For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

Two thousand nineteen has been a tough year for journalism—and not just because the president called reporters “enemies of the people.” On the same day, two high-quality thought-leader magazines, Governing and Pacific Standard, announced that they were folding. Money magazine ended its print edition. Small local newspapers and big digital outlets alike have continued to downsize. 

In this environment, it’s a mystery how the Washington Monthly remains in business—even to me, and I run the joint. Honestly, given our long history of rickety finances, you’d think we would have been the first to go. 

Yet here we are, alive and well and still publishing long-form stories that help to set the policy agenda in Washington on everything from antitrust to higher education reform. In fact, 2019 marks our fiftieth anniversary of doing this kind of work. Who’d have thought?

To celebrate this unlikely occasion, we asked some of the editors who have worked here over the decades (typically as young people, doing two-year stints of hard duty at low pay before going on to stellar careers in journalism) to revisit a story they published in the Monthly that had legs—that is, had impact on the world, or on themselves, or presaged something big to come, or was totally wrong in an interesting way. The idea was to capture the ongoing legacy of the magazine through personal narratives.

As I read through the resulting essays, I was reminded of a story from early in my own career. In 1984, after I finished an internship at the Washington Monthly, founding editor in chief Charlie Peters and one of his editors, the late Jonathan Rowe, asked me to write a piece on the obscure subject of “bond counsel”—the specialized private lawyers who oversee the issuance of municipal bonds for government entities. Rowe, an attorney himself, was convinced that the whole profession was a racket, and that these lawyers were pocketing up to 5 percent of the proceeds of multimillion-dollar bond sales for doing very little work. 

I didn’t know the first thing about the law, municipal government, or the debt markets. It took me months to report and write the piece—which, when I ultimately delivered it, was quite different from the one Peters and Rowe originally had in mind. 

That’s because the sleepy municipal bond business had been transformed over the previous decade. New law firms and investment banks, many with expertise in the then-exploding corporate bond sector, had flooded into the muni bond market, peddling “innovative” new products—specifically, “industrial development bonds” to finance private ventures deemed to be in the public interest, from shopping malls to nursing homes. This had swelled the size of the municipal government debt market nearly tenfold, a significant drain on the U.S. Treasury because the interest on muni bonds is free from federal taxation. And because the products themselves were vastly more complicated than the plain-vanilla bonds that traditionally finance roads and schools, the bankers and lawyers were raking off as much as 30 percent of the take. As I noted in the piece, it would be cheaper for tax-payers if governments just sent corporate borrowers a check rather than pass the money through a bunch of glad-handing lawyers and bankers.

Soon after the story came out, I received a letter from Michael Kinsley, then the editor of the New Republic and a Washington Monthly alum, praising the piece and inviting me to write for him. Kinsley, though still a young man himself, was revered as a godlike figure by my generation of journalists. The letter not only thrilled me but widened the eyes of my girlfriend, a journalist with an actual job who suddenly had evidence that her twentysomething boyfriend living with his parents might have a future. Soon, my byline began appearing in the New Republic, Charlie Peters offered me a paid position as an editor at the Washington Monthly, and my girlfriend, Kukula Kapoor, agreed to marry me.

Nice ending, right? Wait, there’s more. Seven years later, I was working in the Chicago bureau of U.S. News & World Report when I got a call from Don Baer, one of my editors in D.C., asking me to fly down to Little Rock to cover yet another emerging scandal swirling around the Democratic nominee for president, Bill Clinton—this one involving, I kid you not, municipal bonds. As governor, Clinton had created an agency to centralize the issuance of bonds in Arkansas. The press was reporting that he had used it for nefarious purposes—such as rewarding a bond-dealing campaign contributor who was convicted of selling cocaine.

At that moment, I was probably the only journalist in America—certainly the only one covering Clinton—with the arcane knowledge needed to understand what was truly important about the Arkansas bond agency. My story noted that the “scandal” was baloney. (The contributor, for example, had stopped getting state business before his drug arrest.) More importantly, I found that the agency Clinton created actually put more money in the hands of borrowers and less into the pockets of lawyers and bankers. My piece helped burst that particular campaign scandal bubble. The press soon moved on to more important subjects. Like Whitewater. (Sigh.)

Six years later, following Don Baer, I went to work for Bill Clinton in the White House. After the administration ended I took over from Charlie Peters as editor in chief of this magazine, the place where I had gotten my start.

As a journalist, some stories you write affect your life. Some affect history. Some do both. You’ll find examples of all three in the essays that follow. Amy Sullivan explains how a 2003 cover essay on the Democrats’ religion gap helped her break into journalism—and led Democratic presidential campaigns to start organized outreach efforts to religious voters. Joshua Green tells the tale of how in 2002 he almost—almost—convinced John McCain to run for president as a Democrat. And Jon Meacham reflects on his 1994 essay about how gossip columnist Walter Winchell turned celebrity status into power, and on how this transformation paved the way for the Trump presidency.

These are perilous times, for the country and for the press. There has never been a greater need for the type of journalism that small magazines like this one produce: deeply researched and considered pieces that challenge the media’s own groupthink and that formulate the new ideas that can help move the country forward. It’s what the Washington Monthly has been doing for the last fifty years. It’s what we intend to do for the next fifty.  

The post Introduction: The Stories We Can’t Forget (Even If We’d Like To) appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

In early 2010, the Affordable Care Act was stuck.

House Democrats had passed their version of a health care reform bill; Senate Democrats had passed an alternative; and the party had every intention of going to a conference committee to work out a final package. That plan was derailed, however, when Republican Scott Brown was elected in January 2010 to replace Ted Kennedy. Even if Democrats worked out a bicameral agreement, they would need sixty votes to send the bill to Barack Obama for his signature—and they were suddenly left with a fifty-nine-member majority.

To get the ACA un-stuck, Democrats were left with limited options. Eliminating the filibuster was, at the time, a political nonstarter. They could have found a possible Republican ally in the Senate, but after months of outreach, it was obvious no such person existed. Democrats could have given up on the reform effort altogether, but the political consequences would have been catastrophic. More importantly, the effects on millions of American families would be even more severe.

It seemed to me then that the party had only one way forward: the House would have to pass the Senate bill, send it to the White House, and consider related measures in separate legislation to pass through the budget reconciliation process. I wrote about this path at the time from my perch at the Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal blog, where I was the principal contributor.

To my disappointment, many House Democrats resisted the approach—in part because they preferred the lower chamber’s more progressive bill, and in part because they weren’t convinced Senate Democrats would approve a side bill with related provisions. But the more skeptical rank-and-file House members were of this idea, the more I wrote about the need for them to overcome their trepidation and “pass the damn bill.”

It wasn’t long before my exasperation led me to start using more idiosyncratic grammar: “Pass the damn bill,” in short order, became, “Pass. The. Damn. Bill.” The phrase caught on with many readers, who began using it in their communications with members’ offices.

Ultimately, I wrote a print story for the Monthly presenting my argument in the form of a 4,000-word strategy memo.

