Act II, winning an election.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Neoliberalism

Nicholas Lemann, an editor of the Washington Mongthly from 1976 to 1978, is national correspondent for the Atlantic.

The day that I had my job interview at The Washington Monthly a new issue had just come into the office. In huge type, the cover said, CRIMINALS BELONG IN JAIL. It's a sign of how much the liberal world has changed that at the time, February 1976, this seemed shocking to me-it was the kind of thing that you just couldn't say, even if it was true. In order to restore vitality and intellectual honesty to liberalism, much of the psychic energy of the magazine in those days was devoted to raising all the points that liberals felt shouldn't be discussed because it would give the conservatives ammunition. But the assumption was always that liberalism would remain the reigning creed in America. We were not trying to move the Democratic Party to the right. We were not ourselves moving to the right. We were trying to make liberalism even better and stronger than it already was.

Even more than the urge to avoid issues like crime and defense, the aspect of conventional liberalism that the magazine most disliked was its el itism-its snobbery and its mistrust of politics, which seemed rooted in a belief that most people simply weren't very bright. So it's ironic, and sad, that The Washington Monthly's greatest success over the 20 years of its existence has been in influencing the liberal elite-not about elitism, but about issues. On most public policy questions, the Eastern Establishment, such as it is these days, has come around to the positions this magazine has been advocating since its founding. You can bet the rent that the next Democratic presidential candidate will point out that criminals belong in jail.

The problem that nags the most right now is that the acceptance of The Washington Monthly's positions is limited to a fairly small group. Neoliberalism, in essence if not by its unfortunate name, would win in a referendum taken among journalists and policy analysts. But it's still death on election day because of what comes after the "neo." The 1988 presidential election was especially depressing in this regard, because George Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan, is not a great political candidate, and seemed to draw his electoral strength mainly from tapping a reservoir of public distrust of liberalism. The unpopularity of liberalism is obviously rooted more in "populism" than in substantive disagreement; conservatives have been able to...