Note: In 1988, I wrote this article, and it appeared as a cover story in the Washington Monthly. There have been myriad changes in public policy toward poverty in the intervening 35 years, including the enactment of welfare reform and the short-lived expansion of the child tax credit during the pandemic. Republicans have decimated SNAP, widely known as food stamps, and Medicaid. But I wanted to republish it on Christmas last year and this because it remains, I think, relevant. We have had great works of art that focus on the poor in the years since. HBO’s The Wire is often and rightly called Dickensian. Its societal indictments, moral complexity, attention to personal agency, and riveting installments over the years echo Dickens, whose novels were serialized. But with due respect to David Simon, the show’s creator, I’d argue that we still need a new Dickens, an artist who commands global fame and unalloyed praise and whose work helps those who need help the most. That’s a lot to ask for this troubled and war-torn Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, but we can hope as 2026 approaches.

Matthew Cooper
Christmas Day, 2025

Christmas is always the busy season for Charles Dickens, but this year there’s more going on than usual. There’s a Bill Murray remake of A Christmas Carol (playing the perfect ’80s Scrooge—a TV exec too busy to do lunch with his ghost) and, for the truly sturdy, a two-part, six-hour film of Little Dorrit. Coming soon: Disney’s Oliver Twist. And a new biography of Dickens is getting prominent reviews, including front-page billing in The Washington Post Book World.

But what’s been missing from the articles I’ve read about these works is the recognition of Dickens’s central accomplishment: He prodded (and entertained) millions of readers into caring about the poor. Instead of seeing the poor, as Malthus did, as some abstract, seething mass of “surplus population,” Dickens saw them as individuals, engaging enough to merit novels of 700, 800, and 900 pages. He made his readers see them that way too. And that was a revolutionary accomplishment.

One indication of his influence lies in numbers. He was the best-selling author in Victorian England, writing novels that became standard household items, as common as candles and brooms. In the 12 years after he died, nearly 4 million copies of his books sold in Britain alone—an amazing feat even by Stephen King standards. When it came to influence, Daniel Webster argued that Dickens had “done more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into Parliament.” Even the conservative Economist conceded that Dickens fueled “the age’s passion—we call it so designedly—which prevails to improve the condition of the working classes.” Queen Victoria hailed his humanizing influence on the nation and his “strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.”

As for the poor themselves, they not only saw Dickens as their champion, they read him. Journals of the period are filled with accounts of chimney sweeps and factory hands captured by his work. And when they couldn’t make out all the words, there were plenty of illustrations to help them along. The working classes responded by deluging Dickens with invitations to speak before their guilds. “Ah! Mr. Dickens!” shouted a carriage driver to Dickens’s son, on the day of the novelist’s funeral. “Your father’s death was a great loss to all of us—and we cabbies were in hopes that he would be doing something to help us.”

It was not without reason, then, that Dostoevsky called Dickens “the great Christian.’” Characters like Oliver Twist and Mr. Bumble, who ran the infamous workhouse, carry lessons as old as the New Testament. When Mr. Bumble terrorized Oliver for asking for a second helping of gruel, even affluent Englishmen knew how the orphan felt. They knew, too, that they had an obligation to help. That kind of empathy stoked the era’s major reform movements. The resulting bouquet of triumphs included everything from fewer working hours to free education and universal suffrage.

There’s more to Dickens, though, than misty-eyed sentiment. His was a subtle and muscular vision that recognized (and condemned) the sins of impoverished individuals as well as the collective guilt of society. Dickens gives us not only Oliver Twist but also Fagin, the criminal ringleader who press-gangs Oliver into service. He’s no victim of society. Fagin’s problem is Fagin.

Is there any relevance in this today? After all, the sprawling squalor of Victorian Britain has gone the way of the workhouse. The laissez-faire liberalism that Dickens deplored is light-years away from today’s social welfare state. (No food stamps had Oliver. No caseworker.) But America today is in at least one way like the England of the 1830s: Most of us see the underclass as a seething, abstract mob. Of course, it’s not just our artists who’ve failed us, but our politicians, too. And it’s too much to expect all art to serve as social glue, binding each of us to the concerns of the less fortunate. But today, when so much fiction is either mired in minimalist ennui or panting with the lifestyles of the rich and promiscuous, we need someone who can animate our social concern. We need a new Dickens.

A street-walking man

Where to find one? My guess is that it can only be someone who has seen poverty up close; perhaps a journalist. Dickens himself became acquainted with the poor as what today’s social scientists would call a “participant observer.” He was one of them.

His father, John Dickens, tried to give his children a life of parlors and singing lessons on the paycheck of a Navy clerk. As a result, like so many working people of the time, the Dickens family floated in and out of debtors’ prison (bringing their servant with them, as was the custom of the day). By 1822, when Charles was 10, debt’s constant tug forced his family to yank him out of school and place him in a factory pasting labels on pots of shoe polish. When not at work, he spent long days wandering the alleys of work-weary London. With his parents often imprisoned, describing what he saw became a way of mastering a hostile world. He’d jot down dozens of “sketches,” detailed descriptions of just about anything he’d run into. They captured not only turmoil and toil but character, as well. Typical was the one about his uncle’s Soho barber, a man who, playing Monday-morning quarterback, recounted how he would have guided Napoleon’s troops at Waterloo.

Eventually, his family earned its freedom, and Dickens became a law clerk, allowing him to tame “the savagery of stenography,” as he put it, and later become a reporter. At the time, reporting mostly meant taking shorthand, but Dickens was so talented one editor called him “the most rapid, the most accurate, and the most trustworthy reporter then engaged on the London press.”

With his star rising, Dickens didn’t leave the poor behind. Instead, he sketched them. Under the pseudonym “Boz,” he churned out copy about vulgar vendors, ragged children, and raging arguments. In “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” Dickens presented his comfortable readers with a prostitute: “The lowest of the low; dirty, unbonneted, flaunting and slovenly.” In his “Visit to Newgate,” he took them inside a prison that housed children. “Fourteen terrible little faces we never beheld. There was not one redeeming feature among them—not a glance of honesty—not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection.”

This kind of firsthand experience became central to Dickens’s fiction. To write Hard Times, for instance, he traveled to the north to cover a workers’ strike. He was no sit-in-the-study author. After writing in the mornings, Dickens would take afternoon walks of 10 miles or more that returned him to the streets that powered his prose.

Obviously, it wasn’t just the reporting that made Dickens Dickens. It takes a little more than stenography, and a lot of something called imagination, to spin a 900-page novel. But Dickens’s immersion in street life made his novels richer. When a barrister picked up Dickens’s work, he saw his servants and his slums. He saw his London.

The stenographer’s eye and the novelist’s mind gave Dickens the ability—virtually unprecedented—to make the poor seem real. As Gertrude Himmelfarb explains in The Idea of Poverty, this was a time when servants were invisible, even to their masters. When a contemporary critic hailed Dickens’s talent for making a “washerwoman as interesting as a duchess,” it was a tribute not only to Dickens’s wonderful prose, but also to his new vision.

