Reformers Grown Old

...When have questions of right and wrong ever been simple...

...The central meaning of that second assumption resides, I believe, in Graham's deep commitment to the New Deal...

...He takes for granted, for instance, that Soviet missiles on Cuba altered the balance of power and threatened American security, and then argues that those moral absolutists who feared a nuclear war lacked the courage "to face hard political facts...

...Like others of his persuasion, the Twenties are simply a dismal aberration rather than an integral, if unattractive part of modern America...

...Then, under scrutiny, the forty almost melt away...

...Yet it does not always serve him well...

...A mere handful, equipped largely by long humanitarian involvements with the slum-dweller, can wholeheartedly accept the New Deal...

...The book is difficult to summarize...

...Thus, although progressivism is subdivided and sometimes described, it is never examined anew in light of his research...

...He is not so much a political analyst as a linguist...

...Politics as Ritual Anti-Politics in America: reflections on the anti-political temper and its distortions of the democratic processes, by John H. Bunzel...

...But Bunzel himself—and this is the most interesting thing about his book —could not care less about alternatives, procedures, and consequences, except as words...

...The rest either oppose it, say nothing, or in a few instances stand to the left of the New Deal...

...He does not tell us why he opposes the war...

...Intending to use the New Deal as a means of understanding progressivism, he has instead illuminated the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt through the reactions of aging, largely outcast, reformers...

...He is comfortable—and skillful—in analyzing the old reformers through the eyes of a New Dealer...

...For those who doubt—who consider World War I the most overrated and underexamined "turning point" in American (as distinct from European or Western) history—a great deal of Graham's evaluation suffers as a consequence...

...Two such articles of faith are particularly important to Graham's study...

...Genuine realism, on the other hand, holds that it is precisely in its moral confusion—and not in its remoteness from political "realities"—that every form of messianism, "consensus" liberalism included, stands condemned...

...Knopf...

...What we need are books critical of political messianism but equally critical of "consensus...

...Reviewed by Robert Wiebe Professor Graham has written a book of many merits...

...Privately they express grave reservations...

...291 pp...

...Vulgar realism equates moralism with morality, treats politics as process, and sees every effort to insist on the moral content of politics as evidence of "utopianism...

...and Theodore Sorensen, which Bunzel apparently did not bother to consult...

...Of the 168 surviving progressives who comprise his sample, only forty support the New Deal...

...The real anti-politics, in 1962, was the politics of the Kennedy Administration, which was willing, it turned out later...

...he finds the progressive mentality far less congenial...

...John H. Bunzel, a political scientist at San Francisco State College, would disagree with this last statement...

...He claims, for instance, that he opposes the war in Vietnam and "our general posture toward China"—presumably on tough, practical grounds...

...instead he hastens to add that Vietnam is a complicated business which cannot be reduced to simple questions of right and wrong...

...We must believe because, in effect, Graham leaps that decade to confront fully molded progessive minds with the New Deal...

...What American "realists" do not understand is that their pseudo-realism, superficially so modest and so tolerant, serves to rationalize the status quo both within the United States and in the rest of the world and therefore justifies the measures, no matter how brutal, by which the American imperium is maintained...

...The meandering style that charms in phrases and sentences sometimes obscures the argument, and the innumerable essay-length notes placed in the body of the text further disrupt the flow of reasoning...

...By his graceful, easy style, he has transformed a complicated, scholarly quest into a leisurely tour of the past...

...Every historian asks us to believe before we can understand...

...There is no talk of alternatives, no discussion of methods and procedures, no concern about consequences...

...Graham's is a reasonable, certainly a common, orientation...

...they regard themselves as strangers in a threatening world...

...We must believe, because Graham predicates his explanation of the progressives' alienation during the Thirties upon this "truth...

...We discover that age and political conservatism do not correlate...

...6.95...

...The "end of ideology" is another ideology—a beguiling one, since it makes a special point of its lack of ideological content, its renunciation of ultimate objectives, and its great respect for individual freedom of choice...

...He never discusses the content of an issue, he merely lectures you about the proper mode of discussing it...

...Through an intriguing device—the response to the New Deal of those progressives from the age of Theodore Roosevelt who lived to witness the era of Franklin Roosevelt—he has examined a basic problem of continuity and discontinuity in America's reform tradition...

...First, we must believe that World War I divides American history between the stable, individualistic world for the middle class in Woodrow Wilson's time and the searching, group-oriented society that directly precedes our day...

...Those who demand immediate withdrawal, he says, are "moral zealots" and "more theological than political...

...In ways both subtle and open, the New Deal serves as his norm throughout the book...

...Second, we must believe that the 1920's were irrelevant in the development of the old progressives...

...Ambiguous terms, unresolved problems, and incomplete analyses appear too frequently...

...Most important, a question fundamental to the argument—what happens to people as they grow older?—is inadequately explored...

...Reviewed by Christopher Lasch In the political discussions of the last twenty years, those who attack "anti-politics"—politics as the pursuit of ultimate truth—have usually ended up by celebrating the uend of ideology...

...Graham's thesis, though couched in careful, qualified phrasing, seems essentially this: The hostility, confusion, or impotence of an overwhelming majority of the old progressives in the face of the New Deal reflects a basic discontinuity between the two reform movements...

...An extraordinary amount of research underlies An Encore for Reform, and as one commentator notes on the dust jacket, Graham "wears his scholarship lightly...

...Again, for the doubters—for those who find in the Twenties a logical fulfillment of progressivism coloring attitudes toward the past and conditioning minds for the future—the analysis remains elliptic...

...But his opposition to the war, like that of many "realists," strikes me as a token opposition which preserves the illusion of dissent without its substance...

...Yet even these exceptions prove the rule by their inability to contribute constructively to the new reforms...

...But we learn nothing, for instance, about the possible effects of a more general rigidity among people who were trigger-quick to debate, even in their prime, as they encounter that profusion of complex New Deal legislation a quarter-century later...

...What distinguishes messianism—pol-itics-as-salvation—from realism is precisely the abdication of moral judgment, the appeal to some abstract and impersonal necessity which is supposed to make questions of right and wrong irrelevant...

...Equally at home with charts and imaginative insights, he blends systematic analysis with a variety of thoughtful judgments and shrewd guesses...

...But the hard political facts of this matter were not questions of power but questions of prestige, questions of "face"—something that emerges quite clearly from the books by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...Whether this necessity is conceived as historical "law" (as in simplified Marxism), or as the destiny of the "folkish state" (fascism), or merely as the "democratic process," the result is the same—a crackpot realism which, far from banishing moral issues from politics, reintroduces them in the guise of a higher truth, in which virtue is identified, in effect, with the interests of particular classes of people...