The Post Post-Liberal Depression

...Their obstinacy has already cost them, though it is too early to determine whether they will pay in the end as drastic a political price as did the Hoover conservatives...

...Their successors, by contrast, have been men of little faith, stirred less by hope than by resentment...

...it is necessary only that they not resoundingly fail...

...That would mean more planning, of course, and a more activist, intrusive government in general...

...They define morality essentially in personal rather than public terms, which offends those liberals who have made a particular egalitarian version of''social justice'' their political religion and who are as ready to impose their religious values on society as are, in their different way, the zealots of the Moral Majority...

...The failure of liberal policy prescriptions has begun to awaken Americans to some fundamental vulnerabilities of liberal philosophy...

...Not since the 1920s-over half a century ago-have liberals experienced such uncertainty and disarray...

...Yet in much the same way that conservatives in the 1930s refused to adjust to new political and economic conditions, liberals in the seventies seemed unwilling or unable to adapt to altered circumstances...

...The liberals' dilemma consists of both a bewildered indecision as to where they ought to go from here and an unsettling conflict between the pressures of political reality and the biddings of ideological instinct...

...Liberals think of themselves as social democrats or, in the case of men like Michael Harrington and John Kenneth Galbraith, as democratic socialists, which means that they will tolerate but can never approve of democratic capitalism, at least as it exists in its to them inadequately regulated condition in America...

...If the prospects for an attack of political common sense seem remote, liberals might more plausibly look for hope of renewal to the failure of their enemies...

...is that no one knows what the new agenda ought to be...

...They have appeared willing to sacrifice the national interest to vaporous abstractions, pursuing phantoms of peace, disarmament, and human rights in the persistent illusion that good intentions, appeals to reason, and conciliatory gestures constitute a workable foreign policy...

...In civil liberties, the basic struggle for First Amendment political rights having been won, liberals have been diverted to such marginal areas as the defense of pornography, not in the sense of protecting serious literature against the philistines, but of shielding hard-core pornographers from communities concerned, with good reason, over moral decay...

...they are open to the "me-too" charge that eventually sunk the Rockefeller wing of the Republican party...

...Keynes's theory was the bridge by which liberals passed over from New Deal poverty to postwar prosperity...

...Keynes provided the rationale for government policy that was at once activist and yet limited in scope...

...Liberal difficulties with policy and attitude have been accompanied by problems in defining and holding a political constituency...

...Believing in themselves and in their country, they brought a genuine sense of vision and accomplishment to their political activities...

...Liberalism had ceased to work long before it ceased to reign...

...And they were, from their perspective, right: Whatever Niebuhr's politics, his neo-orthodoxy was rooted in philosophical conservatism...

...once remarked that his generation of liberals found their political bearings in encounter with three fundamental forces: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, and Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism...

...The New Deal, it was said, was finally history, and Democrats could no longer expect to live off its political capital...

...It might well still have been 1937, with Franklin Roosevelt reciting his litany of compassion for one-third of a nation enduring in abject misery...

...Modern liberalism has prided itself on being the tribune of the people...

...They will have to offer a credible alternative to a resurgent and self-confident conservatism, and that means they will have to make up their minds as to where they intend liberalism to go from here...

...Unhyphenated conservatives often dismiss the neos as closet liberals out to exploit the new right-wing mood of the public for their own, essentially unreconstructed, ideological purposes...

...Then there are the social issues...

...Since at least the 1920s, liberals have been engaged in a comprehensive critique of America as a middle-class society...

...Bereft of their Keynesian crutch, most liberals simply do not know where to turn in search of an economic policy...

...Liberal politicians will, out of necessity, make some concessions to the current conservative mood, but liberal intellectuals will exert continuing, and in the long run probably successful, pressures from the Left on the Democratic party...

...None of these assumptions holds up well under close scrutiny, but so long as liberalism seemed to work, especially in the economic realm, no one paid much attention...

...All the same, there is reason to expect that liberals will resist movement toward the neo-conservative center...

...President Reagan has displayed to date a deft political touch and there is no present reason to suspect that he will, out of exaggerated concern for his Right flank, forsake the political center...

...Again, the New Republic exemplifies the current liberal condition...

...A hardline editorial on the need for a new realism in foreign relations runs up against a column by Ronald Steel mouthing all the Fulbright/McGovern pieties about the arrogance of power and the essential fecklessness, if not corruption, of American foreign policy...

...It would seem reasonable to suppose, at any rate, that liberals will not be able to recapture political power simply by muddling through or by having their enemies hand them the game by default...

