As a sophomore at UC Berkeley, at the dawn of the Free Speech Movement, Wenner joined a group of radical students that called itself SLATE. But the membership! “A lot of beards, thrift-shop wardrobes, work boots, and bad breath.” Make no mistake: For Jann Wenner bad breath is a deal-breaker, even when the proletariat is trying to wrest control of the means of production. “You are so bourgeois,” his fellow revolutionaries told him.
And the revolutionaries were right (about him being bourgeois, not about the means of production). It’s a fine line Wenner walked, all through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, as a loud advocate for the more enjoyable parts of the ’60s revolution. He was strongly in favor of sexual libertinism, drug legalization, anti-militarism, and the redistribution of everyone’s wealth but his own. He was also in favor of building up a successful publishing business, crushing the competition, acquiring private aircraft, buying many, many houses, filling a warehouse with fancy cars, and amassing a personal fortune in the low-to-mid eight figures.
Before long, Jann Wenner had leapfrogged the bourgeois altogether and become not a radical but a limousine liberal. …
The president that Wenner admires above all others is Bill Clinton, one year Wenner’s junior. Their similarities go beyond their fondness for sexual excess and a tendency to go to pudge if they’re not careful. Like Wenner, Clinton fancied himself a man of the left, with roots in radicalism, but a realist too. Both made a career of taking blistering criticism as sell-outs from leftwing critics whom they inevitably disappointed. Clinton had to disappoint the left because he valued his political success in a center-right nation; Wenner had to disappoint the left because he valued his private plane.
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