Why Independent Magazines Are Dying

The universe of publications that share an ideological affinity with Persuasion has just become smaller. A few months after I founded this magazine, John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, Peter Juul, and Brian Katulis started The Liberal Patriot. All four had been prominent staffers of the Center for American Progress, the biggest left-of-center think tank in the United States. All four had come to chafe at the increasingly rigid ideological strictures put upon them by their colleagues. And all four recognized that Democrats would run the danger of losing to Donald Trump—as, disastrously, they did in 2024—if they were not able to moderate their positions and overcome the party’s tendency for groupthink.