David Klion in The Baffler:
LOOK CLOSELY AT ANY POLITICAL PROJECT—an electoral campaign, an advocacy group, a small journal of ideas—and more often than not you’ll find that someone very rich is paying the bills. Such endeavors typically claim to represent a popular movement with organic, democratic roots, but whether or not that popular movement actually exists is less germane than whether an idiosyncratic benefactor is willing to cut a check. Left, right, and center all know this, but it’s impolite to talk about it; it’s one thing to take the money, another to admit that the donor is an essential player.
Marty Peretz is a money guy. Sure, he lectured at Harvard and blogged for The New Republic, but the main reason we know his name is how he spent his money—most visibly, bankrolling TNR for more than thirty years, during which the magazine’s Third Way liberalism and hawkish foreign policy became ascendant in the Democratic Party. There are lots of money guys out there, but most of them prefer not to be seen, heard, or read. Peretz is an exception, and now he has a memoir, The Controversialist, that brazenly insists on his own centrality to recent history.
Peretz has largely avoided the spotlight since 2010, when a group of students and affiliates of Harvard ambushed him on camera and confronted him with placards bearing incendiary racist quotes about Black Americans, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims from his TNR blog.
More here.