Whatever Happened to Liberalism?
Cranston, Maurice
there ever been a society more obsessed with the various harmful properties of what we put into our mouths? To read the daily papers of the last, say, fifteen years or so is to be kept...
...My guess is that the Kennedy:Hatfield " f r e e z e " will make the running, just because it is a slogan and not a plan, and a l s o - - d a r e one say it?--because it is what the Soviet Union wants...
...Of course, we know why we are being warned in t h i s way--as an appeal for our support for various worthy institutions or organizations undertaking medical research...
...With all this money being drawn from the taxpayers' pockets, liberals have still to admit that the welfare state does not work...
...Some liberals ask for a freeze on nuclear weapons, some ask for multilateral nuclear disarmament, some for unilateral nuclear disarmament...
...Not only does it define itself by its opposition to everything conservative, it defines itself by its opposition to everything distinctively American, whether it is the America of Reagan (described by Walzer as "the chief spokesman of the ideology of selfishness") or the America of Carter (accused by Torn Hayden in The American Futuret of "planning to begin a war while the American people were literally asleep...
...By Paul Tsongas...
...There are even liberals who now claim that Soviet militarism is an American delusion, a product of what they call America's "Cold War mentality...
...But is there anything approaching a concrete policy...
...The feminists of the past were wonderful women--working for political ends, such as the right to vote and own property, by political means...
...Richard M. Pious, Political Science (~tarterly...
...Of course, such films do not glorify Russia...
...The weakness of the Senators' argument resides, in the unreliability of their ctaim that both arsenals are "so nearly equivalent...
...The point of this and similar passages is the powerful claim that at the root of alterations in intellectual fashion, artistic forms, political institutions, and assorted developments in religion, music, literature, and popular culture is a set of rumblings in technology and the forms of property ownership congruent with it that constitute the "material base...
...Indeed we find Tom Hayden warning, in The American Future: "What the partnership with China can lead t o . . . is the same danger as the first Cold War--a hot war, or at least an unbridgeable tension between the U.S...
...Two recent books are devoted to the problem: Nuclear War--What's In It For You?~ which tWashington Square Press, $3.95...
...In the New Republic's "First Draft for -1984," Walter Laqueur and Charles Krauthammer setout the main lines for~ a new liberal foreign policy...
...Senator Paul Tsongas's book**~ is instructive in this respect, since it shows how he has had to change his tune in order to succeed in =~**The Road from Here: Liberalism and Realities in the 1980's...
...now he has learned the importance of helping American industry, if only to relieve unemployment...
...On strategic weapons, Democrats should support immediate negotiations for o drastic and balanced reductions in current arsenals, a goal that would be delayed, and perhaps prevented, ~oy interminable debates over the meaning and enforcement of any 'freeze...
...Translated into practical politics, this idea necessarily entails the enlargement of the state, of that very entity which traditional liberals had located as the central adversary of freedom...
...A d e t a i l e d comparison of the budget of Carter's Administration with that of the Mitterrand government in France--that is, of a socialist government which includes Communist ministers--would, I believe, startle some Americans by showing how far the United States had by 1980 moved to the Left: For example, whereas Mitterrand allocated 4 percent of his budget to health, Carter allocated 30 percent...
...People would do well to r e f l e c t on Professor Bookchin's observation--coming as it does from a source that no one could describe as " R e a g a n i t e " - - t h a t bureau^racy has eaten into the soul of American ~ociety...
...The recent tenth anniversary issue of their journal Ms...
...Society must invent a way for women to be mothers and men fathers, if for some reason they choose to do so, without the need for any selflessness on their part...
...the objectives are still fixed and the passions behind them are still violent...
...Earlier liberals had fashioned their political programs in contrast with, and usually in opposition to, conservatives...
...He also looks for a revival of craftsmanship and depicts a world where everyone collects his own energy in solar batteries instead of hooking up to a nuclear-generated public supply...
...The Institute's political analysis is outstanding...
