E.J. Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics
Lasch, Christopher
WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS, by E.J. Dionne, Jr. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. $22.95. A political reporter by trade (first with the New York Times, now with the Washington Post),...
...On some issues, indeed, libertarians like Murray Rothbard were closer to the New Left than to Weaver and Kirk...
...The issues that give rise to strident professions of faith, on both sides of the ideological divide, seem to have little bearing on the problems most people face in everyday life...
...Conservatives were able to destroy the dominant New Deal coalition," Dionne writes, "by using cultural and social issues—race, the family, 'permissiveness,' crime—to split New Deal constituencies...
...Reagan capitalized on popular resentment of liberal elites in routing the Democratic opposition, but his presidency brought to the surface the "contradictions between traditional values and 'casino capitalism,' " as Dionne puts it...
...Anderson emphasized the issues that had come to define limousine liberalism—civil rights, abortion rights, women's rights, environmentalism...
...His analysis of the Carter presidency is particularly astute—one of the few that explains Carter's downfall without making it impossible to explain how he got elected in the first place...
...It simply reflects an understanding that "children are usually better off when they live with a mother and a father who have made more than a passing commitment to each other...
...They welcomed the abolition of the draft, the decay of authority, and the permissive spirit fostered by capitalism That capitalism promoted hedonism did not bother them in the least...
...But he also defended values quite incompatible with the spirit of aggressive corporate capitalism...
...As late as 1976, American conservatism was still defined largely by opposition to communism and big government...
...The vast middle had dropped out of their vision, enabling the Republicans to pose as the defenders of "middle America...
...McGovern's crushing defeat, as Dionne points out, did not put an end to the "new politics...
...His subject is political ideology...
...In the congressional elections of 1974, "life-style liberals" strengthened their hold over the party...
...This feat would have been impossible, however, without the wholehearted cooperation of liberals themselves...
...In 1982, Daniel Yankelovich reported a two-thirds majority simultaneously in favor of women's rights and a "return to more traditional standards of family life and parental responsibility...
...A public philosophy for the twenty-first century will have to give more weight to the community than to the right of private decision...
...but keeping the schools open all day—one of his suggestions—is not much of an answer...
...As Dionne characterizes them, popular attitudes FALL • 1991 • 589 Books contain more common sense than the rigid ideologies that dominate public debate...
...Libertarians and traditionalists had almost nothing in common, not even consistent opposition to the left...
...A Gallup poll conducted in 1987, moreover, found that 66 percent rejected the proposition that "women should return to their traditional role in society...
...The same ambivalence shows up in popular attitudes toward government...
...Dionne's emphasis on substance is a tremendous improvement...
...he makes no claim to comprehensive coverage...
...It was only in the seventies, when liberals turned their backs on leaders like Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson and made the cause of cultural emancipation completely their own, that the right became a major force in American politics...
...People on the Left attribute right-wing success to public relations, media bias, the people's willingness to be bamboozled, the persistence of racism and male chauvinism and anti-intellectualism— in short, to the alliance of unscrupulous demagoguery with popular bigotry...
...The explanations of political apathy and stalemate offered by other commentators emphasize procedural considerations—sound bites, campaign finance, the overwhelming advantages of incumbency in congressional elections...
...Deeply suspicious of hard hats who supposedly supported the war without reservation, opposed the civil rights movement, and wanted to put women back into the kitchen, the new liberals championed the rights of minorities, seeing them as the vanguard of a struggle against bourgeois morality...
...It is an admirable goal...
...Dionne's analysis of American politics furnishes an invaluable corrective to the fantasies haunting both the left and the right...
...They are often ambivalent but not necessarily contradictory or incoherent...
...Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, on the other hand, advanced a free-market ideology that had more in common with nineteenth-century liberalism than with traditional conservatism...
...But most Americans believe that too many abortions are performed and favor restrictions such as parental consent...
...Reagan's attempt to cut taxes without reducing spending resulted in a gigantic deficit financed by foreign capitalists...
...Back to basics" could mean a return to class warfare, or at least to a politics in which class became the overriding issue...
...When Richard Weaver proclaimed property ownership the "last metaphysical right," he was careful to distinguish personal property from the "abstract property of stocks and bonds," which "actually destroys the connection between man and his substance...
...When Americans say that politics has nothing to do with what really matters, they are largely right...
...Above all, they believe that families in which mothers and fathers live under the same roof with their children provide the best arrangement for raising the young...
...Only a few years ago, I was denounced in these pages for making the same suggestion...
...If we can surmount the false polarizations now generated by the politics of gender and race, we may find that the real divisions are still those of class...
...Only their hatred of communism held the two wings of the conservative movement together under the leadership of William F. Buckley's National Review...
...When the issue is defined as one of private choice against government interference, prochoice positions win out...
...But the point is that the Democrats proceeded to do precisely the opposite, on the whole, of what Scammon and Wattenberg recommended...
...In the end, his policies disappointed blue-collar Democrats and uppermiddleclass liberals alike...
