I am big fan of small magazines that pack a big intellectual punch. Over at The New York Times, Marc Tracy writes about the links between Democracy and the Biden administration.
Here is a taste:
It has only 500 subscribers. And yet Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, a 15-year-old quarterly run by a three-person staff out of a small office blocks from the White House, may be one of the most influential publications of the post-Trump era.
Six of President Biden’s 25 Cabinet-level officials and appointees, including the secretary of state and the chief of staff, as well as many other high-level administration members, have published essays in its pages, floating theories that may now be translated into policy.
Democracy’s print edition has no photos or illustrations, and its website is bare-bones. It has no podcast, and the titles of its articles — “Meritocracy and Its Discontents”; “How to End Wage Stagnation”; “Defend Multilateralism: It’s What People Want” — are not exactly the stuff of clickbait.
It is also not one of those publications with a big social presence, hosting public policy discussions at the Hyatt rather than cocktail parties for the Georgetown set.
“There’s not much pizazz,” said Michael Tomasky, the journal’s editor since 2009.
But if The New Republic of the 1990s was “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One” during the Bill Clinton years, as it was described in the film “Shattered Glass,” then Democracy could play a similar role in the Biden era.
Read the rest here.