After all, one of the main characters in his first lengthy work of fiction, the serial Pickwick Papers, is Sam Weller, a servant. He not only fails to remain invisible; more often than not he seems a good deal wiser than his master. When he first signs on as Pickwick’s valet, the negotiations turn into a “Who’s-on-first?” routine that sounds like Weller is hiring Pickwick. Weller still seems in control when Pickwick checks into an inn. After Pickwick stumbles into the wrong bedroom, only to be kicked out by a very unhappy woman, it’s Weller who rescues him and guides him to his room. “You rayther want somebody to look arter you, Sir, when your judgment goes out a wisitin’,” Weller chirps. The servant’s introduction in the serial’s fourth issue sent sales surging.

In his next book, Oliver Twist, and throughout the other novels he was to write until his death in 1870, Dickens stuck to the simple proposition that no class had a monopoly on smarts or morality or decency or humor. This was a revolutionary creed at a time when the affluent saw the poor as a mob—to be feared or appeased, perhaps, but definitely not to be considered as individuals. And the rich were scarcely alone in their class-bound vision. As Dickens was spinning novels, the history of the working class in Manchester was being written by a German emigré named Friedrich Engels.

The idea of Jacobin-style revolution haunted Dickens, who poured his fears into prose in A Tale of Two Cities. In our century of failed revolutions, there’s no more haunting or timely image than Dickens’s Madame Defarge, knitting by the guillotine. He recognized that, just as the poor weren’t all good, the rich weren’t all bad. His pages brim with venal landlords, nasty bankers, and callous captains of industry; but good-guy capitalists pop up too. A product of the streets himself, Dickens saw no romance in revolution. It’s not the proletariat who overthrew Scrooge, but his conscience.

If Dickens feared revolution, he didn’t fall into the opposite trap of forgetting why mobs charged the barricades. He understood that the capitalist society was rife with institutions that kept the poor down. The villains of Hard Times aren’t just bad apples but overlords of a cruel factory system, dehumanizing in the monotony of its work. The tragedies of Bleak House, one of his last and gloomiest books, are found in the systematic injustice of the courts. By challenging these institutions, he made the lawyer or factory owner see that they shared responsibility.

The idea of poverty

And when Dickens trained his guns, liberals weren’t exempt. The workhouse that Dickens took on in Oliver Twist was one of the most prominent liberal programs of his day. Today it’s hard to think of the book’s cruel overseers as being progressive. But the Poor Law of 1834 was considered a great liberal victory, one that would segregate the indebted poor and prevent them from dragging their fiscally responsible neighbors into the red. (Talk about the unintended consequences of liberal reform.) When Oliver meekly seeks a double dose of gruel, we see unbridled cruelty. “Enlightened” Victorians saw themselves.

And what they saw was folly. Consider the way that Mr. Bumble—who runs the “progressive” workhouse—understands Oliver’s revolt.

“It’s meat.”

“What?” exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

“Meat, ma’am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “You’ve over-fed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am, unbecoming a person in his condition.”

The humor of the scene helps carry its meaning. Had Dickens’s criticisms been heavy-handed, as [the late scholar of the Victorian Era] Steven Marcus points out, middle-class readers wouldn’t have touched his works. Instead of promoting a specific alternative to the workhouse, he satirized it, appealing to his readers’ Christian charity. A second key to Dickens’s success is his choice of the symbol of the good child, in Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit or David Copperfield. He tapped the wellsprings of protectiveness that cultures can be made to feel for the young. Martin Luther King Jr. put that same insight into action when Birmingham schoolchildren stared down firehoses and police dogs, leaving us with one of the most arresting images of the civil rights movement.

But even as he skewered institutions, Dickens understood that the poor were often in the wrong themselves. If anything, there’s a schism in his writing, dividing what you might call, for lack of better terms, the worthy poor from the unworthy—between those who merit our admiration and those who don’t.

Winning hands down in the Worthy Category, family division, are the Christmas Carol’s Cratchits. It’s not just their “conditions” that make them sympathetic—the fact that they’re poor or that Bob Cratchit has a boss like Scrooge or that Tiny Tim needs crutches. It’s the family’s own nobility that lends the story such power, remake after remake. One clear signal to Victorian readers was the Cratchits’ white-glove cleanliness—a paramount virtue at a time when filth was almost always followed by disease. The Cratchits were “darned and brushed” before the Christmas feast. After supper, “the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept.” In the Cratchits, like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Little Dorrit, respectable British middle-class readers found an ideal of themselves.

Meanwhile, a first in Unworthiness might go to the brickmakers of Bleak House, who seem like something out of a documentary on battered wives. We spy them when Mrs. Piggle happens by. “An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome,” boasts the father. “And we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them … And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I giv’ it her; and if she says I didn’t she’s a Lie!” Today, when many liberals still romanticize the poor, Dickens’s ability to distinguish poverty from nobility is well worth remembering.

Dickens understood that there were good and bad individuals within every class. But he rarely saw the individuals who were a mixture of good and bad. His heroes and heroines don’t whine, don’t curse, and even though they’re raised in the company of foul-mouthed, cockney villains, they speak the King’s English. To be sure, his supporting cast could include people like the Peggottys in David Copperfield, who were not so well-spoken. But they, too, were practically flawless. This strict division between the worthy and the unworthy poor is more than an aesthetic flaw. It limits Dickens’s relevance today.

Dickens makes his readers want to help the deserving poor. And, indeed, the Victorian (and New Deal) reforms that were, in part, inspired by Dickens focused on these able-to-help-themselves characters. Kids who’d be okay if child labor was abolished; workers who’d prosper with a union. This is the story of America through the 1950s: The New Deal and rising prosperity catapult the “worthy” poor into the middle class. Oliver goes to Levittown.

This left behind an underclass that seemed short on lovable Cratchits and long on pregnant teens, drug addicts, and gang members. What we don’t have is the popular literature that will jar the affluent into caring about these less savory characters. We don’t have the literature that will condemn their faults and recognize that these are people who can be helped. When I worked in a Big Brothers program in New York City, I remember noticing that there was no novel or film that got at the downright weird complexities of those tenements I visited on 102nd Street. I couldn’t point to any book that explained how those kids could be such utter failures in school, unable at age 15 to write a single sentence, and still be as sharp and savvy and as alert as any kids I had known growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. There was no film that I could tell my friends about that captured the complexity of those mothers I would meet who’d blow much of their money on VCRs and HBO but who were also selfless when it came to helping their kids. There was—and still is—no writer who combines great talent and great popularity and who captures that bizarre marriage of sin and decency I saw in those tenement families.

The Dickens character who most reflects our dilemma is the Artful Dodger, the young pickpocket who befriends Oliver Twist. He’s engaging, to be sure. The first thing we see him do is take Oliver drinking; by the end, he’s in court, trying to sweet-talk a magistrate into pardoning him. But he’s a side dish. We never understand or care about him the way we care about Oliver. The next Dickens needs to put us not in our Olivers’ shoes but in those of our own Artful Dodgers.

