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.  

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

The first time I met Charlie Peters was in a job interview. It was the fall of 1999: I was 24, he was 72, and I was a candidate to be an editor at the Washington Monthly. I trudged up the stairs to the third floor of 1611 Connecticut Avenue to a well-worn office filled with old magazines and crossed by the occasional cockroach. Charlie sat across from me and a big wooden desk with a box for incoming manuscripts and one for outgoing manuscripts that he had marked up with a felt green marker. “What is your relationship like with your father?” he asked a few minutes into the conversation.

“Well,” I responded, “my father drinks way too much, but we get along great.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but the interview essentially ended right there. I was hired.

I didn’t know much about Charlie at the time. Google barely existed, and Charlie didn’t care that it did. I had only ended up there through happenstance. I was an ambitious young man flailing around trying to figure out a career. I had gotten an interview to work with an environmental group in New York City, but I showed up in a sweater and pants that didn’t fit. I probably hadn’t combed my hair. After about half an hour, the woman interviewing me declared that this wasn’t the place for me. She mused, correctly, that I probably didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. She suggested I apply to work at the Washington Monthly. “They hire people like you.” I had never heard of the Monthly, but that afternoon I sent in a letter asking if I could apply.

A week or two later, an editor at the magazine named Robert Worth gave me a call. He didn’t have a job, he explained, but maybe I could write them a story for which they would pay 10 cents a word. A few months later, my story had run, and I was sitting across the wooden desk, inhaling the musty scent of the office and wondering why Charlie had asked me about my dad.

Charlie grew up in West Virginia and came to Washington in 1961 along with John F. Kennedy. He worked in the Peace Corps and then, in 1970, decided to found a magazine devoted to the principle that journalism could make the government work better. It could expose corruption, puncture the image of the city’s many phonies and grifters, it could reward the heroic bureaucrats who did their best inside of unheralded agencies. He wasn’t political. He wasn’t conventional. He wasn’t predictable. He loved the practice of politics but found the horse-race coverage tiresome. He had no social pretensions and scoffed at the many folks in the city who did. He didn’t care a wit about money unless he needed it to pay off a debt accrued by the Monthly.

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He also wasn’t really a journalist, but he had an eye for them, as any reader of this website knows. To start the publication, he hired three young editors, all of whom would go on to have extraordinary careers: James Fallows, Taylor Branch, and Suzannah Lessard. As the years went on, he rarely faltered in the young men and women he chose. The contributors were pretty good too. Not long after I began there, we started running submissions from a brilliant upstart by the name of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I don’t know whether Charlie had an eye for talent, or whether he nurtured it. Maybe it was a bit of both. There were usually two editors at a time, and they served two-year terms. The deal was tough: you were paid very little and worked very hard. In return, you got responsibilities you probably didn’t deserve. I was paid $12,000 a year, and I worked around 100 hours a week. I sometimes slept on the office floor, and I very rarely took weekends off. I lived with my father and learned from Charlie new ways of saving money. You should call people during lunchtime when they’re away, so they’d ring you back and save you on the phone bill. We borrowed Internet from the office downstairs when I routed an ethernet wire up the fire escape. In return for all these sacrifices, I got to edit and write stories that people with power read.

Charlie wasn’t easy. The second story I filed was about the gambling industry in Georgia and Charlie didn’t much care for it. I handed it in on a Saturday morning and was sitting in the office the next day when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard Charlie’s familiar West Virginia drawl. There was no hello or greeting. Just a rhetorical question: “Why would someone give me a story like this? Because they’re an asshole. A fucking asshole.” Then he hung up.

The next day, I sheepishly walked up Connecticut Avenue with my draft to meet Charlie at the restaurant where he was working and having lunch. I apologized for the draft and asked for clarification on what I had done wrong. The problem, he explained, was that I had written it like “a pompous dickhead.” I didn’t get much guidance beyond that. I then took the draft to Worth, who laughed at my tale and helped me fix the work. The story ran that month.

