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. 

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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. 

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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.  

The post When the Country Is in Trouble, the Washington Monthly Is There  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Author’s Note: This article was written on the occasion of Charles Peters’s 96th birthday, but we’ve run it a few times, both to celebrate this magazine’s founder but also because—and he more than anyone would appreciate this—it’s proven a compelling fundraising letter, allowing this small publication to thrive in its 56th year. Since Charlie passed away on Thanksgiving 2023, we thought this might be a good moment again to reflect on his vision for the magazine and how it’s evolved under his successor, Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris, over the past 25 years. —MC

A little over 20 years ago, I made a short film in honor of Charlie Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly. The American Society of Magazine Editors was inducting my old boss and mentor to its Hall of Fame, a kind of Cooperstown of glossies. Held at a glitzy luncheon at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, the editors of venerable titles lavishly toasted themselves as the National Magazine Awards were handed out. (In retrospect, it had an end-of-an-era feeling, with 9/11 and the collapse of so many publications in the offing.)

My short film was a precis to Charlie getting his Thalberg. It began with shots of the Time-Life Building, the Newsweek building, and the Condé Nast tower, followed by voiceover narration: “… and this is the Washington Monthly.” Cut to rickety stairs in a dilapidated building over a liquor store in D.C.’s Dupont Circle.

Much of the crowd laughed, getting the contrast—and the improbable story of Charlie and the publication he founded in 1969, which has now survived far longer than many of the slick publications being fêted that day.

Charlie was almost 75 when he was hailed in 2001. Today, he deserves an even bigger toast as he turns 96.

Please help us celebrate by donating to the Washington Monthly. Your donations keep this magazine going.

For those of us lucky enough to have visited with Charlie at his Washington home, we’ve found him physically slower but still sharp—a remarkable achievement for a man born during the Coolidge administration. When I last saw him, we talked about family and Joe Biden. Charlie remembered a moment from my 1997 wedding as if it were a month ago. (His lovely wife, Beth, a former ballerina, appears ageless.) Yes, Charlie’s body shows its age, and he doesn’t get out much, but his mind still glows.

Peters, with the Monthly as his crucible, reshaped the lives of so many young writers, including myself, who would go on to become prominent journalists. They include James Fallows, Jon Meacham, Katherine Boo, Nicholas Lemann, Michelle Cottle, Jonathan Alter, Gregg Easterbrook, Stephanie Mencimer, David Ignatius, Joe Nocera, and Michael Kinsley, another Hall of Fame winner. It wasn’t just that a bevy of smart kids passed through the Washington Monthly, as if it were another ticket to punch between college and The New York Times. It’s that we were transformed. We learned, in Charlie’s phrase, to cover Washington like an anthropologist covers a South Seas island. And not just to cover it with an eye for what’s wrong, but to write about things that work—a task that, especially at the time, most journalists eschewed, fearing that they’d seem opinionated or biased.

Donate now to the Washington Monthly.

I came under Charlie’s spell in the 1980s, when he hired me as an editor, and we worked in those ratty offices I mentioned (and an earlier set we vacated when the rent got too high). My salary was $10,000 a year—around $26,000 in today’s purchasing power, actually just enough to get by in pre-gentrified Washington. I’d fallen in love with the magazine when I was in college at Columbia in New York City. My best friend, Marc, subscribed, and I got hooked reading his copies.

Eventually, I became so enamored that I habitually raced every month to a nearby luncheonette/newsstand on Morningside Heights, which got the issue a bit ahead of Marc’s. I’d lap it up with scrambled eggs and a bialy. It was funny and irreverent, yes, but also softhearted and hardheaded.

Working for Charlie was not, shall we say, easy. In the days before HR departments were everywhere and the phrase “work-life balance” had become a cliché, Charlie rode us hard. Usually, he had two young editors at a time cranking out a monthly publication, a staff far smaller than even other financially strapped opinion magazines. We’d work for two years and then move on. Why endure the low pay and long hours? Charlie was not a masseur of copy (“Let’s move this paragraph here”) or a Rolodex impresario (“Call Senator So-and-So for comment”). He expressed his ideas in his inimical “rain dance,” a kind of sermon, if you will, in which he’d become increasingly animated about a point he was trying to convey to one of us. His corpus of ideas was fondly referred to as “the gospel.”

I remember one article I suggested about how our culture lacked a Charles Dickens, a first-rate writer with a large audience who could evoke sympathy for the poor, something well needed at the time (it was the Reagan era). Charlie immediately got the idea and elevated it. We need someone who not only sparks empathy with the easily lovable, law-abiding Cratchit of A Christmas Carol, he told me. But also with the criminal, decidedly non-saccharine Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist, which is much more challenging but crucial.

Charlie could also be a tough taskmaster. 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. Fearing getting stuck, my cabbie refused to take me back to the marginal neighborhood where I lived. (This sounds like a Dickensian tale, but 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 real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t the Colorado senator who had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. The scandal about the presidential frontrunner transfixed the mainstream media. Charlie understood that the real scandal was Hart, whom we liked, 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.

At 96, Charlie is still a lodestar guiding me. Part of it is political. He has retained his belief, born of experience during and after the Depression, of how government can change lives for the better. As a supporter of John F. Kennedy in the crucial 1960 West Virginia primary and later as the director of evaluation of the Peace Corps, he saw how politics could inspire and how government succeeded and failed.

Donate now to the Washington Monthly.

But much of our admiration stems from Charlie’s personal example, and not just because he was a Negroni man decades before the hipsters. So many idealists come to Washington to do good and stay, as the phrase goes, to “do well”—meaning to enrich themselves. Charlie is a huge exception. He paid himself a pittance and lived on the edge of financial ruin to make this magazine work. When Paul Glastris (also a former editor) took over the Monthly in 2001, he kept Charlie’s lessons and ethos (and necessary frugality) and put his own mark on a new range of topics from higher education—with the magazine’s revolutionary college guides—to its powerful reporting on monopolies. As Paul says, all of us have Charlie’s voice in our head, asking, “Is that good enough?”

If you think the Monthly’s brand of solutions-based policy-focused journalism is essential, and if you want to celebrate Charlie’s 96th birthday, there’s something you can do: Make a donation. In fact, do it right now.

As a nonprofit, we cannot do our work without your support. And as a celebration of Charlie Peters, I can’t think of a better gift. Plus, as a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in December 2021.