While a new Dickens couldn’t cure poverty, he could inspire personal commitment from the middle class. I don’t mean the anesthesia of paying for yet another government program, but involvement. And that takes understanding. Public health care won’t improve unless talented doctors and nurses want to choose Harlems over Humanas, at least for a few years. We won’t really become a kinder, gentler nation unless our leaders know something that’s true about those on the bottom. But working with or for the poor requires inspiration; it doesn’t come naturally. Individuals disappoint. Projects collapse. Easier lives beckon. Great art, as opposed to Brookings reports, can be the spur we need.

In 1945, Lionel Trilling lamented that no writer in his day had done what many of the leading Victorian writers had done—combine great literature and social concern. “In three-four decades, the liberal progressive has not produced a single writer that itself respects and reads with interest. A list of writers in our time shows that liberal progressivism was a matter of indifference to every writer of large mind—Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann, Kafka, Yeats.” The absence of such a writer may have been a marginal loss in the middle of this century, when the politics of the time were liberal even if the great novelists were not or when poverty seemed like it could be erased simply through economic expansion and a few social reforms. Today when politicians are retreating from helping the poor and growth offers no panacea, we need another Dickens to inspire each of us to help.

I don’t know if there will be a single figure—be it a novelist filmmaker, or journalist—who can animate a nation’s imagination the way Dickens did or whether it may take a disparate group or even an artistic movement. But I’m certain those Dickens-like qualities will not be had by some writer-in-residence strolling the hallowed halls of Haverford. The Dickens mantle demands a life outside the academy, exposed to the real world. It belongs to the writer who can make us care not only about our Tiny Tims but about our Artful Dodgers, too.

The post Why We Need a New Dickens appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It feels like a century ago that Donald Trump stood on the west front of the U.S. Capitol and was sworn in for a second time, promising to seize the Panama Canal, slap tariffs on the world, dispatch troops to the southern border, and let Elon Musk chop down the federal government. But while the past 11 months have often been exhausting and dispiriting, they’ve also been invigorating for us at the Washington Monthly as we generate new ideas to take on MAGA, never flinch from criticizing liberals and Democrats, and offer reporting and analysis that explains what’s really going on. 

We’re not calling these 11 pieces our best (although they are among them), nor are they among our most widely read (though many are), but they are representative of the continued breadth and inventiveness of this magazine in its 56^th year. 

Of course, it takes readers like you to keep our work going, so we hope, in an age of corporate and consolidating media, you’ll support our non-profit, independent voice. Meanwhile, if you’ve read these before, see how they held up, and if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. We’re proud of them. 

The post 11 of Our Most Memorable Pieces from 2025  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, is about to become the latest example of what you might call the Trump Boomerang Effect.

Shortly before airtime on Sunday night, Weiss pulled a piece by 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi about Venezuelan migrants being sent to CECOT, a brutal Salvadoran prison. The ostensible reason was that Stephen Miller—Donald Trump’s Joseph Goebbels—was not in the piece. But CBS News, which thoroughly vetted Alfonsi’s work, had repeatedly asked the Trump Administration to provide an official to be interviewed for their side of the story.

Alfonsi wrote in a note to the staff on Sunday night that the decision was “political” and if not reversed would give Trump veto power over 60 Minutes:

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.

Big props to Alfonsi for standing up.

Here’s what I’m confident will happen next: Weiss will scramble to protect her reputation. This piece will run soon—probably next Sunday—and will get monster ratings. Weiss will then learn the lesson that Bob Iger absorbed when ABC briefly bent the knee to Trump, who wanted to kill Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Trump’s intimidation boomeranged and made Kimmel bigger than ever. Just as Trump can no longer mess with late-night, he won’t be able to force Weiss to kill stories he doesn’t like. She will continue to be careful about CBS News’ coverage of Trump, but won’t want to be seen as caving again.

The Trump Boomerang Effect extends widely and will be even more powerful after he leaves office. Consider the preposterous, embarrassing, and illegal re-naming of the Kennedy Center as “the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” To get a sense of how crazy that is, consider that there was never a Stalin-Bolshoi Ballet or a Mussolini-La Scala Opera House. It’s clear that four or eight years from now—whenever Democrats make it back to the White House—this desecration will be removed. The same goes for “The Trump Institute of Peace” and the other government buildings he’s plastering his name on. A few years ago, tenants in a New York apartment successfully had his name removed from their building. We’ll see that in Washington.

Trump Tower will remain, of course, and he’ll eventually have his name on his presidential library and maybe a few other places that he and his family personally pay for. But even with their new billions, the Trumps are too cheap to shell out much on something that doesn’t go into their own pockets. Most of the Trump “friends” who are helping pay for the White House ballroom and other projects in exchange for government favors will disappear once pay-to-play ends. Every time he names something for himself, he’s tossing a boomerang—and lessening the odds of others naming something for him after he’s gone.

Maybe Israel, where some call him Cyrus the Great, will name a street for him. Or Russia. Or Hungary. El Salvador could rename CECOT in his memory. But that’s about it. Without the leverage of the presidency, it will take only a few determined opponents to stop something, even in red states. Is it possible we’ll see some MAGA cultist propose a “Donald J. Trump Elementary School” somewhere? Sure, but the school board will have a slight problem explaining why he’s a good role-model. Richard Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, and he had only three schools to show for it—in Iowa, New Jersey, and Liberia. All were named for him when he was still in office.

The best comparison might be to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who died in 1957. Just as “the McCarthy Era” entered the language, “the Trump Era”—the one we’re living in now—will be remembered for decades, maybe centuries. But there is nothing named for McCarthy in his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, where even MAGA Republicans have no interest in honoring him. At his peak, McCarthy stood at 50 percent in the Gallup Poll, higher than Trump has ever been. Then he fell. History always gets the last laugh.

Percy Bysshe Shelley got it right in his 1817 sonnet, Ozymandias, right down to the sneer:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This piece appeared originally on the Subtack, Old Goats with Jonathan Alter

The post The Trump Boomerang Effect: Bari Weiss, Meet Ozymandias appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It was a beautiful North Carolina spring day in 2000 at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, and Governor Jim Hunt was sprinting down the giant ruby-red stairs. I was his then-young press aide, and we were running late because he had been on the phone with President Bill Clinton.

Naively, I noted something about their discussing a state issue. Without missing a beat, the governor said of Clinton, his fellow Democrat, “I was telling him what he was doing wrong with the country and how to fix it!”

So began my real education in politics, which I was quickly learning had even more to do with human interactions than I realized.

Last week, Hunt died at 88, a historic figure in North Carolina politics who served 16 years as governor. Appointed governors from the Colonial Era served longer, but no one has yet matched Hunt’s tenure as governor from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001.

The obituaries are full of his accomplishments and his most notable defeat, a 1984 bid to unseat U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Hunt once told me his TV ads were “all wrong,” which may be true, but that was a bad year to be a Democrat, especially in the South. Ronald Reagan carried the state with almost 62 percent of the vote. Helms got 51 percent.