...The New Deal, after all, brought only the most gradual recovery to the economy after 1933 and yet enjoyed extraordinary political success, in part because of FDR's personal popularity and in part because of the weakness of potential political alternatives...

...The less competitive, more egalitarian society of which they dream cannot be achieved without considerable elements of planning and regulation...

...The editors of the journal have evidently decided to open their columns to the widest variety of liberal opinion, and in so doing they have revealed the chaotic jumble to which liberalism is currently reduced...

...It is this seldom explicit anti-capitalist impulse that lies behind the enthusiasm with which the Left has welcomed the limits-to-growth ideology, and which goes a long way toward explaining the current liberal passion for environmental and wage-price controls...

...Not all liberals have succumbed to quirky anti-Americanism, cultural trendiness, or populist resentment...

...In a nation sensibly pragmatic in its political calculations, liberals were judged on the results of their policies rather than on the assumptions of their social philosophy...

...Niebuhr's Christian realism never really took hold among the great majority of liberals, most of whom, if they understood it, regarded it with suspicion...

...both of which, however, are now regarded by most liberals as anachronisms unsuited to an age of detente...

...The more fashionable and articulate circles within the liberal community regard neo-conservatism as a form of moral leprosy...

...It is only fair to note that today's New Republic, whatever its vagaries, is well edited and almost never bores...

...In such a society, the preference for cultivation of private things and for avoidance of pernicious abstractions that conservatives rightly cherish would fall an early victim...

...If Keynes-ianism has run aground and if, for the reasons already noted, the neo-conserva-tive option appears unpalatable, that would seem to leave liberals nowhere to go but farther to the Left...

...Given their uncertainties and internal divisions, liberals could well find a season in opposition to be in their best interests...

...In the interim the liberals remained uneasily dominant, but only, as Robert Bartley has noted, "through sheer inertia...

...Today's Times Square stands as a monument to the degradation of the defense of free speech...

...It might be noted in passing that neo-conservatism has its problems on the other side of the political spectrum as well...

...Tolerance, which liberals used to understand as an instrumental value, has been elevated into an absolute good...

...They are in genuine danger of losing any substantial base in Middle America...

...Liberals have been on the defensive ever since the mid-late sixties, when the Great Society began to come unglued at the same time that Vietnam was turning into a quagmire...

...Nobody knows what liberalism today is or should be...

...Like the conservative Republicans of the 1930s, today's liberal Democrats have been badly enough damaged that their opponents can expect to enjoy a reasonably extended period of grace...

...The liberals' quarrel with the present state of American society extends beyond narrowly economic matters...

...In the collapse of Keynes-ianism, liberals have lost the essential core of their program of political economy...

...It may well be that liberalism's finest legacy to the nation has been its defense, often in desperate times, of civil rights and civil liberties...

...Our economic engine, far from fine-tuned, misfires and sputters when it does not overheat, and it sometimes threatens to break down altogether...

...The heroic postwar struggle for civil rights for blacks has descended into insistence on policies like busing, which wastes large amounts of money and does not work anyway, or imposition of quotas, which denies the fundamental American premise of equal opportunity without regard for circumstances of ancestry, class, or religion...

...The election of 1972 should have been the critical political moment that Watergate, as it turned out, postponed for eight years...

...Parts of the New Republic read like the Nation or the New York Review of Books in their most febrile moments, while others read like rewrites from Commentary...

...The liberals of the New Deal and postwar generations, whatever one thinks of their specific policy prescriptions, were animated by a spirit of public purpose attractive in itself...

...Yet here too, liberals have in recent years lost touch with their society and with the best of their own tradition...

...None of this should be understood as suggesting that liberalism has already suffered irreparable damage or that it has entered a state of inevitable decline...

...Ronald Reagan's impressive margins among ethnics, blue-collar workers, and Roman Catholics reveal how much of the white working and middle classes the Democrats have let dwindle away...

...The Democratic party is currently dominated by its moralist faction, and the moralists are unlikely ever to make their peace with the neo-conservatives...

...How is it that the liberals, who have governed the nation and defined its political/cultural assumptions for most of the last 50 years, have fallen on such lean times...

...Should they do so, America would become what it has not normally been: a polarized and intensely politicized society...

...They oppose its customary lack of political/moral heroism as well as its acquiescence in cultural mediocrity...

...They want more welfare, more emphasis on economic security, more direction and control by the state of the private sector...

...And at the moment, the most reasonable analysis of liberal possibilities would seem to indicate a movement leftward...

...Liberals know only that things are hopelessly muddled and the times badly out of joint...

