Capitol Ideas / Weary of the Leisure Class
Bethell, Tom
a very positive contribution to the Crimes of America conference, had he survived his sad political setbacks of yesteryear. Undoubtedly, he and the Hon. Clark would have spent many pleasurable...
...Or even journalists, I couldn't help thinking when I read that...
...Why...
...Lowell and Kaiser demonstrate their truly breathtaking ignorance of economics by identifying "tax reform" with "taxing a few rich people at higher rates in order to help tens of millions of ordinary citizens...
...I can understand why the liberals feel this way about the book, but not conservatives...
...In any event, we m~ust thank the'm for giving us a rare glimpse into the rather unwholesome mind-set that is today so characteristic of the governin.g classes and their news media patrolmen...
...Today the Republic is nearly as fertile a source of antiAmerican propaganda as the USSR, and these Yankee howlers are more celebrated and prosperous...
...Lovely shortages have occurred, although, stubbornly, "the populace seemed determined not to believe that the shortage was real...
...Thus the promotion and promulgation of such a picture is an essential element in the public relations of the acquisitive state...
...They're not interTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 5 ested in politics, and can get by very well without the politicians whose handmaidens Lowell and Kaiser really are...
...indeed an undeservedly neglected one...
...Clark would have spent many pleasurable hours in Tehran, wearing thin wheat jeans and boots and fretting over bourgeois decadence...
...The last straw, right...
...So too are so many of those who would liberate us from exploitation in America today...
...His recent book on the Supreme Court, The Brethren (written with Scott Armstrong), seems to deserve a footnote in view of the many hostile reviews it has received from all parts of the political spectrum...
...But something else of far greater importance comes through...
...Why are so many journalists today implicit statists...
...They worry, of course, that if the double-knitters get out from under the tax burden, they'll become more independent than ever--completely uncontrollable, in fact...
...We all know that Mr...
...But there is little chance of the politicians doing the right thing...
...So Kaiser and Lowell are right...
...Lowell and Kaiser keep coming back to this point, and they give it perfect expression when they write: "Americans from backgrounds that would have put them in the peasantry in the Old World discovered that you didn't need references to buy a Cadillac or take a vacation in Florida...
...Still, they remain intensely bothered because, great though the advances of the state have been in recent years, economics remains a field in which "politicians have most vividly demonstrated their inability to impose control [my italics...
...Incorrigible, you understand...
...At an instinctive level, the authors probably realize this...
...Tom Betbell is The American Spectator's Washington editor...
...These shortages, of course, have played into the hands of the politicians, who are thereby armed with a more persuasive rationale for redistributing the pie of wealth...
...First, the authors and their compatriots believe that the principal function of government today is to see to the redistribution of income...
...Kaiser and Lowell earn themselves a God-Is-Mocked citation for their chapter on religion, subtitled "God Isn't Dead...
...This book is, of course, hardly the first manifestation of it, nor will it be the last...
...Thus Woodward and Armstrong's act of iconoclasm may well have irritated a good many liberals because the Court surely remains their favorite institution, despite Burger's presence...
...Of course, their sophistries have all been unhorsed by serious scholars like John Lewis Gaddis, but the books still pour forth for the credulous, and among the credulous are numbered thousands of envious and bewildered foreign students like the 60,000 or so Iranians who still attend our universities and who huff and puff about the reactionary Shah, even as the Holy Man cuts back their scholarships-scholarships the nefarious Shah gladly gave them notwithstanding their hostility to him...
...Because the book exposed the Court as a kind of unelected legislature, arriving at many decisions on the basis of ideology, it was denounced, although not of course on these grounds, but more evasively, in terms of "the treason of the clerks," etc...
...No one said anything about disloyal underlings when Woodward and Bernstein wrote their Watergate books, did they...
...WEARY OF THE LEISURE CLASS by Tom Bethell Contempt for the American middle class is a dominant motif in the ideology of the American governing class...
...The unspoken truth of the hysteria that now seizes Iran and lies nascent throughout many of the nations of the Third World is that their anti-Americanism is made in America...
...Could they bring America to the same chaotic condition in which the Italian Messiah left Italy...
...True, there is good news for our statistinclined writers: "Economic troubles have challenged the essential optimism in Middle America by suggesting that the long history of middle class progress might be coming to an end...
...Newspapers have always been known for civic boosterism, and with the federal government being the great civic enterprise here you can hardly expect the morning paper to urge the dismantling of federal programs and, by implication, a great upsurge in local unemployment...
...And to the extent that the double-knit tackies are interested in politics, their influence is "primarily negative," This is because " t h e y believe that the United States works fine the way it is," and they "believe the old truths: hard work pays off...
...The performance of this task transfers an enormous amount of power to the governing classes, who can legally take money away from the unworthy and hand it out to the worthy --the halt and the blind, for example, or the aged, or people whose great grandparents might have been discriminated against, or people who don't speak English too good...
...Sometimes I think that journalists are not so much interested in the state as in their own status...
...Mussolini was a quack...
...And then there is this sample of their refined distaste: "A fat lady in a halter top and double-knit slacks stopped her younger, red-haired female companion, she with the explosion of curlers not quite hidden under a chiffon kerchief, and pointed at Robert Dolgin...
...Once ensconced in their oddly furnished apartment ("all blue, from the blue shag carpet to blue toilet paper"), they set about their task of interviewing the natives in such a way as to convey to us both the inferiority of their subjects and their own superiority...
...Presumably they concluded that this was a risk well worth taking and perhaps negligible compared with the joy of conveying to the world their own superior status in life...
...One can't help wondering: Why this sour-minded disapproval of the middle class...