But I’m drawn to the dynamic between Hunt and Clinton, southern Democratic moderate governors who had to find a policy and political path forward as the South became increasingly Republican in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. They weren’t alone. Democratic southern governors like Ray Mabus in Mississippi, Richard Riley in South Carolina, Roy Barnes in Georgia, and Reubin Askew in Florida had similar dilemmas. They had a common goal, but they were all rivals in a way, too.

Clinton had real indebtedness to Hunt, nine years his senior. Hunt’s advocacy led to him serving as chair of the Democratic Governors Association. Clinton recalled “[I]t was the first significant national position of any kind I had.”

Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory aligned with Hunt’s return to the governor’s seat. Together, they used their bully pulpits in Washington and Raleigh to advance policies that could push the progressive envelope in a conservative era.

In 1997, when Clinton spoke before a joint session of the North Carolina legislature, as part of his crusade for national education standards and a testing plan, he called Hunt a “mentor and friend,” whose work was influenced by Hunt’s labors to create national teaching standards. Indeed, Hunt’s wilderness years outside elective office were spent as founding chair of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which to date has certified over 141,000 teachers with the profession’s highest credential.

Hunt never missed an opportunity to promote this cause to Clinton, even if it meant being aggressive. A White House staffer once told me that Clinton always insisted on understanding how the federally supported teaching certification program was progressing because Hunt was sure to grill him about it.

Photos of Hunt and Clinton are like a time capsule from a bygone era. For instance, there was a joint announcement of a public-private partnership to bring Internet access to the state (and a bit of a tug-of-war over who should get credit).

There were their combined efforts to pass a “global settlement agreement” between tobacco companies and the feds, which faltered, and later a “master settlement agreement” with the states that was sealed. There was their mutual understanding that education had to start before kindergarten and that it was a winning issue with voters—something New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani latched onto over 30 years after Hunt.

The Clinton-Hunt friendship is a testament to the ideals of intergovernmental relations—that federal and state leaders should cooperate. One area that’s particularly telling about how things have changed is disaster funding. The Clinton years allowed Hunt to boast about securing federal dollars for North Carolina after devastating hurricanes; one wonders how Hunt would navigate President Donald Trump’s truculent withholding of disaster relief.

Just because both men were Democrats didn’t guarantee success. Hunt served as governor during Jimmy Carter’s administration, but that relationship was fraught, with fights over college funding and tobacco, the state’s cash crop.

January will mark a quarter-century since Clinton and Hunt last held elective office. North Carolinians should remember that their bond produced outcomes that benefited the Tar Heel State. So should the rest of us. Their relationship continues to serve as a national model during these divisive times.

The post What Bill Clinton Learned from Jim Hunt and Why It Still Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I did my first stint at the Washington Monthly in the 1980s, as a 24-year-old, the magazine was in a ramshackle office near Washington’s Dupont Circle. I worked long hours for $10,000 a year ($28,111 in today’s dollars) as we all did, including Paul Glastris, also in his 20s, who was finishing his tenure at the magazine and is now the editor-in-chief. Our boss, the magazine’s founder Charles Peters, was deeply inspiring, but he could also be, shall we say, infuriating. One night after being up for days, I went to his home amid a snowstorm to drop off copy, leaving it in an old-fashioned steel milk box on his stoop. (These were the earliest days of email. And neither the Monthly nor Charlie had a fax machine.) By the time I made it back to my garret, as sunrise approached, Charlie was calling me to tell me how I’d erred in editing a story about Gary Hart, the senator and presidential candidate. The real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t that the Coloradan had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. But that Hart, whom we liked, was cavorting with the Louisiana lobbyist who owned the boat. I can’t remember what subpoint I flubbed. I do remember that I assumed wrongly, but not without reason, given his tone, that I’d been fired. 

The Washington Monthly is always trying to get at the real story, unafraid to say bad things about people we liked or good things about those we opposed. But we can’t do it without your help. Can you make a tax-deductible contribution to keep us going? 

This year was no exception when it came to challenging shibboleths of the left and right. The Monthly broke ground by raising questions about the “abundance” critique of some liberals we admire, such as Ezra Klein, who maintain that red tape and regulation are holding back the country and liberals. While acknowledging that bureaucracy is often burdensome—the Monthly was born with the idea of making government work—we found that other factors, such as monopolies and corporate lobbying, were often bigger drivers of our national dysfunction. See “The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals” by Glastris and my colleague Nate Weisberg, and “The Broadband Story Abundance Liberals Like Ezra Klein Got Wrong” by Glastris and Kainoa Lowman. 

Please donate now to the Washington Monthly. We depend on readers like you.  

The Washington Monthly was born 56 years ago during a crisis for liberals. It was 1969. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s had crashed on the shoals of the Vietnam War, riots, and the 1968 presidential election, where the combined vote of Richard Nixon and George Wallace was just under 57 percent. The magazine was born to examine how government should work, where it succeeds, and where it often fails. Peters had been a New Frontiersman and a founder of the Peace Corps. 

When Glastris took over the magazine in 2001, liberals, progressives, and common-sense centrists were on their back foot after the 2000 elections. But he enriched the magazine with a newfound focus on antitrust and sophisticated, big-idea thinking about industrial policy, health care, and international trade. While some in the center pushed for incremental solutions and some on the left advocated big, but bad, ideas, the Monthly fused ideas that were both big and smart. The result was the acclaimed magazine you’re reading today, where a new breed of young editors and some wizened hands like me and Glastris keep this venerable institution going.  

We need your help. The Washington Monthly is a nonprofit, so your donation is entirely tax-deductible. Whatever you can afford helps. For just $50, you’ll receive the magazine’s print edition, going strong since 1969.  

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It feels like a century ago that Donald Trump stood on the west front of the U.S. Capitol and was sworn in for a second time, promising to seize the Panama Canal, slap tariffs on the world, dispatch troops to the southern border, and let Elon Musk chop down the federal government. But while the past 11 months have often been exhausting and dispiriting, they’ve also been invigorating for us at the Washington Monthly as we generate new ideas to take on MAGA, never flinch from criticizing liberals and Democrats, and offer reporting and analysis that explains what’s really going on. 

We’re not calling these 11 pieces our best (although they are among them), nor are they among our most widely read (though many are), but they are representative of the continued breadth and inventiveness of this magazine in its 56^th year. 

Of course, it takes readers like you to keep our work going, so we hope, in an age of corporate and consolidating media, you’ll support our non-profit, independent voice. Meanwhile, if you’ve read these before, see how they held up, and if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. We’re proud of them. 

The post 11 of Our Most Memorable Pieces from 2025  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2025, Republicans faced a dilemma. They wanted to extend the tax cuts enacted during Donald Trump’s first term, a central priority of both the president and the party’s corporate and donor base. But because the tax extensions would blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the ten-year deficit projection, they risked losing the votes of fiscal hawks inside their caucus. 

