In March 1974 the New York Times ran a small story in its front section headlined, “Harvard Lecturer Buys New Republic for $380,000.” The lecturer was named Martin Peretz, a well-known radical activist married to a wealthy heiress who had helped bankroll Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign and donated $25,000 to George McGovern in 1971 in the expectation that he would end the Vietnam war and “turn the country toward social justice.” In a joint statement with the magazine’s longtime editor and owner Gilbert A. Harrison, Peretz announced that he planned no real changes in the magazine’s staff or its ideological direction.

Two years later Harrison, as Eric Alterman has reported in his essential book Sound and Fury, arrived at the New Republic’s elegant nineteenth street townhouse to find his belongings unceremoniously dumped in the hallway. Meanwhile, the Washington Post announced that much of the New Republic’s staff, including star reporters Stanley Karnow and Walter Pincus, had resigned in protest. Pincus told Time magazine that Peretz “is a guy on an ego trip, but he doesn’t know where to go.” The magazine’s literary editor Doris Grumbach said, Peretz’s “interests are limited to books by friends, book that friends could review, Harvard-Cambridge books and books about Jews and Israel.”

Ultimately Peretz did indeed decide where he wanted to go: toward the right, and away from liberalism. As someone who worked at the magazine as a contributing and senior editor writing about foreign affairs in the 1990s, I myself witnessed with mounting incredulity the magazine’s steady march rightward on foreign policy, which was championed by both Peretz and literary editor Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier gave me, a fledgling writer, a big boost by generously tapping me to pen numerous essays for his section on foreign affairs and American history. Both Peretz and Wieseltier’s intellectual sheen and refusal to bow to conventional liberal pieties during the 1970s and 1980s were worthy of admiration.

But their idealism, more often than not, ended up curdling into dogmatism. They never recognized that after the totalitarian Soviet Union collapsed the world had changed and that the use of American power abroad was not always an unalloyed good. They remained on automatic pilot. The notion that exercising it could boomerang was, well, foreign to them. They didn’t want to accept or even acknowledge that we could hurt people more than we helped them. Instead, they viewed any kind of hesitation about force as tantamount to a cold and heartless foreign policy. They saw themselves as always on the side of the angels and promoted a kind of group-think at the magazine that I believe explains its disastrous endorsement of the Iraq War and that cost it many of its readers.

As I recall it, once I joined the magazine and began writing opinion and reported pieces, it seemed as though there was never a stand that was hard-line enough to satisfy Peretz and Wieseltier. The weekly Thursday meetings, where Marty and Leon egged each other in their mutual hawkishness (not that it took all that much egging), started to feel oppressive. Despite its supposed penchant for contrarian stands, the magazine’s stands could in fact be predicted with a high degree of confidence. Having been practically weaned on the New Republic’s bellicosity, I myself developed a fairly hawkish disposition and published a number of pieces attacking the Clinton administration for insufficient zealousness abroad. But I always viewed the neoconservatives with some skepticism, and by 1999 my antipathy toward the idea of ballistic missile defense probably helped to ensure that I fell into a state of ungrace. It was no accident that I was replaced by my talented friend Lawrence F. Kaplan, who was then a staunch neoconservative and co-author of a book with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol that demanded a new war against Iraq. At the time, my one word of advice to him was that you could never be too far right for them.

Which is why I confess to rubbing my eyes in disbelief at some of the sentimental piffle being circulated about the magazine’s latest round of upheaval. Its youthful owner, Chris Hughes, who has seen much of the staff resign to protest his expressed hope of reinventing it as a vertical digital vehicle (whatever that means), is coming under fire for having gutted a venerable liberal flagship. For example, the magazine’s old and genuinely liberal guard of Hendrik Hertzberg, Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz have written an open letter to be signed by former staffers that states: “It is a sad irony that at this perilous moment…liberalism’s central journal should be scuttled with flagrant and frivolous abandon. The promise of American life has been dealt a lamentable blow.”

Don’t believe a word of it. Perhaps Hughes has done a terrible thing in upending the magazine, which has announced that it is cancelling its December issue following a mass exodus of writers and editors last week. But destroying the New Republic’s liberal pedigree? That happened a long time ago.

No doubt there have been some dissents at the revisionist history that is currently circulating about the magazine. Of the criticisms that have been directed at the notion that the New Republic is a liberal publication, the main one has been about Peretz’s intolerant and truculent attitudes toward African-Americans or Arabs. Writing in Vox, Max Fisher observes, “In the years of Peretz’s ownership, from 1974 to 2007 and then partially until 2012, he gave himself the title of editor-in-chief and regular space in the magazine and on its website, which he frequently used to issue rants that were breathtaking in their overt racism.” What this critique may overlook, however, is that Peretz’s rants were not confined to racial issues. They suffused everything that he wrote. Nowhere was this more obvious than when it came to foreign affairs, an arena where Wieseltier essentially performed in harmony with Peretz. Both men had a proclivity for personalizing disputes. And both reveled in blowing a raspberry at the regnant liberal elites in the Democratic Party.