The post Washington Monthly Founder Charlie Peters Died On Thanksgiving Two Years Ago. Why He Still Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I hope you will read all of the appreciations of Charlie Peters posted here. Beyond these recollections and long obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is still much more to say about Charlie’s impact on journalism, his critique of the performance of government, and his significant influence on the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. His greatest legacy, of course, is the magazine itself, which continues, under Paul Glastris’ superb leadership, to do everything Charlie envisioned and, with the help of this site, more. But I’d like to tell a more personal story about my obsession with getting a job working for him. Here’s some of what I remember:

That summer, I was eager—even desperate—to meet the man, but it was not to be.

The year was 1978, and I was a ridiculously over-privileged (my wife prefers “under-deprived”) kid, then working as an intern in the speechwriting office of Jimmy Carter’s White House. I had shaken President Carter’s hand on the South Lawn and President Gerald Ford’s in the East Room in 1975. Thanks to being a member of the lucky sperm club, I had also met Martin Luther King, Hubert Humphrey, Robert DeNiro, and Robert Redford—and as an eight-year-old, had seen The Beatles play in Chicago’s Comiskey Park.

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While I was hardly blasé, none of these legends were central to my sense of who I wanted to be. But the idea of possibly meeting Charlie Peters, already a deity in my little world of aspiring political journalists—now that would be thrilling. The magazine Charlie had founded less than a decade earlier—the Washington Monthly—contained the smartest, freshest, and often funniest writing about politics and government in the country, and I inhaled each issue in Harvard’s Lamont Library.

My boss that summer was Jim Fallows, a former Rhodes Scholar who had been named Carter’s chief speechwriter at age 27. Jim was a Charlie protégé, as was another journalist I revered, Nick Lemann, who had been the top editor of the Harvard Crimson when I was a freshman. Nick, who was amid his tenure as an editor, suggested I come over to the Washington Monthly’s ramshackle offices around lunchtime and maybe I could meet Charlie. Maybe.

Charlie was around 50 then, and, as in so much else, decades ahead of his time in his decision to work almost exclusively from home, a tiny house on V Street NW —twice borrowed against to keep the magazine afloat—that he shared with his saintly wife, Beth, and their son, Chris.

Beth’s work at a school paid most of the bills and allowed Charlie to stay home all day reading, clipping articles, and writing his quirky, insightful column “Tilting at Windmills” (Don Quixote was a hero) in illegible longhand. But mostly, he thought. In a world of received wisdom, Charlie was a genuinely original thinker with a mind that forged ores of common sense into a brilliant alloy of skepticism and idealism.

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The only time Charlie ventured out of the house was to drive his aging Oldsmobile sedan downtown for a wine-soaked lunch, which he used as a way of charming everyone from obscure Pentagon whistleblowers to Katharine Graham, who became a good friend (in part because Charlie introduced her to Warren Buffett)—despite the fact that Charlie, fearless as always, routinely ripped the Washington Post in the Monthly.

Charlie would usually stop by the office for 10 or 15 minutes on the way to lunch to drop something off for his hyper-competent assistant, Carol Trueblood, without whom (and this applied to her successors, as well) the magazine would simply not have appeared each month.

Nick figured I might catch him this way, and I almost did. But at the moment I arrived, Charlie was already scurrying out, a smiling West Virginia butterball, maybe five-foot-six, with deep-set raccoon eyes (like mine!), and better things to do than talk to Nick’s friend.

When I moved to Washington after graduation, I caught a glimpse of Charlie on the street, and he smiled again but—deep in thought—didn’t stop. I was not deterred. With a couple of New Republic pieces under my belt, I applied for a job at the magazine. No dice. I wrote a short article, which one of Charlie’s talented editors, Gregg Easterbrook, entirely re-wrote, and with good reason. No cigar. I wrote another longer article that was published after more extreme editing and was finally granted an interview with the great man. To my horror, it lasted only four minutes and consisted mostly of Charlie asking me if I got along with my father, a question that perplexed me. I later learned that he believed anyone who didn’t would never get along with him and, thus, should not be hired. It turned out I gave the right answer, which also had the advantage of being true.

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I was hired in 1981 for $8,700 a year with the understanding that like all of Charlie’s twentysomething editors (he employed only two or three at a time), I would put in 16-hour days doing everything from writing cover stories to taking out the garbage—then move on to a real job (in my case, at Newsweek).

Charlie’s intensity and (usually) endearing eccentricities lent a slightly comic dimension to his epigrams and what we called “the gospel”—the coherent collection of ideas that undergirded the magazine. Phone calls with him lasted a minute and a half, tops, and always ended with him banging down the receiver without saying goodbye. “Rain dances”—when Charlie would jump up and down and tell you what was wrong with your article, you, the country, and the world—lasted longer and, though he did no line editing, always led to a much better draft. I remember one day, my friend Cliff Sloan was sitting in my office when I was called in for a rain dance. Cliff heard Charlie yelling at me down the hall and thought I had been fired. I shrugged. It was business as usual.

Rain dances were not conversations. Those would come later—after I had moved on—and were a source of great satisfaction to me over the decades. This was especially true of the last time we spoke, earlier this year, as he sat propped up in his basement, aided by an oxygen machine and the glow of an artificial Christmas tree that—his own person to the end—he kept lit all year long. We talked about his road trips with JFK in West Virginia in 1960, the Biden presidency, and mutual friends, but mostly just basked in our warm feelings for each other. I had loved a Beatle and, like others in our extended alumni family, had come to believe a Beatle loved me, and my life was the richer for it.

The post “The Washington Monthly—contained the smartest, freshest, and often funniest writing about politics and government.” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Charles Peters, born in Charleston, West Virginia, just before Christmas in 1926, died at his home in Washington, D.C., on Thanksgiving Day. He was 96.

Charlie, as he was universally known, had been in declining physical health for several years, mainly from congestive heart failure. His mind, wit, encyclopedic recall, passion, curiosity, and sense of humor were undiminished until his last days. Charlie frequently said that his partnership with his beloved wife, Beth, who had been a ballet dancer before their marriage, was the greatest good fortune in his long and eventful life. Charlie and Beth celebrated their 66^th wedding anniversary last summer. She had been caring for him, with hospice support, in the same modest house in Washington where they had lived since coming to the city in 1961 as part of John F. Kennedy’s new administration. They had jointly determined that, if possible, Charlie would remain at home, with Beth, and in familiar settings until the end. Thanks to Beth’s strength, constant presence, and their hospice support, he could do so. My wife, Deb, and I join the vast network of Peters family friends in sending condolences and love to Beth, their son Chris, and all of their family.