So, Republicans went hunting for “pay-fors” to lessen the deficit damage. They axed tax credits for EVs and clean energy and decimated funding for Medicaid and SNAP. But in addition to these well-publicized cuts, they radically reduced federal student loan subsidies, including those for graduate students.  

Of course, they didn’t say out loud that they were reducing support for graduate education to finance tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. Instead, they and conservative think tanks argued for the cuts on other grounds. First, invoking the so-called Bennett Hypothesis—named after the former Education Secretary, William J. Bennett, who articulated the theory—they claimed that federal student aid enables colleges to raise tuition, and that cutting federal funding will therefore force tuition prices down. Second, channeling arguments made by pronatalists at places like the Heritage Foundation, they said that young people, especially women, spend too long in graduate school, delaying marriage and childbearing, and that shrinking higher-education subsidies will boost the fertility rate. 

These arguments point in opposite directions. The first claims that cutting federal loan support will make graduate education cheaper and therefore easier to earn, the other that those cuts will make grad school harder to pursue. Regardless, both converge on the same policy outcome: less federal money for graduate education, more for tax cuts.  

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which passed in July, reduces federal higher education spending by roughly $284 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, largely by tightening graduate student lending. It eliminates the Graduate PLUS program, which had allowed students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for graduate degrees. Instead, the legislation limits future loan amounts based on the type of graduate program: $50,000 per year and $200,000 total for “professional” degrees, $20,500 per year and $100,000 total for all others.  

To avoid a political fight about which degrees count as “professional,” lawmakers added a snippet of ambiguous language from an otherwise unrelated regulation. They directed the Department of Education to clarify the final definitions based on it. In November, a committee empaneled by the department released those definitions as a first step in writing the regulations that will implement the new law. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology, law, and clinical psychology were deemed “professional” and eligible for higher federal loan limits. Nursing, teaching, social work, physical therapy, physician assistant programs, and audiology were not. 

Such regulatory notices usually fly under the public radar, but this one hit a nerve. Roughly four million nurses and more than two million social workers, including teachers and therapists, read the rule the same way: as a declaration that their work does not count as a profession. Their unions and trade associations protested. A prairie fire of anger and ridicule spread on social media. National media outlets covered the controversy. Even The Onion weighed in (“White House Reclassifies Nursing as a Hobby”). 

“None of us anticipated the offense that would be taken by the term ‘professional,’” a member of the department’s rulemaking committee told me. In retrospect, however, it’s not hard to understand the anger. Nursing and social work are overwhelmingly female professions already facing shortages, burnout, and stagnant pay. Getting a raise in these fields often requires a master’s degree, and the Trump administration was putting up roadblocks. Nurses already absorb abuse from hospital administrators and arrogant physicians while doing the unglamorous work of keeping patients alive. To then be downgraded—symbolically and financially—by the federal government was seen as disrespect. “It’s just a smack in the face,” said Susan Pratt, a nurse who is also president of a union representing nurses in Toledo, Ohio. “During the pandemic, the nurses showed up, and this is the thanks we get,” she told the AP.

Public outrage has been so intense that, in December, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asked the Education Department to restore nursing to the list of professional degrees.  

If the new federal graduate school loan regime is proving to be a disaster politically, it is not much better as policy. Robert Kelchen, a higher education policy professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville (and data editor of the Washington Monthly college rankings), notes that loan limits only make sense if they follow outcomes—either to prevent students from taking on unsustainable debt or to discourage enrollment in programs with poor repayment prospects. By those metrics, nursing stands out for the opposite reason. It has strong debt-to-earnings ratios, strict licensing requirements, sustained labor-market demand, and a clear social return. If taxpayers are going to subsidize any graduate profession, nursing is among the safest investments. 

Capping graduate degree loans at $20,500 annually might sound reasonable to conservative lawmakers trying to fill a self-created budget hole, but it makes less sense if you’re a working nurse or physical therapist entering an expensive, clinically intensive program in a high-cost area without family wealth. Pair that cap with the elimination of Grad PLUS and a tighter income-driven repayment regime, and the math will not work for many prospective nurses and teachers. Some will never apply. Others will turn to private loans. Many will walk away. 

Of course, there are universities charging outrageously high tuition for certain graduate degrees that don’t lead to commensurately high incomes; some of those programs were created precisely to take advantage of unlimited federal graduate student loans. As the Washington Monthly reported in 2024, the worst offenders are often elite schools. For instance, Northwestern University offers a master’s in counseling that saddles average graduates with $153,657 in debt, who go on to earn only $56,897 on average annually five years later. (By comparison, many regional public universities offer the same degree at a fraction of the cost, and their graduates earn more.) Lawmakers could have protected grad students from such predatory programs—and taxpayers from picking up the tab when those students can’t repay the loans—by directing the Education Department to limit graduate loans based on the average earnings of specific degrees or programs. Instead, they rushed through poorly worded legislation that blew up on the launchpad.  

Nor do their intellectual justifications hold up. The Bennett Hypothesis that higher federal student financial aid leads to higher tuition has been heavily studied, and evidence for it is mixed at best. Meanwhile, the pronatalist argument that reducing graduate education loan support will boost the birth rate isn’t looking so good, considering the damage likely to be done to the careers of many who deliver babies for a living.  

In one respect, however, the GOP’s gutting support for graduate education has been a success: it helped deliver the votes for nearly $5 trillion in tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy (and massive federal deficits to boot). Tens of millions of nurses, teachers, social workers, and their families are likely to remember that in the midterms. 

The post The GOP War on Nurses appeared first on Washington Monthly.

America just skipped December’s NATO foreign ministers’ meeting. That’s a first in over two decades. Part of the reason is the alliance’s irrelevance to President Donald Trump’s personalized, high-stakes peace negotiation to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Another is likely the administration’s weariness over Europe’s anemic defense spending. The alliance’s current 2 percent of GDP benchmark has long been a source of transatlantic friction. It is also a dangerously simplistic metric that measures inputs, not outputs.  

The benchmark quantifies treasure, not strategic capability, and overlooks one of the most critical (and undervalued) contributions allies can make: maritime power—specifically, commercial sealift capacity. There is a solution. 

Future major conflicts won’t be won by fighter jets and armored brigades alone. Logistics will be the deciding factor. The ability to transport and sustain forces across oceans will be decisive.  

In this crucial domain, NATO faces a quiet but catastrophic deficit. A European conflict, such as defending the Baltic states from a Russian attack, would require a sealift operation on a scale not seen since World War II.  

The logistical backbone of the “Arsenal of Democracy” has atrophied. The U.S. Maritime Administration’s Ready Reserve Force (RRF), the core of America’s strategic sealift capacity, consists of a few dozen aging, steam-powered vessels, with an average age approaching 50 years. Their readiness is questionable, and the crews needed to man them are in short supply. Across Europe, the picture is similarly bleak, with national fleets having dwindled for decades. 

