It only has 500 subscribers. Yet Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, a 15-year quarterly magazine run by three employees from small White House office buildings, is possibly one of the most influential publications of the post-Trump era.
Six of President Biden’s 25 cabinet-level officials and agents, including the Secretary of State and Chief of Staff and many other senior administrators, have posted essays on their pages that contain pending theories that can now be translated into politics.
The print version of Democracy has no photos or illustrations, and the website is simple. There is no podcast and the titles of its articles – “Meritocracy and Its Discontents”; “How to end wage stagnation”; “Defending multilateralism: it is what the people want” – are not exactly what clickbait is about.
It’s also not one of those releases with a huge social footprint that is more of a public discussion at the Hyatt than cocktail parties for the Georgetown set.
Recognition…Ting Shen for the New York Times
“There’s not much pizazz out there,” said Michael Tomasky, the magazine’s editor since 2009.
But if the New Republic of the 1990s was “Air Force One’s in-flight magazine” during the Bill Clinton years, as described in the movie “Shattered Glass,” then democracy could play a similar role in the Biden era.
In a 2016 essay for democracy, “Meeting the Pandemic Threat,” Ron Klain, Mr Biden’s chief of staff, issued a warning that now appears prescient. National security adviser Jake Sullivan, in a 2018 essay on democracy, argued that despite the anti-Washington rhetoric that had energized many voters in recent years, most Americans would welcome ambitious federal programs.
Cabinet officials in President Barack Obama’s administration recently used democracy as a medium to give advice to their successors. Economist Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Economic Advisory Council, addressed Mr. Biden’s team members directly in an essay that took on an older sibling tone.
“Nobody has to discuss anything with you or listen to you, let alone do what you say,” he wrote. “You have one power: the ability to convince. If people think you have some useful insight or input, are correct in what you are saying, and are generally a helpful member of the team, you may be able to make some of the most important decisions the president will make and help with positive politics realize. “
The magazine helped advance political careers under the last Democratic president. Elizabeth Warren, then a professor at Harvard Law School, published an essay in the 2007 summer issue in which she advocated the creation of a federal agency to regulate mortgages and credit cards. She later helped advise Mr. Obama when the idea was realized as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Recognition…democracy
Andrei Cherny, a founder of Democracy, said the magazine, which published its first issue in 2006, was listed as “R. & D. Skunk Works of Ideas. ”
“We thought there was an ideas food chain – an idea would start with a place like Democracy and then go to a think tank or university and then be read by someone who will write for the editorial page of a newspaper or for a mass market magazine, and then into the hands of a legal advisor on Capitol Hill, ”said Cherny, who served in the Clinton administration and John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
He started the magazine with Kenneth Baer, a political speechwriter, not long after President George W. Bush won his second term. They dreamed it over a drink at Mackey’s, a pub on L Street that is now out of order.
“We needed ideas that were actually right now,” said Mr. Baer, who wrote speeches for Al Gore during the 2000 campaign and later worked in Mr. Obama’s White House. “There was a role for what we called it in the opening essay, a somewhat anachronistic idea of a small quarterly magazine.”
The founders of democracy took inspiration from conservative publications such as the National Review and Commentary, which for decades served readers as evidence of ideas and helped launch political careers such as that of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the first woman to serve as an American Ambassador to the United Nations.
William Kristol, the former editor of the conservative The Weekly Standard, said small magazines could still make an impact even in the age of social media. The conservative magazine National Affairs – the successor to the neoconservative public interest that his father Irving Kristol founded in 1965 – is a contemporary example.
“If one really smart young person or a hundred smart young people read something,” added Mr Kristol, “it’s worth it.”
Anne-Marie Slaughter, the executive director of New America, a think tank in Washington and a member of the Democracy Editorial Board, agreed that the old medium was still relevant. “It’s this room that’s short enough and wide enough to say, ‘There’s an idea here,’ but serious enough that it needs to be given some weight,” she said.
Aziz Huq, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who wrote for democracy, said the journal was a good forum for “bringing up a crazy idea in conversation.” His 2016 essay calling on Congress to increase its leverage over federal courts was echoed in a democratic primary debate by Pete Buttigieg, who himself contributed to democracy, and Biden’s Minister of Transport in 2019.
Nicole Hemmer, a Columbia University research fellow who studies conservative media, said when writer and arsonist William F. Buckley Jr. started the National Review in 1955, he envisioned a right-wing media ecosystem that pushed conservative ideas into the mainstream could bring in. His work helped bring ideas that were viewed as marginalized onto President Ronald Reagan’s platform 25 years later.
“Small print runs are not a problem,” she said.
