Plenty of small media start-ups these days believe they can deliver the final blow to the tottering neoliberal order. But Compact, a self-described “radical American journal” debuting this week, is taking an unusual cross-ideological approach to the task of challenging, as a note from its editors puts it, “the overclass that controls government, culture, and capital.”“We’re here to start a two-front war on the left and the right,” Matthew Schmitz, one of the magazine’s editors, said in a recent interview with his partners, Sohrab Ahmari and Edwin Aponte.“I’m not much of an interventionist,” Schmitz hastened to add, “except when it comes to political polemics.”A joint venture of two religious conservatives and a Marxist populist, Compact reflects the current continuing political realignment, as the resurgence of class-based politics on both sides of the divide has scrambled ideological lines. Its mission: promoting “a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right.”Compact is also part of an independent media gold rush, as new, or newly reconfigured, political magazines, podcasts and newsletter platforms have opened up fresh (and sometimes highly lucrative) opportunities outside traditional media.The idea, Ahmari, a former Op-Ed editor of The New York Post famous for starting flame-throwing feuds with fellow conservatives, wasn’t to “fix” the right or the left, but to publish “really sharp critiques that transcend the categories.”Aponte, founding editor of the website The Bellows (tagline: “Labor Populism for the Future”) and Compact’s house Marxist, jumped in: “Or treat them as irrelevant?”Compact, which went live on Tuesday, is certainly an eclectic brew. The first dozen articles — with one to follow daily — include salvos against NATO overreach, “zombie Reaganites” and the “aesthetic castration” of straight male artists.The masthead of columnists and contributing editors mixes Catholic anti-liberals and dissident Marxist feminists, European radicals and American populists, with prominent figures (Glenn Greenwald, Patrick Deneen) alongside those who cut their teeth on upstart blogs and podcasts.In an interview, R.R. Reno, editor of the conservative religious journal First Things, who knows both Schmitz and Ahmari well, predicted Compact would “kick up a lot of dust.” But to succeed, he said, “it’s going to have to find that fine line of saying things that are shockingly counter-consensus, but plausible enough they aren’t written off as cranks or irrelevant.”“Matthew is a very good judge of timing and tone, and when to throw the Molotov cocktail,” Reno added. “Whereas Sohrab’s impulse is always to throw the Molotov cocktail.”ImageDemonstrators protesting a lockdown in London in December 2021. The pandemic, a columnist for Compact argues, “has been deliberately exploited by ruling elites to bring about a neo-feudal order.”Credit...Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockAhmari, 37, is one of the more flamboyantly pugilistic characters on the right. An Iranian-born onetime Marxist atheist turned neoconservative golden boy turned “post-liberal neo-traditionalist” Catholic, he has drawn attention for his “dazzling flair for individual self-definition as well as a knack for stoking outrage,” as the Daily Beast put it last year. (There’s also his fondness, critics charge, for Viktor Orban’s Hungary.)The Nebraska-born Schmitz, 36, also a Catholic convert, is more reserved, with a tweedy manner and a more conventional-seeming conservative résumé. After college at Princeton, he worked at the Witherspoon Institute, a socially conservative think tank, before joining First Things.Today, Schmitz, who is also a columnist for The American Conservative, calls himself “a conservative on social issues, more heterodox on economics, with an instinctive American patriotism and suspicion of our interventionist foreign policy elites.”He paraphrased Norman Mailer: “You can call me anything you want, just don’t call me a liberal.”Compact began hatching in December 2020, when Schmitz and Ahmari sat down to discuss a new magazine that would reflect their shared frustrations with the limitations of conservative journalism.Both had signed “Against the Dead Consensus,” a much-discussed 2019 manifesto in First Things calling for a new conservatism to replace fusionism, the postwar conservative blending of free-market ideology, traditional family values and hawkish foreign policy that had been “blown up” by the election of Donald Trump.That letter, along with a fire-breathing follow-up by Ahmari calling on conservatives to wage “cultural civil war” against tyrannical liberal individualism (epitomized by Drag Queen Story Hour at public libraries), By: Jennifer Schuessler
Title: Two Religious Conservatives and a Marxist Walk Into a Journal
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/arts/compact-magazine-conservatives-marxists.html
Published Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 14:00:18 +0000
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