The inspiration for the missive was, oddly enough, a memo Bill Kristol wrote for congressional Republicans sixteen years earlier as the Clinton administration’s health care initiative took shape. Kristol’s advice was callous and partisan, but straightforward: GOP lawmakers had no choice but to kill the Democratic plan, regardless of its merits, and resist any urge to propose alternative solutions. The future of Republican politics, he said, demanded no less.

My hope was to create a bookend memo of sorts. I gave it a tongue-in-cheek name—the Project for a Healthy American Future—with the intention of echoing Kristol’s Project for the New American Century.

After a handful of Washington Monthly readers asked how they could contribute to the Project for a Healthy American Future, it occurred to me that the reference was perhaps a bit too obscure.

Regardless, the piece had legs. In the weeks that followed, Democratic lawmakers came around and ultimately embraced the recommended course. While it would be an exaggeration in the extreme to suggest the items I published at the Monthly were responsible for the outcome, I spoke to several Capitol Hill sources who told me the strategy memo was circulated widely among Democratic offices.

The morning of the presidential bill signing, Brian Beutler, then at the New Republic, joked on Twitter that a handful of progressive writers, including me, were responsible for “saving” the legislation. He suggested that we each receive signing pens.

I never got a pen, but I did get the satisfaction of knowing my work at the Washington Monthly made a small difference on a big issue.

The post Pass. The. Damn. Bill. appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

It can be hard to remember, now, what a successful president George W. Bush had been.

You have to pierce through the miasma of scandal and failure that left him one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history. But before Hurricane Katrina, before the Valerie Plame leak scandal and the mass firings of U.S. attorneys, before the cascading, costly calamities of the Iraq War and the financial crash, Bush practically ran the table.

Elected with a minority of the popular vote, Bush nevertheless governed like a landslide winner, advancing a conservative agenda at a pace that left Democrats dizzied and dismayed. He pushed through massive, deficit-busting tax cuts aimed mostly at the rich. His administration rolled back workplace safety and environmental standards and rewrote media ownership rules to favor large conglomerates. He expanded Medicare’s private insurance component and added a prescription drug benefit cheered by big pharma. Bush was even emboldened enough to launch an attempt at privatizing Social Security, the so-called third rail of American politics. 

In early 2003, Washington Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris and I began thinking about a story that would help explain why Bush was so successful. A major factor, of course, was the overwhelming public approval of his response to the 9/11 attacks. But there was also something else at play. Big presidential initiatives have long had to navigate the thicket of trade associations and other special interests known as “K Street.” Until the Bush years, K Street—so named for the Washington avenue that historically housed many lobbying firms and Beltway corporate outposts—always played both sides. Big companies and trade associations tended to employ a mix of Republican and Democratic lobbyists, so they would be well connected no matter who was in charge in any given year. Lobbyists were linked to their old bosses on Capitol Hill or in executive agencies, but loyal first to their new ones in the private sector. Many major sectors hedged their bets, funneling comparable amounts of campaign cash to both parties so they would never be left out in the cold. In the 1990s, a fashion grew for bipartisan lobbying firms, with both Republican and Democratic partners, designed to serve corporate clients in any political climate. 

From the rise of the modern administrative state through the Clinton years, K Street held enormous power to reshape legislation to its liking or, failing that, to block it altogether. But during Bush’s first term, K Street was uncommonly pliant, even subdued. The Republican Party had conquered Washington’s special interests. In my piece for the Monthly, I set out to explain how.

The magazine had recently moved into new offices near the White House, a stone’s throw in distance—but worlds away culturally—from the steakhouses and sleek offices of K Street. Over deli sandwiches and plates of homemade moussaka—supplied by the late Kukula Glastris, our consummate books editor and the unofficial den mother to the underpaid, twentysomething Monthly staffers—Paul and I batted around ideas. I interviewed dozens of politicians, lobbyists, and former Hill staff, who provided our first clues.

K Street, it turned out, didn’t just work for its corporate clients anymore. Now, under Bush, it worked for the GOP, too. Over the previous decade, the party had built a mirror image of the old Democratic political machines. The spoils were not judgeships or jobs in the county clerk’s office, but mid-six-figure jobs on K Street and lucrative contracts for privatized government programs—with a cut of those profits steered back in the form of campaign contributions to Republican committees and candidates. Each week, senior Republican leaders on the Hill met with a small group of ex-staffers to discuss job openings at leading trade associations and corporate offices. The goal was to stock K Street with party functionaries, and to purge the Democrats who remained.

We called my story “Welcome to the Machine.” (This title was supplied by Paul, who assured me that “everyone” would get the Pink Floyd reference.) As a young reporter, it was my education in a certain kind of journalism, long prized at the Monthly and now much more common at mainstream news organizations, sometimes referred to in journalism as a “conceptual scoop.” While my reporting yielded fresh details on the inner workings of the machine, it wasn’t exactly investigative. Many examples in my story were drawn from daily newspaper coverage. The new machine, it turned out, had been sitting in plain sight. My job was to make better sense of the existing facts and explain how this new world worked to an audience that was eager for answers.

As an investigative reporter at the New York Times, I’ve broken some big stories. But few have had the intellectual impact, or sheer shelf life, of “Welcome to the Machine.” Paul Krugman devoted a column to it, spurring broad discussion. Bloggers (remember those?) across the political spectrum posted and debated the piece. The story was eagerly consumed by liberal and Democratic readers adrift in the post-9/11 era. Even years later, I would notice the piece cited in articles, books, or opinion pieces. 

Remnants of the Republican K Street machine persist. Until very recently, some of Washington’s big corporate trade associations functioned as virtual organs of the GOP. The size of the lobbying industry has increased dramatically, creating even richer potential spoils. Policy expertise resides more with well-paid former Hill aides than with their meagerly compensated counterparts still toiling in Congress.

But as I read the story back now, I am struck by how much more fragile the K Street machine was than it seemed at the time. When I wrote my story, political giving by major industries had tilted two to one in favor of the GOP. Yet money always follows power. The election of Barack Obama forced industries to recalibrate their political giving. The trauma of the financial crash and the Democrats’ successful efforts to overhaul the health care system fractured some political alliances and sealed others. Wall Street became more estranged from the Democrats in the wake of the financial crash and Obama’s efforts at financial reform, but the emerging powers of big tech drew closer. The 2016 election accelerated the trend. By the 2018 midterms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, major industries were giving slightly more to Democrats in aggregate than they were to Republicans, bolstered by strong Democratic fund-raising in the financial and real estate sector and liberals’ dominance in the technology, health care, and legal professions.

The Tea Party movement also disrupted the K Street machine, creating an insurgent class of Republican law-makers and candidates who painted dependable establishment conservatives as weak-kneed squishes, the better to knock them off in primaries. The resulting civil war strained the GOP’s ability to smoothly mesh policy outcomes and political power.

Then came the ultimate political insurgent, Donald J. Trump. Many traditional Republican donors in the business world closed their wallets to candidate Trump during the 2016 cycle, believing him to be politically toxic and unelectable. Yet during his first two years as president, Trump granted establishment Republicans and their industry allies an almost unprecedentedly free hand in shaping policy. In some sectors—energy, in particular—government and business have become almost indistinguishable. At the start of this year, former lobbyists ran four different federal agencies. When it comes to environmental and extractive policies, the machine whirs along like never before. And it can still deliver policy outcomes: The Trump tax cut, engineered by Republicans on Capitol Hill, was in some ways a signal machine triumph of the Trump era.