...Selfknowledge is the one virtue still rec~Edited by Robin Morgan...
...expenditure on health consumed 4.5 percent of the GNP in 1950 (about $12.7 billion...
...Society must arrange it so t h a t r e l a t i o n s between the sexes, especially .sexual relations between the sexes, are e n t i r e l y without weight or consequence...
...Their propaganda purposes are better served by Western films which knock the USA: Missing, for example, which depicts American government officials as murderers, or The China Syndrome, which portrays American industrialists as gangsters...
...The process can, I think, be traced back to the introduction into liberalism of the "social q u e s t i o n " - - t h e idea of using government as a means to resolve problems in the economy and improve the living conditions of the poor and disadvantaged...
...now he argues that "there is no other alternative to nuclear power in the middle t e r m . " Once he championed workers' trade union rights above all else in industry...
...by 1970 it had risen to 7.2 percent of the GNP, and by 1980 it had risen to 9.5 percent or some $1,067 a person...
...But it is very clear from his book--an honest and sympathetic record of a liberal intellectual's life in office--that Mr...
...I t recognizes the urgency of taking a step that is as simple as it is practical, and that is more feasible now than it has ever been before, because both sides are so nearly equivalent in t h e i r arsenals of annihilation...
...In the old days, he admits, he encouraged his public to go on buying their German and Japanese cars "to save gas...
...They have not even assimilated the idea discreetly...
...colleges...
...Hayden speaks of the need for people to lead a more frugal life, which at least sets him apart from those liberals who go on and on about ending the frugality of people's lives by ladling out more state subventions and welfare payments...
...Take the case of Indochina, Some ten years ago American liberals could speak of almost nothing but the sufferings of Cambodia under U.S...
...makes singularly depressing reading for anyone who really cares about freedom...
...They even discourage the diffusion of socialist idealism, lest that should play into the hands of China, whose rival form of Marxism is cleaner and more appealing to the pure in heart...
...Bookchin argues, on the contrary, that freedom requires us to banish the whole thing in favor of a society hbld together by something other than taxes, bureaucrats, rules, and regulations...
...After Stalin's death the Soviets ceased to pin any hopes on people in other countries admiring the USSR or regarding it as a model to imitate...
...is now an optional form of address for business and the U.S...
...for this purpose the soft-thinking American liberal is infinitely more useful than any card-carrying Communist...
...PARTY COALITIONS IN THE 1980s edited by Seymour Martin Lipset Stanford University and Hoover Institution The opinions are diverse, often in open disagreement in this detailed and lively discussion of the past hfstory, present significance, and future implication~ of the American two-party system, including an analysis of the 1980 election...
...Chicago University Press, $20.00...
...Its actual situation is much worse, for to judge from what is being written and said, by the leading liberals in the United States today, a once great system of political thought has degenerated into a sorry mess of cont r a d i c t o r y opinion, prejudice, f a n t a s y , passion, and trivia...
...Their proposal is to effect an immediate halt to the arms race, and to forestall any increase in weaponry while protracted negotiations are undertaken for a more permanent compact on arms limitation...
...The young may wish for society to keep them children...
...Califano ought not really to have been surprised...
...Spitz did not, however, think t h a t liberalism could, or should, be brought unaltered from the nineteenth century into the twentieth...
...of l i b e r a l i s m , wrote a number of essays which have now been posthumously publ i s h e d , * exploring what he called the "authentic tradition" of liberalism and trying to ascertain how that tradition had come to be, as he put it, "sidetracked...
...So long as democracy has a voice there is hope for freedom...
...the actual articles are feeble and trivial...
...The old universal perspective of traditional liberalism has disappeared...
...Americans still pay a greater proportion of their earnings in t a x e s t h a n Frenchmen do...
...The decisive issue for our time," Spitz wrote, "is not Mill versus THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 11 Burke, but Mill versus Marx...
