One wouldn’t normally look to a nearly 50-year-old Woody Allen movie for insight into our current political moment, but Annie Hall, the unlikely winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, just might provide it. With its cameos from Marshall McLuhan and Truman Capote; not to mention its mocking of the personal ads in the New York Review of Books, the “fascism” of National Review, and other affectations of the New York literary scene; the film seemed too parochial and neurotic for a mass audience. Most of these intellectual hit-and-runs were likely lost on Peoria.

Among Allen’s obscure quips in his quest to woo Diane Keaton in her title role was: “I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery.” Yet Allen might not have been totally off base by pairing these two journals. By 1977, Commentary had nearly completed its journey from the social democratic Left of its early years to the neoconservatism that has defined it ever since. Dissent never wavered from its fondness for Marxism and hopes for democratic socialism, but for years it was not unusual to see Dissent contributors such as Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe writing also for Commentary. What these journals—and add in the now defunct Partisan Review (d. 2003)