Neuhaus the Gatekeeper

The judge of what is "respectable" and "reasonable." Too bad we can't have access to his list of donors and funding. Dreher may feel that he is indebted to Neuhaus and owes praise to him, but on behalf of those former allies who were rejected by Neuhaus and were exiled by Neuhaus from the virtual marketplace of ideas, I say it is a good thing that his magazine may be buried soon. Neuhaus compromised with liberalism, and I think it can be fairly said that he even substituted liberalism for the Apostolic Tradition, upholding liberal heresy as what was moderate and reasonable. Did Neuhaus ever continue some sort of fraternal dialogue with those paleos who disagreed with him, much less give them space in his magazine? Did he ever defend their right to question the official narrative and to have opinions that deviated from that narrative? No he sought and preferred acceptance and donations from those who would have been "outraged" by those nonconformists.

Rod Dreher: First Things And Changing Times

However, in reflecting on how Neuhaus made First Things the most important magazine of its kind, I recognize that it’s not simply that being in New York, he could have cigars with the Greats when they passed through town. It’s that being in New York puts you at the white-hot core of American cultural change. I’ve often thought that a political magazine like National Review would be better off relocating from Manhattan to Dallas (while keeping a Washington bureau). I believe that First Things would lose something important if it left New York, even though New York is about as post-Christian as a major American metropolis can be. I lived in New York for five years, and though it is quite easy to be dazzled by the bright lights and thereby to lose sight of what the rest of the country is seeing, it is also true that to live in New York is to be in a position to see the future before everybody else.

The future of blue America, perhaps.

The Trump ascension obviously signaled the diminishment of authority of conservative institutions, including magazines. It’s a confusing time. First Things has tried to seize the Trump moment, clumsily. I realized over the past day, thinking about this current controversy with Reno, that the fear that Reno was making the same mistake that Neuhaus and Weigel did, hitching the magazine too closely to Washington politicians and causes, has been gnawing at me for a long time. Consider, though, how difficult this challenge is facing any editor of First Things: how to be relevant to current debates in public affairs without aligning yourself too closely with a party or politician? It’s even harder when you see yourself as a player, as First Things was from 1990 until the end of the George W. Bush administration. You can’t be a player without picking a team. What if the team captain is Donald Trump? You see the problem. Well, that’s not a problem for some Christians, but the community of intellectual Christians who read and write for First Things are divided sharply in ways that we weren’t in the Neuhaus era.

What sort of relevancy do outsiders really have to the elites? Maybe there would be a U.S. representative or two who would be sympathetic, but would the sort of attempt at mass culture of which First Things is a part have persuaded those in the Deep State, for example? Federal judges who have an erroneous understanding of the Constitution? Lawyers? Oligarchs? Cultural Marxists?

This is still the fundamental problem of conservatives, who accept the premise of liberalism that all are equally rational and open to persuasion. They are not.