...The great mistake of the present-day feminists is that of presentday American l i b e r a l s i n g e n e r a l , of seeking to use political means to solve problems that are either social or private...
...Once Tsongas was all against nuclear energy...
...He is author, most recently, of Capitalism for Beginners and Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics (both published by Pantheon...
...Before World War II the Soviet Union produced films designed to win sympathy for Communism in the outside worldmand very good films they were: The Battleship Potemkin, Bed and Sofa, We From Kronstadt, and others enjoyed a great success in the West...
...and both governments a l l o c a t e d more or l e s s the same proportions of their budgets to labor, veterans, science, agriculture, housing, and urban development...
...In his introduction to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto, Engels attributed to Marx what he described as that great polemic's "fundamental proposition": That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it', form the basis upon which is built up, and from 'which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch...
...They do not thrive, do n6t prosper, are not happy, satisfied, vital, if they are permitted to do so...
...As thirteen of'the nation's foremost political commentators analyze these constraints, they are unanimous in rejecting the superficial conclusion that the presidency has become unmanageable...
...The special number of Ms...
...So there is no ground for optimism...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 seems to have been written by ateam, and Freeze: How You Can Help Prevent Nuclear War,** by Senators Kennedy and Hatfield...
...Which o f ' t h e s e two diametrically opposed liberal policies, the KennedyHatfield or the Laqueur-Krauthammer, is likely to be supported by the majority of progressives in America...
...In America, on the other hand, this is manifestly no longer the case...
...Society must make it possible for the young to remain children and for the old to remain young...
...in Africa, thousands of female children continue to be mutilated by barbarous clitoral circumcision...
...332 pages cloth, $18.95 paper, $7.95 Available in bookstores The trouble with the American judiciary is that its members cannot be removed so easily...
...and the Soviet Union...
...From what Mr...
...Perhaps a foreigner like myself may be allowed to ask, what was Mr...
...John Stuart Mill...
...One must, alas, question the wording of this important utterance...
...The Soviets ceased even to attach great importance to foreign Communist parties, so that the emergence of "Eurocommunism" and other manifestations of independent thinking among Party supporters broke no hearts in Moscow...
...pursue the line of analysis just identified...
...Other contributors gloat over the number of bridal-gown shows and Miss World pageants t h a t have been disrupted...
...Califano's anecdotes: "UN Ambassador Andrew Young began to speak . . the P r e s i d e n t ' s face r e d d e n e d . He i n t e r r u p t e d Young: 'You ha~e repeatedly embarrassed the administration...
...It is the lack of system, the absence of coherence, which strikes any impartial reader of the American liberal literature that is currently being published...
...In sum, this book is an excellent presidential sampler . . . a must for professionals...
...But liberals were no longer in the same situation...
...I f I were a Marxist--and just to avoid misunderstanding I boldly confess that I find Marxism a frequently useful tool of analysiswI should be inclined to interpret recent American experience as a vintage illustration of two imPortant Marxist concepts: the relationship between base and superstructure and the notion of false class consciousness...
...now he urges that the government should "encourage the private sector...
...One has only t o add that this doctrine of "positive freedom" was advanced, far more systematically, by Marx...
...and paradoxically, although he would probably prefer to be called a philosophical anarchist, his thinking is closer to that of a nineteenthcentury liberal than the thinking of most Americans who call themselves liberals today...
...The fact of the matter is that no one who took seriously the ideals of Thoreau and the simple life of communal frugality could possibly accept any alliance with left-wing liberalism...
...It is all very horrifying...
...Society must banish all inequity, all discomfort, all necessity, all tragedy, anzl above all, everything for which the individual has hitherto been responsible...
...Califano recalls that HEW in 1980, after he- had...
...hence liberals and conservatives stand together, at least in the here and now, in defense of democracy against dictatorship...
...F o r narrowness of vision on the American liberal scene, few can match the feminists...
