Just Politics

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A Lefty Legend Pleads for a Return to a New Deal Ethos
By JONATHAN MARTINMARCH 7, 2017

WASHINGTON — Charles Peters, the renowned Washington Monthly editor, is going on 91, does not get around very easily and was disgusted enough by President Trump’s address to Congress to let loose a few profanities in his gentle West Virginia drawl.

But Mr. Peters remains an optimist, believing that salvation is still possible if the country returns to the true faith of his New Deal youth.

“Maybe I’m old,” he said in an interview in his living room here last week, “but I’m forever hopeful about the Democratic Party.”

Mr. Peters has spent much of his life in and around politics. He was once a young state legislator who thought he wanted to be governor. Then he felt the tug to the nation’s capital, where he was one of the first executives of the Peace Corps.

Eventually he founded and ran a feisty, liberal-leaning policy magazine perhaps best known for launching the careers of dozens of prominent journalists, including James Fallows, Jon Meacham, David Ignatius and Katherine Boo. Now he has written a book that some of those old charges think amounts to a last testament.

To hear Mr. Peters himself tell it, though, the book, “We Do Our Part,” is a desperate plea to his country and party to resist the temptations of greed, materialism and elitism — vices he believes have corroded the civic culture and led to the Democrats’ failure last year.

“I’m trying to grab people by the lapels and say, ‘We’ve got to change,’” he said. “And I feel that there is a realism to that hope because of the shock of this election.”


Mr. Peters’s book — the title is taken from the motto of the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration — is not a memoir. But his own formative experiences are at the core of his cri de coeur.

Democrats, Washington and too much of the country, he argues, have drifted from the sense of shared purpose that lifted America out of the Depression, created the will to win World War II and fostered the rise of a more egalitarian, if still inequitable, society.

Mr. Peters saw it firsthand. As a child, he witnessed his parents hand food to hungry strangers who came to the back door of their Charleston, W.Va., home.

Later, as a young lawyer, he oversaw the local presidential campaign of a Catholic senator hoping to win over a largely Protestant state. The success of John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Democratic primary there helped forge a conviction that Mr. Peters feels his party must not lose sight of today, even as more working-class whites drift from what was the party of their class.

“The better angels of the state’s voters had won out, engraving on me the lesson that prejudice can be overcome,” he writes.

Mr. Peters’s idealism is undiminished: He thinks that the sort of blue-collar white voters who just rejected Hillary Clinton in his native state, where she lost by 42 percentage points, can be won back if Democrats are again seen as the party of the common man rather than the liberal professional class. But he spends much of 274 pages outlining why that may prove so difficult.

Through a series of anecdotes, statistics and other plucked-from-the-news items that will be familiar to anyone who read his “Tilting at Windmills” column in Washington Monthly, Mr. Peters recounts how liberals were once invigorated with the public-spirited fervor of the New Deal and New Frontier, but sold out. Race-baiting conservatives then swooped in, he says, and the country was left the worse for it.

“Our national problem is that too many of our cultural winds are blowing us in the direction of self-absorption, self-promotion, and making a barrel of money,” he writes.

He piles up the evidence, reserving most of his scorn for the liberal meritocratic class that he believes has allowed Democrats to be depicted as out of touch.

“By 1985 there were more investment banks conducting job interviews at Harvard than any other profession,” he writes. Only eight retiring congressmen became lobbyists through the entire 1930s, while 41 retiring lawmakers from the class of 2010 alone joined the ranks of influence-peddling.

Mr. Peters even gleans signs of American decline and rising greed in some strange weather vanes, including the shifting motives of those who betrayed the country. Once, reputed spies such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss spied out of “their commitment to an ideology,” he writes. But the two most high-profile moles of more recent years, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, “did it for the money.”

Mr. Peters may not be above stretching his case, but his argument is well timed. In the final pages, he appeals to former President Barack Obama to eschew “making a lot of money and hanging out with Anna Wintour” and focus instead on “teaching how government works” to inspire a new generation of leaders.

“We cannot continue to have our role models continue to cash in,” Mr. Peters warns in a book to be released a week after it was reported that the former president and first lady, fresh from their Caribbean vacation with the British tycoon Richard Branson, will make about $65 million (some of which will go to charity) for writing separate memoirs.

His other prescriptions reflect his preference for New Deal populism mixed with what he fashions as “neoliberalism,” a reform-minded approach to governance that questions progressive pieties on such issues as education.

Mostly, though, Mr. Peters would like to see one final revival of the animating spirit of his youth, an awakening to the importance of government service, teaching, journalism and the worth of public life. Spurning “conspicuous consumption,” a favorite phrase, may seem far-fetched for a country that just elected Donald J. Trump to be president.

But even a few minutes after warning a visitor last week that he was becoming weary, Mr. Peters leaned forward from his chair and continued “evangelizing,” as he put it.

“Think of the great days when we were together fighting for fairness and justice for all,” he said, again summoning an idealized version of the Roosevelt era. “We can be that way again.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/politics/charles-peters-washington-monthly.html?ref=politics