Back to Basics: The Traditionalist Movement that is sweeping Grass-Roots America
Pines, Burton Yale
B 0 0 K R E V I E W S Within nanoseconds of his inauguration, Ronald Reagan shoved the question of "social issues" onto the proverbial back burner. This failure to initiate public...
...The traditionalist revival could still easily end as a meaningless drift in public sentiment...
...At times he lauds Reagan as symbol and leaderof renewal, at times he treats Reagan as quite inessential m as-if a transfigured Democratic party will enact the traditionalist agenda if Reagan Republicans won't...
...Ascherson's view of this period is rigidly revisionist, yet even _9 from the point of view of revisionism some of his arguments are startling...
...They tend to endorse polls that report good news, but to explain away unfavorable results as artifacts of the polling situation or biased questions...
...but, to be brutal about it, the Polish freedom movement has not captured our minds...
...That teachers knew more than pupils, that people should act with decorum in public, were not things people bel i e v e d decades ago...
...As evidence that being a homemaker is regaining some of its lost prestige, Pines cites a widely publicized 1980 Yankelovich survey in which "nearly half" of the respondents agreed that " a woman's place is in the home" and "only 30 percent" disagreed...
...In short, Solidarity is our democratic values put to the test...
...It is "political and economic burdens," but not the structures of the economy and polity, that are at the root of Poland's difficulties...
...Not for him: are the enemies mere "activists": "Americans [who] sim~ ply want those found guilty of crimes to go to prison" fight "liberal penal reformers...
...Ascherson's contention that those most culpable are the United States and its secretary of state, James Byrnes...
...Twenty-five years ago, government had little to do with the stuff of everyday life...
...plus $2.00 delivery charge first bottle, 50 cents each additional one...
...had " r e - voked its approval of Poland's new Western frontier on the Oder-Neisse line...
...According to Mr...
...The " i n " causes and groups and ideas are the ones the government has most recently battened on...
...Grassroots movements do not have to have leaders, and resurgent traditionalism alone can alter such things as TV programming without coordination, if enough people choose not to watch what the commercial networks offer...
...But the full survey tells quite a different story...
...Pines predicts rather forthrightly that Americans will no longer tolerate anti-American diabolism, mindless egalitarianism, and the externalized pathologies of the New Class...
...Many on the Left (Ronald Steel is a telling example) have seen within Solidarity a challenge to the postwar status quo and a threat to the possibility of detente...
...Send for free sample and fragrance list...
...L e f t i s t s . . . socialists...
...All very inspiring, until the reader recalls that it was Kaiser, under pressure from the Office of Contract Compliance and in cahoots with the United Steelworkers, which established the racial quota system upheld by the Supreme Court in Weber...
...Item: Phyllis Schlafly blocked the Equal Rights Amendment by tapping grassroots feminine resistance to ERA and resentment against the rest of the feminist agenda, incidentally deflating the pretensions of feminists to represent any women other than themselves...
...However, a movement whose telos is the repeal of laws and the overthrow of judicial decisions needs generalship...
...They were definitive if adopted as the result of a internalized so deeply they served as prior decision...
...Nearly one year ago, General Jaruzelski's declaration of a "state of war" Adrian Karatnycky is research director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and associate editor of Workers Under Communism, a quarterly journal...
...The election of a nominally conservative President and Congress surely suggested a turning away from such values, never mind the bienpensantswho continue to find 1980 the fluky byproduct of inflation and Iranian hostages...
...radical feminists.., the culprits ruining American education," and corporations are "in the trenches" with "radical environmentalists" and legatees of the counter-culture...
...Values are those beliefs having final control over behavior, and no belief, no creed, can be thus marrow deep can shape a culture...
...In 1962 public approval of capital punishment registered 42 percent...
...Ascherson's telling, it is today unclear whether Stalin intended to incorporate Poland and other East EuroPean states into the Soviet orbit...
...Metaphors of combat dominate as experts troop, ranks swell, and neoconservatives--the "heavy artillery" of the Right--' 'bring an enormous tactical advantage--a firing position from wiShin the camp of the East Coast intellectual Establishment...
...Of the two books, Ascherson's is the more ambitious in scope, with nearly half of it given over to an examination of Poland's postwar history...
...On the Right, representatives of major American financial institutions likewise have found Solidarity to pose a threat to their own set of higher interests...
...ended the brief but remarkable period of Solidarity's ascendance...
...While Yankelovich found some renewed faith in private enterprise and technology, he also found no decline in the sixties' preoccupation with "self," and--sociologically more significant--continued support for the blurring of sex roles...
...This is what Heine meant when he said that convictions, not opinions, built the Gothic cathedrals...
...Still...
...Those high-school competency tests often demand very little--ninth-grade reading will get you your diploma m and civil rights lawyers have already laid siege to them in federal courts as discriminatory (blacks don't pass them as often as whites...
...Ascherson his lamentable judgments were it not for their grim consistency...
...Now ever...
...It is interesting that Australia, which mainlines cultural stimulants from America, has witnessed a similar pattern...
...The author cites Secretary Byrnes's famous Stuttgart speech in September 1946, where he announced that the U.S...