Through his work and force of personality, Charlie directly influenced several generations of journalists and people in government and public life. It’s been more than 20 years since the American Society of Magazine Editors elected him to its Hall of Fame for the example he had set and the forms of journalism he championed during his tenure as founding editor of The Washington Monthly, from 1969 to 2000. In the days to come, you’ll hear in this space from many people who have learned from, worked for, or in other ways have been shaped by Charlie’s enormous presence in our field. Most of them will have laughed with Charlie and argued with him—perhaps both at the same time. They will have loved him and been exasperated by him, marveled at his insights and resented his quirky or imperious demands, rolled their eyes during his animated editorial-guidance pep talks known as “rain dances” but then been motivated or chastened by what he said. All of them have become more aware with the passing years how deeply grateful we are to have been part of his world.

This brief post is meant as a notice of Charlie’s death and an introduction to the appreciations to come.

For a few samples of earlier reflections on Charlie’s work and effect, please see this by Matt Cooper, on the occasion of Charlie’s 95^th birthday and this by Paul Glastris, Charlie’s worthy successor for the past 20-plus years as editor-in-chief of the Monthly. Paul’s piece was framed as a review of Charlie’s lastingly important final book, We Do Our Part: Toward a Fairer and More Equal America, which came out when Charlie was 90 and drew on his lessons as a young man during the Great Depression and World War II. I wrote an appreciation of the book as well. Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour did a special segment on Charlie and that book; Jonathan Martin wrote about it in The New York Times. Fifteen years ago, Ezra Klein, then of Vox and now of the Times, did a revealing Q-and-A with Charlie in the Monthly. Early this year, Paul Glastris explained why the “neoliberal” outlook Charlie was proud to have pioneered in the 1980s was entirely different from the crass and heartless market-mindedness that goes by that name now. Together, these pieces offer a very useful guide to the through-lines in Charlie’s thinking about patriotism, about justice, about kindness, and decency, about ways to recreate an American sense of idealism and fellow-feeling. I hope you’ll read and watch them all, read and think about We Do Our Part, and join in the reflections on Charlie and his influence that will be appearing on this site.

Few could dispute that Charlie Peters has mattered. His presence in the Hall of Fame of the American Society of Magazine Editors is only the most obvious indicator. It is more important to realize that he matters and that his ideas and example can play an ongoing indispensable role in responding to our country’s deepest problems.

Charlie Peters matters in the example he has given us for journalism: For reporting that is hard-headed but not hard-hearted, that rides on stories but is anchored in data and fact, that calls out the evil and failures in people and institutions but also recognizes their possibility for good.

He matters in the ideals he has set for his country: That it should be patriotic but not jingoistic, that it can respect the military without being pro-war, that it can celebrate ambition and entrepreneurship without forgetting those left behind, that it should be skeptical of government failures precisely because effective government is so crucial to America’s success.

He matters as a person: Showing that one can be flawed but triumphant, that awareness of one’s flaws can be the greatest strength, and that an open mind and a ready laugh are gifts to all. He fully enjoyed life’s pleasures, including, for many decades, season tickets to what was then a good local NFL team. And he was delighted to have lived long enough to see that team freed from the clutches of its previous evil owner! But in what he said, and more importantly in the way he lived, he warned against the Marie Antoinette effects of big money, lavish spending, and conspicuous consumption. Charlie believed that cheap could be fun.

Charlie Peters matters. Many who have known him will explain why he matters to them. In lieu of flowers, Beth Peters suggests that donations be made to The Washington Monthly, as the truest tribute to Charlie’s memory and ongoing example.     

We will miss Charlie tremendously even while his example remains with us.

The post Why Charlie Peters Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A little over 20 years ago, I made a short film in honor of Charlie Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly. The American Society of Magazine Editors was inducting my old boss and mentor to its Hall of Fame, a kind of Cooperstown of glossies. Held at a glitzy luncheon at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, the editors of venerable titles lavishly toasted themselves as the National Magazine Awards were handed out. (In retrospect, it had an end-of-an-era feeling, with 9/11 and the collapse of so many publications in the offing.)

My short film was a precis to Charlie getting his Thalberg. It began with shots of the Time-Life Building, the Newsweek building, and the Condé Nast tower, followed by voiceover narration: “… and this is the Washington Monthly.” Cut to rickety stairs in a dilapidated building over a liquor store in D.C.’s Dupont Circle.

Much of the crowd laughed, getting the contrast—and the improbable story of Charlie and the publication he founded in 1969, which has now survived far longer than many of the slick publications being fêted that day.

Charlie was almost 75 when he was hailed in 2001. Today, he deserves an even bigger toast as he turns 96. Please help us celebrate by donating to the Washington Monthly. Your donations keep this magazine going.

For those of us lucky enough to have visited with Charlie at his Washington home, we’ve found him physically slower but still sharp—a remarkable achievement for a man born during the Coolidge administration. When I saw him last, we talked family and Joe Biden. Charlie remembered a moment from my 1997 wedding like it was a month ago. (His lovely wife, Beth, a former ballerina, appears ageless.) Yes, Charlie’s body shows its age, and he doesn’t get out much, but his mind still glows.

Peters, with the Monthly as his crucible, reshaped the lives of so many young writers, including myself, who would go on to become prominent journalists. They include James Fallows, Jon Meacham, Katherine Boo, Nicholas Lemann, Michelle Cottle, Jonathan Alter, Gregg Easterbrook, Stephanie Mencimer, David Ignatius, Joe Nocera, and Michael Kinsley, another Hall of Fame winner. It wasn’t just that a bevy of smart kids passed through the Washington Monthly, as if it were another ticket to punch between college and The New York Times. It’s that we were transformed. We learned, in Charlie’s phrase, to cover Washington like an anthropologist covers a South Seas island. And not just to cover it with an eye for what’s wrong, but to write about things that work—a task that, especially at the time, most journalists eschewed, fearing that they’d seem opinionated or biased.

Donate now to the Washington Monthly.

I came under Charlie’s spell in the 1980s, when he hired me as an editor, and we worked in those ratty offices I mentioned (and an earlier set we vacated when the rent got too high). My salary was $10,000 a year—around $26,000 in today’s purchasing power, actually just enough to get by in pre-gentrified Washington. I’d fallen in love with the magazine when I was in college at Columbia in New York City. My best friend, Marc, subscribed, and I got hooked reading his copies.

Eventually, I became so enamored that I habitually raced every month to a nearby luncheonette/newsstand on Morningside Heights, which got the issue a bit ahead of Marc’s. I’d lap it up with scrambled eggs and a bialy. It was funny and irreverent, yes, but also softhearted and hardheaded.

