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**NOVEMBER 27, 2023**

On the Prospect website

The Blueprint

The far right has a plan to remake America. They even wrote it down. BY
HAROLD MEYERSON

The Amazon Loophole Is Driving the Fentanyl Crisis

A rule allowing 'de minimis' items to be shipped from overseas
without fees or inspections has facilitated the illegal drug trade. BY
DAVID DAYEN

Escaping Public-Transit Quagmires

New York City moves to overcome its public-transit dysfunction and is on
the road to stability. Boston, not so much. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

Kuttner on TAP

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**** Charlie Peters and the Odyssey of
Neoliberalism

The uses of small magazines in the battle of ideas

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.

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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.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

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