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TNC's presence in The Atlantic was so huge it distorted people's sense of the magazine. Now that TNC is gone, the centrist nature of the publication is much clearer.
More broadly, I think Jeffrey Goldberg has decided to make The Atlantic the magazine of neo-centrism or Joe Biden liberalism. That's a smart move politically & economically (that's a big, underserved market) but maybe not editorially.
Neo-centrist nostalgia politics (what I once called the ancien regime resistance) is being underserved. Lots of people think like that, maybe enough to make Joe Biden president. I just don't think it'll make for an interesting magazine.
The Atlantic could do well as the Joe Biden of magazines: broadly popular and hated on Twitter. a good model
The journalistic problem is even if Biden becomes president (quite possible) the old American consensus won't return
Even if Biden is elected, the old consensus won't return: the neo-liberal/neo-conservative consensus of 1988-2008 was destroyed by the Iraq War, the financial meltdown & the racist backlash (already evident in Palin's rhetoric) to Obama. Even Obama couldn't bring it back.
Even if Biden is elected, all the forces driving fragmentation & polarization (the climate crisis & the policy imperatives it demands, inequality, the increasingly vocal racism on the right) will continue. So the project of a centrist revival is DOA.
Because the old consensus can't be revived, I question the journalistic wisdom of trying to recreate that consensus in virtual reality form (as a magazine or op ed page).
As the saying goes, we have to be as radical as reality itself. That's good advice for a magazine editor. Journalistically I think the interesting work is being done by magazines that are not creating a new center but trying to grapple with emergent politics of the moment
On the right, there's attempts to rehabilitate nationalism & populism (in effect a more cerebral Trumpism) in @ModernAgeMag, @amconmag & writings of @michaelbd. On the left, the dialogue between liberals & socialist in @thebafflermag, @newrepublic & @thenation
