"Consolidation is inherently less exciting and uplifting than the sweep into power," Meyerson said. "You're not involved with just your own agenda anymore but with all sorts of agendas. There's a different feeling in the city now."
Left-wing intellectuals who were used to the L.A. Weekly being a loyal ally cried foul at the Contreras story. In an angry letter, Meyerson cut all remaining ties to the paper and lamented the fact that the Weekly no longer saw its "mission as fostering a particular kind of political, social and economic change in Los Angeles."
Conspiracy theorists are likely to blame this intellectual shift on the absentee landlords who own the Weekly and The Times. Maybe they'd even call it a conservative backlash. But although there has been a slight movement to the right in the city's public intellectual climate, the change is more about stridency, relative openness and tone than it is about ideology.
"Journalists in L.A. are starting to realize that all the leading local institutions are controlled by liberal Democrats, and they have to write about them critically too," Stewart said.
The truth is that the intellectual climate is more open than it was a decade ago, more points of view and shades of gray are on the table, and demands for ideological loyalty have subsided. This is not to say that Los Angeles is no longer a liberal city. It is, but the rules of engagement have clearly shifted.
"Our beliefs probably haven't changed," said writer and poet D.J. Waldie, "but we do seem to have learned the language of compromise. Or maybe forces are emerging in L.A. that can't be so easily identified as left or right, red or blue."
Wouldn't that be revolutionary?