...But, as the Democrats are now learning, memories fade and practices, if they do not bring improvement, eventually are seen as futile...

...And in that moment of self-revelation, the Democrats of 1980 were the Bourbons, forgetting nothing and learning nothing...

...It stimulates even though, or perhaps precisely because, it does not know where it is going...

...Planning, equality, restrained growth-these are likely to become the dominant economic themes of the American Left, especially if the Reagan program runs into trouble...

...The nation drifted through most of the seventies in a kind of political vacuum, of which Jimmy Carter's presidency was the perfect expression...

...Stalinism generated during the postwar years a principled anti-Communist ideology and a policy of containment of Soviet expansio...

...Whatever their other differences, all commentators agreed-the point became tiresome in repetition-that the party must move beyond the old programs and the old rhetoric...

...In a more particular sense, the problem for liberals is that they have been coasting for some time on the momentum provided by earlier sources of liberal inspiration...

...Again, though, liberals cannot count on too easy a solution to their problems, and they would be unwise to depend on having their political work done for them by their opponents or by the simple unfolding of events...

...Though their intentions were surely otherwise, most liberals have in the years since Vietnam sounded more often than not like anti-American cranks...

...Such a development would have near-term political benefits for conservatives, but it would divide Americans in a way contrary to the society's traditions of consensus and comity...

...The world is turned upside down: The conservatives are in, the liberals are out, and the Republican party, for the first time in anyone's memory, has to contend with the problem of overconfidence...

...group political memories and practices tend to be extraordinarily long-lived...

...They have lost more than an election...

...Even those liberal economists who heap scorn on proponents of the Laffer Curve seem ready to concede that our current need is to focus on supply-side economics rather than on the Keynesian emphasis on aggregate demand...

...Without Richard Nixon's gift to them of Watergate, the Democratic liberals would have lost their ascendancy well before 1980...

...Americans remain more likely to vote their pocketbooks than their concern for the nation's role in the world or their cultural discontents...

...They have regularly suspected the worst about their own nation's intentions while believing the best about those of its enemies...

...The centrists risk being dismissed as Ripon Democrats...

...Nor is it necessary to his political success that his economic policies rapidly turn the nation around...

...Liberalism today appears to be less a people's movement than what Arthur Schlesinger, referring to Eugene McCarthy's followers, called "a semi-precious rally of the illuminati...

...indeed, it has no center at all...

...Our liberal moral zealots have traditionally been restrained by their pragmatic political moderation, but it seems not unreasonable to suppose that America's shift to the Right, should it continue, will so frustrate and alienate its liberals that it will move them sharply in the opposite direction...

...On any given issue, its individual articles and columns turn on each other in fratricidal warfare...

...liberal Democrats have thought of their party as representing the interests of the ordinary men and women of America...

...And yet, despite this solemn consensus, the convention experienced its only moment of genuine enthusiasm in response to a speech by Ted Kennedy that conjured up an America consisting entirely, at least in metaphor, of widows and orphans and oppressed minorities...

...So disappointed have they seemed with their society, and so distorted and cramped have their views of it become, that they have disqualified themselves as guides for the national renewal their countrymen now desperately long for...

...We should have seen enough of that in the 1960s to want forever to avoid it...

...Pat Moynihan writes on the need for liberals to reassess their assumptions, while a few pages over he and those like him receive the most withering, and often viciously personal, assaults...

...One election, however significant, does not a political revolution make...

...And we are all still liberals, after all...

...The civil rights movement served the purpose for a time, but, as already noted, it has worn down in recent years, while the antiwar movement was, from the beginning, so bitter and anti-American in temper that it could only serve as a great negation...

...At one level they understand that things have changed and that they must change with them, but at another, deeper level they sense that to change would be to forsake the only religion some of them have ever known...

...America in 1980 was not the America of the 1930s, and liberals would have to adjust their ideas and their policies accordingly...

...We see more clearly today than we have before that much of liberalism rests on questionable premises: that human nature, if not wholly benign, is at least infinitely malleable, that social relations and social structures are readily responsive to applications of rationality and good will, that society can and should change its values as rapidly as it adjusts its technological apparatus, that distinctions between people are essentially environmental in origin...

...The neo-conservative wing of liberalism understands that liberals can be responsive to contemporary public concerns without sacrificing their New Deal heritage...

...Unity in opposition is easier than unity in power, and should Reagan's new economic policies fail, or should he, through political allow himself to be captured by the ideologues of the New Right, liberals could reap great benefit simply by virtue of offering the only other game in town...