...A "coherent notion of the common good" —Dionne's concluding plea— will still have to rest on difficult choices, even if they are not the choices dictated by worn-out ideologies...
...Dionne has written a book that historians ought to envy...
...The tensions and contradictions in the conservative movement were already evident in Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign for the presidency...
...q 590 • DISSENT...
...Dionne probably underestimates the difficulties of finding an approach to family issues that is "both pro-family and pro-feminist...
...The politics of ideology, according to Dionne, has distorted our view of the world and confronted us with a series of false choices—between feminism and the family, social reform and traditional values, racial justice and individual accountability...
...From the beginning, conservatives were torn between freedom and virtue—between the free market and the cultural traditions thought to produce self-disciplined, self-respecting citizens...
...Public opinion about abortion likewise defies easy classification...
...This kind of language, Dionne points out, was hard to reconcile with a defense of free enterprise as the be-all and end-all of the American dream...
...A political reporter by trade (first with the New York Times, now with the Washington Post), E.J...
...Dionne's treatment is highly selective, of course...
...Such reforms imply interference with the market and a redefinition of success, neither of which will be achieved without a great deal of controversy...
...but since he believes that ideological conflicts have dominated American politics in the postwar period, he is obliged to say a great deal, sometimes in passing and sometimes at length, about the major politicians, movements, and presidents of the last forty-five years...
...In 1970, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg warned the Democrats, in The Real Majority, that they could win presidential elections only by avoiding "social issues" and stressing economics...
...There's a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material successes toward the inner meaning of our lives...
...This commitment to the "traditional family," Dionne insists, should not be interpreted as opposition to feminism or even to "alternate life-styles...
...A new breed of liberals emerged from the antiwar movement of the sixties...
...As Dionne himself admits, the country's ambivalence often shades into schizophrenia...
...What was this talk, . . . from a firm advocate of the free market, about 'inner meaning...
...It is the prominence of issues that strike most Americans as unreal, Dionne argues, that explains "why Americans hate politics...
...Americans have a "split personality, which by turns emphasize individual liberty and the importance of community...
...These are by no means completely irreconcilable values, but neither can they be neatly balanced simply by splitting the difference...
...The decline of liberalism by no means guarantees a rosy future for the right...
...Liberal attacks on middleclass culture—on "white Western society" in general—enabled the Republicans, traditionally the party of wealth and privilege, to present themselves as defenders of the common people against a "new class" of do-gooders, busybodies, and educated snobs...
...The lower-income wing of the conservative coalition," according to Dionne, "has tended to vote Republican for president, to express its cultural values, but Democratic for Congress, to protect its economic interests...
...Carter's basic problem was that prowork welfare reform is inevitably more expensive FALL • 1991 • 587 than the current system...
...Most people agree, in principle, that government is too big and intrusive, but they support Social Security, national health insurance, and full employment...
...In 1976, Carter managed to win back many of the working-class Democrats who had deserted the party in 1972...
...He shows how liberals lost public confidence by embracing the "new politics" of cultural liberation...
...The problems confronting American society (or any other advanced industrial society) can't be understood simply by taking account of "what Americans believe," though that is certainly a step in the right direction...
...Unfortunately, they find no expression in national politics, and it is for this reason, according to Dionne, that Americans take so little interest in politics...
...Ideological rigidity has the effect of obscuring the views Americans have in common, of replacing substantive issues with purely symbolic issues, and of creating a false impression of polarization...
...That Bush was able to seize the initiative, successfully picturing Dukakis as a "sixties liberal," does not alter the fact that the conservative coalition remains "inherently unstable," as Dionne puts it...
...They also made a mockery of his claim that "America's back, standing tall...
...As Joseph Duffy observed, as early as 1970, liberals talked as if there were only "two major groups" in America—"the affluent and the welfare poor...
...They downplayed economics and became the party of abortion, affirmative action, busing, and civil liberties—civil liberties so broadly construed that criminals and pornographers seemed to become the chief beneficiaries of the Bill of Rights...
...They denied that political freedom required the "underpinning of religious and moral sentiment," as M. Stanton Evans disapprovingly observed...
...Buckley's "fusionist" position managed to embrace all but a few disgruntled isolationists, who criticized the New Right's willingness to give "all-out aid to every dictator . . . who proclaims his unbending `anti-Communism.' " Still, the attempt to reconcile the virtues of "discipline" and "self-denial," praised by Weaver and Russell Kirk, with the acquisitive ethic promoted by unregulated capitalism was inherently unconvincing...
...Dionne's assessments of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan are unsparing, even devastating, but not at all dismissive...
...Not that ordinary Americans are necessarily unsympathetic to the goals in question...
...They do not describe what Americans actually believe...
...By tracing the conservative revival back to its origins in the 1950s, Dionne shows how unstable the right-wing coalition really is...
...It offers a well-integrated, carefully argued interpretation of a large chunk of our political history—the period since the Second World War, with particular attention to the dissolution of the New Deal coalition and the rise of the New Right...
