The Liberal World Confronts the Reagan Era
Nuechterlein, James
James Nuechterlein THE LIBERAL WORLD CONFRONTS THE REAGAN ERA After a year in the political wilderness, liberals remain bewildered. To understand the reaction of the American Left to the...
...One gets a bleak picture of an America at the brink of catastrophe...
...As astonishing as it seems, liberals have not yet got over their habit of underestimating the man...
...The Reagan Administration came under attack without regard to the effects of its policies on people's lives (the critiques, of course, came before anyone could know what those effects would be...
...I Please enroll me in Fortune Book Club and send the ] three choices I've listed below...
...The Left has not even learned how to react to Ronald Reagan...
...But the matter is still more complicated...
...The political disarray of the Left has left it intellectually vulnerable in a way unimaginable a decade ago...
...How to make it...
...To be moral is to hold correct political opinions...
...Reagan is also lucky, even in misfortune...
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...indeed, it's about all there is...
...The liberal reluctance to decide among priorities reflects a situation in which one political world is dead (though still longed for) and no new one has arisen to take its place...
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...Liberals still control the commanding heights of the...
...Conservatives and neoconservatives appear more confident and less defensive than at any time in modern American memory...
...Their political incompetence, it seems clear, derives directly from their having run out of ideas...
...Liberalism has for so long dominated American political thought, that it has been less an argument than an assumption...
...It now seems that it is to neoconservatism, rather than liberalism, that the Administration will have to look for perceptive criticism...
...Mainstream Protestant Christianity is a case in point...
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...We hear endless appeals for a "new liberalism," yet the prescriptions for the new order remain so vague that we cannot be sure just what is intended...
...American intellectual/cultural life in the fifties remained securely liberal, even if the liberalism of the decade was rather less flamboyant than it had been in the New Deal/Fair Deal years...
...The liberal community's critiques of the President's policies have been superficial when not simply demagogic...
...Whereas those liberals who became neoconservatives saw the logic of the angry young and decided that the liberal assumptions might be at fault, most mainstream liberals acknowledged the charges of failure of will and so reacted with predictable guilt and self-hatred...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 23...
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...Better a bumbling liberalism, these messages suggest, than a determined conservatism...
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...Even those who most-hate his politics find it hard to dislike the man, and Reagan's undogmatic manner makes this most doctrinaire of Presidents appear less ideological than in fact he is...
...There's ironic justice here, but also reason for concern--and even some regret...
...All of which explains why the new liberalism remains so insubstantial: The Left's moral allegiance still resides with the old liberalism...
...They wait for things to deteriorate not simply out of political expedience, but also out of a sense that their customary prescriptions can apply only to an economy wracked by deflation...
...The National Council of Churches, which has long since" lost interest in personal behavior, could wait no more than thirty days beyond the Inaugural to issue its first denunciation of the moral callousness of the Reagan Administration...
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...The immediate rush of public sympathy has long since worn off, but there remains a legacy of heightened respect that will work for him for the rest of his Presidency...
...Keep it...
...Even the liberals seemed impressed, despite their best efforts not to be...
...I t should come as no surprise, then, that the Left can challenge the Reagan Administration with little other than moralism...
...Pluralistic voluntarism dispenses with the centralized direction that alone captures the moral imagination of the Left...
...While it is understandable, if regrettable, to liberals that they must occasionally endure a season in political opposition, it is quite literally inconceivable to them that they should not continue to determine the parameters of social and intellectual conventions...
...Liberals who had conceded Reagan's ability to influence the general public watched in amazement as he extended this persuasiveness to Congress in a series of legislative victories that should provide political scientists with enough case studies of presidential leadership to fill textbooks for a generation to come...
...W'dl it...
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...Unable to generate positive initiatives, Mondale and his cohorts have settled on fear as their best weapon...