But by thrusting the GOP’s id—white identity politics—to the fore, Trump has made K Street–oriented machine politics more difficult for his party to maintain. His firmly held, sometimes incoherent views on immigration and trade set him on a collision course with the Fortune 500 companies that cheered his tax cuts and regulatory policies. He has feuded with major companies to settle political gripes, promising new regulations (!) to combat alleged anti-conservative censorship by Facebook and Google and seeking to stymie AT&T’s merger with Time Warner to punish the latter for news coverage by its subsidiary, CNN. At times, Trump has suggested that he would break with big pharma, perhaps the congressional GOP’s most loyal ally, over drug prices. Trump’s Republican Party is thus both more corporatist than ever, and less.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leftward drift means that its candidates face growing pressure to forego financial support from lobbyists, big business groups, and corporate PACs. Increasingly, they can afford to do so, thanks to the rise of efficient grassroots fund-raising, through online platforms like ActBlue. Even if Democrats won enough power in 2020 to construct a countervailing K Street machine, it’s not clear that they would want to—or need to.

Ultimately, political machines thrive on certainty and order. Trump is allergic to both. His policies are driven more by resentment, instinct, and ego than by a considered strategy to gain and hold power. Trumpian turmoil in Washington has certainly been lucrative for K Street; total lobbying spending has begun to climb again since he took office, as businesses scramble to avoid the president’s Twitter flamethrower or carve out special deals and dispensations under the cover of his chaos. But it has not been good for the old K Street machine. Swaths of the old Republican professional class in Washington have been displaced by a new group of Trump acolytes and hangers-on, building a mini patronage machine inside the carapace of the old one. Formerly C-list GOP operatives, like Corey Lewandowski, have become the Beltway’s new power brokers, setting up new consultancies and lobbying shops to monetize their connection to Trump. 

But Trump’s reelection appears to be an uphill climb. While the Trumpers scramble to cash in while they can, some mainstays of the Bush-era machine are eying an exit. As the Washington Post reported in April, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—Washington’s most powerful lobbying group—has faced an internal revolt from members who believe it is too aligned with the Republican Party and too timid in challenging Trump on issues like trade and global warming. Whether they are followed by other cogs in the K Street machine will depend on whether Trump and his party can build an enduring political coalition around a declining pool of mostly white voters. Unless it is properly maintained—lubricated by a steady supply of money, jobs, and policy victories—even the most exquisitely engineered contraption eventually grinds to a halt.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described the prevalence of bipartisan lobbying firms in Washington. We regret the error.

The post How Trump Could Blow Up the Republican Lobbying Machine appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

On December 18, 2014, I sat down with the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly and had the worst job interview of my life.

I met Paul Glastris for lunch at the Daily Grill, D.C.’s finest restaurant that also shares a building with the Monthly. Over a pair of the cheapest lunch specials on the menu, we never got into my qualifications (years of reporting experience, plus digital production and strategy), my greatest weakness (perfectionism?), how I dealt with adversity in the newsroom (mostly by quitting or getting laid off), or any other typical interview questions. Instead we talked at length about the state of the journalism industry and the magazine’s place within it.

That’s how, picking at French fries as the last lawyers and lobbyists disappeared from the dining room, we ended up discussing internships. I mentioned that I couldn’t imagine working somewhere that didn’t pay interns. Paul smiled and gave me a look like I had told him I couldn’t imagine working somewhere that didn’t own and operate a spaceship. 

“First of all, I was an unpaid intern,” he said. “Second of all, we give interns a better experience than almost any other place because we’re so small. You can go spend $50,000 to get a master’s degree, or you can spend zero and we’ll take care of you.”

We argued for the rest of the meal. This wasn’t a good-natured policy debate, either, at least not on my end. It wasn’t until I was walking back to my apartment, sliding into the adrenaline hangover from being Mad in Public, that I realized I had spent half the interview fighting with my would-be boss, raising my voice like we were a bickering couple. I got home, sent a halfhearted email thanking Paul for the “great conversation,” and told my roommate I didn’t even expect a rejection.

Teenagers’ brains aren’t fully developed; they have trouble making rational choices and recognizing the long-term implications of their actions. One dumb decision can have dire consequences that last well into adulthood.

When I was seventeen, for instance, I decided to go to journalism school.

So began an era of internships, none of which were adequately compensated and most of which were completely unpaid. One of them was set up by my university as a requirement for my undergraduate degree—meaning that I paid tuition for the privilege of working for a news outlet. (That outlet shut down in the middle of my internship, costing a dozen reporters their jobs and giving me more insight into the journalism industry than I ever got in the classroom.)

A three-month unpaid internship in a big city can cost as much as $6,000 in rent, food, and transportation. As Saahil Desai—whom I’m proud to have hired as one of the Monthly’s first-ever paid interns—recounts elsewhere in this issue, unpaid internships select for people who can afford to work for free until they get a full-time job. This ultimately affects the composition of newsrooms. As another former paid Monthly intern, Mel Jones, wrote in “The Second Racial Wealth Gap” (Washington Monthly, November/December 2015), white Millennials are much more likely than their black or Latino counterparts to get small but continual financial assistance from their parents, allowing them to weather periods of little or no pay rather than give up on journalism entirely. A rent payment here and a medical bill there can be the difference between moving to D.C. to spend three months writing for a well-respected progressive policy magazine and staying home to find something that actually pays minimum wage. All this narrowing of the talent pool isn’t just bad for aspiring journalists—it’s bad for journalism. 

I had done most of my internships while I was a student; after graduation I held down two at once so the paid one could offset the unpaid one. After I was laid off from my first reporting job, I took a fellowship (a word derived from the Old Norse term félag, which I assume means “to trick people into working full-time for a stipend”) that paid less than minimum wage. By age twenty-four I was advising anyone younger to turn down un- and underpaid positions on the spot. 

Not long after all those feelings spilled out over lunch at the Daily Grill, I was shocked to get a phone call from Paul offering me the editor job. I reminded him over the phone about the internship program, and he assured me we’d work something out. I happily accepted.

When it came time to hire interns, though, the magazine’s budget was tighter than expected. Paul asked if we could go one more year with unpaid interns, and fund-raise specifically to pay the next year’s crop. I asked him to cut my salary and use it to pay the D.C. minimum wage, at least part-time. He refused, so I went home calculating how much it would cost for me to pay my interns under the table.

Luckily for our collective IRS standing, fate intervened, as it often does, in the form of Monthly vice president of circulation and business Claire Iseli. She combed through the budget and found a stash of unspent money originally meant for freelance digital content. In 2015, the Monthly welcomed its first-ever cohort of legally compensated interns—the first of many who would go on to do great work at the magazine and elsewhere.

As I was writing this, I gave Paul a call, both to get his side of the story and to needle him about his frequent claim that younger reporters are afraid to use the phone. He remembered our lunch dustup well, although it turns out that the worst job interview of my life wasn’t much of an interview at all.