The Trump administration has recognized the parlous state of America’s shipbuilding and announced plans to revive the yards to rebuild the U.S. merchant marine. As my colleagues at the Hoover Institution recently concluded in The Arsenal of Democracy, “In our estimation, the U.S. military’s logistics system is the single weakest link in U.S. deterrence. The U.S. maritime logistics system is in dire condition in terms of its number of ships, its number of personnel, and its surge capacity.” Yet even on an optimistic schedule, new hulls, trained mariners, and expanded yard capacity are a generational project, not a quick fix for the next Baltic or Taiwan crisis.  

This decline contrasts sharply with China’s meteoric rise. Beijing is not just building a world-class blue-water navy; it is solidifying its dominance across the entire maritime domain. China is the world’s largest shipbuilder, accounting for nearly 50 percent of global output in 2023, while the U.S. languishes with less than 1 percent. China has the world’s second-largest commercial fleet, and its national security laws explicitly integrate this fleet into the state’s military strategy, mandating that many new ships be built to military specifications. In a crisis, Beijing can call upon a vast, state-directed logistical armada. What about NATO? 

This is where the strategic myopia of the 2 percent rule becomes most apparent. Consider Greece. The Hellenic Republic is one of the few NATO members that consistently exceeds the 2 percent spending target. In 2023, it spent around 3.76 percent of GDP, then the highest in the Alliance. Driven by regional security challenges, this commitment equips NATO with a formidable, modernizing military in the vital Eastern Mediterranean. Yet this figure fails to capture Greece’s most profound contribution to Western security. 

Greece is a maritime superpower. Greek shipowners control over 20 percent of the world’s commercial shipping tonnage and nearly 60 percent of the European Union’s fleet. This includes thousands of strategically vital vessels: crude oil tankers, LNG carriers, and bulk carriers essential for transporting fuel, grain, and heavy equipment. The Greek-flagged fleet is among the largest and most modern in the world. It is crewed by a deep pool of experienced personnel from the Hellenic Merchant Marine—a human capital asset nearly impossible to replicate. 

This is not merely a private-sector resource. Under long-standing principles of maritime law and national statutes, Athens can requisition Greek-flagged vessels into state service during wartime or national emergency. These ships are a de facto strategic reserve. In a kinetic conflict, Athens could, by law, mobilize a transport and logistics fleet dwarfing the dedicated sealift capacity of the entire NATO alliance combined. 

The potential is staggering. Imagine Europe’s reinforcement in a crisis. While the U.S. struggles to activate its handful of aging Ready Reserve Force ships, Greece could mobilize hundreds of modern vessels, providing tankers to fuel NATO’s air and ground assets, plus bulk carriers to transport munitions, supplies, and follow-on forces. This is not a theoretical capability; it is a tangible, legally accessible asset that addresses NATO’s greatest logistical vulnerability. 

Maritime capacity must be formally recognized and credited within NATO’s burden-sharing framework. NATO should devise a formula that allows maritime nations like Greece—and others such as Norway, with their significant fleets—to count a portion of the value of their requisitionable commercial tonnage toward their defense contributions. 

This is not an accounting trick or a ruse for allies to evade their responsibilities. On the contrary, it is a call for a more sophisticated, strategically relevant accounting for burdensharing. The current value of Greece’s 3.1 percent contribution would be even more significant in real terms, given its latent logistical power.  

Acknowledging this would do two things: first, it would give a more accurate picture of an ally’s actual contribution to collective defense. Second, and more importantly, it would incentivize the behavior the alliance desperately needs. By crediting the strategic value of national-flagged fleets, NATO would encourage member states to repatriate ships to their own flags, rather than “flagging out” to registries in Panama or Liberia. It would also incentivize investment in mariner training programs and the maintenance of strong legal frameworks for vessel requisition. 

Additionally, it would validate the core national security rationale for maritime cabotage rules, such as America’s Jones Act. These laws, often criticized in peacetime as mere protectionism, are designed precisely to ensure a nation retains a domestic fleet and experienced mariners for a national emergency. By formally valuing this capability, NATO would acknowledge a tangible contribution to the alliance’s collective security. 

History offers clear and costly precedents for the decisive role of commercial fleets. In World War II, Norway’s contribution was indispensable. When Germany invaded in 1940, Norway had the world’s fourth-largest merchant fleet. The Norwegian government-in-exile established the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission, or Nortraship, placing the fleet at the Allies’ disposal. These ships and their brave crews created a transatlantic lifeline, transporting fuel, food, and war materiel. Their contribution was so vital that Winston Churchill said they were worth more than a million soldiers. This came at a staggering cost: nearly 500 Nortraship vessels were sunk, and over 3,000 Norwegian sailors perished, but their sacrifice was instrumental to Allied victory. 

More recently, during the 1982 Falklands War, the United Kingdom’s rapid victory was enabled by the requisition of over 50 commercial vessels—“Ships Taken Up From Trade” (STUFT)—including the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2, to transport troops and supplies 8,000 miles to the South Atlantic. 

Skeptics will argue that valuing such a contribution is complex. In 2016, I argued for in-kind donations for cyber defense and an “Erasmus Brigade” to defend NATO countries’ networks and data. Is this proposal any more complex than weighing cyber defense expertise or intelligence sharing? Defense economists can readily develop a credible methodology based on deadweight tonnage, vessel type, age, and readiness. A modern LNG carrier, available on 30 days’ notice, is a quantifiable strategic asset. Its value to the alliance in a crisis is arguably far greater than an equivalent dollar amount spent on legacy equipment. 

The 2-percent target—growing to a 5-percent benchmark by 2035—was designed to ensure the Alliance has the capabilities it needs. If NATO treats the benchmark as sacrosanct, it risks ignoring the very capabilities that could determine victory or defeat.  

The nature of warfare is changing, and the geostrategic landscape is being reshaped on the high seas. NATO, a fundamentally maritime alliance, must adapt its thinking. Recognizing the immense, untapped power of the Greek merchant marine—and that of its other shipping powerhouses—is the first, most logical step.  

The strength of the alliance is not just in its budgets but in its collective resources. Hulls in the water, ready to serve the cause of freedom, are a resource we can no longer afford to leave off the ledger. 

The post NATO’s Myopic Accounting Ignores Maritime Superpower Greece  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump is a singular—and solitary—figure.

“I alone can fix it,” he solipstically declared in 2016, before his first presidential run. Now in his second term, he’s been a one-man tsunami, destroying decades-long global alliances, creating chaos in the global economy with his unilateral tariffs, and unleashing bitter partisanship domestically.

Like a kid locked in a toy store after midnight (or the drunken raccoon who recently trashed a Virginia liquor store), he’s gleefully demolished cherished institutions. He’s defaced the Kennedy Center by adding his name and bulldozed the East Wing for a garish ballroom. He’s trampled on the presidency’s traditional decorum with unhinged late night rants on social media. Especially appalling was Trump’s attack this week on the beloved director Rob Reiner, which led to rare bipartisan condemnation. Ever the narcissist, Trump turned Reiner’s tragic death into just desserts for Reiner’s opposition to the president’s policies.