...K a i s e r ' s colleague at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, now Metro editor, is I suspect of a more genuinely iconoclastic disposition, and not particularly interested in knocking the lower classes or in promoting state power...
...They don't admire these upwardly mobile peasants, nor do they admire the system that produces them...
...On the contrary, they fear the one and loathe the other...
...That is why they want us to believe not merely that the recipients are worthy but also that the donors are unworthy: Tasteless fatties driving their gas guzzlers to McDonald's, with an excess of dollar bills tumbling out of their leisure-suit pockets...
...It seems to me, in fact, that the book could very well have been distributed by the Conservative Book Club...
...He Has a Marketing Problem...
...Why are so many Americans fat...
...The great mystery., really, is why so many members of the news media should have aligned themselves with this ever-growing state...
...There is an entire subculture comprising them and their dupes...
...The more one studies this unpleasant book, the more one realizes that what really bothers the authors is the sheer, unforgivable independence of the middle class...
...6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980...
...What the book makes clear is that the Supreme Court throughout the 1970s has continued its drift to the left, despite Burger's nominal leadership...
...Then there's the tax revolt--a terrifying threat to our media mindpatrolmen, judging by the number of times they deride it...
...In fact, Las Vegas was "a monument to American classlessness--and if the truth be told--tastelessness...
...I suspect that in a good many instances, the parents of today's well-educated journalists were better placed and better 6ff than they are...
...In case you had forgotten, the authors remind us that "money is America's standard unit of measurement," and Kaiser, who was the Was,Sington Post's correspondent in the Soviet Uhion (about whose citizens he wrote with a good deal more affection than he displays toward American~ in this book), apparently, cannot bring himself to write the word freedom without putting it into quotation marks...
...It really does encourage the governing classes to believe in their hearts that this is a moral task and not just a power grab...
...The instincts of the populace are sounder than their own...
...The best way to prevent any further slippage--to keep everyone in his place, so to speak--would be for the politicians to "impose control" on the economy...
...The New York Times is shot through with anti-business, pro-government bias, and government is hardly the dominant business in New York...
...Mussolini began as a socialist full of populist whim-wham, but how many recall that in his last weeks, as the fascist state crumbled around him, he returned to the socialist fold, solemnly promising liberation and palmy days to the workers of Milan...
...The image of the Justices deciding cases .by turning around in their swivel chairs and referring to a copy of the Constitution nailed to their walls has been seriously undermined by the book...
...It became commonplace for the children of the American elite to voluntarily relinquish their status to become carpenters or farmers or even bums...
...Still, the invocation of self-interest is ultimately unsatisfactory...
...I suspect that when he wrote this Kaiser was harking back nostalgically to his days in the Soviet Union--one of the few countries of the world where the government really has imposed control over the economy...
...True, it is unkind to Chief Justice Warren Burger and seems in part to have been animated by a desire to "get" him, to retire him to the sidelines along with Richard Nixon...
...Its authors, Robert G. Kaiser, a reporter for the Washington Post, and Jon Lowell, a correspondent for Newsweek, have written up the Middle American hoi polloi with such gusto and candor that they risk being labelled snobs...
...Uppity peasants who don't know their station in life can be threatening because upward mobility for some implies downward mobility for others...
...I suspect that Lewis is lying awake at night worrying that the nation at large might begin to suspect--as a result of reading The Brethren--that Justice Brennan is the left-wing ideologue that he really is...
...When you see the near-frenzy that New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has gone into over the book, you know that it has somehow exposed the "wrong" thing...
...The thing about capitalism which terrifies so many in the educated classes is that it generates so much upward mobility so rapidly...
...The more this picture of the "taxpayer-as-slob" is built up, the fewer qualms the redistributors in Washington feel about taking away his money and giving it to others...
...America is abundant with goodygoodies like the Hon...
...The Wasbtngton Post columnist Joseph Kraft gave this sentiment suitably camouflaged expression when he referred to "Middle Americ a . " For obvious reasons it is considered bad form, not to mention bad politics, to allow this disdain to show through too blatantly...
...The elites have suffered from downward mobility...
...The authors write: "During the 1960s a new social phenomenon appeared--downward mobility...
...I wonder if writing about public events doesn't sometimes seem to him a little feeble in comparison to participating in them...
...they inquire sternly at one juncture...
...But one or two reasons do seem obvious enough...
...Kaiser's father, for example, is an ambassador...
...But then exposing the Nixon White House is one thing, exposing the politics of the Supreme Court is another, and not kosher exactly...
...But their sneer at automobiles and fast food, although obligatory, somehow lacks originality: "There would be no mass American culture without automobiles, no familiar status ladder, nothing for the kids to aspire to-no McDonald's...
...Our authors, accredited members of the Ministry of Mind Patrol, set off bravely for Las Vegas, which they found to be "a mirror of popular style and taste," but not entirely to their liking on that account...
...That is what makes Great American Dreams (Harper & Row) such an interesting book...
...Elsewhere they write: "Americans talk good, as a lot of them might put it...
...In the case of the Washington Post, of course, one can legitimately raise the issue of self-interest...
...Kaiser and Lowell worry (even if the foregoing reform were a logical possibility, which it isn't) because, alas, "Americans aren't really interested in punishing rich people...
...The Court has generally given the liberals what they want, mobilizing judicial activism in the service of expanded state power and delivering all kinds of goodies, like busing and affirmative action--things that were only a gleam in the eye of the late lamented Earl Warren...
...Kaiser and Lowell themselves are almost certainly too unfamiliar with basic economics to understand that the shortages of the 1970s, including the oil shortage, were a direct outcome of government policy--as indeed all shortages are...
...Perfectly true, of course, but so very revealing...
Vol. 13 • August 1980 • No. 8
