All Tomorrow's Partisans

The culture war after the 2004 election.

Matt Welch from the January 2005 issue

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While not all of the increase is attributable to politics (vanden Heuvel gives credit to "the best business staff we've ever had"), The Nation and left-leaning publishers such as Metropolitan Books found themselves planning for the perverse (if ultimately unmaterialized) possibility that political success might undermine profitability. Although she acknowledges that circulation took a dip after Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, vanden Heuvel says the magazine has learned valuable lessons about "holding a Democratic administration accountable."

Sara Bershtel--publisher of Metropolitan Books, a division of Henry Holt that publishes Noam Chomsky and Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter With Kansas)--maintains that the success of her company's American Empire Project is due in part to a long-term political reawakening that transcends political candidates. "There's a different climate now," she says. "I think that there has been a general mobilization of readers, demonstrators, and people who have a very active concern about the direction of the country."

Larger current events houses, meanwhile, will continue to hedge their bets. "At the end of the day, no matter what you think about publishers' political leanings, they know what side their bread's buttered on," Donaghy of Powell's City of Books says. "Right now the publishing cash cow is Bush bashing, but that's pretty much on the way out."

Book lovers can expect a well-deserved post-election breather from campaign politics. At least for a week or two. "No matter who wins," PublicAffairs' Taft tells me a week before the election, "at this point we're more concerned with moving existing product." He pauses a moment. "Though if Bush wins, I'm certain we could do another quick George Soros book...."