“I totally remember the argument,” Paul told me. “But we’d already decided to hire you at that point.”

He owns up to his earlier blindness. Between social media, web production, fact-checking, writing, and all the other work Monthly interns do, he says he can’t imagine the magazine functioning without paying them. He called his change of heart instructive for other organizations, journalistic or otherwise, that don’t pay their interns. 

“I was really on my high horse about it,” he said. “I sleep better now—it was totally the right thing to do. You just adjust your budget. You make it work.”

Before I said good-bye, I laid a little trap for him. I had agreed to write this piece for the Monthly’s fiftieth anniversary, but we hadn’t talked fees at all. We had just discussed at length the importance of paying for journalism, an inverted image of our first conversation. So, on the record, am I getting paid for this article?

“Absolutely,” he said. “If you want a better kicker, though, you can donate it instead.”

The post Why We Started Paying Our Interns appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

I was seventeen when I showed up at Columbia University in the fall of 1980. One of my first assignments for the campus radio station was to cover election night. It was a bit like the Martin Scorsese movie After Hours, a dark comedy in which a normal guy encounters ever-weirder moments during an all-nighter in New York City. My version involved a party at the 21 Club where cheering Hasidic Jews, who seemed out of place in that famed old-money, WASPy restaurant, were dancing en masse celebrating Ronald Reagan’s election. Later I wound up at a party for Alfonse D’Amato, the newly elected Republican senator from New York, who had knocked off the liberal incumbent Republican, Jacob Javits, in the GOP primary. Cheers went up from the ballroom each time another liberal icon, like George McGovern or Frank Church, went down.

If you were a liberal that night, you had to be deeply shaken. It was clear that Reagan hadn’t won purely because of his communication skills. Something wasn’t working with American liberalism. 

In my effort to understand what that something was over the ensuing years, I found myself turning often to the Washington Monthly, a magazine that offered a sleeves-rolled-up approach to reforming liberalism itself. I fell in love with the magazine’s wisdom, its humor, its capacity to find a way forward that wasn’t just about mealymouthed moderation or corporatism.

In some ways, the Monthly reminded me of another influence that greatly shaped my thinking: the work of Diana and Lionel Trilling, the prominent New York intellectuals whose careers largely tracked the fortunes of American liberalism throughout the mid-twentieth century. From their perch on Morningside Heights—Lionel was the first Jewish tenured professor of English at Columbia—they were an “it” couple on the social and literary landscape. As it happens, Lionel was a professor of Washington Monthly founder Charlie Peters, who was an undergraduate at Columbia in the 1940s. While Charlie was turned off by Trilling’s intellectual snobbery, he admired the professor’s insistence on rigorous, critical thought, and his willingness to critique aspects of the American left without jumping ship as so many of his contemporaries did in forming the neoconservative movement. 

In fact, the august professor’s 1950 collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, foreshadowed much of what the Monthly would stand for at its founding nineteen years later. “Trilling argued that liberalism, though born of laudable motives, often becomes rigid and ossified,” I wrote for the Monthly in 1993, in a review of Diana Trilling’s memoir of her early life with Lionel. Much of the Monthly’s defining work over the previous two decades had been marked precisely by its tendency to challenge the rigidities setting in among American liberalism—whether that meant criticizing the leadership of labor unions or urging Democrats to get over their squeamishness toward business and economic growth—without dismissing the underlying values that make liberalism worth defending.

I wrote that review during the early days of the Clinton administration’s attempt to reinvent Washington and the Democratic Party, when I was a White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report trying to make sense of the era. The Trillings’ ethos seemed resonant then. Today, it’s even more so. During times that were arguably more turbulent than today’s, they managed to stay admirably level-headed; they rarely let anger and resentments steer their politics. They weren’t perfect. They could be snobs, as Charlie says. But they got most of the big questions right. The Trillings were liberal anti-communists. They opposed Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Stalin. They were clear-eyed about the guilt of the accused spy and convicted perjurer Alger Hiss. (Lionel had been friendly with Hiss’s main accuser, Whittaker Chambers, but never followed him to the far right.) 

These things seem obvious today, but then, as now, there were mass delusions and insane polarization. The coolly intellectual Trillings kept their heads. When protestors took over campus buildings in 1968, signs appeared on campus saying “Wanted, Dead or Alive, for Crimes Against Humanity” beneath a photo of Lionel. Still, he served on the committee that negotiated with the occupiers and conceded that some of the more moderate among them had more compelling points than he’d expected.

Diana has never gotten the attention that Lionel has, but she, too, was wise and accomplished. In 1968, she famously squared off against the novelist Mary McCarthy, who was besotted with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. In the New York Review of Books, Diana agreed that the U.S. needed to withdraw, but predicted, correctly, the bloodbath and reeducation camps that would follow. 

So today, in an age threatened foremost by Donald Trump and a Republican Party that appeases him, when illiberal leftists take their pugilism to Twitter, and when the best-seller lists are dominated by hyperpartisan blather, the lessons of the Trillings seem wise to remember: Be principled but also reasonable. Be willing to change your mind. Recognize the nobility of liberalism, but be willing to criticize it. 

Those are also the lessons of the Washington Monthly.

The post The Washington Monthly’s Liberal Imagination appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

After Barack Obama’s decisive reelection victory in 2012, it looked as though the long process of conservative radicalization might be at a turning point. Democrats had trounced Republicans among all minority groups. The Republican National Committee, aware that the white GOP base constituted a shrinking share of the electorate, released a stunning “autopsy” report, diagnosing what had gone wrong. The document warned that the party was becoming closed-minded, that it needed to move left on LGBTQ issues, and that its stance on immigration would have to change. 

By 2013 there appeared to be a burgeoning conservative reform movement—and I decided to write about it. I interviewed many of the reformers, including former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett and then conservative commentators Josh Barro and Ramesh Ponnuru. At the time, they were pushing for moderate immigration reform and for tentative moves away from the traditional right-wing insistence on tax and welfare cuts. Their efforts were fairly weak, I argued, and they faced “an extremely steep climb” to achieve influence. But, I concluded, “if in 2016 a Republican presidential contender can break free from the death grip of conservative Know-Nothingism and still succeed electorally,” the reformers “may well become very influential.”

Whoops.

Instead, the Republican Party drank even more deeply from the well of Know-Nothingism in 2016, nominating a racist game show host with literally zero political experience—and he won. Despite my caveats, the whole premise of the article was disastrously wrong. Now it’s time for an autopsy report of my own.

There were four factors that made a hash of my thinking. First, I failed to anticipate Republicans winning a blowout victory in the 2014 midterms. This seriously dented what little momentum reformers had.

Second, I didn’t realize what a disaster nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016 would be for the Democrats. She had an astoundingly difficult time putting away Bernie Sanders, who at the time was a barely known weirdo from the second-smallest state in the nation. By late 2015—long before the email story got going—her popularity numbers were deep underwater, where they would remain. She ended up being the second-most-unpopular major-party nominee in the history of polling, behind only Donald Trump himself.