Though Peretz and Wieseltier shared an aesthetic revulsion toward the Republican Party, they routinely promoted the most bombastic clichés emanating from it about foreign affairs. It wasn’t always that way, at least in Wieseltier’s case. He wrote a shrewd book called Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace in 1983 that took on the assumptions of both left and right. Wieseltier was also never quite as uncritical of Israel as Peretz. But overall, as the decades went by, he and Peretz together kept moving “liberalism’s central journal” further into the realm of neoconservative thinking without ever quite openly acknowledging it.

Perhaps that journey really started in the late 1980s, when the magazine at its zenith with both Michael Kinsley and Hertzberg passing the editing baton to each other. Writing in the recent 100th anniversary issue, Hertzberg noted that the uproar that ensued in 1986 when the magazine provided an “unqualified endorsement” to the Reagan administration’s backing of the Nicaraguan contras. This wasn’t a one-off episode. Instead, it was merely a pit-stop on the way to the magazine’s full-scale endorsement of foreign-policy precepts that were identified far more with the Republicans than the Democrats.

I became aware of the extent of the drift after penning a skeptical about piece missile defense. In the same issue, Wieseltier wrote a vehement editorial that credulously accepted the report of Rep. Chris Cox about the state of the Chinese military threat and demanded a defense system. There was never a threat that couldn’t be inflated, a military program that was too expensive, and so on. This very mindset helps explain why the magazine so lustily endorsed the Iraq War and never really came terms with it. Writing in the magazine in November 2006, for example, Wieseltier himself blamed the Iraqis for not having accepted the gift of the Iraq War, asking “What have they done with their freedom?” and concluding, “After we invaded Iraq, Iraq invaded itself.”

And what about Israel, the neuralgic tender spot of the magazine? Here Wieseltier would, more often than not, devote himself to playing what might be called the anti-anti Israel card. Consider what he said about Peter Beinart, another former TNR luminary, whose transgression was to write an article in the New York Review of Books that expressed concern about the relationship between American Jews and Israel.

Once again Wieseltier’s language conveyed intellectual impatience with lesser mortals: “Beinart’s pseudo-courageous article is an anthology of xenophobic quotations by Israeli hawks and anguished quotations by Israeli doves: familiar stuff.” James Wood, Wieseltier’s former deputy, was also not exempt from criticism after he wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review taking issue with Harold Bloom’s claims that anti-Semitism was rampant in England: “So what if Wood’s authorities are Jews? Can Jews not be wrong, or anti-Semitic? Wood’s Jews are certainly anti-Zionist.”

This past February, Wieseltier denounced his TNR colleague John Judis for publishing a book on the American recognition of Israel in a letter that was leaked to the neocon web site Washington Free Beacon. Judis' book, Genesis, suggested that American Jews had exercised undue influence in prompting Truman to recognize Israel in 1948. Wieseltier said this was intolerable, that Judis’ book was “shallow, derivative, tendentious, imprecise, and sometimes risibly inaccurate—he is a tourist in this subject. Like most tourists, he sees what he came to see. There is more to be said also about the utter shabbiness of discovering a Jewish identity in—and for the purpose of—criticizing the Jews: it is not only ignorant but also insulting.” But was it really illegitimate for Judis to write about Zionism? Anyway, do you have to be an expert to qualify to write about a topic for a general audience?

Yet Judis was a mere sideshow for Wieseltier. He has always been after bigger game. He has constantly striven to package a crusading and militant moralism as synonymous with liberalism and American national interests. The most recent example was his endorsement of Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan’s article “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire” as a revelatory essay, even though Andrew J. Bacevich, writing in Commonweal, correctly called it “slickly mendacious” for remaining silent about the Iraq War and acting as though American power can set everything that is wrong abroad aright.

When it comes to other liberal hot-button issues such as health care, the magazine has been all over the map in recent years, but hardly consistently progressive. Certainly there will be things to miss about the New Republic, including the reviews and essays in Wieseltier’s section on topics other than foreign policy. But the warrior-intellectual moralism masquerading as foreign-policy wisdom that suffused the magazine will not be one of them. It’s still unclear why Chris Hughes and his CEO, Guy Vidra, wanted Wieseltier and Editor Franklin Foer (who, it should be said, is no neocon) out, although the Daily Beast reported that Hughes “came to think of his writers and editors as ‘spoiled brats,’and especially disliked the flamboyant, feud-prone, white-maned Wieseltier.” Nor is it clear whether Hughes, who helped organize President Obama’s 2008 online campaign, intends to take the magazine in another ideological direction.

But as he sets out on a new path the one thing Hughes surely doesn’t have to worry about is that he’s destroying liberalism’s last bastion.