A Usable Past for Liberal Government.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

Two thousand nineteen is the fiftieth-anniversary year of the Washington Monthly. That's got me thinking about how to describe the role the magazine has played, and continues to play, in the life of the nation. It's a complicated question, about which I'll have more to say in the future. For now, one answer I can offer is that the Monthly has long been in the business of trying to create a "usable past" for liberal government.

That phrase comes from an influential 1918 essay, "On Creating a Usable Past," by Van Wyck Brooks. The famed literary critic argued that American novelists and poets of his day lacked boldness, inspiration, and a shared sense of purpose because they too often emulated European writers, whose instincts and traditions were far different from their own. To find their voice, he maintained, American writers needed to rediscover the work of their own literary forebears, like Herman Melville, whose books at the time were largely forgotten (hard as that may be for later generations of high schoolers to believe).

Those earlier writers, Brooks noted, had grappled with the same tensions as his contemporaries--in particular, trying to create art and find meaning in a country overwhelmingly devoted to commerce. Only by studying those earlier works and creatively articulating the qualities they shared (a task Brooks spent his professional life on) could his generation of writers find the language and vision to lead the country toward what he, a man of the political left, saw as an emerging progressive future:

Knowing that others have desired the things we desire and have encountered the same obstacles, and that in some degree time has begun to face those obstacles down and make the way straight for us, would not the creative forces of this country lose a little of the hectic individualism that keeps them from uniting against their common enemies? The Washington Monthly is a politics and policy magazine, not a literary journal. Still, we hold the Brooksian view--shared by our founder, Charles Peters, most recently in his book We Do Our Part--that today's liberals are surprisingly unaware of the policy solutions that their own predecessors devised for problems remarkably similar to those we face today, and that rediscovering those forgotten solutions is the key to building a contemporary liberalism that is in accord with the American spirit.

A good example is the rise of monopoly capitalism. For over a decade, as regular readers...