![]() We want to encourage the entrepreneur not with Reaganite policies that simply make the rich richer, but with laws designed to help attract investors and customers. "Americans," says Bradley, "have to begin to treat risk more as an opportunity and not as a threat." Our hero is the risk-taking entrepreneur who creates new jobs and better products. Of them, economic growth is most important now, because it is essential to almost everything else we want to achieve. Our primary concerns are community, democracy, and prosperity. We have found these responses not only weren't helping but were often hampering us in confronting the problems that were beginning to cripple the nation in the 1970s: declining productivity the closed factories and potholed roads that betrayed decaying plant and infrastructure inefficient and unaccountable public agencies that were eroding confidence in government a military with too many weapons that didn't work and too few people from the upper classes in its ranks and a politics of selfishness symbolized by an explosion of political action committees devoted to the interests of single groups. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. ![]() We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. If neo-conservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. When I use the first person plural, it usually means some but not all of us, and occasionally it may mean just me. Practicing politicians in particular should be presumed innocent of the more controversial positions. While we are united by a different spirit and a different style of thought, none of these people should be held responsible for all of what follows. There's even a cell over at that citadel of traditional liberalism, The New Republic. But there are many others, ranging from an academic economist like MIT's Lester Thurow to a mayor like Houston's Kathy Whitmire to a governor like Arizona's Bruce Babbitt. Kaus of Harper's, Nicholas Lemann and Joseph Nocera of Texas Monthly, and Randall Rothenberg of New Jersey Monthly. The ones I know best are my fellow journalists, including James Fallows and Gregg Easterbrook of The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley and Robert M. ![]() The best known are three promising senators: Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gary Hart of Colorado and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. They deserve something better, because they are a remarkable group of people. As the sole culprit at the christening, I hereby attest to the innocence of the rest of the faithful. NEO-LIBERALISM is a terrible name for an interesting, if embryonic, movement. By Charles Peters Charles Peters is the editor of The Washington Monthly.
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