...It could well be amusing, for example, to see a unit for the history of female homosexuality calling itself "Lesbian Herstory Archives" were it not for the deadly earnest hatred of the male which that silly linguistic innovation bespeaks...
...But it seems that the editor of this anthology has looked not so much for the voices of women as the voices of unhappy women...
...I had my radical training before becoming a hustler, so that even while involved in the drug, hustling and homosexual life, I still was able to understand some of the dynamics of it...
...The agency and the bureaucrat have become the substitute for the family, the town, the neighborhood, the personal support structure of peoples in crisis . . . . With no other structure to speak of but the bureaucratic agency, socie~ has not merely been riddled by bureaucracy, it has all but become a bureaucracy in which everyone is reduced to a functionary...
...democracy offers America's only prospect of escape from the twin clutches of the bureaucracy and the judiciary, whose powers have been so greatly increased by the enactment of liberal legislation and the diffusion of the liberal ideology...
...government and that there are now more than 30,000 women's studies courses in U.S...
...Unfortunately, when it is safe for him to press a hard-left line, Tsongas still does so, and it is doubtful whether the leopard really has changed his spots...
...The Amish sect and other religious communities have long lived successfully in America on such principles...
...Indeed, there is a large section of liberal opinion in America which cannot bring i t s e l f to swallow the KennedyHatfield assertion...
...but the Soviets no longer seek to glorify Russia...
...His argument was that liberalism, in its essentials, is a doctrine about liberty, a doctrine which assigns priority to the freedom of the individual, and notably to freedom from the constraints, of the state...
...The British National H e a l t h Service, however admirable in its origins when the traditional independence of the professions was p r e s e r v e d , began to d e t e r i o r a t e rapidly as soon as the system became b u r e a u c r a t i z e d and'when uncontrolled immigration put excessive pressure on its resources...
...It makes no difference that the diseases of the hypochondriac are imaginary...
...Catifano, for at the very top the bureaucrat has no tenure...
...Not air pollution, not carcinogens, not viruses, not too much wealth or too much poverty, not too much technology or too little spontaneous feeling...
...I think we s u f f e r from a massive denial of human limitedness, which is, as I said, j u s t a n o t h e r way of describing hypochondria...
...that consequently the whole history of mankind . . . has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes...
...I was told this again and again at Camp David . . . You have caused ~ embarrassment to me by calling Britain the most racist country in h i s t o r y . . , saying Cuban troops in Angola were a s t a b i l i z i n g i n f l u e n c e . . , saying there are hundreds of political prisoners in the United S t a t e s . ' " Califano adds that Carter was so angry that he "had killed any o t h e r meaningful comment...
...To read the daily papers of the last, say, fifteen years or so is to be kept constantly in mind of menace...
...The Soviets rejected Lyndon Johnson's proposal for a nuclear freeze in 1964 becau-se America was then ahead in the arms race...
...What needs to be discovered is how to avoid a nuclear war...
...As doctors and drugs to the individual hypochondriac, so something called " s o c i e t y " must be made to prescribe to our collective denial of nature...
...a distrustful electorate...
...A surface of professionalism is provided by the advertisements--for gin, whiskey, cigarettes, automobiles, and a make-up " i n a sexy new precision applicator" (Question: I s sexy make-up calculated to provoke sexual harassment in the office...
...Without precisely that burden, the knowledge that a n o t h e r ' s existence and needs mean more to one than o n e ' s own, life becomes an ever more accelerating accumulation of t r i v i a - - o f evanescent j u n k - - without s u s t e n a n c e and without Satisfaction...
...Califano doing governing America, spending 36 p e r c e n t of its f e d e r a l budget...
...The whole idea, to put it plainly, is a socialist idea...
...It is deeply entrenched not only in the bureaucracy and the judiciary, but in the universities and the media, and in many of those places it has become a vested interest, as jobs, prestige, and advancement depend on adherence to it...
...Mitterrand allocated 1 p e r c e n t to p r e s i d e n t i a l administration, Carter 9 percent...
