I recently gave up Harper’s after years of subscribing. Their copyrighted Index was still fun, but the magazine’s politics – mine, basically - had become predictable and the tone was too snide.
I am reading the Atlantic Monthly these days. It is not always liberal. In fact, it keeps printing articles on political problems that combine lots of information and complex analysis, with no ideology at all. In other words, the Atlantic pretends to objectivity, which is silly.
The tone, however, is refreshingly non-shrill. Take, for example, a short piece in the March issue,"The Unfree World", in which authors Jen Joynt and Marshall Poe trace the growth of liberal democracy in the former Soviet Union (negative) and around the world (mixed), concluding:
"All this suggests a major obstacle in the quest for global freedom: most of the world has no tradition - ancient or modern – of liberal democracy. This rare form of governance was mainly the product of a very specific time (the 19th century) and place (a small number of North Atlantic nations, including England, France and the United States). …
"The Bush Administration has wagered that the US, by force of arms and aid, can transform Iraq into a liberal-democratic regime and thereby set an example for other countries in the region. The history of such efforts is not encouraging…."
And so on.
You get the idea. The Atlantic makes me think of what my mother tried to teach me as a child. "Don’t yell. Don’t point. Don’t use your hands."
Yes, this is the WASP Establishment, which simply doesn’t raise its voice, is polite and seemingly uninvolved in its conclusions. Not lots of fun to read, the Atlantic, but perhaps, therefore more persuasive.
PS Now if we could get the Atlantic's editors to use a little body English once in a while...