ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Nation’s Interns Declare War on the Nation.
A brief Sunday morning Corner note, because here in the terminal throes of the strangest presidential campaign of the past half century, the surrealistic comedy is rushing by in a slipstream that makes it all too much to process — you have to get some of the funnier moments down in writing, or else all these memories will be gone for good, lost in time like tears in rain.
On September 23, the editors of the venerable ultraprogressive magazine the Nation endorsed Kamala Harris for president. That is not the story, because that is not noteworthy — the Nation has been endorsing far-Left Democrats for well over a century, during most of which time it was run by actual Communists. No, the story here is that, yesterday, the Nation‘s fall 2024 internship staff just published a collectively written counter-essay attacking their editors for selling out and endorsing Harris — and they published it in the Nation itself.
I’ll admit that my first reaction pretty much tracked with that of Ben Dreyfuss in the link provided above. (I would love to reprint it here, but Sunday feels like an inauspicious day to test standards of decency.) The interns’ piece instantly became the butt of jokes on social media last night, but I’ve noticed that some misunderstand why it’s being mocked and why every media professional with even a shred of self-respect is mocking it as well. It’s not that interns shouldn’t be allowed to write articles. It’s not that interns aren’t allowed to have opinions. (Ideally, they would not be dumb opinions, but, hey — it’s a sorting process.) It is that interns should not be ganging up to attack their own bosses in public. The lunatics aren’t running the asylum, at least not yet, but they are collectively organizing to dictate morality. I cannot even believe I have to point it out, but this is no way to run an organization.
I’m so old, I can remember when editors decided what articles a publication would run, before these new enlightened times in which publications leak like a sieve via their Slack channels and allowing interns a chance to upload their own sophomoric takes on a particular topic.
