Neoliberals in the wilderness.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter

Walter Shapiro, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1977 to 1976, is now a senior writer for Time.

About the same time Charlie Peters was boldly launching this magazine in early 1969, an obscure 29-year-old conservative political analyst was putting the final touches on a book that would chart with eerie precision the rough political waters that lay ahead. The author was Kevin Phillips and the prophetic book was, of course, the Emerging Republican Majority. Its cover depicted Richard Nixon's 1968 triumph with the kind of color-coded map that has since become all too familiar to election night TV viewers: an uninterrupted blotch of Republican red stretching from Virginia to California. For as Phillips foretold in his opening sentence, Nixon's ascendancy "bespoke the end of the New Deal Democratic hegemony and the beginning of a new era in American politics."

How obvious it all seems now, but how obtuse we were then. Unveiling a liberal political magazine in 1969, inspired by the failures of Lyndon Johnson, turned out to be akin to starting a Republican journal in 1933 designed to be a corrective to Herbert Hoover. Laudable in theory, but a tad irrelevant during the next fiveterms of FDR and Harry Truman. Of course, when I joined the Monthly after the debacle of the 1972 election, at a time when every Volvo still defiantly brandished a McGovern sticker, there still was an unmistakable sense that the Nixon era was merely a painful period of penance before liberal Democrats would regain their rightful place in the White House. The Democrats were America's natural governing party; the Republicans were just the cynical beneficiaries of the nation's anguish over Vietnam, civil rights, and the countercultural revolt.

All through the Nixon years, the Monthly maintained a certain disdainful distance, as if the Republicans' handiwork was too ephemeral to be taken seriously. The magazine was never designed as a nonpartisan journal of public administration; we regarded ourselves as a kind of teaching tool for right-thinking Democrats. The cautionary lessons about the culture of bureaucracy and the need for independent program analysis presupposed an administration that shared the Monthly's liberal goals. Each article was a potential object lesson for the next Democratic president. Each restatement of the magazine's Gospel was a sermon to remind the faithful of the follies that had destroyed LBJ and the Great Society. Even the sharp ad hominem...