Government can work.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Effectiveness of public agencies - Cover Story

Where it got us in the past and how to get it back on track

I had my job interview at The Washington Monthly in February 1976. Everything went extremely well. In those days most of the life of the magazine took place in three locations, none of which exists anymore: the La Salle Building, a combination cheap residential hotel and office building, where the actual office was; the old Sholl's Colonial Cafeteria, with its constant low hum of people talking to themselves, where the staff hung out; and the Safari Lounge, where Charles Peters, the editor-in-chief, lunched every day amid mounted heads of big game (unless someone else was paying, in which case he went to Jean-Pierre). I moved progressively through the office, Sholl's, and the Safari Lounge without incurring any major damage, and I was beginning to allow myself to luxuriate in a feeling of new membership.

But when I returned to the office with Charlie after lunch, I saw something that sent an icy stab of anxiety through me. While we were out, the latest issue of the magazine had arrived from the printer; on the cover, in giant-sized letters, was the headline CRIMINALS BELONG IN JAIL.

It's surprisingly difficult to reconstruct the standard contents of a young liberal's mind back then. It wasn't exactly that I, and the people at the Monthly who had argued heatedly against using that headline on the cover, believed that criminals belonged out of jail; it was more that we believed you just couldn't say things like that. Why not? Because the information might fall into the wrong hands. Because you felt that most of the people who believed that criminals belong in jail believed it for the wrong reasons, and you didn't want to be in league with them. Because liberals should present a united front. Because to want criminals in jail was somehow also to want to abandon all attempts to alleviate poverty. It put you on the wrong side.

Much of the early history of this magazine can be understood as a struggle to get liberals to stop blindly clinging to the weak ideas in liberalism. The feeling wasn't so much of convincing people to change their minds about things; it was of overcoming the sense of "that may be true, but you just can't say it" that pervaded liberalism at the time. One of the main taboo subjects--probably the main one, in terms of the energy the magazine expended on it--was the inefficiency of government bureaucracies. This subject was considered the province of diehard anti-New Dealers and Taftites, people who either hadn't been able to come to terms with the realities of a modern industrial society or who were using a stated concern about government inefficiency as a polite cover for opposition to the basic health, education, and welfare provisions of the modern welfare state. Even among Republicans, ominous rhetoric about "big government" was considered faintly embarrassing--the kind of thing that one doled out for Nebraskans at fundraisers but didn't really mean--until about 1978. It wasn't, again, that everyone didn't know bureaucracies tended toward inefficiency, it was that the idea seemed to be disreputable and not to lead anywhere useful. Frustration with bureaucracy had been almost an overriding theme of American life during World War II, for example, but nobody would have suggested that we not fight because of it.

No change in the general climate of political thought over the last 10 or 15 years has been as dramatic as the one in the attitude toward government: We've gone from intellectual dishonesty about the genuine issue of inefficiency all the way over to a prevailing conviction of government's complete inefficiency. In the 1970s, Pandora's Box arguments were often thrown at The Washington Monthly: If you open up certain subjects for discussion, unimaginable disaster will result...