Is Slate Conservative?

Apropos of the launch of LibertyWire, which promises to be a general-interest website along the lines of Slate, but more conservative, Matt writes:

This is a bit bizarre. Slate and The Atlantic are already center-right publications (I know my soon-to-be-former colleagues at The Atlantic don't necessarily see it that way, but it is).

I'll refrain from commenting on my own publication's politics and just say that describing Slate as "center-right" strikes me as more than a little weird. True, Slate publishes some writers whose politics Matt would probably describe as right-of-center - from Emily Yoffe and Mickey Kaus to Christopher Hitchens and maybe Will Saletan, among others. Personally, I would describe some of these people as either center-left or - in the case of Hitchens, especially - entirely unclassifiable, but for the sake of argument let's accept Yglesias's progressive-centric premises about who's right and who's left. Even then, it's awfully hard for me to see how a publication where Fred Kaplan is the go-to guy on foreign policy, where Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon cover law and social issues, where Timothy Noah writes about domestic policy and politics, and where everyone from David Greenberg to Stephen Metcalf to Meghan O'Rourke to Amanda Schaffer to Dana Stevens can be counted to provide a center-left (or just plain left) take almost anytime they touch on politics, can be reasonably described as "center-right."

Update: While I was writing this post, Matt clarified himself a bit: "I'll admit that while I look at Slate all the time, I'm not a particularly thorough reader of it and the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in my mind." I think if the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in your mind, then you're probably reading Mickey Kaus way more than you read Slate. (Which is easy to do, admittedly, if you spend most of your time reading blogs ...)

Comments

I like the atlantic but who would be the other lefty here other than MY?

Posted by berger | August 1, 2008 1:05 PM

Andrew Sullivan, of course!

Posted by jose | August 1, 2008 1:15 PM

Agreed. Slate is basically the Village Voice plus a few oddballs, in terms of its politics.

The Atlantic is progressive in spirit, but has such a penchant for pieces that focus on (1) wargaming (2) large pieces of machinery, or (3) inside the beltway gossip politics, that it comes off as center-left.

Posted by lampwick | August 1, 2008 1:18 PM

Yeah, I still see Slate as carrying on the same "voice" that it had under Kinsley: center-left, but with a contrarian streak and decent sense of humor about everything including its own views.

Posted by Shawn | August 1, 2008 1:25 PM

I've always thought of Slate as unabashedly center-left, as well, although, to their credit, not in an obnoxious way like The American Prospect or The Nation sometimes is.

I think this says more about Matt than it does about Slate.

Posted by Jeff | August 1, 2008 1:31 PM

I should clarify that I was talking about the paper Atlantic, not the blogs here.

I subscribed to the paper Atlantic starting in 1990 and dropped it in 2003, when I got kinda tired of all of Bob Kaplan's panygerics to the lonely virtues of the US Special Forces.

Posted by lampwick | August 1, 2008 1:35 PM

This brings up something I've always wondered about: Why do people read Mickey Kaus? Is it just out of habit, because I've never seen him write anything worth spending 10 seconds on.

Posted by AlanW | August 1, 2008 1:45 PM

Don't forget Daniel Gross on business, who seems to have two colums:

* Why this economic problem is Bush's fault
* Why Bush's proposal to fix this economic problem won't work or will make things worse.

Posted by JohnMcG | August 1, 2008 2:27 PM

"I like the atlantic but who would be the other lefty here other than MY?"

James Fallows.

The Atlantic went through a brief center-right stage, back when Michael Kelly brought along David Brooks and others. But I think now it's pretty firmly center-left, with a few right-wing surprises on occasion.

Posted by Chris | August 1, 2008 2:34 PM

Don't forget Daniel Gross on business, who seems to have two colums:

* Why this economic problem is Bush's fault
* Why Bush's proposal to fix this economic problem won't work or will make things worse.

Posted by JohnMcG | August 1, 2008 2:34 PM

When evaluating The Atlantic's political orientation, please do not forget to account for Jeffrey "I fabricate evidence to help start wars" Goldberg and Mark "Torture ain't so bad!" Bowden.

Posted by rickm | August 1, 2008 2:41 PM

Debating who's left and who's right, let alone what collection of independent voice counts as left or right is soooooooooooo productive.

