Nicholas Lemann’s inaugural column at Tilting at Windmills is packed full of food for thought. It’s of particular interest to me because working at the Washington Monthly has compelled me to consider the magazine’s history and role in shaping the Democratic Party, and it’s a history that has often been at odds with my personal politics. Yet, I haven’t felt that way for quite some time. I think our views began to converge during the early Bush years and actually wound up close to the same place by the end of Obama’s first term. But this feeling of mine didn’t have much real content; it was more of a nebulous sense I had, before I read Lemann’s mea culpa:
If anybody asked me for a book to read that would capture the atmosphere around the Washington Monthly in the 1970s—other than articles in the magazine itself—I’d suggest Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism, which was published in 1969. This was an attack on liberalism from the left, by a prominent political scientist. Lowi’s scorn was particularly directed at what he called “interest group liberalism”—the takeover of the apparatus of government, such as congressional committees and regulatory agencies, by people who wanted some goodie or other and knew what to do to get it. The Vietnam War was raging, the cities were burning, and Washington seemed unable to address the country’s real problems. Interest group liberalism had to go.
The prospect of replacing interest group liberalism with something that was better targeted at the needs of the country, and also more effective, was deeply alluring. In those days we were about as distant from the heyday of the New Deal as the 1970s are from us today; you’d still see white-haired former aides to FDR (Joseph Rauh, Thomas Corcoran) wandering around the streets of downtown Washington. They had come to town to do good and had stayed to do well, and now it was time to sweep their old corrupted structures away and create new, purer ones. This was also the long-forgotten heyday of Ralph Nader as a super-respectable figure, who had an initiative staffed by bright young people aimed at reforming just about every department and agency of the government. Deregulating industries, using the power of markets to make government work better, embracing technology, targeting government social programs on people who really needed them, helping consumers rather than politically connected businesses, taking down trade barriers, reducing the power of the Democratic Party establishment and the labor unions, orienting government toward the public interest rather than toward interest groups—all of this was our dream.
I don’t mean to renounce these ideas entirely, but in retrospect they present a couple of problems. First, we had too much faith in the ability of people like us, smart and well-intentioned upper-middle-class (defined by family background, not by what the Monthly paid) Washington liberals, to determine what was and wasn’t a genuine social need. Our scorn for interest group liberalism led us to undervalue the process of people organizing themselves and pushing the political system to give them what they wanted from it. Second, we failed to anticipate the way that eliminating all those structures that struck us as outdated—the government bureaucracies, the seniority system in Congress, the old-line interest groups—would almost inevitably wind up working to the advantage of elites more than of the ordinary people on whose behalf we imagined ourselves to be advocating. The frictionless, disintermediated, networked world in which we live today is great for people with money and high-demand skills, not so great for everybody else. It’s a cruel irony of the Monthly’s history that our preferred label for ourselves, neoliberal, has come to denote political regimes maximally friendly to the financial markets. I’ve come to see the merits of the liberal structures I scorned in my younger days.
The Washington Monthly’s editor in chief, Paul Glastris, says he has a more sanguine view of the magazine’s impact on politics and government. As a newcomer who doesn’t know all the history, it’s hard for me to judge. As a broader matter, though, I think there are a whole host of areas where the takeover of the party by New Democrats in the 1990’s had unintended and often quite lamentable results.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, we can see Bernie Sanders sounding like a relic of the 1970’s.
“If I run [for president], my job is to help bring together the kind of coalition that can win—that can transform politics. We’ve got to bring together trade unionists and working families, our minority communities, environmentalists, young people, the women’s community, the gay community, seniors, veterans, the people who in fact are the vast majority of the American population.”
Because I came of political age in the 1990’s, I never fought the ideological battles of the 1970’s, and I’ve never understood the hostility to “interest group politics.” I come from the progressive grassroots, what Lemann refers to as “people organizing themselves and pushing the political system to give them what they wanted from it.” From the beginning, I was working in the inner city among people of color, and so it wasn’t difficult for me to avoid letting my “well-intentioned upper-middle-class” background give me the false impression that I knew the genuine needs of the underclass. I learned their genuine needs from them. And that made it painfully easy to spot myopia and condescension from the ivory towers of the white progressive movement.
It also taught me not to think of the progressive movement as a collection of discreet interest groups. I didn’t initially have much interest in trade unions, for example. But I quickly realized that they were doing the same work I was doing, organizing the underclass to vote, to get a higher minimum wage, better working conditions, safer streets, and a better safety net. Rather than thinking of the labor movement as a discreet interest group, I think of them as an essential partner.
