“Harper’s Editor Lewis H. Lapham aims to raise a ruckus with ‘Tentacles of Rage,’ his 7,700-word contribution to the magazine’s September issue. Pouring purple into every paragraph, Lapham writes in a controlled panic about the right-wing ‘self-mythologizing millionaires’ who have turned this once-liberal country to the reactionary right over the past three decades. Donating $3 billion to various Republican ‘propaganda mills’—think tanks, foundations, research groups, magazines, authors, and academic programs—the millionaires have drowned the former liberal consensus with their ‘prolonged siege of words.’
Lapham got his ruckus, all right, but not the one he expected, as when Reason‘s Hit and Run blog (Aug. 23) caught him describing events from this year’s Republican National Convention before it convened (Aug. 30).”
More on “Figuring out what’s wrong with Harper’s magazine” here at Slate (including links to Lapham’s article and the Hit and Run blog).