...Califano calls his book Governing America...
...None of this is actually impractical...
...That is not the information we have i n E u r o p e , where Soviet s u p e r i o r i t y in nuclear i n s t a l l a t i o n s at this moment is calculated by the b e s t a u t h o r i t i e s to be substantial...
...they have reached the stage of proclaiming it as their very own...
...I s u s p e c t it would have to be Democracy, Bureaucracy, and the Judiciary in America since democracy has to compete all the time a g a i n s t t h o s e two alarmingly powerful o r g a n s of government...
...Califano did not think of himself as the servant of the President or of Congress...
...Similarly, people today who ale too discreet to suggest that America should get rid of its military nuclear installations suggest instead that America should get rid of its civil nuclear installations...
...Men and woman may wish for society to render their entanglements of no consequence...
...American liberalism continues to define itself only in opposition to conservatism, and far from rejecting Marx, seems only to add more and more pieces of Marxism to the flimsy structure of its own ideology...
...The answer is that American democracy did not decide...
...Mothers and fathers may wish for society to take over t h e i r burden of selflessness...
...They write scornfully of what they call " t h e current spate" of calls for an immediate bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons...
...In the Moslem world, millions of women are subjected to TtCheshire Books, $9.95...
...L i b e r a l i s m in America is thought at the moment t o be unpopular...
...greater oppression and humiliation today than they were a generation ago...
...practical politics...
...He is a fierce exponent of the Marcuse doctrine of intolerance toward conservatives, and was a star performer in the Senate witch-hunt of Ernest Lefever...
...And the judiciary since World War II has taken an increasingly large share of what Mr...
...In short, it is technology and the law of property which distinguish slavery in ancient Rome and 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982...
...But no, the message is the opposite...
...To f r e e z e f i r s t and then negotiate reductions makes sense on many l e v e l s , " they write...
...Emerging Coahtions in American Politics was a seminal work, and the encore, Party Coalitions ~n the 1980s, is just as iflvaluable...
...It betrays an unwillingness to think clearly or think thoroughly, or even to think at all about certain subjects...
...Speaking of the human predicament in present-day America he writes: What has largely replaced the sinews that held community and personality together is an allencompassing, coldly depersonalized bureaucracy...
...And later in the same manifesto, Professor Michael Walzer alleges 12 that "the demand that government 'get off our backs' has a short history...
...been in charge of it, "accounted for more than 36 per cent of the total federal budget...
...This view, widespread in Europe, has a relatively small following in the United States because it is too frankly pacifist...
...Hypochondria is itself a mortal disease...
...Some have described the condition from which we s u f f e r as narcissism...
...The legacy of domination thus culminates in the growirig together of the state and societymand with it the dissolution of the family, community, mutual aid and social commitment...
...But in recent times, the Soviets have turned aside from this activity...
...For example, in a liberal manifesto "A First Draft for 1984" published in the New Republic on March 31, 1982, we read: "historically, government . . . is the instrument by which the nation's people can guide their destiny and express their principles...
...one has only to bear in mind that such societies are intensely disciplined and puritan, and not at all "liberal" in the manner of Hayden, whose attitude is one of pure self-indulgence, combining apologies for the worst totalitarian regimes with proposals for the restoration in the West of a medieval economy...
...The only connection he could claim to have with democracy is t h a t a democratically e l e c t e d P r e s i d e n t a p p o i n t e d him and a democratically elected Senate approved of the nomination...
...It is curious how, when the Soviets want a policy put into effect, all sorts of opinion groups--church groups, community groups, service groups, all led by certified nonpolitical, nonleftist personalities--spring u p like mushrooms to promote it and collect signatures for petitions in its favor...
...The third liberal response to the threat of nuclear war is to ask for unilateral nuclear disarmament...
...I do not think the name o f this condition is narcissism, a term which in any case is all too often confused with just plain selfishness...
...A student radical of the 1960s at Dartmouth College, Tsongas rose swiftly in the Democratic party...