Third, I failed to anticipate the depths of moral depravity to which the Republican Party would sink. I implicitly assumed that if Republicans continued to bleed support among younger generations, they would have to moderate their positions. But this assumed that they would play by the rules. In reality, they have compensated by cheating, using counter-majoritarian strategies like gerrymandering and voter suppression and stuffing the federal courts with right-wing ideologues who will rubber-stamp those maneuvers. Using these tactics, plus their undemocratic advantage in the Electoral College and the Senate, Republicans cling to power even as their elderly white voting base shrinks. 

For my entire life, the Republican Party has been a geyser of awful policies and even worse moral behavior. Despite that, I gave into wishful thinking that perhaps, this time, they would turn things around of their own volition. Instead, the reformers I profiled have been sidelined by the party or have left it altogether. Barro now identifies as a neoliberal, while Bartlett is so disgusted with Republicans that he’s closer to Elizabeth Warren than to Mitt Romney. Ramesh Ponnuru, David Frum, and Reihan Salam are Trump skeptics, cast out in the cold by a party that approves of their president by a nine-to-one margin. It is clear that nothing will halt the spiral of Republican depravity aside from repeated, crushing political defeat.

That leads to my final mistake, which was a tacit overestimation of the strategic sense of the Democratic leadership. Republican extremism provided an opportunity that Democrats failed to exploit—in turn weakening the hand of reformers. 

As I detailed in the article, Democrats had undergone their own reform process in the 1990s, when they ditched much of the New Deal liberalism that had defined the party for a generation, and moved to the center. But that was nearly thirty years ago, and it’s now clear that moderate thinking is dragging Democrats down. Millennials, the oldest of whom are nearly forty, are arguably the most left-wing generation of voters in American history. The Gen Z cohort coming up behind them is further left still. 

Even so, Democratic Party leadership seems nearly incapable of shaking off the ’90s-vintage belief that the country is implacably conservative. Indeed, surveys show that both Republican and Democratic legislators over-
estimate the rightward slant of the average citizen. In 2016 the party elite united around Hillary Clinton, who had run to Obama’s right in the 2008 primary and lost. Even after Democrats won a sweeping victory in the 2018 midterms, the party leadership spent most of 2019 squashing calls for impeachment hearings.

However, there are signs that the Democrats’ learned helplessness is finally shaking off. As of this writing, the House has begun an impeachment inquiry over Trump’s attempts to blackmail Ukraine into investigating the Biden family. (No doubt the bill of particulars will have expanded by the time you read this.)

Elections are always strongly affected by chance events, and incumbents always have an advantage. But it’s also clear that both Donald Trump and the Republican Party are extremely unpopular, clinging to power only through cheating and a geographically warped constitutional system. When it comes to the psychosis that grips the Republican Party, the particular course chosen by Democrats matters a lot less than the party coming to believe and behave as though it has a majority behind it—as it in fact does. Only when Republicans are shut out of power for a decade or more will there be any hope for a successful conservative reform movement.

The post The False Promise of Reformish Conservatives appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

Compared to the never-ending drama of the Trump presidency, the plight of unpaid congressional interns may seem trivial. For decades, most of the roughly 6,000 interns who descend each year on Capitol Hill have earned nothing for their labor. But does anyone really care if some moneyed Yale student has to spend a summer answering constituent calls and leading Capitol tours for free?

We should. Today’s congressional interns are tomorrow’s staffers and elected officials, and Congress’s penny-pinching has long skewed the pipeline toward the type of people who can afford to work an unpaid stint—in other words, moneyed Yale students. One intern I talked to, from a working-class background, commuted an hour and a half to get to the Hill and worked late nights as a server to make her internship feasible. Others in her situation don’t even bother to apply for unpaid positions. 

This helps explain why Hill staffers tend to be far wealthier and whiter than the constituents they work for. In 2015, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that among the 336 top staffers in Senate offices, only twenty-four were people of color. House aides aren’t much more diverse—as of last year, more than 85 percent of top staffers were white. 

In 2017, I set out to write about the problem for the Washington Monthly. I started with a tip from Jean Bordewich, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative and a former Hill intern. For decades, Bordewich said, Congress did pay its interns, opening up government to the nonwealthy—including a working-class Harvard student from Brooklyn named Chuck Schumer. But while I tracked down a few former paid congressional interns, I lacked data to prove the theory, or explain why the stipends had dried up. When I filed my first draft, Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris said the words you never want to hear from an editor: “This is a great start.”

To my chagrin, he sent me off to the Library of Congress, where I spent several days in a windowless room paging through budgetary records from the 1970s and ’80s. It was a gold mine. In 1971, virtually every House office offered paid interns stipends that would equal $22,000 annually in today’s dollars. In the Senate it was a similar story: By 1980 almost all offices paid their interns. The practice met its demise in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich took a chainsaw to Congress’s operational budget and offices began asking interns to work for free.

Since my piece came out early last year, however, Congress has done something very un-Congress-like—it has course-corrected. Starting in March 2019, it has set aside a pool of money specifically to pay interns. Salaries are capped at $1,800 a month, a small but helpful sum for a twenty-year-old already making do on bowls of ramen.

It’s hubristic for journalists to claim credit for developments that unfurl after their stories are published. Activists, especially the group Pay Our Interns, did the hard work of convincing members of Congress to appropriate the money. But I suspect that the Monthly helped advance the cause by publishing the piece as that effort was underway. It’s a reminder of what the magazine does best: diagnosing what prevents government from working properly and prescribing solutions to root out the problem. Paying interns is a modest victory, but it’s precisely the kind of reform that actually makes government work a little better.

The post How Congress Came to Pay Its Interns appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

Thirty-two years ago, I stepped off a plane from the Philippines and started a job as an editor at the Washington Monthly, a position renowned for its mix of high purpose, low pay, shabby quarters, and mad-genius editing by its founder, Charlie Peters. Then I sat down to write a long story about living in a Manila shantytown.

The article revolved around Tita Comodas, the woman who had taken me in during my year in Manila. I had found her captivating—a mother of five with a sixth-grade education who read English newspapers using a Tagalog dictionary, took seriously the command to love thy neighbor, and poked fun at herself for her lowborn status. The months I’d spent sleeping on the floor of her hovel were my version of graduate school, a crash course in poverty and resilience.

I poured myself into the story and gave it to Charlie, who tore it apart. He called it treacly here and contradictory there, alternately self-indulgent and turgid. He mocked and berated. In Monthly lore, a hazing session like this was known as a “rain dance.” As the new guy, I got one with special thunder. I was told it was a compliment.

I seethed and brooded, especially where I saw that Charlie was right. (To this day, I edit myself with his prosecutorial voice in my head.) Setting aside my wounded pride, I went back to writing, and Charlie did something few editors would have done—he put a long story about a Manila slum on the cover of the magazine. The story was both a character study of Tita and an exploration of the Philippines’ fragile democracy. I wrote it as a tribute and an act of catharsis, and after more than 8,000 words I figured I was done as Tita’s chronicler. 

Fortunately, I was wrong.

I don’t know who was more frightened the day we met, Tita or me. I was a twenty-six-year-old reporter in Manila on a year-long fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation. Interested in shantytowns, I asked a nun who lived in one called Leveriza to help me move in. When she told me to return in a couple of days, I figured she would use the time to approach a family or two. Instead, she led me through the alley and auctioned me off on the spot. 

