Do these subscription totals include institutional subscriptions (libraries, schools, etc.)?

If they do, then the actual number of people who get a copy of any of these magazines in their home must be pretty low.

Kind of embarrasing that Rutten forgets to mention Reason, which sits in our backyard and is creeping up on the big four. It's more interesting too.

Gosh, an essay question.

For what it's worth, I can try to offer a more moderately liberal perspective than you're likely to find in *The Nation*. After all, the Democratic spectrum of opinion is much broader.

Al Qaeda is clearly a profound threat to the U.S. We are in fact at war with them. We need to destroy their ability to harm us and we need to take the offensive to do it.

I think Bush handled Afghanistan pretty well, at least initially. The Taliban were removed and a sanctuary was taken away from Al Qaeda at a relatively low cost in U.S. and Afghan blood.

We probably took reliance on Afghan allies too far in the end, which allowed Bin Laden to escape Tora Bora. Our follow-up has been poor, as well -- too acquiescent to warlordism, too distracted by Iraq to devote the attention to rebuilding Afghanistan required to ensure that it doesn't revert to its former self.

Iraq? I find it hard to argue with Bush's initial challenge to the UN, which seemed designed to get the world to once again be serious about Hussein's WMD potential and to once again work to force him to live up to the post-Gulf War conditions he accepted.

But Bush utterly failed to make the case that Hussein constituted a truly imminent WMD threat or had any real connection with Al Qaeda. And now that the war is over(and despite the recent nonsense in the *Weekly Standard*), it seems even more doubtful that there was any such case to make.

It wasn't necessary to profoundly damage our relationship with the United Nations and our Western European allies in order to deal with this threat. The rush to go to war in 2003 was likewise unnecessary. A steady ratcheting up of the pressure on Hussein, in concert with our allies, would have been the more sensible course. And, had war eventually been necessary anyway, we would have been in a much stronger position to deal with the aftermath of a broad allied or UN-sanctioned effort to bring down Hussein, than we now are in the wake of the George-and-Tony rodeo show.

But I don't think the real point of George Bush's war was to protect the United States from an imminent threat. I think we went to war in pursuit of some neocon fantasy that taking out Iraq would somehow rearrange the Middle East in ways beneficial to Israel.

Ironically, the war hardly seems to have made either Israel or the U.S. more secure. The sight of foreign troops taking an Arab capital seems only to have deepened Arab antagonism toward the West and the U.S. in particular. We have created a vacuum for the jihadis to fill and a cause they can use to broaden and deepen their support.

So my beef with Bush is that he took us to war on false pretenses -- a war, moreover, that has made us less secure, rather than more. And the cost, in terms of the alliances that sustained the U.S. from the middle of the the last century, has been horrendous.

America is much weaker as a go-it-alone cowboy than as a leading member of a concert of nations. That's what the Bush crowd evidently fails to understand. To me, liberalism in a foreign policy context is founded on a view of internationalism as the ultimate source of security, not on pacifism or a reluctance to do what is necessary for self-defense or a naive approach to power politics.

But going it alone also meant doing it on the cheap, in terms of manpower deployed. A lightning strike by highly mobile units was enough to topple Hussein, but is clearly not enough to pacify the country. So you have George Bush saying we're not going to "cut-and-run" as he's preparing to do just that.

He could substantially increase the number of U.S. troops or find ways to obtain sufficient allied help, but either course would make it pretty transparent to the U.S. electorate that Bush sold them a bill of goods before the war. And, besides, Karl Rove is no doubt telling George he's got to wind things up before the next election.

Anyone else remember "Vietnamization?"

We took a wrong turn in Iraq. We've replaced a contained and isolated enemy with the kind of chaos that constitutes an even greater threat in the long run, and we've alienated our major allies in the process. Now that we're in this pickle, we're looking for the easy way out, because the alternatives would require acknowledging that we made the wrong assumptions in the first place.

Unwillingness to do so is perhaps Bush's biggest failing, in my view.

A long answer which will put most of your visitors to sleep and offers no insights on readers of *The Nation* (I don't normally read it or *The New Republic*, being more partial to the *New York Review of Books* than the other two), but I've been looking for an opportunity to crystallize my thinking, so thanks!

