Capitalism: Sources of Hostility, edited by Ernest van den Haag, and An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's, byJackKemp
Goldberg, Steven
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Capitalism: Sources of Hostility, edited by Ernest van den Haag, and An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's, byJackKemp" New Jersey, the introduction of the Volkswagen to America, the trial of Preston Tucker, the attempt to assassinate Harry S. Truman, "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Rudolf the RedNosed...
...But what is most impressive about this book is not Kemp's convincing (at least to a point) argument that conservative economic policies will do more for the poor than present welfare programs --others have made that point--but Kemp's obvious desire that they should...
...This may not be good history in the strict scholarly sense, but it is what the lit trade calls a good read...
...Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the post-Watergate role of money in politics...
...To say that Jack Kemp's An Amemcan Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's is remarkably good for a book by a politician is not to damn with faint praise...
...Fortunately, van den Haag's thoroughgoing empiricism precludes his relying on those murky moral assumptions on which many pro-market analyses founder...
...Besides, in what other general work on recent U.S...
...A revised edition of his The Inevitability of Patriarchy has recently been published in England by Maurice Temple Smith, Ltd...
...Participants spanned the political and academic waterfront, including representatives of organizations committed to campaign reform (Common Cause and the Democratic Study Group), academic skeptics and friends, representatives of the federal election commission, political professionals from both major parties, leading political journalists, and a wide-ranging group of political action committee representatives...
...New Jersey, the introduction of the Volkswagen to America, the trial of Preston Tucker, the attempt to assassinate Harry S. Truman, "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Rudolf the RedNosed Reindeer," a habitual threatener of suicide, the West Frankfort mine explosion, Captain Kurt Carlsen's heroic efforts to save The Flying Enterprise, chlorophyll, panty raids, a southern California earthquake, Mickey Jelke, king.size cigarettes, tight skirts, slim ties, poodle and ponytail hairstyles, flying saucers, science fiction, and Immanuel Velikovsky--all in the space of five and a half pages, There are other things for curmudgeonly scholars to grouch about...
...20036 Be sure to include your ~ume and address and the number of c~pies you want...
...There is nothing irrational about judging an economic system, as socialists do, on the basis of how it serves the worstoff...
...CAPITALISM: SOURCES OF HOSTILITY Edited by Ernest van den Haag / Epoch Books / $10.95 AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: A STRATEGY FOR THE 1980's Jack Kemp / Harper&Row / $8.95 Steven Goldberg I t ' s not necessarily ideological need or malicious purpose that leads an intellectual to misrepresent reality~ sometimes the misrepresentation may be merely to make discussion possible...
...Washington, D.C...
...Feuer is most persuasive when he traces the leftist's belief in the dialectic to its roots in the dialectical personality, and when he draws a connection between this personality and the trauma engendered by the market...
...Who, if anyone, has b e n e f i t e d from t h e laws...
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...Lewis Feuer's analysis of intellectual resistance to capitalism, unlike van den Haag's, is clearly predicated on certain Freudian assumptions about basic human drives and the necessity for any social system to permit these drives to manifest themselves...
...Print your new address and mail this form to The American Spectator...
...One might go on and on--this is a big volume, after all...
...No doubt even many readers who accept Kemp's view will question whether the economy is sufficiently important a cause of the "decline" of America to produce the renaissance Kemp sees once it has been set right...
...Bauer contributes an informative and extensive analysis of the hostility towards capitalism in lessdeveloped countries, Stanley Rothman responds at length to the essays I have mentioned, and Roger Starr, Nathan Glazer, and Dale Vree comment on the papers of van den Haag, Bauer, and Feuer, respectively...
...But enough is enough...
...How do campaign finance laws in other countries affect their own p a r t i e s and i n t e r e s t groups...
...An intellectual without something to argue about becomes desperate, and such desperation may explain the possibility of controversy over, for example, the relative merits of the United States and the Soviet Union...
...William Benton, for example, one of the more decent public men of his time,, is both unfairly savaged and rechristened "William Benson...
...In his introductory essay, Ernest van den Haag offers a brilliant analysis of the psychological resistance to the market system t h a t is generated by its very success...
...he uses _9 Roy Cohn's biography of McCarthy as documentation for the unlikely tale that John Kennedy first met Joe McCarthy in the South Pacific during Changing Your Address...
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...Perhaps something of this sort plays a role in the various battles over the relative merits of capitalism and socialism...
...It would be worthwhile even if it were simply a layman's introduction to the failures of Keynesianism and an explanation of how misguided governmental programs have petrified the economy and limited people's lives...
...By rejecting such notions as "natural rights" and by refusing to equate economic reward with just deserts, van den Haag is able to concentrate on the practical benefits of the market system...