I understood just enough Tagalog to know that the first prospect was horrified. So was the second. Tita, the third, was simply struck mute. Her thin patience exhausted, Sister Christine stomped off. “If you don’t want him, pass him on to someone else,” she said. “And don’t cook him anything special—if he gets sick, too bad.” Tita stalled for as long as she could, then offered me a place on her floor, deciding that Sister Christine’s introduction had left her no choice.

For the first few days, language gaps and excessive politeness kept us strangers. Then Tita sought my help with a glue-pot project, turning newspapers into paper bags. I botched the job so badly she laughed and threatened to mark them “Made in the USA.” My incompetence put everyone at ease. I stayed on and off for eight months, lending a hand here and there but mostly just observing shantytown life through Tita’s eyes.

The oldest of eleven siblings raised on a farm, she had moved to Manila at sixteen to work in a glove factory. Then came marriage and five children, including one with a heart defect. To buy medicine and patch the leaking roof, Tita’s husband, Emet, a pool maintenance man, had taken a job in Saudi Arabia, while Tita raised the kids on the money he sent—ten times what he had been making in Manila. 

Half of Tita’s life revolved around drudgery. I’d be lying on my floor mat before dawn, listening to her boil the breakfast rice, and back there again at midnight, listening to her wrestle the laundry. The other half revolved around slum solidarity as a lieutenant in Sister Christine’s uplift group, Alay Kapwa. With a mix of Bible studies and livelihood projects, the group was built on the notion that Jesus had a special love for the poor—a radical thought in a place where conditions suggested the opposite. As the manager of the co-op store, Tita was responsible for buying 2,000 eggs a week, which she stacked beneath a fluorescent light in an effort to keep away the rats. 

Though Tita had arrived in the slums as a timid young woman from the provinces, the group had pulled her out of her shell and given her the confidence to ask questions. Some she directed at me. Are all Americans rich? (No.) What do they think of Filipinos? (Most don’t.) Did I like the fish head she bought me for breakfast? (I lied.) Her curiosity encompassed big matters. She told me she’d been asking God, “Why, if you love your Son, are so many people poor?” It’s the central dilemma of faith—why does an omnipotent God allow suffering?—and one with special immediacy in a place that suffers as much as Leveriza. I asked whether God had answered. “Not yet,” Tita laughed.

My time as the shantytown’s journalist in residence, if that’s what I was, proved formative, but I can’t quite say what it formed. Certainly no five-point plan. It was more like an encounter with grace. Tita had faced crushing poverty without being crushed. Our relationship was so unlikely I didn’t know what to call us. Reporter and source? Tenant and landlady? Friends? One night a group of Alay Kapwa women and I walked past a hotel dining room, gleaming with white linens and chandeliers. The women laughed and teased me: I could enter, while they could not. I laughed, too, but the real joke was class itself—however fleetingly, the divisions seemed absurd. To subvert them was rare good fortune. I’m not sure what I expected to find in the Manila slums. But it wasn’t a woman in a worn housecoat trying to live out the gospel beneath a tower of eggs.

Poverty had claimed Tita’s teeth. But she looked resplendent with her dentures in.

I left the Monthly after two years, in 1989, to cover poverty for the New York Times. New attention was being focused on the American underclass. Experts debated what mix of forces kept people from seizing opportunity in a society of plenty. 

Tita’s life had posed a different question: How do people find opportunity in places where it scarcely exists? Her example stayed with me and shaped the questions I asked. Yes, I wanted to know about poverty’s structural causes—about job flight, racism, and torn safety nets. But I also wanted to know about people’s inner lives, their search for meaning and purpose. What did they ask God? What did they make of the answers?

I spent seven years following a group of families on welfare for my first book, American Dream. The main character, Angela Jobe, presented herself (to me and the world) as a jaded veteran of ghetto life. Certainly she had much to feel jaded about. She had dropped out of high school to have her first baby. Her children’s father was locked up for murder. Her late-night accounts of her life, flowing beside Colt 45s, were offered in bursts of excitable swearing that could peel the paint from the walls. The hard face was real, but also a mask. One night, after I’d known her for years, she dug out a poem she’d written as a struggling young single mother.

I’m tired

Of trying to understand

What God wants of me

Recoiling from her own irreverence, Angie had then substituted “the world” for “God,” and hidden the unfinished page in the back of a closet in a satchel of journals and love letters. Stories of street fights she was happy to share, but the bag was so secret no one knew it existed. “Don’t you know I like looking mean?” she said. “If people think you’re nice, they’ll take your kindness for weakness. That’s a side of me I don’t want anybody to see. That way I don’t have to worry about nobody hurting me.”

Maybe Angie would have shared her inner seeker anyway. But my experience with Tita helped me sense it was there.

Tita and I stayed in touch but didn’t see each other for nearly twenty years. In the meantime, all five of her children became overseas workers like Emet had been. What started as an act of desperation became a way of life, and the lens through which I saw the family switched from poverty to migration. The child I knew best was Tita’s daughter, Rosalie. A shy fifteen-year-old when we met, she combined her two chief assets—her father’s overseas earnings and her own quiet tenacity—to make the leap from the slums to nursing school. She spent years working in Abu Dhabi while hoping to get to the United States.

I knew that migration loomed large for the family. But my lightbulb moment in grasping its global importance was learning that remittances—the sums that migrants send home—are three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combined. In 2006, I returned to the Philippines for the New York Times Magazine to write about the family and the rise of migration. I took a car from Manila to a small-town restaurant near the family farm where Tita and Emet had moved after leaving the slums. I waited nervously. Then an aging couple walked in, wearing familiar grins. In an instant, I felt home again.

But what a different home! A dozen houses sat in a rough semicircle in the family compound, each belonging to a different relative who had worked abroad. Like an ocular form of carbon dating, a quick look yielded a fair guess at how long each owner had been away. The home without paint or windowpanes belonged to the worker who had been sending money home for just two years. A tile roof and second kitchen suggested an absence of a decade or more. Tita and Emet occupied the compound’s jewel—a pink bungalow with a private water tank, paid for by Rosalie. She and her husband both worked abroad, while Tita and Emet looked after their kids.

Eventually I decided to write a book, using the family as a vehicle to explore the rise of global migration. For all my enthusiasm, the story line had a problem: A tale about Filipinos in Abu Dhabi would seem peripheral to American life. Then the narrative gods smiled. Rosalie got a job in Texas.

I met her in Manila in 2012 and joined her on her initial flight to the U.S. Her husband and three young children followed, and I spent years reporting on their adjustment. My book, A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, tells the family story across three generations and charts the rise of global migration. It starts improbably, with Tita adopting me in the slums, and ends more improbably still, with her grandchildren flourishing in a Houston suburb. It’s the greatest poverty success story I know—a change in life circumstance so vast it defies the imagination. Faith, grit, and family bonds fueled it, along with the opportunities afforded by migration.