...at $16.00 per oz...
...Admittedly, when in the latter half of The Polish August Ascherson turns to the emergence of Solidarity, he is on firmer ground...
...It is Mr...
...Essential Products Co., Inc...
...Do Americans believe--did they ever believe--that 'it is permissible to kill something inside you i f it becomes inconvenient, that discrimination is so bad it should be rectified even before it happens, that freedom isn't so great after all...
...Thus, with the exception of the AFLCIO and certain West European trade unions, the Solidarity movement has found few enthusiastic supporters for its wide-ranging agenda...
...Jerry Falwell may not be Julian the Apostate, but nothing can be as it was before...
...There is some merit in these complaints--a poll on ERA couched in terms of "equal rights for women" is worthless, for example, and state ERA's that polled 60-40 pre-election majorities have lost by as much as 60-40 in Iowa, New Jersey, and New York...
...Indeed, both the American Left and the American Right find within Soli,SAVE UP TO 90% ON PERFUMES We've created our versions of Opium, Bal A Versailles, Joy, Oscar de la Renta, 1000, L'Air du Temps, Chloe, Shalimar, Norell, Halston Night, etc...
...Thus it is Truman and Byrnes, but not Stalin, who are responsible for Poland's metamorphosis into a chunk of the Stalinist monolith...
...Both books are written by authors whose biases can be fairly characterized as belonging to the Left...
...Whatever anyone's private convictions about unisexuality, it would have been upon us all had ERA passed, and it is inconceivable that ERA could have been stopped without Phyllis Schlafly...
...conservatives should be more 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 consistent in taking the good poll news with the bad, and it is to Pines's credit that he does not downplay polls that contradict his thesis...
...We might, however, forgive Mr...
...Who, then, is to blame for Poland's absorption into the Soviet bloc...
...Federal agent s stepped in when someone fobbed a bank o r ' did something wrong on Indian land...
...Society is a Foucault pendulum: By the time the bob has swung back, the ground has shifted underneath...
...It is perhaps for this reason that planned demonstrations protesting martial law have been so sparsely attended...
...The trendy Anglican and Uniting Churches have together lost over 20 percent of their membership since 1971, while the far more conservative Catholic Church has held constant...
...Perhaps Maier is improving free enterprise after all, for Newsweek touted Weber in its best newspeak as " a solution unique to the free enterprise system...
...His evidence is one part poll an d electoral statistics, another part interviews with hundreds of educators, clergymen, businessmen, the antiERA "legions," and New Right field marshals, and several parts anecdotes...
...General Reagan, in contrast, has just won a $100 billion tax hike...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 27 This is why norms have only to be brought to consciousness, studied and objectified, to be weakened, why a housewife who has once categorized her duties as "deferring to her husband's will" cannot return to those duties with innocent authenticity, why "consciousness raising" is so effectively corrosive...
...BACK TO BASICS: THE TRADITIONALIST.MOVEMENT THAT IS SWEEPING GRASS-ROOTS AMERICA Burton Yale Pines / William Morrow and Co...
...It is Gomulka's shortsightedness, but not Communism, that accounts for the .upsurge in worker militancy in the 1970s and beyond...
...It is not clear to me how a priest who once regarded slum clearance as his earthly mission can devolve into the simple shepherd of his flOck--or how his flock, once aware that such aspirations are possible, can expect him to...
...Such thoughts come to mind in reading Neal Ascherson's The Polish August and Lawrence Weschler's Solidarity: Poland in the Season of its Passion, the advance guard of what one expects will soon be a flood of books on Poland's free trade union movement...
...for example, dropping from 3.4 to 2.8 million members--conservative churches have grown...
...In doing so, Solidarity has captured Our hearts...
...Ascherson, " L i t t l e remains of the old Western orthodoxy of the early Cold War [which] held that Stalin meant from the outset to reduce the Eastern European states to servile clones of the USSR . . . . " It is an astonishing claim...
...In doing so, he persuasively chronicles the evergrowing pressures upon Solidarity's leaders from an increasingly frustrated and radicalizing rank-and-file...
...That Stalin needed an "irrefutable argument" when he could rely on the irrefutable Red Army is an innov, ative discovery indeed...
...13.50 Michael Levin peiling...
...But even though his sympathies clearly lie with Solidarity, Mr...
...those "battling to save the American family" take on "ultraliberals...
...Where in the past "government employee" meant "stodgy and hardbitten," today it means hip...
...That "private morality has no place in public l i f e " is not only false (laws against theft are obviously based on someone's ideas of property rights) but outrageously disingenuous, what with the idiosyncratic and suffocating morality the Left has been imposing through state organs for twenty years...
...At every opportunity, he prefers to blame everyone and everything but the source itself...
...Item: While " l i b e r a l " churches have declined since 1965-the Episcopal Church...
...All this--and the uplifting tales Pines brings from the campuses, school boards, and think tanks--sugg e s t s . t h a t Americans are again insisting that schools teach, jails punish and deter, churches attend to spiritual needs, and feminists go away...
...This failure to initiate public discussion about quotas, abortion, the judicial obstruction of justice, and governmental instrusion into private activities has made it hard to gauge the public's attitude toward the values underpinning these policies...