We can blame our national habit of venerating iconoclasts, a tendency Trump exploited to leverage himself into office. We like to lionize the man who speaks out—the brave rebel who defies the establishment.

We revere the visionary genius of the solo entrepreneur and the pluck of the “self-made” billionaire. We mythologize the pioneer and the cowboy—the rugged, self-reliant men who tamed the West. It’s no coincidence that Tom Cruise’s world-saving hero in Top Gun has the call sign “Maverick.” Many of the presidents Americans most admire are the ones who challenged the conventional wisdom of the day and forged new paths for the country’s future: Lincoln, FDR, JFK.

But for every iconoclast, there’s a crank. For every visionary, a conspiracist. For every genius, a madman. After FDR, Trump. Idiosyncrasy becomes transgression, and defiance becomes insurrection.

Above and beyond the immediate and obvious wreckage of the last 11 months, Trump’s gospel of self-reliance has inflicted deeper wounds on America’s communal identity. Too many of us have been told that we don’t belong, are no longer welcome, or aren’t “American” enough. GOP policies, moreover, aim to erode the collective institutions that undergird our social fabric. In the selfish self-centeredness of Trump’s America, you’re on your own.

Take, for instance, Republicans’ current opposition to Obamacare and the extension of premium subsidies for those who buy their coverage through this program. The great achievement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to transform the outrageously expensive and opaque individual market for health insurance into a collective enterprise—a marketplace that allows individuals to pool their risk with others and reduce their individual exposure. This is how insurance is supposed to work: The more people there are in the pool, the lower the costs for everyone.

The GOP’s refusal to extend premium subsidies will send costs soaring for millions of Americans, many of whom will now choose to go uninsured. The impact on the ACA marketplaces is obvious: Fewer people buying insurance means smaller pools and higher costs. This is turn could prompt even more people to drop out, leading to what health care economists call a “death spiral” for the ACA. The result could be a return to the individual market status quo ante, when nearly 50 million Americans—or 1 in 5 of the non-elderly—were uninsured.

What meager “solutions” Trump and Republicans have offered are also geared toward individual assistance, rather than shoring up the collective infrastructure of insurance. Trump’s idea to give people cash for health care would leave people on their own to pay for their care out of pocket. GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy’s amendment to this proposal, to expand individual health savings accounts, would do the same. Few Americans on their own can afford to protect themselves from the catastrophic expenses of a serious accident or illness.

Health insurance isn’t the only arena where the GOP is pushing ideas to undermine shared societal responsibility. Republicans love school vouchers, for instance, because they’re a backdoor mechanism for gutting public education. (See a related analysis by PPI’s Rachel Canter below.) And who needs Social Security when you can have your very own “Trump Account”? (Read my early critique here.)

Future presidents can restore the Rose Garden and rebuild relationships with the allies Trump has spat upon. But the larger project of collective national identity and mutual responsibility might take generations to repair.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founders ditched the Articles of Confederation because they realized that a loose structure of individual states would make the forging of a great nation impossible. They understood that America is powerful when it’s united: In common purpose, with common values, and in collective regard for the common welfare. We can’t let Trump destroy that.

The post Donald Trump’s Go-it-Alone America appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Death by Lightning is a gripping drama about the assassination of President James Garfield, spiced with F-bombs and tawdry sex, not a heavy-handed civics lesson. Yet the four-episode Netflix miniseries is also about the birth of the professionalized federal civil service, with hires based primarily on merit, and the end of a spoils system in which political relationships wholly determine who receives government jobs. Considering that our current president, Donald Trump, is resurrecting what had been left for dead, Death by Lightning provides a valuable service by giving viewers a peek into how government functioned in the bad old days of corrupt, incompetent bureaucracy, if not portrayed with rigorous historical accuracy. 

“Two-thirds of all federal revenue flows through the Port of New York. [Senator] Roscoe Conkling, he controls New York. He’s got the [Republican] party by the balls.” That’s how Treasury Secretary John Sherman introduces the personification of the spoils system during Episode 1 (“The Man from Ohio”).  

Sherman asks then-Representative Garfield to nominate him for president at the 1880 Republican National Convention against Conkling’s choice, former President Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman explains that while he does not expect to win, “we might at least be able to push the party toward reform, lest we yield to the majority view that two terms’ worth of Grant’s grift and corruption merit another.” (So much for Ron Chernow’s labors to cleanse Grant’s reputation.) 

Garfield nominates Sherman with a speech so good it sparks a draft movement for his own nomination that overwhelms Grant and Senator James Blaine of Maine. We learn quickly in Death by Lightning that Blaine and Conkling hate each other, but the script doesn’t bother explaining to viewers that each led a party faction: with Half-Breeds supporting Blaine and Stalwarts behind Conkling. Stalwarts were fervent defenders of the spoils system. Half-Breeds were moderates less attached to the spoils system but not beyond exploiting it.  

Another faction, Reformers—as the name implied—were more committed to civil service reform, and partial to Sherman. In real life (but not in Death by Lightning), Sherman’s Treasury Department in 1877 under President Rutherford B. Hayes led an investigation of the New York Customs House at the Port of New York, which prompted Hayes to replace the collector, Conkling’s right-hand man, Chester Arthur. Hayes nominated Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., whose namesake son would become a reformist President. Conkling and his Senate allies blocked the nomination. Roosevelt died of stomach cancer in 1878 during the stalemate. Still, Hayes was able to temporarily replace Arthur during a Senate recess with another nominee who then remained in the job because Republicans—and Conkling—lost control of the Senate in the 1878 midterms.  

Death by Lightning skips these details in favor of a simpler, fictional narrative in which Arthur is still the Collector—and Conkling is still in the control of the port’s patronage jobs—in 1880. 

So, in the miniseries, once Blaine jumps on the Garfield bandwagon and he and his allies must identify a running mate that can unite the party, Blaine proposes Arthur as he is “the collector for the New York Customs House, through which three-quarters of all federal revenue is amassed,” (the percentage increased between Episode 1 and Episode 2, each being roughly accurate), “negotiates a complex network of job appointments, his generosity repaid in the form of party contributions” and in turn can bring Conkling’s “machine” without putting Conkling himself on the ticket. As Blaine speaks, we see Arthur (played with gusto by Nick Offerman) sampling alcohol that comes through the port, taking an envelope of cash, and ordering goons to beat up an unnamed person who presumably wasn’t towing the party line.  

This paints a harsher picture of Arthur than warranted—I’m unaware of any evidence that Arthur was violent. But, as described in the Arthur biography The Unexpected President by Scott Greenberg, he ignored an early attempt at civil service reform that sought to end mandatory campaign contributions by federal employees and to require new workers to pass civil service exams. Arthur rigged the tests for his political friends and dubiously claimed any campaign tithing was voluntary.  

The collector post was the juiciest plum in the federal government; on top of his salary, he could legally take a cut of any fines levied by his inspectors, who, according to Greenberg, were “frequently overzealous.” In today’s dollars, Arthur took in $1 million annually.  