I haven’t seen Tita in three years, since I accompanied Rosalie on her first trip back from the States. Thrilled to have everyone home, Tita bustled about and beamed. “Kain na!” she shouted all day. Come eat! What could be happier than a family so large they had to come to the table in shifts? Emet, who had suffered a stroke, sat in a wheelchair and held Tita’s hand. They marveled at pictures of Rosalie’s house and how quickly their Americanized grandchildren had forgotten Tagalog. “Amazing, amazing changes,” Tita said.

Emet died this year. After a half century of marriage, Tita is now a widow, with most of her children living abroad. At seventy-three, she is lonely and in uncertain health. We communicate, imperfectly, on Facebook and in Skype calls punctuated by rooster crows. Perhaps after two magazine pieces and a book, I should feel like I’ve fully told her story. But I don’t exactly. Perhaps writers never exhaust their favorite subjects. Her life is entering a challenging new stage. I still marvel at her grace. And she still looks resplendent with her dentures in.

The post The Story I Couldn’t Stop Writing appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

The mind-set of the 1970s was that everything was running out, especially fossil fuels. The OPEC oil embargo caused long lines at gasoline stations and rising pump prices. The impending exhaustion of oil reserves widely was decreed by politicians, editorialists, and academics. The influential 1972 study The Limits to Growth used computer modeling—then thought to possess godlike powers—to predict that global petroleum supplies would collapse, as soon as 1992 and no later than 2022.

Natural gas was viewed as so scarce that in 1978 Congress enacted legislation that essentially banned the new use of natural gas for electricity generation, forcing utilities to burn more coal. President Jimmy Carter asked Congress to create the Department of Energy and set it off on the ultimate snipe hunt, an emergency super-subsidized project to convert coal into synthetic natural gas, justified with the claim that gas reserves “would be exhausted by the end of the 1980s.” Carter declared the Persian Gulf—previously an exotic destination for the U.S. military—an American national interest. Henry Kissinger began to comment about going to war to seize Arabian oil. Grandees and toffs (these are technical terms) declared that soon oil would cost $345 a barrel, while pump prices would soar past $50 a gallon. (Money figures in this article have been converted to today’s dollars.)

Now it’s a generation later. Oil and gas are in such oversupply that world markets are glutted. As I write this sentence in October 2019, the best-quality crude trades at $53 a barrel; adjusted for inflation, gasoline pump prices are at the level of the 1950s. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation established by Congress no longer exists, after having accomplished nothing. Now there is an extensive network of Pentagon bases throughout the Gulf region, protecting oil supplies the United States no longer needs and propping up dictators. Natural gas, a low-carbon fuel, is so plentiful that U.S. electric utility emissions of greenhouse gases have declined in most recent years. And far from depleting, gas reserves keep rising. 

Consider these numbers. In 1980, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, there were an estimated 2,500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the global reserve. Since 1980, the world has consumed about 3,400 trillion feet. Today there are about 7,100 trillion feet in the global reserve. Society has used more natural gas than there was in 1980, and today we have twice as much left.

How did the experts get this so wrong? Was it simply that no one at the time could have known that a huge amount of oil and gas was about to be discovered? In fact, there were plenty of leading indicators; they were just not visible in Washington, D.C., where the politicians and so-called experts live. 

In the summer of 1980, I traveled to Edmonton, Alberta, then the center of North American oil exploration, to interview people who handled rigs and maps and actually knew the geology of oil and gas deposits. Wildcatters and hydrocarbon geologists in the field told me there was plentiful fuel that deregulation could bring out. At the time, federal rules prevented most oil and gas from being sold at a profit—so why produce them? Offer profits and producers will innovate, such as with 3-D seismology, horizontal drilling, and hydraulic fracking in shale, advances that happened after the “experts” disdained new techniques on the assumption that the reserves would soon be gone.

In October 1980, the Washington Monthly published a cover proclaiming “Pssst—the Energy Crisis Is Over.” Inside was a story by Thomas N. Bethell warning that the Synthetic Fuels Corporation was a white elephant. At a time when Carter was calling this project “the keystone of our national energy policy,” Bethell presciently dubbed the whole concept “dehydrated water.”

Accompanying Bethell’s story was my article about the wildcatters who hunt for oil and natural gas. I argued that the energy shortages causing fear in many sectors were the product of regulatory errors and price controls. (To his credit, late in his term Carter set in motion energy price deregulation and investments in research that led to big increases in domestic production.) My article went on to argue that the favored solution of the “experts”—to ration use of fossil energy—got the whole thing backward. More production would cut the price of oil and gas, helping both average people and the economy, while energy efficiency and improved oil refining would moderate pollution and greenhouse gases.

At the time, the United States was importing 5.6 million barrels a day of oil from Gulf dictatorships. Based on my reporting, I estimated that domestic discoveries and new drilling technology could produce enough North American oil for the United States to need only three million barrels a day from the Gulf. I was wrong: Today the U.S. imports about 1.5 million barrels a day from the Gulf.

What lessons can be drawn from the cranky, underfunded Washington Monthly saying the opposite of what the best minds in Washington were proclaiming—and then turning out to be right?

One lesson is the importance of the core insight of founding editor Charlie Peters: Do not simply accept at face value what the people at the top of the institutional hierarchies are saying; go out and talk to those on the front lines who are engaged in the actual work of the institution. They typically know more than their bosses.

Another lesson is that the “experts” who turn out to be wrong rarely are called to account. For example, one of the voices crying “energy crisis” was the physicist and future Harvard faculty member John Holdren, who in 1971 predicted that oil and natural gas supplies “may be tapped within the lifetimes of many in the present population.” This prediction did not even get into the general zone of accurate. Yet Holdren went on to be White House science adviser for President Barack Obama. The fact that he was wrong on such a basic level was not held against him, because Holdren said what the environmental lobby wanted to hear (shut down industry!) and the Democratic Party wanted to hear (more regulations!). Donald Trump advisers who are denying climate change will be shown to be just as far off as Holdren was. But they are using the same playbook, saying what the president and his base want to hear.

A final lesson is to be suspicious of doomsday claims. Climate change is real, is driven by human activity, and is already causing harm. But the worst-case outcome is unlikely. Half a century ago, looking at then-current trends, experts thought the world’s forests would shrink rapidly. Since 1980, however, global forest cover has increased by about 15 percent. Smog was supposed to turn the atmosphere into poison. Since about 1975, the air in Los Angeles, for example, has become steadily cleaner. Population growth was supposed to overcome the carrying capacity of the planet. Today the family has nearly twice as many members as in 1968, when the doomsday book The Population Bomb was a best seller, yet the World Bank found in 2018 that extreme poverty “is at the lowest level in recorded history.” 

When existential threats become widely known, regulatory reforms are enacted, inventors and businesspeople roll up their sleeves, and state and local groups take action. This was the case during the energy crisis when many experts said hope was lost—and will be the case for the reduction of greenhouse gases, as well.

The post The Pundits Who Get It Wrong—and Pay No Price appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

To support our work, please consider making a donation. We’re a nonprofit that relies on reader support, and from November 1 to December 31, your contribution will be doubled by NewsMatch.

In her celebrated 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels, the scholar Elaine Pagels argued that a dissident theme in early Christian doctrine could have set the whole course of Western religion in a different direction—one less patriarchal and more open to women—if its teachings had not been suppressed and forgotten.