...Everything edible, it seems, is at one time or another scrutinized for the richness of its carcinogens or the emptiness of its calories...
...Both books provide d e t a i l e d projections about the destructive potential of nuclear weapons~ and offer dramatic descriptions, complete with figures and charts, of the f a t e of various American cities in a nuclear war, however good a civil defense those cities might think they possessed...
...The irony is that self-knowledge is the virtue that American feminists seem in general most signally to lack...
...And we all learned during the Vietnam war that pacifism in America is seldom more than a facade: People who called themselves "antiwar" at that time nearly always turned out'on closer inspection to be people who wanted North Vietnam to win the war againstthe South...
...Even if some judges are elected by popular suffrage, the judiciary cannot be a democracy...
...That offer, by correcting the massive inequality that has resulted from the Soviet installation of S~-20 missiles in Europe, would help stabilize the European frontier, and thus make nuclear war in Europe far less likely...
...Here is one of Mr...
...and an anthology of feminist writings Sisterhood is Powerful=~=~ are taken up with such matters as the sexual harassment of female office workers in the USA and the reluctance of American fathers to nurse and feed their children while the mother finds fulfillment in a career...
...So we are healthy but always in danger of illness--figuratively as well as literally, spiritually as well as physically...
...The cause of women's freedom is, in truth, a serious one...
...Those of us going through this cycle in twentieth-century democratic society, in American society, do so in physically, socially, and politically privileged surroundings...
...hostile media...
...Senators Kennedy and Hatfield plead the case for a freeze on all nuclear weaponry and suggest that this could be accomplished by agreement with the Soviet Union...
...Ellen Strong, who contributes a brilliant essay, is a reformed junkieprostitute...
...For one thing, he is still worr.ied about the plight of humanity in general, and not merely that of the inhabitants of the United States...
...The left-liberal ideology will not die because it is incoherent and intellectually impoverished...
...To watch television--particularly, for some reason, to watch television late at n i g h t - - i s to be bombarded with the message that every minute so and so many of our fellow Americans are dying of this or that arcane disease...
...This is our blessing of health, but, as Kafka said, we seem determined to treat it as a disease...
...There can be no doubt that he has changed his policy on all these matters because his political career has forced him to listen to ordinary people and seek their votes...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 ognized...
...Obviously, Tsongas could not have moved so far so fast if he had stuck to the abstract dogmas of liberal theory...
...It is all grimly humorless...
...In pursuing their ends, the Soviets since Stalin have relied almost entirely on building up hostility to "Western imperialism" rather than on fostering love for themselves...
...They do not trust a regime that has friends in Washington...
...There's the stuff for the troops...
...The allegiance of the judiciary is not to the people's will but to the law, and the law is what the judiciary says it is...
...Here we can discern another striking characteristic of current American liberalism...
...It cannot be written off as out of date...
...The ' f r e e z e , ' " they say, " i s a slogan, not a plan, and even if it were practical, it would cancel the zero option offer to Europe...
...bombs: Cambodia's infinitely greater sufferings under different Communist regimes seem not to engage the American liberal's interest...
...the American courts decided...
...And here the voice of American liberalism is incoherent...
...Instead, they offer a number of positive and realistic suggestions for tackling the job...
...He has expressed as adroitly as any American liberal the theory of "positive freedom," according to which, however much " n e g a t i v e freedom" may be diminished by the intrusion of government, "positive freedom" is actUally increased by state activity which enables certain groups to enlarge their options, even at the expense of reducing the options of others...
...The reasoning here is revealing: The author does not conjecture that a radical upbringing might have propelled her toward a life of drugs, prostitution, and lesbianism, only that it enabled her to understand it while she lived it...
...Tom Hayden's book The American Future is a no-nukes manifesto, in which sweet thoughts derived from Rousseau and Thoreau are cynically put together with sour ones derived from Marx...
...now he gives priorityto productivity...
