The New Republic used to be the flagship of smart, energetic liberalism. I say used to be, because in recent years, under the leadership of inkstained, wretched hacks like Andrew Sullivan and Martin Peretz, the magazine has turned into something akin to National Review on a liberal guilt trip. TNR subsequently enjoyed the magazine world's equivalent of Joementum, which is unsurprising, given that the magazine labored under the vain delusion that Joe Lieberman represents a significant school of thought within the reading public, and tailored its content to that demographic. In consequence, circulation dropped from 100,000 to about 40,000. As Jack Schafer writes in Slate:

[U]nder outgoing editor Peter Beinart, the magazine invested inordinate energy to navigate to an island inhabited by only the couple of dozen Democrats who were as devoted as it was to the defense of Israel and a pro-Iraq war policy that was also anti-Bush. Unable to move left and having shifted as far right on foreign policy as physically possible, Beinart's magazine became in its final months a sort of Joe Lieberman Weekly: daring in its audacity but of more interest to Republicans than Democrats, the magazine's traditional constituency.

TNR has now done all of us a favor – and by all of us, I mean the entire Progressive movement, because we need a magazine like TNR used to be – and hired a new editor. Perhaps they have finally realized that there is no wealthy ideologue waiting in the wings to rescue them from the marketplace, of the kind that keeps National Review and The Weekly Standard afloat even if neither of them has ever made a dime. It shows – read the new op-ed on why universal healthcare should be a prime policy goal.

That's a refreshing and welcome change for all of us. It's also, in a larger sense, a useful metaphor for where the Democratic Party is going. We're finally casting off the tattered rags of Liebermanesque conservatism, just as the reactionary experiment in Washington is imploding. Perhaps the Democratic Party is next in line to re-acquire its soul.