Working for Charlie was not, shall we say, easy. In the days before HR departments were everywhere and the phrase “work-life balance” had become a cliché, Charlie rode us hard. Usually, he had two young editors at a time cranking out a monthly publication, a staff far smaller than even other financially strapped opinion magazines. We’d work for two years and then move on. Why endure the low pay and long hours? Charlie was not a masseur of copy (“Let’s move this paragraph here”) or a Rolodex impresario (“Call Senator So-and-So for comment”). He expressed his ideas in his inimical “rain dance,” a kind of sermon, if you will, in which he’d become increasingly animated about a point he was trying to convey to one of us. His corpus of ideas was fondly referred to as “the gospel.”

I remember one article I suggested about how our culture lacked a Charles Dickens, a first-rate writer with a large audience who could evoke sympathy for the poor, something well needed at the time (it was the Reagan era). Charlie immediately got the idea and elevated it. We need someone who not only sparks empathy with the easily lovable, law-abiding Cratchit of A Christmas Carol, he told me. But also with the criminal, decidedly non-saccharine Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist, which is much more challenging but crucial.

Charlie could also be a tough taskmaster. 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. Fearing getting stuck, my cabbie refused to take me back to the marginal neighborhood where I lived. (This sounds like a Dickensian tale, but 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 real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t the Colorado senator who had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. The scandal about the presidential frontrunner transfixed the mainstream media. Charlie understood that the real scandal was Hart, whom we liked, 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.

At 96, Charlie is still a lodestar guiding me. Part of it is political. He has retained his belief, born of experience during and after the Depression, of how government can change lives for the better. As a supporter of John F. Kennedy in the crucial 1960 West Virginia primary and later as the director of evaluation of the Peace Corps, he saw how politics could inspire and how government succeeded and failed.

Donate now to the Washington Monthly.

But much of our admiration stems from Charlie’s personal example, and not just because he was a Negroni man decades before the hipsters. So many idealists come to Washington to do good and stay, as the phrase goes, to “do well”—meaning to enrich themselves. Charlie is a huge exception. He paid himself a pittance and lived on the edge of financial ruin to make this magazine work. When Paul Glastris (also a former editor) took over the Monthly in 2001, he kept Charlie’s lessons and ethos, frugality on everything from higher education—with the magazine’s revolutionary college guides—to its powerful reporting on monopolies. As Paul says, all of us have Charlie’s voice in our head, asking, “Is that good enough?”

If you think the Monthly’s brand of solutions-based policy-focused journalism is essential, and if you want to celebrate Charlie’s 96th birthday, there’s something you can do: Make a donation. In fact, do it right now.

As a nonprofit, we cannot do our work without your support. And as a celebration of Charlie Peters, I can’t think of a better gift. Plus, as a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in December, 2021.

The post Charlie Peters, Washington Monthly Founder and Mentor to Leading Journalists, Turns 96 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In February 1979, I wrote an article for The Washington Post’s Metro section on what I regarded as a near miracle: The Washington Monthly, under the leadership of Charlie Peters, had lasted a full decade, during which time “many better-funded, better-read periodicals have come and gone.”

Having myself run an alternative weekly that lasted a mere three years, that decade seemed like an astonishing feat—one inspired and guided, as Monthly readers know, by its founder and tutelary spirit.

To call Peters eccentric, I admitted, would have been an understatement. Who else, in a mere 10 years, would produce journalism that challenged so many sacred beliefs? Consider just a few of the stories he published: “Abolish Social Security,” “Cancel the National Debt,” “The Case for Nuclear War,” “The Case Against Day Care,” and “Nuclear Hijacking: Now Within the Grasp of Any Bright Lunatic.” Charlie might have been a country boy from West Virginia, but he sure had chutzpah.

Two years ago, we celebrated a feat that was far beyond my 29-year-old imagination when I wrote the Post story: TheMonthly turned 50 years old. And during that time, the magazine has continued to publish reporting that is by turns brilliant, insightful, surprising, and sometimes (let’s face it) annoying—we’re not afraid to tell our readers what they don’t want to hear.

Peters, who turned 95 this week, continues as its tutelary spirit (we live in fear of displeasing or, worse, boring him), but what once seemed an impossible task—replacing him—has now been accomplished. Paul Glastris has been editor for two decades, and the Monthly continues its tradition of reporting and analysis that readers can’t find anywhere else. Those who have worked with Paul can testify that he also continues the Peters tradition of hands-on editing, of a kind that writers rarely find elsewhere.

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The Monthly has also been a training ground for brilliant young journalists who are willing to be underpaid, overworked, and aggressively edited. The familiar names are so familiar that I won’t recite them here. The Monthly continues to hire, train, and graduate young writers who will be the familiar names when the Monthly celebrates its 100th anniversary.

I myself can claim Monthly heritage. I was the publication’s first and only fiction editor from 1977 to 1978. Having a fiction editor seemed like a good idea at the time. Having read James Thurber’s The Years With Ross and Walter Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson, I was clear in my mind that a great magazine should publish fiction and belles-lettres as well as exposés and thought pieces. Alas, a year of solicitation did finally produce one memorable piece of fiction in its pages—an excerpt from The House of God by Samuel Shem, a hilarious depiction of hospital bureaucracies that remains in print today. (“Any doctor I know read House of God and was transformed by it,” Dr. Sanjay Gupta once wrote.) But it turned out that the supply of fiction for a small political magazine on a par with “The Case for Nuclear War” was more limited than we had hoped, and so I departed the masthead. (I have returned, decades later, in the more fruitful role of legal affairs editor.)

The point of that story is that the Monthly wasn’t afraid to try for greatness even if it meant falling on its face. And we’re still not afraid to take risks, or do things out of the ordinary, or question the conventional wisdom. We’re a small magazine, and we pride ourselves on consistently punching above our weight.

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If you’ve read this far, you undoubtedly have your own favorites—and you also no doubt know about the Monthly’s revolutionary college rankings, which challenge the dominant educational hierarchies by daring to suggest that colleges should be judged on how well they serve the public and their students rather than on the size of their endowment or the exclusivity of their admissions offices.

But the Monthly has only made it this far because of a lot of effort and a lot of help from people like you. Even now, more than half a century after its birth, each decade of survival remains a breathtaking achievement. We need your support as we push not only to survive but to thrive.

If you think the Monthly’s brand of journalism is essential, and if you want to keep it alive, there’s something you can do: Make a donation. In fact, do it right now.

