night. Sadly, everyone involved, including Lizza, seems to think that this was a good sign. But it wasn’t. It was just a pampered rich boy playing with his new toy. Here were all these urbane sophisticated people willing to hang out with Hughes, who is the kind of guy every one of those writers would have scoffed at had he not been the boss.
Just how pathetic a figure is Chris Hughes? After totally screwing up and causing a mass exodus of his staff, he whined to his remaining staff that he cared “about tradition and about institutions.” And as an example of that, he noted that he studied history and literature at Harvard. Oh my! That does settle it, then. And this is why he hired a guy who said the following on his first day of being placed in charged of the magazine:
This bit of self-consciously belligerent new economy babble was widely mocked by the staff at New Republic. What’s become clear over the past decade or so is that the jargon of the high tech “entrepreneurs” is no more meaningful than the Sun Tzu quotations of the idiot traders of the 1980s. But this is all that Hughes and company bring to the table: business “truisms.” The fact that Hughes considers himself a Democrat is all you really need to know about the state of the Democratic Party.
One of the first things that Hughes did after buying New Republic was an amazing bit of micromanagement. The magazine was already being printed. But Hughes stopped it because he didn’t like the following headline, “Attack of the Crybabies: Why Hedge Fund Honchos Turned Against Obama.” He had the staff remove “Attack of the Crybabies” from the headline. Similarly, when Amazon cut off their participation in their Alpha House campaign because of a critical New Republic article, Hughes did not want that information made public. That one’s a twofer: two different high tech icons showing that they behave exactly the same (if not worse) than their business predecessors.
But I will just quote Lizza for the best example of how small-minded Chris Hughes is. It shows what really attracts him to the Democratic Party: it accepts his sexual orientation and makes no claims on his wealth:
Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”
The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.
“I’m confused,” Hughes wrote back. “Has anyone, including this article, said what they did was illegal? Companies have an obligation to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value, including through strategic tax planning.”
When the whole thing was over, Hughes was genuinely surprised. One ex-staffer said, “He was shocked. And I’m kind of shocked that he was shocked.” Hughes had no problem with New Republic being a money loser so long as he was having fun with his new toy. But that could only last so long. Rather than flattering him, people like Alec MacGillis were saying things that indicated that maybe they disagreed with his outlook on life. So New Republic quickly became just another investment. And that meant that it needed to make money! Of course, Chris Hughes doesn’t have a clue how to actually make money other than to hire people who speak the same incoherent language that he does.
If we had a just society, Chris Hughes would die soon, alone, and broke. But no one with a half billion dollars is ever allowed to fail in our society. So Chris Hughes will always be successful in the only way that matters to him: financially. But I do hope that liberals will finally wake up to the fact that Chris Hughes and all the other billionaire “liberals” are anything but actual liberals. They are, in fact, a great impediment to making social progress. We need to elect a president who would never take a call from the likes of the crybaby billionaire class. They only harm society.
Update (14 December 2014 10:14 am)
I haven’t read it yet, but the subtitle to Thomas Frank’s column today is, “Zillionaire new media barons think themselves geniuses, not say, really lucky to’ve been Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate.” It appears great and middling Franks think alike.
You’re wrong on thinking justice would involve shitbirds like Hughes being dead. I understand the notion, as people I like have died from being poor, and I will never stop being pissed that they died and monsters lived, but the Hughes level of arrogance doesn’t deserve that nothingness of death. They deserve horrid, backbreaking jobs, which they work at for a long, long time. Unless you believe in Purgatory!
I was only giving him death after losing everything. Not good enough? The funny thing is that Hughes is from a middle class background. But it probably says something about white privilege that he so easily became a rich douchebag.
I think what has happened to him would happen to anyone. In fact, research shows this. Even people who win large lotteries (which is true of Hughes) go on to believe that somehow they deserve it. And their politics move rightward. I think the key for society is to not allow people to become douchebag, and that means not allowing them to become unreasonably rich.
(It’s interesting how an English and History major from Harvard so easily spouts the rhetoric of socially destructive shareholder obligations.)
Nope, not good enough. Easy-peasy to die broke and poor at a relatively young age. These bastards must be forced to live long, unhappy lives, and die in their 60s with every joint in their bodies screaming painfully from a lifetime of pointless manual labor.
Does that surprise you how rich kids exposed to the classics can end up ignoring all the humanity those classic texts can teach? I went to a rich kids school in Portland (scholarship, not tuition) and learning Western Civ stuff had no meaning except getting the students into the swankiest colleges. Some of these were stupendously dumb, dumb people, but they knew enough to reference Plato in Princeton college interviews.
I made the mistake a while back of looking up a few of them on search engines. Thankfully, few have amounted to anything. One that did was my total high-school crush! She’s a scientist at a public university doing stem-cell research, which pisses off super-Christians and helps our understanding of how diseases function, a two-fer. That’s both depressing (the lady was perfectly correct in ignoring me) and kinda cool (I had really good taste in my crushes.) I told my current SO about this, and it made the SO laugh, because my ego needs constant diminishing. (I still have good taste in crushes!)
I’ve very interested in that. I’d like to ask Hughes, “So you read Jude the Obscure and your takeaway was that CEOs should do everything they can to screw the commons in the name of profits?”
I recently exchanged email with a high school crush. She seemed nice enough. Not at all like the exciting/dangerous woman I would come to see as my (unfortunate) “type.”
In the newest Frank (the other Frank) there’s a link to an old “New Republic” essay on how George Will is a monstrous poopwad for totally misappropriating Western Civ. It’s a neat take; you might check it out.
Wow, that takes guts to e-mail the old crush. Unless I had some data that could help the research, I wouldn’t dare contact the one I had. This is me bowing now, serious guts.
@JMF – No, no, no! I do not go to the people, they come to me. Or at least that is true of people out of my past who I have at best mixed feelings about. So she emailed me. It is very common. People are very interested to know how a person like me could have lived such a “colorful” life.
Yes, the article is great. I loved this paragraph:
“Still, the most bizarre genealogical claim for his ideas appears in Statecraft, a slim book that we are nonetheless entitled to take—since he so presents it—as his testament. ‘When a kind reader calls me unpredictable [not the drowning maiden’s word for him], I am tempted to respond: to anyone sufficiently familiar with the minds of the Oxford Movement, circa 1842, all my conclusions are predictable.’ Of course few Americans, even if Will were among them, are ‘sufficiently familiar’ with the Oxford Movement to know what he is talking about. We can only ponder, not to his credit, why the claim is made. There is no explanation. It is thrown in. Nothing follows from it.”
Three decades ago people knew what a pretentious twat he is!