PBS NewsHour
Journalist Charles Peters interviewed on PBS NewsHour in 2017
Charles Peters, the founder and longtime editor of the Washington Monthly, died on Thanksgiving at the age of 96. I have a certain affinity for founding editors of small magazines with large influence, especially ones that seek to challenge the conventional wisdom.
Peters, universally known as Charlie, was a superb editor and contrarian, as well as a lovely human being. At the Monthly, he launched the careers of an exceptional generation of journalists, including James Fallows, Nick Lemann, Suzannah Lessard, Taylor Branch, Katherine Boo, David Ignatius, and numerous others. He hailed from West Virginia where he served in the legislature. He worked for JFK’s election in 1960 and came to Washington to serve in the Kennedy administration’s Peace Corps.
Our paths crossed in many ways. We were friendly rivals, institutionally and ideologically. I was present at the founding meeting of the Monthly in 1968, where Charlie proposed to compensate writers partly in the magazine’s stock. He published a long piece of mine in the Monthly’s second issue in 1969, dealing with the bureaucratic struggles to make affirmative action work, a classic topic for policy wonkery and deep reporting on what it takes to make government work. It went through several drafts.
Where Peters’s contrarianism went astray was in his fervent embrace of what he named neoliberalism. And Peters’s use of the term, as opposed to its meaning in economics, is the source of untold confusion.
For economists, going back to Friedrich Hayek and then Milton Friedman, neoliberalism is the idea that despite what seemed to be the lessons of the Great Depression as informed by the insights of John Maynard Keynes, free markets were perfectly efficient after all if government would just leave them alone. The 1980s were the heyday of those beliefs in the academy and in public policy.
For Peters, who published “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto” in 1982, initially as a Washington Post piece and later expanded into a book, neoliberalism meant a less bureaucratic form of liberalism, true to verities but willing to challenge old orthodoxies. He held the labor movement to blame for wage-driven inflation. He was willing to add income tests to Social Security.
Given the tendency of government to get captured by special interests, the idea of a less bureaucratic form of liberalism had its appeals. But one problem for Peters’s version was timing. By the time Peters wrote his manifesto, Reagan was in the White House and it was open season on all forms of liberalism. And Peters’s ideas ended up giving aid and comfort to those Democrats who thought that they should move right with the times.
It was that premise that the Prospect was founded to challenge. To regain credibility and power, we argued then and now, Democrats and progressives needed to be better updated New Dealers, not a second center-right party.
These arguments antedated and informed the creation of the Prospect. In May 1985, Mother Jones published a cover piece titled, “‘But Charlie …’ ‘Now Bob …,’ Charles Peters & Robert Kuttner Battle for the Soul of Liberalism,” featuring the two of us as representatives of two dueling concepts of how to revive American liberalism.
With the ascendancy of “New Democrats” and the presidency of Bill Clinton, the two rather different meanings of neoliberalism had an unfortunate convergence. Clinton both embraced the Peters critique of statism and implemented aspects of the neoliberal economic formula, such as deregulation and free trade.
In recent years, as both forms of neoliberalism have proven a debacle for working Americans and the Democratic Party, the Washington Monthly has moved away from either brand of neoliberalism. Under its skilled editor since 2001, Paul Glastris, the Monthly reads rather more like much of the Prospect. About a decade ago, the two magazines even had preliminary discussions of a possible merger, but we ultimately decided that our respective DNA was too different.
Charlie Peters was everything one prizes in an editor, even when we disagreed on issues. He was both exacting and kind, willing to take a chance on young writers, a rock of integrity and decency, open-minded while sticking to his own core convictions. He treated a magazine as a broad community of writers and readers and a place to have interesting arguments. It was those traits that engendered such fierce affection and loyalty.