Of course, it beats the hell out of calling any large gathering of Germans "Hitlerite", so I can't complain too badly.

Posted by Mike | August 1, 2008 2:51 PM

Been away from this site for a while. Where is Yglesias going? What could be a better gig than this?

Posted by Fred | August 1, 2008 4:15 PM

That post illustrates L'il Mat's lightweight thinking. He says something dumb & is immediatly called on it. Then he writes, "well I could marshall the evidence, but that's, you know, work and effort, so I'll just stick with my opinion." Of course, his flunkies come out in the comments to say, "no, Matty, you're right (er, left). don't be hard on your self, you're a good man."

Most mature readers will probably agree that Slate and Atlantic offer good writers that are worth reading and bad writers not worth reading, and it doesn't really matter what side of a particular issue is being emphasized.

Posted by Bababooey | August 1, 2008 5:14 PM

1. It's no longer necessary to pretend that MattY's thoughts have any value.

2. "Liberals" really, really hate Kaus. I'm sure a good part is due to welfare and the like, but most of it is because, unlike their leaders, he opposes illegal activity.

3. Either four or eight years ago, Slate printed how their contributors voted. It was something like 30-1 D, with a few voting G. None indicated they'd voted P&F, which might be the gold standard MattY is seeking.

Posted by TLB | August 1, 2008 6:06 PM

This conservative dishonesty about Slate is breathtaking. All that Slate publishes is takedowns of liberalism. That's not something they publish; that's the dominant subject of their magazine. You cannot have read Slate during the war years and not have integrated the enormous disdain and contempt Slate has for liberals. Did you guys ever read a Jacob Weisberg column?

Slate's primary interest has always been and remains attacking liberals. That's where their bread is buttered. All this shock about the idea that a magazine created by Michael Kinsley and conceived of as a neoliberal enterprise is anti-leftist seems crazy to me.(Hint: neoliberal means "conservatives pretending to be liberals.") If you want to read the defining Slate piece, read Jacob Weisberg's article about the Democrats of Connecticut nominating Ned Lamont instead of Joe Lieberman. It's tell you everything you need to know, right down to the mocking graphic of a donkey dressed as a hippie.

Posted by Freddie | August 1, 2008 7:23 PM

Ross is right. Slate is center left. Mickey is a freak and actually very un-Slate-like.

BTW it is very center-lefty to keep people like Hitchens & Kaus on the payroll year after year.

Posted by tomtom | August 1, 2008 9:03 PM

Jacob Weisberg is Freddie's idea of a right-winger? The guy who wrote "Bushisms," a weekly compendium of all the suposedly ways that Bush said while speaking extemporaneously (also published as a book)?

Posted by ed | August 2, 2008 12:59 AM

ed writes: "Jacob Weisberg is Freddie's idea of a right-winger? The guy who wrote "Bushisms," a weekly compendium of all the suposedly ways that Bush said while speaking extemporaneously (also published as a book)?"

Had to see how that makes Weisberg some sort of hard-hitting hero of the left, dude. By the way, were you imitating Dumbya with that atrocious second sentence?

If Weisberg is a big Liebushman backer he's a right-winger. Liebushman is a despicable Bush-slurping sell-out. And no, I didn't like it when Gore chose him in '00. I think that miserable choice cost Gore the election, and this country a whole lot more than that.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 2, 2008 2:01 AM

Political typology is somewhat relative and depends on where the person is at. By some measures Landrieu or Byrd are center-left, but I imagine there are people who see them as center-right.

The blogs at Atlantic Monthly feel slightly right-leaning to me, but I don't know if this is really true or just a misunderstanding based on what I check. Slate has run some surprisingly right-wing things on occasion and looking it up it does seem to have moved a bit to the Right of what I remember. I still don't know if I would think of it as "center-right", maybe more like mixed-up.

Posted by Thomas R | August 2, 2008 5:40 AM

While I try not to spend too much time worrying about the precise location of various publications on some finely-calibrated scale of left to right, one of the main reasons I've kept my Atlantic subscription active is that I feel they do a good job overall of balancing left/right/center viewpoints (and also good non-partisan reporting).