...China, however, is another subject about which today's American liberals are either silent or hostile...
...Green seems to think t h a t the answer lies in a more "comprehensive" national health scheme, but if t h a t means more s t a t e control and intervention, the experience of Great Britain must refute his expectations...
...Mark Green, for example, protests in his Winning Back A m e r i c a , t t t " D e s p i t e Medicare and Medicaid, t h e r e are 34 million Americans who lack f u l l - t i m e year-round medical c o v e r a g e . . , and some 70 million who are medically indigent-unable to afford adequate coverage yet not poor enough for Medicaid...
...Theleft-liberal ideology has less and less poPular support in America, and to that extent democracy has halted its advance, at least in its overt and unequivocal form...
...Nevertheless it has come about that the great majority of American liberals have taken over this essentially socialist concept without admitting that they have ceased to be liberals...
...that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class--the proletariat--cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class--the bourgeoisie---without at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles...
...It is as if America alone concerned them, or rather, as if the criticism of America were the only exercise that mattered...
...We are i l l - - o f something it will take more than a new political climate to cure...
...Jim Doyle, Newsweek...
...David Spitz believed that this was still the only genuine form of liberalism, and the credo he devised for liberals in the twentieth century began with the maxim: "Esteem liberty above all o t h e r values, even over equality and justice...
...Vintage Books, $5.95...
...On the crucial question of foreign policy, Tsongas goes on advocating support for some of the worst Marxist-Leninist despots in the Third World, even in Ethiopia, where he has seen with his own eyes what is going on...
...Vintage Books, $5.95...
...Before his death in 1979, David Spitz, a distinguished American political philosopher who specialized in the theory Maurice Cranston is Professor of Political Science at the London School o f Economics...
...Once he voiced the liberal demand for all-out support for the public sector of the economy...
...unwieldy bureaucracy...
...And yet one wonders whether there was any need to spell it all out, since everyone must know t h a t a nuclear war will bring a holocaust...
...He saw himself as a minister of the government with a duty to serve the public interest as he best understood it...
...Without weight and consequence, even unhappy consequence, to give them meaning, these entanglements are pure pain and poison...
...This amount was more than $200 billion, a greater sum than the whole national budget of any o t h e r country in the world, save the USSR...
...How is this+ to be explained...
...This was the liberalism of John Locke and--in some at least of his writings--of *The Real World of Liberalism, by David Spitz...
...The pursuit of this objective brings the liberal Left into a curious alliance with the ecology movement, and adds to their program a strangely dreamlike quality...
...Gloria Steinem, for example, can proclaim as triumphs of Women's Lib over the past ten years that "Ms...
...Their selfa b s o r p t i o n is something a l t o g e t h e r diff e r e n t - n o t a virtue, but a charmtess and ruinous defect...
...For evidence of this we may turn to Murray Bookchin's latest book, The Ecology o f Freedom,~ft which provides, among other things, a forceful refutation of Michael Walzer's gospel of positive freedom...
...Sisterhood is Powerful affords no relief from the gloom, but it does contain some better writing, and well it might, since literature is a trade where women have long proved themselves the equals of men...
...Whether one agrees with him or not, Bookchin's writing has an eloquence which recalls that of Camus...
...If Alexis de Tocqueville were to return to the Untied States today and could write a sequel to his Democracy in America, what title would he need to give it...
...It is a devious way of undermining American nuclear technology...
...But it is still fashionable in many quarters...
...qtPocket Books, $2.95...
...480 pages cloth, $19.95 paper, $8.95 POLITICS AND THE OVAL OFFICE Towards Presidential Governance edited by Arnold Meltsner University of California, Berkeley Hailed in the national press as "a uide for the new Reagan presidency" os Angeles Times), this study offers a nuts-and-bolts account of the many hindrances to presidential success: a fragmented Congress...
...T h i s danger of hot war, or nuclear war, with the Soviet Union is one about which there is a great deal of talk on the American Left...