As a nonprofit, we cannot do our work without your support. Plus, as a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

Indeed, as this horrible year draws to a close, we hope that you will remember the Monthly in your giving decisions. After all, if we falter in our support for this indispensable American institution, where will future readers go when they want to read the case for nuclear war?

The post The Washington Monthly’s Indispensable Chutzpah appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One morning 20 years ago, while my wife Kukula and I were getting our kids ready for school, I got a call from a colleague at the Washington Monthly saying that our offices were violently shaking, as if hit by an earthquake. I jumped in the car and sped down Massachusetts Avenue, listening to the radio. There was no news of any seismic activity in the area.

I had taken over as the magazine’s editor in chief from founder Charlie Peters a couple of weeks before. The Washington Monthly was still producing great journalism and attracting world-class talent, but its finances, never good, were in the red zone. I knew that my most important job was to find a way to keep the doors open. I had not figured that this would also mean keeping the walls from collapsing.

I arrived at the old row office building north of Dupont Circle and, skipping the elevator (a tiny, unreliable contraption with one of those collapsible manual doors), climbed the stairs to the Monthly office—a warren of mismatched desks separated by rickety partitions with a single internet connection, shared with the environmental NGO upstairs, coming in through the window. The bohemian working conditions had descended into outright squalor thanks to a landlord who, eager to drive out the tenants in order to upgrade the building, had reduced trash pickup from weekly to monthly. This had greatly increased the population of roaches.

Upon arrival, our fresh-out-of-college associate publisher, Christina Larson (now an award-winning science writer and foreign correspondent), walked me through the damage. Chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. Hairline cracks were spreading on the walls, fast enough to watch. The front-door frame was now so off-kilter that the door itself had to remain open (one problem solved!). We soon discovered the source of the trouble: A construction team had mistakenly removed a load-bearing wall beneath us.

We needed to get out of those offices immediately but didn’t have the spare funds to move. So I contacted the landlord, met him on the sidewalk in front of the building, and, at the suggestion of editor Stephanie Mencimer (now an investigative reporter at Mother Jones), offered not to call the city building inspectors if he would buy out the remaining months of our lease. There was a noticeable quaver in my voice—the guy had six inches and 75 pounds on me—but after angrily waving his finger in my face, he agreed.

The money he shelled out was enough to cover the security deposit and first month’s rent on a new office space and to hire a cut-rate moving company that editor Nick Thompson (now CEO of The Atlantic) had discovered from a handbill stapled to a nearby telephone pole. The movers turned out to be recently released inmates from the Lorton Correctional Facility. One of them had an angry meltdown and had to be summarily dismissed by the foreman, but the rest were very nice. After they finished hauling our furniture to the new offices, we paid them, then set off a couple of cans of insect fogger, locked the doors, and went home for the weekend. We came back on Monday, swept out the roach carcasses, and wiped down the furniture.

Our new digs were on the 10th floor of the Woodward Building at H and 15th. Though located only two blocks from the White House, where I had been working months before as a speechwriter for President Clinton, the building was famous in D.C. for its low rents. On the ground floor was a Croatian barber, a Christian bookstore, not one but two boutiques mysteriously selling only bikinis (we suspected they were recruiting offices for an escort service), and a liquor store—the only place within a mile of the White House where you could buy a cold 16-ounce Colt 45 to go. The offices above, with their dark wood doors, transoms, and frosted glass, had a Guy Noir vibe—the tenants in fact included a private eye along with a variety of lefty nonprofits.

Charlie had handed me control of the magazine on the condition that I would transform it into a nonprofit, the better to attract tax-deductible donations. I spent much of the following months reaching out to scores of Monthly investors and trying to convince them to donate their shares to the new 501(c)3 that my brother Bill, a private equity investor, and his lawyer were setting up for us pro bono. Business manager Claire Iseli and I had to do some detective-like sleuthing to track down the heirs of those who had died. Thankfully, the vast majority of the investors generously cooperated, especially once I explained that their shares were effectively worthless. One of them, the famed investor Warren Buffett, sent Charlie a cheeky letter noting that the magazine had, in effect, “always been a nonprofit.”

Though a lousy business, small magazines can be a great way to influence the world. That’s the case I made to Markos Kounalakis, a foreign correspondent turned tech executive whom I knew through Greek American political circles. Markos heartily agreed, and for the next six years he served as the magazine’s publisher, president, chief financial benefactor, and my intellectual partner. With his support I was able to recruit a string of brilliant young journalists—Josh Green, Nick Confessore, Josh Marshall, Amy Sullivan, and Ben Wallace-Wells—and set them loose on George W. Bush’s Washington.

During Bush’s first term, and especially after 9/11 when his popularity soared, the mainstream press was slow to grasp some of the new and alarming ways the administration was wielding power—and establishment Democrats seemed to have no idea how to fight back. That gave the Monthly the opportunity to publish a series of investigative and analytical scoops about the administration’s antiscientific and incompetent policymaking on everything from terrorism to stem cells; its strategy of overwhelming Americans and the press corps with sweeping, impossible to verify, and yet clearly false statements; and its transformation of K Street into a new kind of political machine. We were aided in this effort by a series of insightful bloggers we hired, like Kevin Drum, Steve Benen, and Ed Kilgore, who brought this critical approach to day-to-day debates in the news (a tradition carried on in later years by D. R. Tucker, Kathleen Geier, Daniel Luzer, Joshua Alvarez, Martin Longman, Nancy LeTourneau, and David Atkins).

Journalists and Democrats had begun to wise up to the GOP’s game by Bush’s second term. So the Monthly began to pivot to wonkier subjects we felt were of major importance but that the press and political class weren’t focused on or sometimes even aware of. These included the growing consolidation of the U.S. economy, the increasingly inegalitarian nature of American higher education, the hollowing out of expertise in Congress and federal agencies, and electoral reforms like vote by mail that held out the promise of reinvigorating democracy. These stories didn’t necessarily get us attention in outlets like The New York Times. But they found influential audiences in government, think tanks, and academia. They also attracted much-needed funding from forward-thinking foundations such as Lumina, Hewlett, Gates, Kauffman, and Arnold Ventures. And, over time, they pushed the issues we were writing about onto the front pages and into law.