...At the same time, they believe that "hard work should be rewarded, that people who behave destructively toward others should be punished, that small institutions close to home tend to do better than big institutions run from far away, that private moral choices usually have social consequences...
...Under Reagan, the Protestant virtues were not much in evidence...
...In order to answer this question, Dionne ranges through the political history of the last forty-five years...
...How did we arrive at such a sorry state of affairs...
...Much will depend on whether men and women of good will shrink from this prospect, as they usually have in the past...
...Polls reveal "far more room for agreement" than we might think, as Dionne argues, but they hardly add up to a public philosophy...
...As a guide to sound political practice, schizophrenia is not much better than ideological paranoia...
...Freedom was Goldwater's principal theme—the freedom of the unregulated market, that is...
...Changes in the nominating procedures of the Democratic party, designed to assure broader participation, served instead to give ideologues and activists a greater voice and enabled them to capture the party in 1972...
...It will have to limit the scope of the market and the power of corporations without replacing them with a centralized state bureaucracy...
...He distanced himself from busing and other liberal causes, criticized the welfare system for discouraging work, and promised relief for middleincome taxpayers...
...Dionne takes the Right seriously, neither belittling it as a pathological symptom nor exaggerating its power to dismantle the welfare state, subvert civil liberties, and inaugurate a regime of repression...
...These are the same issues the continuing sponsorship of which condemns liberal Democrats to permanent exile from the White House...
...Almost 90 percent described themselves as having "old-fashioned values about family and marriage...
...The solution, of course, is not simple at all...
...Carter's opposition to government spending, moreover, made it impossible to replace the welfare system with a program of work relief and job training...
...Those who deplored secular humanism, permissiveness, and moral decay could take little comfort in policies that encouraged materialistic self-indulgence on a grand scale...
...Instead of restoring America's economic preeminence in the world, Reagan's policies facilitated the infiltration of the domestic market by the West Germans and the Japanese...
...They were untroubled by the erosion of civic obligation...
...Lee Atwater, Bush's campaign manager in 1988, acknowledged the failure of the conservative revolution, so called, when he predicted that "conservative populists" would return to the Democratic party if Dukakis was allowed to dictate the issues of the campaign...
...Four years later, it was firmly identified with "populism" —resistance not only to lavish spending, economic regulation, and bureaucracy (the usual targets of conservative criticism) but to the 588 • DISSENT Books cultural revolution organized by educated, uppermiddleclass liberals on behalf of the victims of "bourgeois repression...
...Today there will be less inclination, I trust, to deny that the old ideologies of left and right have outlived their usefulness and that our best hope lies in a politics that defies classification in conventional terms...
...In rejecting simplistic explanations of this kind, Dionne is a better historian than many historians...
...It will have to find a better expression of the community than the welfare state...
...But liberals propose to reach these goals by way of policies that threaten working-class neighborhoods, families, and jobs...
...This advice fell considerably short of what the Democrats needed to hear—that they should take conservative positions on social issues, radical positions on economic issues...
...One of them went so far as to write "in praise of decadence...
...Traditionalists were not amused...
...They expect others to pay the price for their own ideological enthusiasms...
...Politics has become a matter of ideological gestures, while the real problems remain unsolved...
...The problem is really quite simple: the political process no longer represents the opinions and interests of ordinary people...
...What is needed is a restructuring of the workplace designed to make work schedules far more flexible, career patterns less rigid and predictable, and criteria for advancement less destructive to family and community obligations...
...An abandonment of the old ideologies will not usher in a golden age of agreement...
...In 1980, blue-collar voters went for Reagan, while liberals furnished the core of John Anderson's "new politics" constituency...
...But his administration was undone not only by the hostage crisis but by rising interest rates and inflation, which drove up taxes...
...In the current era," Dionne writes, " .. . the concepts of 'left' and 'right' seem less useful than ever...
...It will have to emphasize responsibilities rather than rights...
...The impasse of ideological politics finds its institutional expression in divided control of the national government, which threatens to become permanent...
...In general, polls suggest that "Americans believe in helping those who fall on hard times, in fostering equal opportunity and equal rights, in providing broad access to education, housing, health care, and child care...
...If he is right, the way out of this impasse is clear: a politics that will unite cultural conservatism and economic radicalism in the same coalition...
...Liberalism became more and more closely associated with the modernist liberation of the educated classes and the championship of minorities and the poor...
...Yet 68 percent, according to the same poll, believed that "too many children are being raised in day-care centers...
...His cultural conservatism, as Dionne points out, had a "populist edge" that made him attractive to working-class and lower–middleclass voters repelled by McGovernism...
...Indeed, his policies made a "mockery of middle-class virtues," as Wilson Carey McWilliams noted...
...Public opinion polls show that large majorities favor the expansion of economic opportunities for women...
...It unites upper-income groups, whose main interest is in smaller government and lower taxes, and middle- to lower-income groups, who are culturally conservative but still support most of the New Deal and a lot of the Great Society...
...We feel we have lost our way," he said...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