What bothers me about the Atlantic is that it feels at times too hidebound, too Washington-insider, conventional-wisdom-based for me. One recent issue sported an ominous view of the White House under stormy skies with the headline "Lessons of a Failed Presidency". The lead article was a good dissection of Karl Rove's disastrous influence on the W.H. by Joshua Green ... but the next big piece was an overly long hit piece about Michael Gerson taking credit for other folks' speechwriting -- the kind of thing which is of interest to absolutely nobody except insiders -- and which assiduously avoided any mention of the real subject of this issue, the fact that the President for whom these guys were writing speeches has been a complete disaster, and that their speeches helped push his awful policies. It's definitely a worthwhile magazine, but I don't know if I want to pay my hard-earned money for this kind of nonsense anymore.

Posted by Fred J. | August 2, 2008 9:06 AM

Good lord, some of you are delusional. The Atlantic used to be centrist with a mild tilt to the right, when Michael Kelly was in charge. It's moved well to the left since then. Douthat is one of those "nice" conservatives, the pet that liberals keep around to pretend that they're openminded.

Slate is center left with a skeptic's tilt. TNR used to be centrist but under Foer, it's moved well to the left.

Posted by Cal | August 2, 2008 12:37 PM

Last I checked, Will Saletan is a pretty solid liberal.

Posted by jaltcoh.blogspot.com | August 2, 2008 11:46 PM

Last I checked, Will Saletan is a pretty solid liberal.

Since when was Saletan a liberal? I'm a Republican and I think Saletan leans conservative.

Posted by Just Dropping By | August 3, 2008 9:32 AM

I think this says more about Matt than it does about Slate.

QFT.

If Hitchens, who self-classifies as a Marxist, is 'right,' then the left-right axis is exclusively situational, based only on contemporary one-off issues, instead of grounded in any broad, ideological notions.

More likely, Yglesias now sees 'left' or 'right' by his new, propagandist standard of whether or not someone is being a team-player. Anyone who isn't, like Hitchens, is center-right or right. That Hitchens is an outright Marxist, which is further-left than anything Yglesias self-professes, is inconsequential because Hitchens, unlike Yglesias, is not spinning and cherry-picking to make the Democratic party look good.

If Weisberg is a big Liebushman backer he's a right-winger.

Lieberman as a 'right-winger' is a myth. I'd take another look at Lieberman's non-foreign-policy-related voting record if I were you. It's as solidly 'left' as it gets. I seem to remember looking up his rating from organizations like Heritage or the NRA over the last few years and ending up thoroughly unsurprised that he had never received a higher score than 'F' from any of them (usually worst or t-worst percentage grade out of anyone in the Senate). I think even John Kerry had a couple 'D's and a 'C-' or two.

Even if you consider foreign-policy of so much greater importance than other issues, and thereby conclude that Lieberman is a 'right-winger' despite his non-fp voting record, you'd still have to deal with the fact that Bush's foreign policy thinking more closely mirrors that of Wilson, LBJ or even Trotsky (none of whom are exactly 'right-wing'), than Nixon's, Reagan's or Eisenhower's.

Posted by Shinyk | August 3, 2008 12:34 PM

I thought Hitchens abandoned Marxism. (He still is to the Left on most things)

Liebermann being seen as such a Right-winger is kind of strange. Going by "National Journal" he's, at most, as Right as Lugar on Foreign Policy. Going by most measures of US politics he's center-Left.

I think it can be explained though by him being in New England. New England Democrats are generally very much to the Left. If Liebermann, with the exact same beliefs, were a Senator of Nebraska the Democrats would be happy to have someone so liberal. It's the same with Republicans. They'll tolerate a Chris Shays easier than they did Gilchrest.

Posted by Thomas R | August 3, 2008 2:06 PM

Check out this story from Slate from October 2004 in which reporters and staff say who they'll be voting for (http://www.slate.com/id/2108714/). Short story: practically all of them voted for Kerry. Now, maybe Slate's writing could be center-right when all the writERS seem to be (at the least) center-left, but I doubt it. And I think Slate is great!

Posted by Andrew Biggs | August 4, 2008 5:16 PM

Corrected: "practically all of them say that they voted for Kerry."

Including Kaus! Which pretty much invalidates the list all by itself.

Posted by Barry | August 5, 2008 3:13 PM