There are different ways mentors can help you improve, just as there are different ways that parents can help their children. One can be tough; one can be inscrutable; one can be kind; one can offer detailed instructions and guidance. There’s no one right approach. Now that I’ve had children and thought more about it, I’ve decided that there’s one variable that matters most: the parent, or mentor, must have genuine care or even love. And this is what made Charlie’s method work. I knew he hated the gambling story. He screamed at me more than a few times in the years to come. But I never doubted that he cared and that he wanted the best for me as well as the magazine. He cared intensely about the country; the magazine was the tool he had to help; and his young editors had to shoulder the burden of getting the darn thing out. So, I kept going, kept working, and kept trying to improve. After two years, I was unquestionably a better journalist than when I began.

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I left the Monthly in 2001, right about when Charlie passed the reigns over to the wonderful Paul Glastris, a former Monthly editor who had just wrapped up his tenure as a White House speechwriter. Everyone who loved the Monthly feared that Charlie wouldn’t last long once he’d stepped away. He had lived hard and didn’t exercise much. How could he go on without the thing that, besides his family, he loved the most?

Charlie kept going though. He wrote a column for the magazine, which was like a proto-blog before blogs became a thing. He continued to mentor his former editors. When my career was going badly, he’d tell me to keep faith. When it went well, he took delight. He was charming to me, just as he’d been charming to all the people who didn’t work for him during the years running the Monthly. When my wife first met him, after months of hearing my war stories, she declared, “He’s just a big teddy bear.”

Last year, I made my final visit to his house, the same one out in Georgetown that he had moved into in 1961. I went down to the basement where Charlie sat, covered mostly in a blanket. He had made it through Covid, but he was now 95 years old and didn’t have much time left. We talked about our years together and his hopes for The Atlantic. When I left, he said something that men don’t really ever say to each other: “I love you.”

I had made plans to visit Charlie this week when I came down to Washington for the Atlantic Festival. I got news the night before my trip, though, that he had lost consciousness and wouldn’t be able to see me. He died Thanksgiving week at his home with Beth, his wife and beloved companion of 65 years. I should say it here that I loved him too.

The post “Why Would Someone Give Me a Story Like This?” 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.

Many Americans are looking toward 2022 with a sense of dread. Not so here at the Washington Monthly. Sure, we recognize the gathering threats—from mutating viruses to rising illiberalism. We just don’t share the belief that our institutions and citizens are too weak to fight back.

What’s most needed is the right weaponry—that is, the specific political ideas, policies, and arguments that can turn the tide. That’s what we at the Washington Monthly try to provide. After all, one of the definitions of the word magazine is “a storehouse of ammunition.”

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As a regular reader, you know that the Washington Monthly made a difference in 2020—especially our advocacy of vote by mail, a policy we’ve championed for nearly a decade and without which Donald Trump would likely still be president. And in 2021, the Biden administration began to deploy the anti-monopoly policies the Monthly has been writing about for more than a decade. We think the substantive and political payoff of these policies has only begun.

In 2022, we’ll be unveiling a new set of political and policy ideas—many of which Democrats can advance without having to ask Mitch McConnell for permission—that can help win elections and move the country forward. There are plenty of fine publications that tell you what everyone in Washington is talking about. Only the Washington Monthly tells you what everyone should be, and eventually will be, talking about.  

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But we need your support. Independent media outlets always struggle, and COVID-19 and predatory tech monopolies don’t help. But you can. We rely on grants and donations to fund our crackerjack team of reporters and editors. And because we’re a nonprofit, your donation is tax-deductible. Please give before the year ends, and 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.

In this season of giving, please give.

Wishing you health and happiness.

The post Scrappy New Year 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.

Wisconsin-based reporter John Nichols co-chairs the National Commission for Voter Justice, an organization committed to promoting citizen participation in our elections. He’s had a front row seat as his state’s governor has taken the lead in a national effort to suppress voter turnout, particularly among left-leaning groups and demographics.

Gov. Scott Walker and his cronies have worked hard to tip the balance against competitive elections in Wisconsin — with extreme gerrymandering, restrictive voter ID requirements, schemes to limit early voting, and an assault on the independence and integrity of the former Government Accountability Board.

Walker has emerged as a national leader in the corporate-sponsored push to upend practices and procedures that are designed to make voting easy. This has put the governor and many of his closest allies — including House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Janesville — at odds with Wisconsin’s historic commitment to high-turnout elections.