...There is much more in this book than it is possible to recapitulate here, but it all rewards close reading...
...And we are confronted with the astounding assertion that John F. Kennedy, because he was a man of limited political connections, chose his secretaries of state and defense solely upon the advice of a Republican, "Robert Lovell" (he means "Lovett...
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...What is irrational is their rejection of a system that, at least to this point, does best that which they most highly value...
...P.T...
...He has an especially good touch with some of the lighter aspects of popular culture, and from time to time he evokes a sense of real experience...
...At times, as with the Rosenberg trial, or the Black Muslims, he does a good job of stating both sides of a controversy and opting for neither...
...This is precisely the right tack, given the purposes of the book, for it is the success of the market system in 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 doing the very things that are most valued by its critics that shows their hostility to be so irrational...
...Suffice to say that the author does not deliver on his promises and in fact largely ignores some of the most important issues of contemporary American social history: the relationship between class and politics, the rise of what the neoconservatives call "the new class," the impact of television upon American culture and politics, the increasing dominance of the bureaucratic ethos in almost every aspect of our national life...
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...Edited by AEI Resident Fellow Michael i. Malbin, the 384 page report is the result of a two-day conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in September, 1979...
...A theorist need not care about the effects of his conclusions, but a politician absolutely must...
...For if, as Feuer implies, the irrational leftist's primary emotion is guilt, the irrational conservative's is fear--fear of inundation by emotion that is projected onto social movements which seem to threaten society with barbarism...
...It clearly and interestingly presents the case for conservative economic policies, and demonstrates an intelligent and discriminating understanding of economic theory...
...So what you have to do is to alter the reality to contrast an affluent oppressive society with a poor free society: Then you can have a discussion...
...After all, what kind of discussion could you have if the issue were whether one should prefer a society that is free and affluent or a society that is totalitarian and poor...
...Kemp's book, like any attempt briefly tO summarize an economic and political position, is vulnerable in a hundred places to the attacks of those who are basically unsympathetic to it...
...Kemp's book is precisely the kind one would want if one were forced to assess a candidate on the basis of what he has written...
...Nonetheless, the book is well worth reading both for its inherent virtues and for a glimpse of the virtues of its author...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 35...
...this simply follows from their idea of what an economic system should do...
...How have t h e federal e l e c t i o n laws a f f e c t e d t h e power o f organized i n t e r e s t groups...
...No doubt some journalists, armed with a double standard, will attempt to charge through openings of necessity left undefended in such a summary...
...Be sure to include the line of information above your name...
...But there is no avoiding the suspicion that there are deeper Steven Goldberg teaches at City College, City University of New York...
...On other occasions, he comes up with such off-thewall pronouncements as the coupling of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lenny Bruce among "the great servants of truth...
...One questions his critical faculties when he cites the Earl Mazo-Stephen Hess biography of Nixon as his source for an assertion that the Democrats stole 100,000 Texas votes in 1960...
...This cannot be said of Congressman Kemp...
...It is not well thought-out, and portions of it are sloppily researched...
...Perrett's achievement in lending his work to parody obscures the fact that taken at a less serious level, it is not a bad book at all...
...Whether it is worth the price of dinner at a first-class restaurant is ultimately for the consumer to decide according to his tastes...
...It is this puzzling abhorrence of capitalism-an abhorrence not explicable in terms of a mere difference of opinion about which economic system is superior-that is investigated in the essays brought together in Capitalism: Sources of Hostility...
...Numerous minor errors and a few ludicrous ones cumulatively tax one's patience...
...M r . Perrett's interpretive performance is at best uneven...
...but when the author devotes a chapter to a single topic with some natural coherence, he frequently is fluent and informative, if not profound...
...Parties, Interest Groups, and Campaign Finance Laws The e x p e r t s on campaign finance debate t h e impact of federal regulation of political campaigns...
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...On reading Feuer's essay one does wish that--in the interest of fairness--Feuer will someday provide a similar analysis of conservative irrationality...
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...history could one discover that the first modern digital computer was known by the acronym ENIAC and that, five years later, it was rendered obsolete by a much-improved model called MANIAC...
...forces pressuring so many intellectuals to attack so readily and so unremittingly an economic system the worst about which even the socialist can say is that it is the best yet, but not so good as the variety of socialism the socialist espouses...
...One doubts his thoroughness when he discusses the Hiss case with no reference to the work of Allen Weinstein...
...More often than not, conservative politician s have acted so begrudgingly towards the poor that, even were their theories about improving the poor's lot correct, they might rightly be found wanting...
...Has t h e law changed campaign s t r a t e g i e s ? * Have federal and s t a t e campaign finance regulations a f f e c t e d n a t i o n a l and s t a t e party organizations...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
