Dear Nation Readers
Dear Nation Readers, here I go again: I too like reading
Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman (when he posts), Calvin Trillin, etc. — I like it
when The Nation is at its best, leftish but non doctrinaire —but the magazine
owes readers an accounting.
Or does anybody still care enough about The Nation to notice
and demand it? Perhaps not.
In any case, publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and her
husband, Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, have repeatedly used the magazine as
a platform for their views that any difficulty between the United States and
Russia is all the responsibility of the United States.
Putin harbors no grand anti-democratic, anti-Western
designs.
There is no Russian cyber-strategy aimed at the West.
Russia did nothing to encourage Brexit.
Nothing to encourage anti-democratic regimes in Hungary and
Poland.
Nothing to help Trump win in 2016.
One could go on.
Perhaps this is a throwback to the Cold War, when some
lefties attributed the whole contretemps to the West, the United States in
particular.
Perhaps it is a testament to the fact that, whether you are
left or right — true I am addressing the left — learning is hard, when
historical circumstances shift strangely and radically.
Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen evince no
propensity for learning. They are still defending and foolishly upgrading
an ideology that may have made some sense once upon a time, or not.
The Nation owes readers an accounting.
On the other hand, given lack of demand for it, maybe nobody
cares.
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