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 not going to lie, watching the rebelliously proggier-than-thou Zoomer servitors of the Nation rebel against their elders fires my shrunken coal lump of a heart with a warm, amber glow — you really do hate to see it happen, and to the nicest people, too. I have read many pieces from the Left about how the Trump and, especially, George Floyd eras brought progressive institutions shrieking to their knees in arthritic agony, their joints suddenly locked and nerve centers seized up in a spasm of ugly recrimination as social dysfunction, grievance, “fragility” culture, and the emergence of new racial and sexual status hierarchies exploded internal authority. But also understand: I read those pieces with glee. I can only thrill to see chaos — and self-inflicted, willfully chosen chaos, no less — visited upon my ideological opponents.
Rest assured that here, at National Review, we pattern our treatment of interns after the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.