Not every Wisconsinite Republican has been willing to along:

Former state Senate Majority Leader Dale Schultz broke with the Republican caucus in 2014 on voting rights issues, telling Wisconsin radio hosts Mike Crute and Dominic Salvia: “I am not willing to defend them anymore. I’m just not and I’m embarrassed by this.”

“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics,” explained Schultz, who did not seek re-election that year. “We should be pitching as political parties our ideas for improving things in the future rather than mucking around in the mechanics and making it more confrontational at the voting sites and trying to suppress the vote.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner tried to rectify the situation:

The official biography of one of Wisconsin’s senior Republicans, Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, proudly declares: “Throughout his tenure in Congress, Jim has fought to protect the gains made during the civil rights movement. As Judiciary Committee chairman, he introduced the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. After approximately 20 hearings, the measure passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. However, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of this law. After, Jim introduced the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014, a bipartisan, bicameral modernization of the original 1965 law that ensures Americans’ most sacred right is protected.”

Sensenbrenner continues to advocate for the revitalization of the Voting Rights Act — along with Congressional Black Caucus members such as Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore and Georgia Congressman John Lewis.

Sensenbrenner does not have many Republican co-sponsors for his legislation. But he is undaunted. “Ensuring that every eligible voter can cast a ballot without fear, deterrence and prejudice is a basic American right,” he explained several years ago. “I would rather lose my job than suppress votes to keep it.”

But Sensenbrenner has been stymied by his colleagues in the House of Representatives. The Republicans (state and federal) have moved full steam ahead to gain every ounce of advantage they can out of the Holder v. Shelby ruling. Meanwhile, recent Supreme Court rulings have gone even further to help Republicans game elections through racially motivated gerrymandering and voter purges.

Last week, Stanford political science professor Adam Bonica wrote a column for the New York Times that helped explain both why the Republicans are so motivated to mess with people’s voting rights and why the Democrats would be well-advised to fight back as forcefully as possible.

The simplest way of explaining this is that the demographics and voting preferences of the electorate have developed in such a way that higher voter turnout helps the Democrats and hurts the Republicans. This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it gives the Republicans a strong motivation to discourage civic engagement and participation, and to go after people’s voting rights and all efforts to make voting easier and more convenient. Second, it makes the Democrats look like they’re being partisan when they promote civic engagement and participation and work to protect people’s voting rights. From the Republicans’ point of view, easier registration, more days of early voting, more voting machines/shorter lines, vote-by-mail, etc., are all partisan efforts to take away their jobs and their majorities. And, the thing is, it’s simply true that they’ll generally do worse if more people vote.

There’s two conflicting values at play here. It’s a seriously dangerous development that one party is so threatened and frankly disadvantaged by voter participation that they (with a major assist from the Supreme Court) are systematically looking to roll back voting rights and reforms. The more the Democrats push back, the less consensus on the basic American value of representative democracy there will be.  Yet, if the Republicans are the only ones willing to use their power to shape electoral law, they will ultimately succeed in their quest to destroy our system of government and the values that underpin it.

That’s why the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly is dedicated to convincing the Democratic Party to take up the banner of civic participation and voting rights. Our editor-in-chief explains the game plan in Winning Is Not Enough and he also discussed it in a The Hill television interview (watch here) yesterday with Krystal Ball. Some of his ideas are echoed in Prof. Bonica’s piece, including statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington DC, and universal vote-by-mail.

At the conclusion of his argument explaining all the ways that Democrats can benefit from higher voter participation, Prof. Bonica offered the following rationale:

This is not about weaponizing electoral institutions for partisan gain; it is about delivering on the promise of American democracy. The nation is at its best when democracy is on the rise. Many of our most celebrated figures — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez — fought to enfranchise the disenfranchised and left a more inclusive republic as their legacy. Let’s finish what they started.

It’s a genuine problem that things have developed in such a way that “delivering on the promise of American democracy” by encouraging people to participate in our civic life and protecting their right and ability to do so is synonymous with partisan gain for the Democratic Party. But that’s where we are. Fighting to win elections has become fighting to have meaningful elections at all.