The work of producing these policy stories was done by a constant flow of up-and-coming journalists who signed on for tough two-year stints as Monthly writer/editors before moving on to better-paying gigs at bigger enterprises—people like Charles Homans, Rachel Morris, Zach Roth, T. A. Frank, Mariah Blake, John Gravois, Haley Sweetland Edwards, Anne Kim, Gilad Edelman, Saahil Desai, Ryan Cooper, and Matt Connolly. The most enjoyable part of my job has been getting to work with these gifted young people. The most bittersweet has been watching them leave. I’ve long marveled at the insanity of the Washington Monthly business model: hire great people, train them in Monthly ways, and then hand them to your competitors.

In a way, the Monthly is a sort of uncredentialed grad school for policy journalism, and my role is thesis adviser. Fortunately, it’s not a job I have to do alone. There’s a whole brain trust of veteran journalists and academics associated with the magazine, many of whom I’ve worked with for decades, who both write for us and provide intellectual guidance to the editors and me. They include Phil Longman, Garrett Epps, Kevin Carey, Robert Kelchen, Shannon Brownlee, Phil Keisling, Tim Noah, Tom Toch, Keith Humphreys, Steve Teles, Barry Lynn, and J. J. Gould. Charlie Peters remains an inspiring presence—at 94, his health’s not great, but his mind still is. Contributing editors from Charlie’s era are also a constant source of support; three of them, Nick Lemann, Michelle Cottle, and Steve Waldman, serve on our board. Matt Cooper, with whom Steve and I worked as young editors under Charlie in the 1980s, is now our executive digital editor. He’s recruited an all-star cast of online writers like Bill Scher, Chris Matthews, Jodie Kirshner, Margaret Carlson, and Jennifer Taub. Longtime Art Director Amy Swan makes us look sharp, and veteran Managing Editor Amy Stackhouse not only keeps the trains running but our spirits high. And a seasoned group of colleagues on the business side, now led by our deputy director, Alice Gallin-Dwyer, continues to keep our doors open.

Doing so is not easy. Journalism is under immense stress from tech platforms that have monopolized our advertising dollars and from a Trump-controlled Republican Party that has trained nearly half the country not to believe the facts we present. Like you, I’m worried about the survival of our democracy.

But I’m luckier than most, because I have a job that gives me leverage to fight back. And I get to do so from pretty nice digs. After the Woodward Building went condo in 2005, we decamped to another affordable space, then another, and finally landed at our current location in a lovely old building south of Dupont Circle owned by a benevolent family that offers reasonable rents to nonprofits that don’t throw loud parties. The family even paid to have the whole office beautifully refurbished in 2019 in return for us signing a 10-year lease. Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve hardly set foot in the place over the past year. But we’re looking forward to returning soon. I have no plans to leave my post before the lease runs out.

If you appreciate the Monthly’s unique brand of journalism, then please consider helping us by making a donation. Give whatever you can—$10, $20, $100, $1,000. If you donate $50 or more, you’ll receive a complimentary one-year subscription to our print edition. Your contributions to the Washington Monthly are vital, tax-deductible, and much appreciated.

The post Reflections on 20 Years of Editing the Washington Monthly appeared first on Washington Monthly.

So much has changed since 2001, some good but a lot of it not. There was 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the election of our first Black president, and our first orange one. We’ve endured a financial crisis, a pandemic, two impeachments, and a searing assault on the Capitol.

But during the tumult, there’s been only one editor of the Washington Monthly.

For two decades, Paul Glastris has not only led the Washington Monthly. He’s saved it. In 2001, as he was readying to leave Bill Clinton’s White House, where he was a speechwriter, Glastris had the array of options that greet those leaving such a prestigious post. Paul could have found a lucrative corporate sinecure. An acclaimed journalist, he had reported from Berlin, Chicago, and the Balkans during its 90s bloodbath. He could have ambled back to the world of well-paying magazines. (Yes, kids, those existed in 2001.)

[Help us celebrate Paul Glastris’s 20 years at the Washington Monthly. Make a gift today.]

Instead, Glastris chose to return to the magazine he’d worked for years earlier. The Washington Monthly, the plucky but venerable magazine located in, shall we say, less than glamorous offices over a liquor store near Washington’s Dupont Circle where the heat was less than reliable, was coming to the end of an era. Charles Peters, for whom Paul and I worked for in the 1980s, had founded the magazine in 1969, was approaching 80 himself and ready to release the reins.

Glastris took a risk. With two small children and no family fortune, almost a requirement for small magazine owners, he cobbled together funding for the Monthly. He did not take a salary the first year, relying on side gigs and the modest earnings of his late wife and later Monthly book editor, Kukula. Most importantly, Glastris, on Peters’ advice, made the Monthly a non-profit. When told of this development, Warren Buffett, the famed investor and an early backer of the Monthly, quipped: “It’s always been a non-profit.”

The change in tax status was more than an accounting shift. It allowed the Monthly to garner support from philanthropists like Markos Kounalakis and foundations too numerous to mention here that, through their generosity, fueled the Monthly’s groundbreaking work on education, health care, anti-monopolism, corporate accountability, and other aspects of American life sorely in need of more scrutiny. Among Glastris’s innovations was an annual college guide that disrupted the old test-scores-and-admission-rates rankings with an entirely new way of looking at post-secondary education based on what’s good for non-wealthy students and the country.

While the Monthly had evolved under Paul, it has hewed to its mission of standing up for the average person and explaining government in ways that can make conservatives, and sometimes liberals, uncomfortable. But it has always done so with the belief that Washington can do good—something Glastris and Peters knew from their time in government. Peters, one of the founders of the Peace Corps, famously mentored unknown writers who became renowned, including James Fallows, Jon Meacham, Michael Kinsley, Nicholas Lemann, and Michelle Cottle. Glastris helped launch future luminaries like Joshua Green, Nick Confessore, Anne Kim, and Haley Sweetland Edwards. Working for the Monthly has never been lucrative, but it’s always been a springboard.

As someone who’s known Glastris for decades, I can tell you how little the man has changed. We first met when I was a college senior looking for a job and he spent part of his honeymoon (!) reading my clips. When we worked together at the Monthly in the 80s, his steely logic and iron bladder saved many an article we’d written off as doomed. I’m most grateful that he used his film school education and steady hand for the dubious honor of holding the then oversized video camera at my son’s bris. In all that time, he’s been impossibly kind, breathtakingly smart, and an incessant champion of his Greek heritage. Paul has also been a champion of the kind of journalism we need—richly reported, persuasive, aimed at convincing a reader and not, like so many news feeds and cable lineups, reinforcing their biases. I’m proud to call him boss and friend.

[Help us celebrate Paul Glastris’s 20 years at the Washington Monthly. Make a gift today.]

