Coalition for the Sane: Harper's and Similar Magazines Are Just Doomscrolling in Printed Form Spreading Liberal Despair For More Than A Century

 

I'm very aware of how badly print journalism is doing, which is one of the reasons why I'm still astonished so many left-wing magazines are still in existence in print form. I speak of Harper's, The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic and The New Yorker all of which I've either read frequently, had a subscription to more then a few and which I still browse when I'm in either a bookstore or Penn Station.

None of these publications have a huge individual readership and if I had to guess there's a significant overlap between them collectively. They're not the kind of magazine I can see anyone who isn't a college graduate reading voluntarily and I bet in states like Mississippi and Arkansas you could count the number of subscriptions on one hand. And having read all of them I can assure you they're all essentially covering the same subject matter and in tone they're virtually identical particularly in the opinion sections. They all have the tenor of the professor those who went to college all had and that even if you agreed with their lecture you secretly were put to sleep by their monotony or were annoyed by their stridency.

And having read many of them well before the internet and social media were part of our daily lives I can assure that they were all basically doomporn before that term existed. And now that you can find them so easily (including this one) I've come to question their purpose in the grand scheme of things.

I'm not saying that they don't have value when it comes to some of their individual journalism and interviews to be sure but it does astonish me that Mother Jones still exists when magazines such as Newsweek is gone and Time is a shell of its former self. Much of it no doubt has to do with the fact they are being propped up by wealthy academics and interests who truly believe they serve some kind of higher calling but the reality of America is much different. Combined their readership wouldn't come close to what CNN or MSNBC manages on a single night and given their tenor they know all too well what a choke-hold the right-wing media has on so much of America. And considering how much the authors of their columns clearly hold both political parties in equal amounts of contempt, I can't imagine they're getting support from the Democrats. So why are they here?

I don't have an answer but I can speculate as to why these publications do have a following and why the people who write them believe their necessary. Harper's and similar publications are written by some of the most left-leaning academics in the country for essentially college educated or post-grad people.  Now if you can afford subscriptions to them, as opposed to say The New Criterion or Forbes, you meet the progressive mindset of being rich, well-educated and almost certainly white. In other words, the American Dream is working perfectly for you and you're reading to make sure that the rest of the country is asleep and you're not.

All of these publications, especially after Trump's election but even when Democrats or other Republicans are in office, are almost certainly staffed  by the kind of people who either didn't vote or voted for Nader in 2000 and then said W. stole Florida or either didn't vote or voted for Jill Stein in 2016 and then argued about the unfairness of the electoral college.  They hate Republicans with every fiber of their being and are convinced the Democrats sold out years ago because they betrayed 'the cause'. They can't define what 'the cause' is and they rarely, if ever, have stories in their publications of real-life examples of left-wing theory. And often when they do, its when they've realized they didn't work and are only really reporting it years after right-wing media has made it clear they failed. Witness a  recent Atlantic story that argued that the policy of harm-reduction had failed in cities like Burlington and Portland – years after right wing media had showed to its much larger audience how badly it had played out in cities like San Francisco and Seattle.

Almost all of their magazines are devoted to the collapse of some major liberal institution or some failure of the Trump administration with such detail that it almost seems like they're doing it with a kind of eagerness. Considering that most of their op-eds in the last decade have been about how all things Trump and Republicans are destroying the country as well as the collapse of the liberal order, you'd think a little seriousness would be in order. Yet the detail these journals go into when they describe how our country is in slave to seniors or the way that RFK Jr has destroyed the American Health System has a combination of smugness to it that I always associate with the left far more than the right. It's like their anticipating America finally becoming a dictatorship just so they can write about in their final issue with a great big "We Told You So!" on the front cover.

So much of these publication stories are often vastly out of correlation with what is happening in America, even under Trump, to the point that I can't help but wonder if these are just the left-wing versions of conspiracy theories. I remember seeing multiple publications in The Atlantic or Harper's arguing that Trump was going to eventually seize power and cause a military coup. They argued in the spring that in case the majority of the House was close Trump would order the military to seize ballot boxes and put them under his custody.  There was no evidence he was planning to do this – and to be very clear if he was I'd argue that The Atlantic's first duty would have been to go the Democrats or some other outside agency with people they could trust.  Furthermore if he is the dictator they say he wants to be and he heard of this article, well, wouldn't he have arrested these writers or at the very least tried to sue them if there was truth to it?  Considering that he is the most litigious President on so many minor details in American life, you'd think he'd do that when something that was a threat to him became published.

And yet that did not happen. Now another theory popular among columnists like this (Heather Cox Richardson is one of the bigger posits of it) is that even if the Democrats win the election Mike Johnson and JD Vance will just refuse to swear them in. They will ignore the results of the people and just fire the clerk and then appoint someone who will ignore the result of the elections and, I guess, all the Democrats will be arrested by the FBI and face a firing squad in front of the White House?

Now I'm fully aware of Trump's election denialism and who he is. But again if he were actually going to do this doesn't that call for more than just circulating memos? And again, wouldn't it be in the President's interest to make sure that the people who know this are arrested and/or killed? That is, lest we forget, what dictators have a habit of doing to political dissidents and journalists. Wouldn't the author meet the fate of Alexei Navalny?

If it sounds like I'm not taking Trump as a threat seriously, I am. But I can't help but be aware of the disconnect between the screaming and stridency of left-wing journals like the ones I describe and what I actually witness happening on the news. Is his Justice Department engaging in false prosecutions of his political rivals? Yes. Have all of them been dismissed by other judges? Yes. Has he introduced legislation like the SAVE Act and demanded it be passed by the Senate? Yes. Has John Thune refused to put it on the floor? Also yes. Has the President pushed so many of his policies to the point that they get to the Supreme Court? Also yes. Has the Supreme Court refused to go along with the most important ones, such as tariff and election rules for mail-in voting? Also yes.

