Permit me, our dear readers of this column, to present to you Part 2 of the following essay which is of much interest, dated September 5th, 1982, entitled “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto”, written by Charles Peters, who is the editor of the Washington Monthly. It is as follows:

There is another reason for our support of the draft. We want to bring people together. When I was growing up, both the public schools and the draft mixed social classes. Today the sons of the rich avoid the public schools and scorn the military service. This is part of a trend toward separatism, not only by race but by class and interest group, that has divided the nation and produced the politics of selfishness that has governed this country for more than a decade. The rise in the power of the interest-group lobbies has been accompanied by an increase in single-issue politics, with misleading oversimplifications of the other side’s position — as on the abortion issue, for example — and a tendency on both sides to judge a politician solely by his stand on this one matter. I fear that the nuclear freeze, something I support, could turn into another example. I don’t mind having anti-nuclear demonstrations outside the United Nations, but I would also like to see antipoverty demonstrations outside David Stockman’s and Paul Volcker’s offices. I would like to see the anti-nuclear people concerned about non-nuclear defense issues, asking questions about MXs, B-1s, Aegis cruisers, and other dubious weapons, questions based on a belief in a strong but not profligate defense.

I think the only possible salvation for this republic is a citizenry that is determined to inform itself on a broad range of important issues — and that will vote for an elected official on the basis of his or her stand on all the issues. We now have a Congress that is petrified of offending any single, passionate group — even private boat owners — and that won’t change until the members know we’re not going to throw them out of office on any basis other than overall performance. The only way we are going to destroy the escalating power of the lobbies is to destroy single-issues politics. Today, everyone is imitating the National Rifle Association. That’s the way to have a successful lobby. It’s also the way to ruin America. We have made dividing ourselves against ourselves into a virtue. While it is certainly necessary at times, the adversary approach to problems has come to dominate our national life, at a disastrous cost to all of us.

In industry, our adversarial system has been a major factor in making our corporations less efficient than their foreign competition. In Japan auto workers think about how they can improve their products; in America, they think about filing grievances. The adversary relationship between Congress and the White House all too often paralyzes government. It has led to a situation where Congress cannot trust the information provided by the executive branch. As a result Congress has set up its own bureaucracy, including a budget office, to develop the same information that is supposed to be provided by federal agencies. Finally, the adversary system of justice helps to create a society where differences are magnified, breeding suspicion and mistrust, instead of calmly reconciled. That’s why we favor a no-fault approach to two of the major court-cloggers — divorce and auto accidents — and the use of mediation in most other cases. Mediators would not have to be lawyers. They could be elected by their neighbors or selected by the parties to the dispute.

This brings us to another fundamental tenet of neo-liberalism: We generally oppose requiring a law degree or similar paper credentials for most jobs. People should be judged on their demonstrated ability to perform, not on their possession of degrees and other credentials. Did you read that Paul Blair, an ex-major leaguer, was denied the right to coach high school baseball because he didn’t have a teaching credential? Another example of this concern is the recent criticism of Marva Collins, the black Chicago teacher who started her own school to help poor children. Some of the criticism may be justified, but one charge — that she lacks a teaching certificate — is the sort of thing that makes me desperate, particularly since the press solemnly reported the charge without the slightest suggestion that a teacher’s certificate may not have any relation to teaching ability. The proof is that many of the best private schools do not require teacher’s certificates. What they care about is that the teacher can teach. Neo-liberals share this concern with actual performance because they want to encourage productivity and discourage the bureaucratization that credentialism fosters.

The search for credentials is also undermining our economic prosperity. During the past academic year, 127,530 men and women were enrolled in law schools. These are among our ablest young people. If they had chosen productive work, they would be on the cutting edge of the economic recovery we so desperately need. Instead, they spent the year sitting in some library, trying to focus their eyeballs on “Corpus Juris.” “Anthropologists of the next century,” Michael Kinsley has observed, “will look back in amazement at an arrangement whereby the most ambitious and brightest members of each generation were siphoned off the productive work force, trained to think like a lawyer, and put to work chasing one another around in circles.” Seniority is another enemy of the performance standard. Take the way the government has been carrying out its RIFS (reductions in force). People are being fired not for lack of ability, but for lack of seniority. Someone who has been around a long time can “bump” a younger employee even when the junior official is much more talented and dedicated. This indifference to performance is not some abstract problem of public administration. It is central to the declining efficiency of both American industry and government. It even affects everyday life. If you doubt me, just remember the next time your bus breaks down and you’re sweltering in the heat that Metrobus is forbidden to consider actual job performance in evaluating its mechanics.

Snobbery, like the credentialism to which it is related, is another of our targets. The snobbery that is most damaging to liberalism is the liberal intellectuals’ contempt for religious, patriotic, and family values. Instead of scorning people who value family, country, and religion, neo-liberals believe in reaching out to them to make clear that our programs are rooted in the same values. Take school prayer. While I easily can see how the custom of my youth, requiring children to recite the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of school, was offensive to non-believers, I also can see no reason to oppose a few minutes of silent meditation. During such a period those who want to pray can pray, and those who don’t want to pray can think about baseball (which I often managed to do while reciting the Lord’s Prayer), or anything else sectarian or nonsectarian they want to think about. There is absolutely nothing wrong — indeed there is great good — in asking young people to think quietly for a few moments about the meaning of it all. Yet many liberals see the prayer issue as one of the seminal battles of the enlightenment against the “hicks.”

It is this contempt for the “hicks” that is the least appealing trait of the liberal intellectuals. They don’t really believe in democracy. Neo-liberals do — we think a lot of those hicks are Huck Finns, with the common sense and goodwill to make the right choices if they are well-informed. Informing them properly means giving people a better education in politics and government, not just in the schools, but through the press. This in turn requires better teachers and reporters than we have now, teachers and reporters who know the history of the American political system and the lessons of its successes and failures — subjects largely ignored in our teachers’ colleges and journalism schools. Since experience is the best teacher of all, if we truly are going to reform the American system of government, we need to give more Americans experience in government. We need more politics, not less — more good people running for office. Unfortunately, the worst form of snobbery in America today is the smug assumption that politics and politicians are inherently bad. If you think for a moment about the kind of choices we’ve had in recent elections, you’ll realize why we must have a lot more good people pursuing political careers. This in turn means offering decent rewards for a life in politics.
(To Be Continued)

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May 28, 2023
Finca Solana
Corozal Town