If you think the Monthly’s brand of policy-focused journalism is important, if you want to celebrate Paul’s two decades at the magazine’s helm, there’s something you can do: make a donation. In fact, do it right now.

As a nonprofit, we cannot do the work we do without your support. And as a celebration of Paul Glastris, I couldn’t think of a better gift. As a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly. Donate today.

The post The Washington Monthly Celebrates as Our Editor-in-Chief Marks 20 Years at the Helm appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Most of us, as we get older, tell ourselves that we’ll keep working past age sixty-five, or at least use our skills and experience productively in retirement. That’s especially true of writers. But few of us will pull off what Charlie Peters has done. At ninety years old, Peters, my mentor and the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, has just published an important book on the central issue facing the country.

We Do Our Part is a history of how American political culture evolved from the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth to a get-mine conservatism in which someone like Donald Trump could be elected president. It’s a fall-from-grace story interlaced with Peters’s rich life experiences and generally consistent with the Greatest Generation narrative we’ve all come to know. The arguments and anecdotes will also be familiar to anyone who has read Peters’s previous books and the Tilting at Windmills column he wrote for so many years.

But as he told me when, as a young Washington Monthly editor, I groused about having to commission a version of a story we’d previously published, “there’s no sin in repeating the truth if the truth hasn’t sunk in yet.” The truth Peters aims to impart in this book is one that all Americans, and especially liberals, need to understand: An America in which the elite serves the interests of the majority isn’t a pipe dream. That world actually existed, in living memory. And there are signs, in the country’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump, that it could exist again.

Peters was a six-year-old in Charleston, West Virginia, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office at the height of the Great Depression. He remembers unemployed men, mostly from the outlying rural areas, selling apples on the street corners and knocking on the back door of his home asking for food. He also vividly remembers the popular culture of his youth—Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart playing Average Joe heroes, comedies that mocked the pretensions of the rich. Over the course of the 1930s he saw the numbers of apple sellers and beggars decline as a result of New Deal policies that were crafted and implemented by thousands of idealistic bureaucrats who had poured into Washington to do their part for the country.

At seventeen, he caught a glimpse of the most brutal side of that era when the local police chief gave him a tour of the jail and, “trying to treat me as a man of the world, said he wanted to show me how they dealt with niggers. He opened a door to a closet that was full of bloody garments.” But soon after, as an Army draftee, Peters broke his back in basic training, and during several months spent recuperating in a racially integrated hospital ward saw signs of a more hopeful future. “Our laughter came so frequently and with enough volume that the nurses would tell us to quiet down. There was absolutely no racial tension. [It]…made you think of what could be.”

From there came Columbia University, law school at the University of Virginia, and a move home to Charleston to join his father’s law firm. In 1960 he ran for the state legislature while also helping lead John F. Kennedy’s presidential primary campaign in West Virginia. Both men won, and after a short time in the statehouse Peters, like the young New Dealers a generation earlier, went to Washington. There he ran evaluations for the newly founded Peace Corps, a job he held well into the Johnson administration.

In the standard telling, the decline of big government liberalism begins sometime around the Tet Offensive and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Peters fixes the date much earlier: 1946. That’s the year a number of senior advisers to the recently deceased FDR, people like Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas, decided to become lobbyists. Few New Dealers had done this before, so the connections and insider knowledge these men possessed were rare and valuable. Arnold and Fortas grew rich and powerful—the advance guard of what would become a vast Washington industry.

Peters’s concern isn’t just with how lobbying corrupted the political process, though it certainly did that—Fortas, for instance, was denied the job of chief justice of the Supreme Court thanks to shady payments from a client-connected foundation—but more broadly with how it corrupted the incentives and worldview of those who came to Washington. Men like Fortas, a brilliant Yale Law School grad from a modest background who owned multiple homes and Rolls-Royces, set a new lifestyle standard in Washington. As more staffers and ex-congressmen followed the lobbying path, those still in government began to see their salaries, which they once considered comfortable, as penurious. (Eventually they became so, as all the high incomes bid up real estate prices and the local cost of living.)

This acquisitiveness was connected to another rising sin: snobbery, specifically the practice of signaling superiority to the hoi polloi through one’s purchases and discriminating tastes in food, drink, and culture. JFK himself, despite his war heroism and inspiring call to service, embodied the trend by marrying the high-born, fashionable Jacqueline Bouvier and surrounding himself with celebrities.

The twin viruses of greed and snobbery are not, to say the least, conducive to a focused and sympathetic concern for average Americans. But Peters reminds us that these behaviors were not widespread among educated people in Washington or throughout America in the 1950s and ’60s. The postwar prosperity and compression of incomes continued, the draft was still nearly universal—even baseball greats served their two years—and the federal government continued to deliver impressive new national projects, from interstate highways to Medicare, that the vast majority of Americans appreciated.

All that changed in the tumultuous late ’60s and early ’70s. Rising crime, race riots, and draft-deferred college students protesting the Vietnam War while working-class kids fought and died alienated white working- and middle-class voters. Lyndon Johnson’s lies about Vietnam, Richard Nixon’s about Watergate, and Carter’s fecklessness made educated Baby Boomers cynical about the government.

Under these conditions, the viruses of snobbery and selfishness spread wildly over the course of the 1970s and ’80s. Graduates from top colleges flocked to high-paying jobs at law firms and investment banks rather than to public service, and the caliber of the civil service accordingly declined. Magazines that catered to consumer chic and cultural signaling, like New York, Vanity Fair, and Washingtonian, grew fat with advertisers and subscribers. On PBS, the TV home of the educated elite, Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street Week became the number one show.

“Money had become a major and open interest of the meritocratic class,” writes Peters, in a way it simply hadn’t been from the 1930s through the ’60s. As a consequence, “the cause of lower taxes and of conservatism in general flourished, as shown by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.” Even elites who didn’t support Reagan were sympathetic to the growing idea that the market should deliver more “shareholder value.” So they didn’t protest (some even cheered) when corporations closed plants, busted unions, and spent their cash on stock buyback schemes rather than on new products and services. To the extent that they expressed their public spiritedness, it was by supporting causes—gay rights, the environment—that weren’t the central concerns of most middle- and working-class voters, whose incomes were stagnating while the meritocrats’ were soaring.

The result was greater and greater resentment of the educated elite. The Rush Limbaughs and Roger Aileses of the world fed off that resentment to boost their ratings and advance a conservative movement that didn’t, in the end, improve their audiences’ economic situation—a fact that Trump exploited by running against establishment conservatives as well as liberal elites.