A much shorter response:

I would be interested in the raw numbers reading political blogs vs. political magazines. I think blogs are beginning to surpass them by a considerable amount. Sullivan says more people read him now on his weblog than did when he was editor of The New Republic.

Also, how many are reading The Weekly Standard online? That might blow these stats out of the water.

The truth is that the Nation made the biggest gains in the nineties. By the first Gulf War, it had 100,000, nearly catching the New Republic then. Since then, they've both been growing.

I look at these numbers like tech fliers in the late nineties. Sure, JDSU would "double earnings", but when your earnings were a nickel and now are up to a dime, IBM's advance from $2.33 to $2.50 is still kicking your ass.

The Nation has a longer shelf life than the LA Weekly or the Village Voice, but the Internet makes the shelf-life less important. LA Weekly's 200,000+ include an awful lot of people who read for left-leaning political content. The left isn't hurting in print.

Also: Schneider is only a year late. It was commonly observed over a year ago that the problem with the splenitive side of the left wasn't that they were really crazy, but that the egregious sins of Shrub had made them so. But now that there are actual flagdraped coffins to point to, not the mere speculation that they might someday arrive, and now that the abominations of the Patriot Act are sinking in, the left really doesn't sound as shrill as it did pre-war.

I don't know what Reason's audited numbers are, but we're right in the TNR/WS ballpark of 60,000. Be interesting to know about the two Americans, Prospect and Spectator....

Roger -- There's a reason almost all of these publications have a strong online presence; among other things, I would bet that their various blogs and Web-only columns help bring in new subscribers in an era when all publications are dribbling away readership. Also, it's easy for opinion journalists to write opinion-y blog stuff.

Matt, I'm sure you're right about the online presence goosing subscriptions to some extent (and of course that opinion writers can spew opinions for both media). But I wonder in the long run (of even short run) sense. Speaking anecdotally (meaning personally), I used to subscribe to a raft of publications, including several listed. I don't anymore, not just because I'm cheap, but because I would PREFER to read that kind of thing online. I can switch publications at a mouse click AND I'm not deluging my house with paper like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In the case of The Nation I miss out, but with most of the others I get most of what I need--and with the endless other material out there, what human could keep up? So I wonder how those paid sub figures actually mesh with real reader numbers. Something's changing.

Also, as a paid subscriber of the LAT and the NYT, I find myself reading most of those papers online too. Only the Sunday editions regularly make it out of their plastic wrappers.

From the article:
"The New Republic is an interesting magazine, but we are not a cause. We tend to write articles that are iconoclastic politically."

It's not iconoclasm so much as conventional wisdom by our middle-of-the-road elites. As such, it's a better gauge of what's politically possible than the idealogically purer Nation.

TNR's most consistent position has been pro-Gulf War II, which happens to be a Martin Peretz preoccupation.

The circulation of The Nation has risen pretty consistently since the late-80s, as I recall. (But I was not able to turn up the figures on the WWW).

On the PR side, they have tried to open up the format of the magazine, lighten it somewhat -- since at least the late 1990s. John Powers wrote a good column indicating that these changes were not enough:

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/41/on-powers.php

They have also instituted a program of left-wing cruise-ship outings, etc., as a way to cultivate a readership. (Cynics might even say: a readership that's writing their wills.) This "outreach" is the sort of road that KPFK was going down during the Schubb years, and seems to represent a healthy effort to engage people.

However, I stopped my subscription a year ago when it became too clear that the writers were stuck repeating the same stories, offering the same solutions to complex problems, and --worst of all -- giving no positive agenda. Just, resist the Bushies. (Culturally, there were symptoms too: if Gene Santoro wrote another laudatory Springsteen "working class hero" story, I was going to lose it.)

The increase in circulation since 9/11 must have been huge, if this well-timed bit of history is to be believed:

http://foliomag.com/ar/bush_bump/

From 100,000 to 160,000 readers in just two years!

Navasky makes the point there that The Nation's circulation rises when conservatives are in power. He is a little more circumspect in the quote Rutten got, noting that people are looking for assurance that their dissent is OK.

Blogs depend on other sources. There are a scant amount of blogs that would have anything to say worth reading were it not for the magazines (and dozens of others) mentioned in this piece. In general blogs are highly useful filtering tools for the infoglut, distillers. But you can't really use them as a basis for comparison over "what's more important".