...if the Soviets like the idea now it is because they believe themselves to be ahead in the arms race...
...The impression, however, is unmistakable: With enough money and enough research and enough scientific ingenuity, no one ever need die of anything...
...Sylvia Plath, whose poems are perhaps the best, committed suicide at the age of thirty...
...In our determination, we have succeeded...
...a member of the House of Representatives in 1974, he stood in Massachusetts for the Senate in 1978, and while all the time asking for more blacks in politics, opposed the only black Senator, the impeccably progressive Senator Brooke, and defeated him...
...and whether desirable or undesirable, it cannot be reconciled with the origina...
...Just for the fun of it, I shall yield to temptation and, for a space, Robert Lekachman is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Lehman College and Graduate Center campuses of the City University of New York...
...Joseph A. Califano, J r . , in his book Governing America,*** which is mainly about his t h i r t y - m o n t h s ' e x p e r i e n c e as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter Administration, remarks that, HEW was "often charged by law to solve human problems that other institut i o n s - t h e family, the schools, the economy, local governments--had f a i l e d to solve or even to address...
...indeed we know that Carter took a very long time to undo that preposterous appointment...
...liberal principle of keeping the state's powers to a minimum...
...It is the ideology of modern s e l f i s h n e s s . " It is strange that a professor who made his name as a student of seventeenth-century political thought should imagine that the demand for minimaJ government was first heard only recently...
...Of herself Ellen Strong says, looking back on a life that began as a "reddiaper baby" given a vigorously radical upbringing: "Perhaps I am lucky...
...But this, one discovers from reading their publications, is not what concerns the American Women's Liberation Movement...
...Liberals and conservatives ought logically to stand together against Marxism and Marxist dictatorship, and in some parts of the world they do...
...Without forcing easy or superficial conclusions, twenty-one authors set forth the strategies and _9 guideposts for the Republicans and Democrats who must build winning coalitions in the 1980s...
...Califano t e l l s us, it seems that it was Carter who was made to feel bad when he d i s a g r e e d with any members of his cabinet...
...This attitude is the more unfortunate in view of the world situation in which we all now live and the Soviet strategy which threatens our peace and freedom...
...He has moved from the antiwar rhetoric to calling for a vigorous response to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan...
...A l l of this is what really threatens us...
...Walzer, for example, in his contribution to the New Republic, says that in the name of freedom, "It is time to defend .the welfare state--taxes, bureaucrats, rules and regulations--the whole thing...
...Califano calls "governing Ameri c a . " How, for example, did American democracy settle the questions of egalitarian schooling, of abortion, of prison reform, of pornography...
...HEW was brought into being to take the place of those other institutions...
...The very unfamiliarity of the names of the maladies now stalking one in ten, or one in twenty, or one in two hundred might be thought to reassure us of just how hale and hardy we have become by comparison with our forebears...
...The old may wish for society to keep them young, but they lose the richness o f their lives, the golden rewards of all t h e i r travail and experier~ce, when such a-pretense is made possible...
...It is the rush to denounce our connection to the eternal and inevitable order of things: that we are all born, male or female, that we spend a short, sometimes tragic, often comic, time on the scene, that we geherate others, look after them, and one day, hopefully without being too ugly about it, make way for them...
...But at l e a s t the system allowed the P r e s i d e n t e v e n t u a l l y to rid h i m s e l f of Andrew Young--and indeed also of Mr...
...Bantam Books, $3.95...
...Nobody elected him...
...I suppose it would be generally agreed that it was the development of HEW which gave the USA the dubious honor of considering itself a "welfare s t a t e . " It is probably not so well realized how much the powers and functions of the s t a t e in America were at the same time enlarged and extended...
...But Professor Walzer is certainly not lacking in sophistication...
...He does not tell us that Carter had the s t r e n g t h of will to fire Andrew Young...
...When all is said and done...
Vol. 15 • December 1982 • No. 12