...Limited government, individual freedom, ! commitment to a world of pluralistic and countervailing powers-these are things that all people of political sense, however they define themselves, hold in common against the men and women of terrible earnestness who are our society's true enemies...

...From Vietnam to Iran, from Latin America to the Middle East, with friend and foe alike, the result has been a record that has favored neither the cause of peace nor the security of the nation...

...Societies like our own that emphasize individual freedom not only tolerate as a price of that freedom what seems to liberals an intolerable degree of inequality, but they also remain politically, morally, and aesthetically untidy...

...A glance at Senator Moynihan's voting record indicates that neo-conserva-tism need not entail rejection of the welfare state...

...I hope I am wrong in that supposition...

...There is no logical (although there may be an ideological) contradiction between a "progressive" economic policy on the one hand, and a traditional cultural and non-apologetic foreign policy on the other...

...The dynamics of the New Deal came out of a particular set of historical circumstances that no longer obtain...

...Yet the old inclusive New Deal coalition has begun to break down...

...today one wonders where a Keynesian might be found...

...It is difficult to rally troops to a cause the substance of which remains to be determined...

...Liberalism has lost its vital center...

...It must be understood, in the first place, that their difficulties have not arisen overnight...

...Out of habit and inertia, the components of the traditional Democratic coalition stayed liberal in voting behavior long after the liberals had begun to drift away from them in outlook and program...

...Private ownership and public purpose could be combined in a scheme that seemed to steer perfectly between the perceived evils of unregulated capitalism and state socialism...

...In the long run, it is better for conservatives and for the country in general that liberals not drift into radicalism...

...At is leftward, in the end, that committed liberals truly want to go...

...None of these forces persists today in other than the faintest echo...

...It seems hopelessly torn between neo-con-servative and neo-populist instincts...

...Liberals tend to see the end of growth less as an economic threat than as an opportunity by which a., society no longer expecting the expansion of its economic pie might become more receptive than it has been in the past to schemes to divide that pie more evenly...

...In the first days of the convention, a common theme dominated the observations of outsiders and party members alike...

...What all these uncertainties and contradictions add up to is a kind of political schizophrenia...

...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...Many liberals have never quite got over the Great Depression, and they find it difficult to see America or to formulate social policy in terms other than those appropriate to that now-distant time...

...they have lost their confidence, their will, and their sense of direction...

...Yet in recent years, Keynesian policy has failed to accomplish any of the things promised in its name...

...The aftereffects of last November's shockwave linger on all along the political spectrum, but they are felt with special force on the Left...

...It seems only yesterday that Richard Nixon confided to a reporter that he too, like everyone else, was now a Keynesian...

...It is the failure of liberalism in economic affairs that matters most politically...

...What has happened...

...Thus liberal centrists have been the recipients of the kind of intense hatred reserved for any apostate from the one true faith...

...If Reagan continues to show political shrewdness, and if the key lines on the economic graph move, however slowly, in the proper direction, the liberals could remain out in the political cold for a long time to come...

...Elsewhere, liberals have drifted into support of ever more radical and exotic versions of gay rights and women's lib, thus allowing conservatives to monopolize the political benefits accruing from public concern over erosion of traditional values in the workplace, the home, and the church...

...Through the management of demand, the theory went, liberals could ensure growth and prosperity, moderate the waves in the business cycle, and in general fine-tune an economic system capitalist in its basic structure but with plenty of room for the provision by government of public goods and services to which liberals were politically and emotionally committed...

...The cunning of history is such that the presumed logic of any" event bears only a random resemblance to how things actually turn out, but if we regard prophecy not necessarily as prediction but as plausible extrapolation, it can serve a useful analytical purpose, so long always as we remember how conjectural and precarious an operation we are involved in...

...In foreign affairs, the liberal record, perhaps less costly in political terms, has been even more disastrous...

...The old sources of inspiration have been played out, and no new ones have emerged to take their place...

...The second and more painful horn of the liberal dilemma-the tension between what it makes political sense to do and what liberals actually want to do-found dramatic expression at the Democratic convention last August...

...The New Republic, which has served for so long as the voice of mainstream liberalism, summarized the former problem when it remarked recently that while most liberals agree that liberalism must be redefined for the 1980s, "the problem...

...Whether in domestic affairs, where it led the economy into inflation in the midst of recession, in foreign policy, where it first overextended the nation's efforts and then retreated into a peevish and guilt-ridden isolation, or in cultural matters, where its tolerant pluralism descended, willy-nilly, into defense of moral decadence, the moderate Left found itself floundering amidst exhausted ideas, discredited policies, and worn-out men...