The New Republic enters The Bob Zadek Show only incidentally. No episode in the excerpts takes the magazine as its subject; it is named by guests describing their own careers or by a guest narrating the intellectual and legal history of American labor law. What the excerpts establish is therefore narrow: who among Bob Zadek’s guests wrote for it, who was said to have founded it, and what role one guest assigned it in the pro-union turn of the early twentieth century.
John Judis and the magazine
The most substantial reference comes in the 2021 episode on socialism, where Bob Zadek interviews the author John Judis about his book The Socialist Awakening. Introducing his guest, Zadek describes Judis as an avowed socialist and a prolific author, and the book as one that helps listeners understand socialism as the term is used today rather than as it was used several hundred years ago Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021).
Judis supplies the magazine’s place in his own biography. Recounting his political evolution, he says he was a socialist from the 1960s, from Berkeley SDS, and an editor of a publication called Socialist Revolution, a journal put out in San Francisco in the early 1970s. At that time, he says, he was what he would describe as an orthodox Marxist socialist: he believed workers should own and control the means of production, there should be no capitalist class, markets should disappear, and there should be central planning. He describes that vision as the Soviet Union plus democracy — central planning and democracy together Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021).
Judis goes on to say he became disabused of those views during the 1970s, that he could not figure out what socialism would mean in America, and that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of that outlook. He then says that for years, if asked his views, he would have said he was much closer to a kind of progressive — and he names Herbert Croly, whom he identifies as the founder of The New Republic, the magazine for which Judis says he worked for twenty years Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021).
That single sentence carries the article’s only biographical fact about the magazine: Croly founded it, and Judis spent two decades there. The excerpts do not say when the magazine was founded, where, by whom besides Croly, or what its editorial position was at any point. Judis’s own account of his thinking continues past the magazine: he says he began to rethink socialism in the 1990s on a mainly theoretical basis, influenced by a historian named Marty Sklar, and came to see socialism not as a stage of history after capitalism to be brought about by revolution but as something developing within capitalism, as capitalism itself developed within feudalism. He cites public ownership of energy, transportation and healthcare, and the New Deal itself, as places where aspects of it could be seen Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word? (2021).
Sean McElwee and the magazine
The earlier reference is briefer and comes from the host rather than the guest. In the 2015 episode on inclusive capitalism, Zadek introduces Sean McElwee of Demos, describing Demos as a progressive think tank in Manhattan and McElwee as a journalist there. In the course of that introduction Zadek lists outlets McElwee has written for, naming Rolling Stone, the Washington Post and the New Republic Inclusive Capitalism: Economic Savior or Socialism in Disguise? (2015).
McElwee himself returns to the point at the close of the hour, when Zadek asks him to describe Demos and its work with about a minute left. McElwee says Demos mainly focuses on issues of economic inequality and does not do quite as much, if at all, on social issues. He directs listeners to Twitter for Demos and for his own work, says he writes a weekly column at Salon and a monthly piece for Al Jazeera America, and adds that he occasionally contributes to the New Republic, the Atlantic, and Politico Inclusive Capitalism: Economic Savior or Socialism in Disguise? (2015).
So the two guests’ relationships to the magazine are of different kinds and are stated at different levels of specificity: Judis describes twenty years of work there and identifies its founder; McElwee describes occasional contributions alongside a list of other outlets. Neither excerpt says what either man wrote for the magazine, when, or on what subjects.
The magazine in the labor-law narrative
The third reference is the most substantive in argument and the least concerned with the magazine as an institution. In the 2022 episode on labor law, Richard Epstein narrates the judicial and legislative history of freedom of contract and unionization. He says that if you read the National Labor Relations Act, there was a long history of judicial situations in which courts held that any effort on the part of government to acquire individual firms, at the federal or state level, to unionize was an interference with freedom of contract. He cites a 1908 decision called Adair v. United States, by Justice Harlan, which took that position, and a more elaborate and more effective version of the same thing by Mahlon Pitney in a case called Coppage v. Kansas, decided in early 1915. The upshot, he says, was that you could not force unions on anybody Which Side Are You On? (2022).
Epstein then turns to the 1920s and the intellectual forces pressing against those precedents. By that time, he says, The New Republic was then a serious, very powerful situation, and people like Felix Frankfurter were so strongly pro-union that it was only a question of time as to when the earlier cases would topple Which Side Are You On? (2022). He dates the toppling from the passage of the Railway Labor Act in 1926, applied to railways only because there was no question the federal government had jurisdiction under a narrow reading of the Commerce Clause. He notes 1930 and a book by Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene called The Labor Injunction, which he describes as very strongly pro-union; the passage of Norris-LaGuardia in 1932; and then the National Labor Relations Act after a couple of failed attempts in 1937, which he says completely undid the structure the earlier cases had put together Which Side Are You On? (2022).
Epstein’s characterization of the magazine is thus a single clause in a longer argument, and it is a characterization of its influence rather than of its contents: serious, very powerful, and, in his telling, aligned with the pro-union position associated with Frankfurter. The excerpts do not say who was editing the magazine in that period, what it published on labor questions, or whether Epstein’s description is drawn from any particular article.
Across episodes: no development
Three episodes touch the magazine — the 2015 conversation with Sean McElwee, the 2021 conversation with John Judis, and the 2022 conversation with Richard Epstein — and the excerpts show no development between them. Each reference is incidental to its episode’s subject, and none of the three speakers responds to or revises what another said.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when The New Republic was founded, where, by whom besides Herbert Croly, who owns or owned it, who edited it, or what it has advocated at any period. They do not name a single article, issue, or editorial position of the magazine, and they do not say what either Judis or McElwee wrote there. Epstein’s description of its influence in the 1920s is asserted without citation to anything the magazine published, and the excerpts contain no episode in which the magazine is the topic of discussion.