I’d argue that young voters will eventually get older and participate at higher levels, and given their strong distaste for the Republican Party, that will wipe away the Republicans’ ability to undermine our democracy. But there’s the rather large matter of the Supreme Court. It is setting up to have a strong conservative majority for the next few decades, and that’s going to mean that this war will not end on favorable terms anytime soon.

What’s certain is that the Democratic Party can’t avoid this fight.

The post The Democrats Have to Fight for Our Democracy Because the Republicans Won’t appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Boston hedge fund billionaire Seth Klarman lavished more than $7 million on Republican candidates and political committees during the Obama administration, using his fortune to help underwrite a GOP takeover of the federal government.

But the rise of Donald Trump shocked and dismayed Klarman, as did the timid response from the Republican-controlled House and Senate, which have acquiesced rather than challenge the president’s erratic and divisive ways. So, in an astonishing flip, Klarman, at one point New England’s most generous donor to Republicans, is taking his money elsewhere: He’s heaping cash on Democrats.

He’s given roughly $222,000 since the 2016 election to 78 Democrats running for Congress, according to federal election data from 2017 and a preview of Klarman’s first-quarter donations provided to the Globe by a person familiar with his giving.

“The Republicans in Congress have failed to hold the president accountable and have abandoned their historic beliefs and values,” Klarman said in a prepared statement to the Globe, opening up for the first time about the reasons behind his change in political giving. “For the good of the country, the Democrats must take back one or both houses of Congress.”

Klarman said he’s financing his new political donations using his share of the $1.5 trillion tax cut Trump signed into law late last year.

“I received a tax cut I neither need nor want,” said Klarman, who Forbes estimates is worth $1.5 billion. “I’m choosing to invest it to fight the administration’s flawed policies and to elect Democrats to the Senate and House of Representatives.”

It’s impossible to resist assigning a cynical partial motivation to this action; one can’t help wondering if Klarman is angling for a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award a year from now. One also can’t help asking Klarman why he didn’t realize the profound perversity of the Republican Party years ago. Then again, sometimes it takes a while before people who were apparently sound asleep when the GOP got grotesque hear the alarm bell, even if they never fully become “woke.”

It would be nice if this were a true moral reckoning, a moment when Klarman confronted in full the profound immorality of Republican politics, a time when Klarman apologized for having ever supported a party that has been laser-focused on dividing this country from the very moment Barry Goldwater rejected the 1964 Civil Rights Act, if not earlier. Not to be too snarky about it, but it seems that Klarman, at the very least, understands that one can’t spend or invest their money if one has been killed in a nuclear war. (Too bad his fellow Republican billionaires don’t grasp that common-sense concept.)

However, understandable cynicism notwithstanding, there is something to be said for doing the right thing even for the wrong reasons. Klarman may be a bit of a self-aggrandizer, but if he is now using his fortune in an effort to hold Trump accountable, so much the better, no?

Yes, it is very likely that the moment Trump is gone from the scene, Klarman will once again seek the right’s warm embrace. After all, he did donate to pro-Chris Christie and pro-Marco Rubio super PACs in 2016, and if the GOP nominates a Republican Presidential candidate in 2024 with a less primitive personality than the 2016 and 2020 nominee, one can envision Klarman returning to Republican folly (think of former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who became an “Obama Republican” in 2008 only to champion Mitt Romney in 2012). However, the need to hold Trump accountable is of such paramount importance that progressives wouldn’t be wrong to welcome Klarman as a temporary ally, particularly if he’s willing to use his money to focus on ensuring high anti-Trump turnout in November.

Right-wingers love to say that freedom isn’t free. Freedom from the tyranny of Trump will certainly cost a lot. Is it necessarily wrong to accept the assistance of an imperfect individual who’s nevertheless willing to bear some of that cost?

The post Money Changes Everything appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The conclusion of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was, for the most part, greeted with relief. Up to the day before the Opening Ceremony, there were plenty of reasons to predict a disaster: pollution, multiple security threats, crime, the Zika epidemic, a looming economic recession, and an ongoing political crisis that had led to the removal of President Dilma Rousseff. But spectators and athletes departed mostly content and without any major incident—except for one American athlete with “over-exaggerated” story-telling abilities.