And so on. All the things the President turn my stomach – and I often watch network television with this dread some point he's going to make an announcement along those lines. But it never comes. No I haven't listed every single thing that each time is considered the first step down the slippery slope but he never escalates, usually because his focus shifts to something else, equally bad or backs down while declaring he won on social media. His tweets don't make it so anymore then the left's arguments that we are getting there.

That's also why, for all the arguments in these publications of how we're practically a dictatorship now – no seriously, we really are! – I feel compelled to remind people that there are already enough actual dictators and that while Trump clearly admires them, he doesn't have the follow through to actually be one. If Trump were an actual dictator, he'd do more than just loudly tweet and scream on social media every time he suffered a reversal. Actual dictators like Putin, like the Saudis, like Kim Jung Il, do not simply  mess around with social media, they actually kill and arrest their enemies and do things that actual suppress so that no one resists at all. Publications like The Nation and Harper's would have been raided as early as inauguration day, their writers arrested. They certainly wouldn't be allowed to interview Trump's staff members or even write about them. That's how dictatorships work. They actually destroy the institutions; they don't merely weaken them.

Now I'm not going to deny Trump is the worst President in history and that all the horrible things that are reported about him aren't true. But for God's sake only report on the horrible things he actually does; don't use them to argue their proof of future bad acts unless you actually have proof.

That actually gets to a different point. Let's say for the record I agree with the thesis of these articles: that even if the Democrats win, Trump will ignore the results and there's nothing I, as a citizen, can do to stop him. Well, if that's the case, why should I bother to vote at all? Why should I spend my time and energy trying to elect Mary Peltola to the Senate in Alaska if she's not going to get seated even if she wins? Why should I vote for Tom Suozzi, who's critical to Democrats taking the House, if the end result is he's thrown into jail?

I think that the threat Trump holds to democracy is a valid one. But just as valid is the attitude in these articles that even when it's working perfectly, democracy is useless. I remember vividly how in the final weeks of the 2024 election the intern's of The Nation published an editorial where they reversed a previous endorsement of Harris. They argued that neither candidate would make a difference either to the fate of Gaza, but that democracy wouldn't be better off if one candidate or the other was elected. We knew already that was a lie so for the editors of The Nation to allow it to go to print was journalist malpractice.

But I'm pretty sure that the reason they did was the real reason these magazines exist. They don't believe in democracy any more than the far right does. In fact I read an op-ed by Thomas Frank in Harper's in January of 2026 called 'Liberal Despair' in which he wrote of the destruction of Trump's first year in office with something that bordered on admiration. He tore about the results of the 2025 elections, saying that by agreeing to reopen the government in their aftermath Democrats had betrayed the people, and spent more time criticizing Clinton's efforts to 'triangulate the right' and yearning for so many candidates like Mondale and Dukakis who'd lost in landslides to Reagan and Bush 41. The results of those two elections had taught Democrats that their version of liberalism was dead and that they had to try and go to the center to where the voters actually were, as Clinton did with success. To those such as Frank and the like that was a betrayal of the liberal cause, and its clear he would have preferred Republicans continuing their dominance to Democrats compromising. (Frank worked for Sanders' 2016 primary campaign so its clear where his bias comes from.)

What Frank refers to as liberal despair is really 'progressive fatalism' and its what Harper's and all of these magazines are essentially publishing and selling to their readers. And there's something tonally off about. It's nihilistic enough to make the reader certain that everything you ever thought was real about America is either a lie or a false flag yet smug enough to somehow argue that all of these horrible things that are happening are either not your responsibility to deal with or that it's not going to affect you personally when the worst comes. Put bluntly, it's saying that America is going to become a dictatorship any day now but you'll still be safe reading about it in the comfort of your home and even though you are the exact kind of person the enemy hates and wants dead, they'll never knock on your door. All of this was always going to happen and there was never anything you could have done to stop it, except read these articles which told the world exactly what was going to happen. If we're living in a fascist state, its everyone else's fault for not subscribing to The New Republic.

As I said I'm not oblivious to everything the President did in his first term and is doing in his second. I just don't buy the fatalism that publications like this thrive in. Even if I did, then I believe it is the obligation of everyone who is worried about these things to get off their asses and do something. That's what I'm doing this year in my small way and I support all of those who are working voting drives or campaigning for Democratic officials this cycle. It's why I've spent so much time this year in particular highlighted the candidates I support. I'm not naïve enough to believe this articles, on their own, will be enough to bring about change but I sure as hell consider them more productive then just sitting in my living room, doomscrolling waiting for the end to come.

I believe, at some level, many of the writers as well as the subscribers to these magazines have basically given up on the country or the liberal order. I understand why they think this but not their collective willingness to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic if that is the case. I think their minds are in the right place but they have no desire to do the heavy lifting the way the right has clearly managed to succeed at.  The right has worked within the system in order to corrupt it to shape their vision, and we should be horrified by that. But the left basically refuses that same level of involvement, passive aggressively wanting the system to change for them while never exactly telling you into what or how. They deserve a measure of disgust for that as well.

As for me, I'm going to keep doing my part. I have another cycle on the phone banks for Peltola tonight. The work is difficult, with little reward, frequent hostility and little sign of actual accomplishment. But if we truly want America to recover from this horrible period in its history, it is incumbent on those of us who can to do so.  Sam Rayburn, one of the greatest Congressmen in America's history. famously said: "Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one."  Publications like the ones I've discussed are where the jackasses go to bray. Having spent far too much time with them, I've decided I prefer the company of carpenters.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a barn to build.