Peters credits Bill Clinton with being the only Democratic president or candidate in decades who managed, through his policies and gift for empathy, to bridge the gap between the meritocrats and the white middle and working classes. And he sees evidence that Democrats have awakened to the problems of greed, snobbery, and elite detachment, including “the radical increase in awareness of income inequality” and “some meritocrats overcoming their snobbery to make a serious effort to understand the Trump vote.” He also sees signs “that people are beginning to question their relentless pursuit of money, or at least some of the reasons why they think they have to make a lot of money.”

More concretely, he is heartened by examples of elites returning to government service. These include the investment banker Steve Rattner, who joined the Obama administration and helped save the auto industry, and the top Silicon Valley talent Obama personally recruited to the new U.S. Digital Service after the disastrous rollout of the health care exchange website. Peters makes a plea for more Americans, especially liberals, to run for office at the local, state, and national levels—something that, in the months since his book went to press, actually seems to be happening.

If anything, I think Peters underestimates the degree to which Americans are hungry to serve. What confounds his call for more of the best and brightest to join government is a lack of opportunity. The problem is political. There are eight applicants for every slot in AmeriCorps, the national service program founded by Bill Clinton. But Democrats’ attempts to expand the program have been consistently checked by Republicans. Trump’s budget office has drawn up plans to eliminate it altogether. More broadly, the federal workforce, at 2.8 million employees, is the same size it was in the 1960s when Peters was part of it, even though the U.S. population since then has more than doubled and the federal budget has quadrupled in real terms. Lawmakers control the federal head count and don’t want to be seen as “growing the bureaucracy.” The most Democrats in Congress have been willing to do is beat back repeated Republican efforts to further decimate the federal workforce.

To make up for the inadequate number of staff, the government increasingly relies on contractors. Peters bemoans this trend, citing numerous examples of how it has hurt government’s performance. He’s right. But he doesn’t call for the obvious solution: boost the number of federal employees so more of the work can be done in house. This would require hiring a million new federal workers, according to University of Pennsylvania political science professor John DiIulio, and boosting their pay as well.

That is also the key to curbing the power of lobbyists, which won’t happen merely by inveighing against their greed. Lobbyists’ power comes mainly from their control of information—about the industries they represent, about the ways government programs work—that congressional staffers, many of them young and inexperienced, often lack. The way to neutralize that power is to strengthen government’s capacity to get that information independently, by hiring more staffers and researchers and paying them more so they can make a decent living without having to join the private sector.

Of course, a politician who called for hiring a million more federal workers, and raising their salaries, might appear suicidal in the current political climate. But if Peters is correct—and I think he is—that a key to bridging the class gap is for more Americans, especially the elite, to serve in government, a political way has to be found. The same bilious anti-government fever that gave America Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich has now given us Trump. Peters reminds us that government service was once a broadly shared and elite experience and value. To cure the fever, today’s liberals must figure out how to make it so again.

The post Charles Peters on Recapturing the Soul of the Democratic Party appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This budget is a fantasy if the administration believes it will preserve EPA’s mission to protect public health,” Gina McCarthy, who served as the agency’s leader from 2013 through the end of the Obama administration, said in a statement Wednesday. “It ignores the need to invest in science and to implement the law. It ignores the lessons of history that led to EPA’s creation 46 years ago. And it ignores the American people calling for its continued support.”

Sadly, support for the EPA’s pre-Pruitt priorities has been lacking among the American electorate; if voters generally recognized the threat posed by human-caused climate change and the EPA’s crucial role in reducing carbon, the House, Senate and White House would not be in the clutches of climate deniers.

As Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project noted late last year, those who do recognize the threat posed by human-caused climate change haven’t always consistently shown up at the ballot box to support climate hawks on Capitol Hill:

Approximately 20.1 million environmentalists are registered to vote, according to Environmental Voter Project research. But in the 2014 mid-term elections, only 4.2 million of them voted, and in the 2012 presidential election barely 10 million of them voted…

Millions of long-registered voters likely stayed home on Election Day [2016], which is particularly bad news for the environmental movement, because we tend to be poor voters.

Regardless of party affiliation, environmentalists need to address their turnout problem. We need to start voting for one simple reason: Politicians want to win elections. To do that, they focus on issues of importance to voters, not non-voters…

Still, there’s a real opportunity hidden in these statistics. Although voters don’t prioritize environmental issues, non-voters do. Large majorities of Americans support government action to address climate change and protect the environment. Furthermore, committed environmentalists already go to great lengths to act on their beliefs: They diligently recycle, they bike to work, and they install solar panels on their roofs, all of which require much more time and effort than voting.

In short, millions of Americans are already fully persuaded environmentalists; now we just need to change our habits and start voting. Fortunately, changing people’s habits is much easier than changing their minds.

Yes, the Women’s Marches were huge and historic. Yes, the planned marches in April in defense of science and in support of climate action will be significant. However, all the marches, protests, signs and hats in the country will not turn back Trump’s tyranny. Only voting can do that.

Speaking of voting, Washington Monthly founding editor Charles Peters has a fascinating piece in the New York Times about the political and cultural forces that created the Trump electorate in formerly Democratic strongholds such as West Virginia. Peters observes:

[W]hen the average American feels looked down on, his interests minimized or ignored, he can not only become less generous, he can also sometimes become downright ugly…

It is not going to be easy for liberals to win back red states like West Virginia. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and Donald Trump have been too successful in encouraging ugly feelings like the senseless hatred of Barack Obama. But liberals can start on the road back if they stop wounding themselves, advocate fair play for all, and instead of looking down on Trump voters as a bunch of boobs and bigots, listen to their [legitimate] concerns. If we don’t listen, how can we persuade?

John Lydon declared three decades ago that anger is an energy–and as Peters notes, that anger has driven right-wing voters to the polls consistently for years, bringing us to this moment of moral crisis.

That raises the question: why can’t progressive anger be harnessed the same way politically? By all rights, the degradation of our planet, the destabilization of our democracy, the horror of handgun violence and the injustice of income inequality, among other issues, should serve as a constant impetus for progressive turnout, the way guns and abortion serve as a constant impetus for right-wing turnout.

“Resistance” will be futile if those horrified by Trump’s agenda don’t commit themselves to becoming consistent voters in the future. Even if Trump loses in 2020, another right-wing reactionary will come down the pike sooner rather than later, and only sustained progressive turnout will prevent the next Trump from seizing power. Plenty of Americans consider themselves “woke” now, but what happens if they go right back to sleep once Trump leaves office?

The post Marching is Good. Voting is Better. appeared first on Washington Monthly.