But it turns out the costs, financial and otherwise, have further damaged a country that only last decade put the B in BRIC. “During the Olympics, the city was really trying hard to keep things together,” Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian who teaches international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a Brazilian university, told the Associated Press recently. “But the minute the Olympics were over, the whole thing disintegrated.”

AP reports that creditors are calling in $40 million of debt. The iconic Maracana stadium, refurbished for the 2014 World Cup at the cost of $500 million, sits abandoned and was recently ransacked by vandals who ripped up seats and stole televisions. 3,600 brand new apartments that housed 10,000 athletes are mostly unused; the developer has since sold only 260 units in the $1 billion complex. Rio is now considering providing loans to public employees to purchase the remaining units. The upgrades to infrastructure have mostly benefited the already wealthy areas of the city, further exacerbating inequality in one of the most unequal societies in the world. A major corruption investigation is underway, tying Olympic building projects to dirty money that made its way to dozens of Brazilian politicians and businessmen. All this has added further strain to the country’s already ruinous economic recession.

This wasn’t unforeseen. The New York Times wondered if the Olympics help economies, and the answer from economist Philip Porter was pretty straightforward: “The bottom line is, every time we’ve looked — dozens of scholars, dozens of times — we find no real change in economic activity.” Abandoned Olympic villages litter the globe. “The beautiful stadiums and training facilities that Athens constructed in 2004 have mostly sat idle since [their Olympics]—though some of them now house refugees. The billions of dollars Greece borrowed to build these facilities helped tip the country into its current crushing financial crisis,” Washington Monthly’s editor in chief Paul Glastris wrote in the Washington Post before the Rio Olympics began.

The obvious solution, Glastris argued, is for the Olympics to be held in the same location (Greece) every four years:

All of this waste, risk and corruption is utterly unnecessary. The ancient Greeks held the Olympics in the same wooded sanctuary on the Peloponnese for a thousand years with no evident complaints in the extant literary record. We should do something similar for the modern Olympics: pick a city or country to be the permanent host — one each for the Summer and Winter Olympics.

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who has had to contend with Greece’s financial instability, agrees.

Standing in the way, however, is the irretrievably corrupt International Olympic Committee. Perhaps national and municipal governments around the world will finally realize that there’s no glory in playing host.

The post Rio Olympics Prove Devastating to Brazil appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Embattled “Today” anchor Billy Bush is likely to get a $10 million lump settlement from NBC after his abrupt ouster following the vulgar revelations on the Donald Trump tape.

Bush and his legal team have been battling with NBC News chiefs to iron out a settlement — which, sources exclusively tell Page Six, will involve a large lump payment said to be the full value of his three-year contract, valued at around $10 million.

Bush’s attorney Marshall Grossman told Page Six on Friday, “Negotiations between Billy and NBC are progressing, and will continue to progress, and hopefully we will reach a conclusion in the near future. We were preparing for battle, but today we are preparing for settlement.”

High-powered Hollywood attorney Grossman declined to discuss what they were hoping for in the settlement, or the exact timing of the deal.

As Paul Glastris observed last year, Bush is not the only member of the Bush family to receive, shall we say, special treatment from NBC. Rather curious, no?

Of course, Bush could receive a $50 million settlement from NBC, and he still would not be able to buy his reputation and good name back. Think about it: when Bush passes away, his bantering with Trump will be in the first line of his obituary. He will forever be linked to the moment he rooted for a pervert to take advantage of the vulnerable. Last night, journalist and producer Callie Crossley of Boston’s PBS affiliate, WGBH, explained just how repulsive Bush’s actions were:

When Crossley referenced Anita Hill and her description of “enablers,” it reminded viewers that Billy Bush’s uncle, George H. W. Bush, nominated Hill’s alleged harasser, Clarence Thomas, to the US Supreme Court. Billy Bush was 20 years old when the controversial Thomas confirmation hearings took place. What was the lesson he took from those hearings–that one could treat women like third-class citizens and get away with it? Will he learn a different lesson now?

The post The Winners of Life’s Lottery appeared first on Washington Monthly.