While Arthur was greedy and corrupt, at least he was competent. Historian C.W. Goodyear, in President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, noted, “Even reformists agreed Arthur ran a tight—if sleazy—ship.” Despite never having run for elective office, Arthur became Garfield’s running mate, which helped unify the party even though the petulant Conkling wanted Arthur to turn down the offer.  

In Death by Lightning, Arthur convinces Conkling to get over it and support the ticket after Blaine was weakened by a Democratic victory in a September election for Governor of Maine, presenting an opportunity for Conkling to get the credit for a November victory. In real life, Conkling’s allies were placated by a New York City meeting with Garfield in July, after which the Stalwarts believed Garfield would make one of their own Treasury Secretary and give them control of the New York Custom House jobs. But as Goodyear noted, Garfield walked out with a wholly different understanding, writing in his diary, “No trades—no shackles.” 

The importance of the Treasury Secretary is perhaps more crucial than that of the Collector of the Port of New York (which was within the Treasury Department) for understanding the problems with the spoils system. As described in The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur by Justus D. Doenecke, “there were some fifteen hundred patronage posts in the Treasury Department, and [Garfield] did not think that he could cope with a secretary who might be a tool of the Stalwarts. In fact, because of its functions, the Treasury Department was the most important federal agency of all. Its tasks ranged from collecting revenue to regulating the currency, and it daily enforced laws dealing with specie resumption, war debts, and the tariff.” Treasury jobs needed to go to professionals, not hacks, if government was going function at its best.  

In Death by Lightning, once Garfield is elected, he shares with Blaine a “list of appointees” that includes the Mainer for the Secretary of State position. Blaine reacts anxiously, “All the names on your list are, and not one of them is remotely viable. These are all progressives, avowed enemies of the spoils system. They won’t even get hearings. Conkling owns a third of the Senate.” But Doenecke found Garfield’s actual cabinet “remarkably balanced … There was hardly a faction or party leader that was excluded,” with a Stalwart as Postmaster General (albeit one with a good record on using civil service exams) and Blaine as the lone Half-Breed. Moreover, Garfield reappointed five Stalwarts to various New York posts, pleasing Conkling and upsetting Reformers.  

But Garfield moved to replace Hayes’s man at the New York Customs House with a Half-Breed instead of a Stalwart. Again, in Death by Lightning, Garfield is naming a successor for Arthur and, therefore, is taking control of the Port away from Conkling. In real life, Conkling and Arthur had already lost control of the Port, but were hungry to get it back. In both fiction and non-fiction, Arthur publicly broke with Garfield on the record with a reporter. And Conkling and his fellow Republican Senator, Thomas Platt from New York, made the weird choice to resign their seats in protest, believing they would be swiftly re-elected (back then, state legislatures elected U.S. Senators) and infused with additional political strength. The plan backfired, with Garfield’s nominee for collector rapidly confirmed after the resignations, and then Conkling and Platt losing the election. 

Unlike in the fictional portrayal, Arthur did not offer his resignation to Garfield after criticizing him in the press. Nor did Arthur sever his relationship with Conkling after Garfield was shot in July 1861. Nor did Arthur, hours later, tearfully pledge to Blaine and Garfield’s wife Lucretia, to “quit it all,” only for her to slap him in the face and say, “Will you resign like a coward in disgrace, or will you step up and reform?”  

“Reform, ma’am,” blubbers the fictional Arthur, “I’ll change my ways.” 

But the real Arthur did change. 

Charles Guiteau, Garfield’s assassin, told the arresting officer, “I did it and will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president.” In turn, Greenberger writes that Arthur, “received death threats, and was deeply shaken by the widespread belief that he was complicit in the crime.” Still over the summer of 1861—while an incapacitated Garfield futilely tried to overcome his horrible medical treatment—Arthur stayed in his Manhattan home where he continued to consult with Conkling. (Conkling’s Senate defeat did not happen until late July, after the shooting. A still alive, magnanimous Garfield offered, “I will offer him any favor he may ask, or any appointment he may desire,” but Conkling did not take him up on it.) 

Yet a woman did tell Arthur to reform. But it wasn’t Lucretia Garfield. It was Julia Sand, a 31-year-old stranger who lived in New York City about 50 blocks north of Arthur. Shortly before Garfield’s death, she wrote him a letter:  

The day he was shot, the thought rose in a thousand minds that you might be the instigator of the foul act. Is not that a humiliation which cuts deeper than any bullet can pierce? Your best friends said: “Arthur must resign—he cannot accept office, with such a suspicion resting upon him.” And now your kindest opponents say: “Arthur will try to do right”—adding gloomily—“He won’t succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him.”  

But making a man President can change him! At a time like this, if anything can, that can. Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine. 

Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you—but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform! 

Arthur saved the letter. 

A few weeks after Arthur became president, he met with Conkling, who demanded that he remove Garfield’s new man at the New York Customs House. Greenberg writes that “watching Garfield’s long ordeal, and the suffering of the dying man’s family, had greatly affected Chester Arthur.” While he still “valued Conkling’s support and friendship,” Arthur told him he was “morally bound to continue the policy of the former president.” Conkling went back to New York, trashed Arthur as a traitor, and left politics. (In 1882, Arthur tapped him for the Supreme Court, but Conkling refused the nomination.) 

In December, Arthur delivered a message to Congress in which he expressed support for civil service reform. A Democratic Senator introduced a reform bill the same day that went farther than he wanted regarding exams. Sand pressed him, “The vital question before the country today is Civil Service Reform. The vital question before you is how you will meet it.” 

She kept writing the president, toggling between praise and criticism, despite not getting responses. But in August 1882, President Arthur showed up at her house and stayed for an hour. Greenberger recounts, as Arthur was leaving, “Julia asked him whether he had forgiven her for some of the harsh things she had written in her letters. ‘No,’ he said with a wry smile.” But the extraordinary decision by Arthur to visit showed how much he valued her words. 

The legislation was mired for a year, but public support was rising, as evidenced by the Democratic victory in the New York gubernatorial race by the reformist Grover Cleveland. Arthur leaned in with another message to Congress, announcing he would sign the legislation despite the provision about exams. The bill swiftly cleared both chambers. Sand wrote, not with praise, but with an admonishment to carry out the law since “words will never serve you again—actions only will count.” 

Arthur’s signing of the civil service reform law is noted in text at the end of Death By Lightning, but that is the most long-lasting policy consequence of Garfield’s murder, the opposite of what his murderer envisioned. And while that law didn’t professionalize the federal civil service overnight, it began a transformation that vastly reduced corruption and improved government services. 

The spoils system is what Trump is trying to restore with his mass firings of civil servants and his “Schedule F” executive order to end protections for career employees, allowing them to be hired and fired for political, not merit-based, reasons. Civil service reform is an inherently dry subject, but Death by Lightning—with its riveting acting and its profane and salacious script—is an entertaining reminder of how government shouldn’t work.  

The post Death By Lightning Shows Why a Professional Civil Service Matters  appeared first on Washington Monthly.