That book came out a few years after I worked at the Washington Monthly. Since reading it, I’ve often thought about the parts of any movement’s founding message that end up being highlighted—and those that are overlooked. This can be true whether we are talking, as Pagels was, about a religion of world-historical importance, or, as I’m doing here, about something as limited and scrappy as the approach to journalism that Charles Peters invented fifty years ago—to which his young employees referred with affectionate mockery as the “rain dance” or, yes, the “gospel.”

Charlie brought to his new magazine insights from a range of his previous roles and experiences, including West Virginia state legislator and summer-stock drama impresario. But the one we staffers heard most about was his time running the Office of Evaluation and Research under Sargent Shriver at the newly established Peace Corps. There Charlie would send evaluators, many of them professional or in-training reporters, out into the field to see how things worked, and didn’t work, in Peace Corps projects around the world.

The second part of that function—learning how things didn’t work—was naturally aligned with what draws people to journalism. Getting the real story, “afflicting the comfortable,” asking the questions people would rather not answer, going places people would rather you not see—these are all functions that matter to the workings of society. They are also what most people who end up as reporters think of as the heart of our job and, to be honest, as much of the fun. It is why we read and admired Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens from the muckraker era, Edward R. Murrow and Rachel Carson a generation-plus later, and a hundred other print and broadcast reporters who tried to reveal the unpleasant truths about mid-twentieth-century America, from formal and informal segregation to environmental poisoning to the war in Vietnam.

The years when I worked alongside Walter Shapiro at the Monthly—following the staff editor team of Taylor Branch, John Rothchild, and Susannah Lessard, and before passing the baton to Art Levine and Tom Redburn—were rich in this kind of investigative reporting. The Vietnam War was still on; Richard Nixon was running for reelection, scheming with his Watergate plumbers to maximize the scale of his victory over George McGovern. The Pentagon Papers had recently been published, as had Seymour Hersh’s exposé of the massacre of civilians at My Lai. I had come to the Monthly straight from writing two exposé books for Ralph Nader. Everything about Charlie’s exhortation to expose what wasn’t working made perfect sense.

But over time, I started remembering that Charlie’s “evaluation” model had always contained another part—which, fortunately, the Monthly has maintained more faithfully than the early Christian church heeded the Gnostic Gospels. In addition to fearless attention to how things went wrong in politics and government, Charlie’s gospel included paying attention to how, when, and why things sometimes go right. 

This may seem a banal point, since investigating, assessing, and telling stories of success has such an established place in many parts of our culture. Think of business books like In Search of Excellence or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Think of “how they did it” narratives—from Moneyball to The Soul of a New Machine to The Right Stuff to, yes, the Hamilton musical. Think of . . . you get the idea. Knowing why things fail matters. Knowing why they succeed can matter at least as much. 

Anyone involved in journalism is aware of these examples—but also is aware of the internal and external cultural friction involved in explaining success rather than failure, especially when it comes to government. Erring 10 percent on the too-critical side is unfortunate—but in the culture of journalism it’s not usually a huge reputational or career risk. Far more perilous is erring the opposite way. If you’re too cynical, you’re “tough,” which is good. Too credulous, and you’re “soft,” which is not. 

It’s what the economists would call “asymmetric risk.” When writing exposés and critiques, you don’t feel duty bound to take note of every offsetting positive fact. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t need to buffer every news break about Watergate with “to be sure, Richard Nixon opened relations with China and founded the Environmental Protection Agency.” But any reporter knows the near imperative of buffering any positive story with the possible negatives. (“West Virginia has an impressive new public housing program—but what about
the opioids?”)

To say it again: Skepticism is a reporter’s first duty. But it’s not the only duty, or the only way to make a difference. And the fact that it is so satisfying and exciting to break a big story, and so much in sync with the incentives of the business and culture, is one of several reasons that reporters spend less time on “how things work” stories than they should. 

I think that’s part of what Charlie Peters was saying, in his own gospel of 1969. And I think of it now, on this fiftieth anniversary, because the Monthly has done so much to keep the tradition alive.

Charlie’s successor as editor is Paul Glastris, who in his own work as writer and editor has adhered for a very long time to both parts of the message—examining what doesn’t work along with what does. More than twenty years ago, when I had an improbable two-year run as editor of U.S. News & World Report, Paul was a writer and editor there. In 1997 he produced a special section called “Silver Bullets,” a compilation of specific, practical, proven ideas that could make a big difference. These ranged from congestion pricing for the most crowded freeways to new funding models for public schools, universities, and medical care systems. “Overhype by one inch and you sound like a sap,” I quoted Paul saying in my editor’s note introducing some of these ideas. But take the risk of vetting and presenting solutions to real problems, and you have done something valuable. 

Since Paul took over in 2001, the Monthly has continued to emphasize this part of the dual duty of journalism. To pull out just a few examples:

Phillip Longman, “The Best Care Anywhere” (2005)—In this groundbreaking piece, Longman told the surprising story of how the Veterans Health Administration had become the most effective health care system in the country, and how it provided a model for how to make American health care work better. It’s a beat that Phil and the magazine have returned to often over the years, challenging the anti-government right’s ongoing effort to portray the agency as dysfunctional and scandal ridden as a pretext for privatizing its functions.

Phil Keisling, “Vote from Home, Save Your Country” (2016)—Here, Keisling (a Monthly contributing editor and former Oregon secretary of state) made a sweeping case for what could be the single most effective way to reform the way we vote in order to strengthen election security, save money, and, most importantly, increase democratic participation: adopting universal vote by mail. In the years since, the Monthly has commissioned a pair of studies showing that states and counties that adopt a “vote-at-home” system see dramatically higher turnout—especially among the young. The reform continues to gain momentum around the country, and was included in House Democrats’ H.R. 1 omnibus democracy bill.

Tom Toch, “Hot for Teachers” (2017)—If there’s any epithet most commonly applied to the D.C. public school system, it’s “scandal ridden.” But in this article, the product of years of reporting, Toch showed how, in the aftermath of Michelle Rhee’s embattled tenure as schools chancellor and her ignominious departure, DCPS has quietly become a model for the sorts of reforms that teachers and education experts agree are the most important for raising student achievement: attracting top teacher talent; paying them well; and providing rigorous training, feedback, and opportunities for ongoing career development.

Grace Gedye, “System Update” (2019)—Inspired by lawmakers’ seeming inability to grasp the problems posed by the likes of Facebook and Google, Gedye made the case for why Congress must beef up its own capacity for legislating and providing oversight on tech issues—including by reviving the Office of Technology Assessment, a proven success that was murdered for ideological reasons during the Newt Gingrich era. The piece fits into a broader, ongoing argument that the Monthly has been making for years: As unpopular as Congress is, a major key to restoring it to some semblance of efficacy is for it to buck decades of anti-government dogma and restore its own capacity to actually govern.

I took me a while to recognize fully both parts of the founding Washington Monthly credo. I am glad that Paul and his colleagues have been on the case all the way along.

The post The Charlie Peters School of Journalism appeared first on Washington Monthly.