...Only values that are fixed points in organizing behavior...
...Ascherson strains to mitigate the Party's 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982...
...And this in turn resulted in the Polish government's losing "much of the international room to manoeuvre which was so important an element of its relative independence within the Soviet alliance...
...My own unscientific estimate is that traditionalists are still sufficiently timid and liberals sufficiently aroused f o r one final liberal victory at the ballot box and one final liberal push for their full program of planles's socialism-electoral quotas, "equal pay for equal worth," national health insurance, gay rights, ramps rampant, the works...
...That the halls of government are not the most'appropriate setting for a revival meeting may explain Pines's ambivalence toward Ronald Reagan...
...It remains in our consciousness because it is an aspect of our values, an affirmation of the universal aspiration of men to be free...
...Davy Crockett rose and fell, and Detroit introduced tailfins, without regard to the state...
...The present moral revival, to be genuine, must reverse the legacy of such state actions as Roe v. Wade and the creation of the whole alphabet soup of regulatory agencies...
...With each successive protest, with each daring Radio Solidarity broadcast, with each new periodical that appears in the Underground, and with mass demonstrations in May and August--all executed under threat of severe reprisals--the Polish people and their trade union movement appear to have passed their test admirably...
...Men's colognes too...
...By Mr...
...A t a deeper level, I have my doubts that there can be a "revival" of values, especially as explicit as the one Pines contemplates...
...Now comes Burton Pines to present in somewhat overheated prose the case for such a shift, for liberalism's loss of its "Mandate of Heaven" and for a well-entrenched revival of "traditionalist" vahJes in America...
...What complicates the revival of old-time morality is the intertwining of American cultflre and American government...
...Conservatives too often want it both ways with polls...
...In both cases, this political at...
...90 Water St., Dept...
...It won't do to smile dismissively at such wham-bam partisanship, for Pines is persuasive, if not cornMichael Levin is research associate at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and professor of philosophy at the City College of New York...
...Praise, however, has not been unqualified...
...Item: Since 1977, 36 states have mandated minimum competency requirements for high-school graduates...
...THE POLISH AUGUST Neal Ascherson/The Viking Press / $14.95 Penguin Books / $5.95 SOLIDARITY: POLAND IN THE SEASON OF ITS PASSION Lawrence Weschler/Fireside Books-Simon and Schuster $15.95 cloth, $8.95 paper Adrian Karatnycky More than two years ago, striking dockworkers at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk captured the world's imagination with their stunning triumph over the Polish government...
...Indeed, he even implies that the upgrading of the American military is best viewecl not as Realpolitik but as a moral reaffir-' mation of the value Of our system of liberty...
...Pines ap, provingly cites a Harvard dean's lament for the required courses eliminated during the 1960s, but fails to note that Harvard's new core curriculum is one more multi-everything stew concocted with an eye mainly to avoiding charges of Eurocentrism...
...Values cannot be both effective and selfconscious...
...A New York, NY 10005 212-344-4288 Serving Wall Street area since 1895 darity aspects both comforting and threatening...
...by 1981 it was 73 percent...
...And yet, and y e t . . , Beneath all these smiles there are skulls...
...He provides an excellent account of the tensions and negotiations between the union and the government in the period before martial law...
...Yet despite the severity of the martial law clampdown, Solidarity persists and continues to haunt our imaginations...
...Then there are the polls...
...Despite the fact that Poland continued to be occupied by the Red Army well after hostilities had ceased, that the Soviets during the war had instructed Polish Communists to challenge the legitimacy of the Polish governmentin-exil-e and to create their own parallel "government," that all key ministries and institutions in postwar Poland (including the security forces, the army, and the functions of the press) were in Communist hands, and despite the arrests and sentencing in 1945 of General Leopold Okulicki and other representatives of the armed anti-Nazi resistance to long terms of imprisonment, we are expected to believe that Stalin had no clear idea of what he was doing there...
...Pines presents the issues clearly, avoiding tha t coyness which afflicts more irenic commentators...
...Item: Since 1977, more than 35 states have begun to phase fixed sentences into, andparole out of, their criminal codes...
...tachment produces distortions which undermine what otherwise are welldocumented, well-written, and wellmeaning enterprises...
...The Western Left has seized upon those traits of Solidarity most consonant with socialist values: its trade union nature, its radical egalitarianism, its support for worker selfmanagement...
...This is war," declares this champion of capitalism: Free enterprise "can't survive in this country unless those of us who should be defending the system, who should be improving it, fght to save it...
...And the Soviet Union gained an irrefutable argument for coordinating Polish foreign policy more closely with its own...
...cuitural initiative becomes an enforceable obligation or' prohibition or entitlemen~t...
...The book opens with Cornell Maier, " t h e feisty boss of Kaiser Aluminum," facing off against various segments of the liberal media...
...The Western Right in turn has emphasized Solidarity's rejection of the Communist model, its firm commitment to traditional religious values, its nationalism and patriotism...
...Washington was a place where diplomats met, gerierals discussed Strategy~ and dams and post offices were doled out...
Vol. 15 • November 1982 • No. 11
