At least the fellows I know are fairly anti-Empire, anti-moderate- centrist, though they may not use the terms Empire, etc (in fact, I am not sure I do either ;-)). My own guess is that its got something to do with technical language and division of labour -- two things that are the foundations of what I like to call the "technopticon". In general, in my experience, the more technically skilled (I use technical in a narrow sense of analytical/scientific) a person is, the more they live in (and subscribe to) a world highly segmented by concepts and language, with well-established hierarchies. The tendency, when looking at an outside field is to identify the "sophisticated", rigourous sounding "leader" and stick with it unless it is obviously stupid (which The Economist is at times, but not always). I think also that there is a general embarrassment at being leftist (in sentiment) since its sort of woolly-headed and what passes for rigourous stuff (in the left) sounds "pomo", incompletely argued or empty reactionary hand-waving. The intentional cruelty of The Economist, on the other hand, makes a good substitute for rigour. There are other beneficiaries of this sort of identification of "tough talk" with rigour (and "unpalatable, but unavoidable truths") -- Steven Pinker comes to mind.
There are worse things of course -- highly intelligent people still read Thomas Friedman, Alan Dershowitz and the non-technical writings of Richard Feynman! ;-)
Jeff Fisher writes:
>
> Why are we as leftists capable of reading "The Nation" critically,
> but not
> the Economist or FT?
>
> Y'all can generalize speculatively all you want about readers of
> this or
> that publication, but it just makes you sound like Bill O'Reilly
> calling Jon
> Stewart's viewers a bunch of potheads. Certainly, without research,
> it's an
> exercise in self-indulgence, particularly when you engage in it
> with such
> disdain.
But I am no more capable of reading The Nation than I am of The Economist. And believe me, I actually gave The Economist more of a try than I have The Nation. And the problem I found with The Economist was not that their ideology differed from mine or that their conclusions were antithetical, but that their reasoning was weak (I do not have the exact text to quote here, but they had a laughable argument against animal rights/liberation in one of their articles that wouldn't have survived Logic 101).
I cannot say general things about the readership of the rag, so what I write above is about the people I know who read it.
--ravi