...Most of the communicants of the mainline churches have learned to ignore those churchmen who forsake transcendence for political evangelizing, and whose moral earnestness (and economic and political ignorance) has shielded them from social reality...
...Liberal fundraising letters these days indicate little of what the Left's restoration to office might mean...
...Thus the "we have failed" syndrooae-failure signifying not that liberalism had been found wanting, but only that it had not been rigorously enough pursued...
...He domesticated, and thereby legitimated, the interventionist state...
...True, the Eisenhower era was a time of general conservatism (which no doubt accounts for the glow of nostalgic approval that now surrounds it, even though just a few years ago, under a different dispensation, the fifties drew only disparaging references to their "blandness" and "conformity...
...But Ike's victory in 1952 had virtually no effect on the reigning assumptions of the general political culture...
...For the Left today, worse is better...
...The new liberal in Mondale recognizes that government, trying to do too much, has done nothing very well, and that social progress requires reinvigoration of the private sector...
...Perhaps they are victims of their own propaganda...
...prices...
...This exploitation of fear corresponds to liberalism's basic strategy: Wait for disaster...
...Exempt it...
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...Born of the Great Depression, the liberal political economy has focused on the Keynesian emphasis on stimulation of demand as the heart of its program, and liberals have shown themselves incapable of dealing with contemporary inflationary pressures...
...This is a temptation that conservatives, of all people, should know how to resist...
...Each issue reviews a new Main Selectwn plus scores of Alternates...
...These were not tame Republicans, fresh from the latest Ripon Society workshops in moderation...
...The overriding poIitical issue remains the economy, and liberals, with nothing to suggest, have little to do but sit back and hope that the opposition does itself in...
...These were instead counterrevolutionaries, men (and a few women) in fundamental disagreement with the liberal world view...
...Reagan is a Taft Republican (but with Eisenhower charm...
...The essential premises of American liberals remained unexamined...
...The war in Vietnam, combined with a suddenly inflamed sense of racial injustice, created anti-establishment discontents, but for the first time in American history, the establishment under siege was perceived as liberal, not conservative...
...Reagan's skills and popularity aside, the liberal community has suffered most from its own confusions and its inability to provide plausible alternatives to the President's programs...
...If the egregious Norman Lear and his People for the American Way (savor that name) continue to typif) liberal understanding of America today, there will be no reason for the White House to pay ~ny attention to what the Left has to say...
...I t is the root-and-branch nature of today's challenge to liberalism that differentiates it from the conservatism of the 1950s with which it is occasionally compared...
...A vigorous public sector needs no economic justification...
...Or they insist on the need for new investment incentives but demand that well-to-do taxpayers (who do the investing) receive no tax benefits...
...A great deal is said, 22 THE-AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 however, of the horrendous things in store if the marauding forces of the "radical right" are not soon removed from power...
...As in economic policy, so everywhere else...
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...1"he most damning ofatl judgments on contemporary liberalism is that, having been forced from power because of its bankrupt ideas and policies, it has not even the resources to mount a worthy opposition...
...There was a brief flurry of interest in something called the New Conservatism, but it had no discernible impact on the thought of the time, in part because its adherents (men like Peter Viereck and Clinton Rossiter) were so polite, not to say timid, in their disagreements with liberalism, that few people noticed that a debate was under way...
...9 Cancellations...
...That the establishment churches have turned themselves into adjuncts of the Left makes less political difference than might be expected...
...battlefield of ideas, but they no longer have the field to themselves...
...Moral behavior, they insist, is to be understood entirely in public and collective terms...
...To understand the reaction of the American Left to the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, one must begin with the shock his election brought to the liberal community's sense of the rightness of things...
...No sooner had the radical challenge collapsed under the weight of its own excesses and absurdities than liberalism was faced with an assault from the Right...
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...Knowing this, Democratic party leaders have found it difficult to construct an effective, or even coherent, opposition to Republican conservatism...
...Forced to acknowledge (with varying degrees of openness) widespread disaffection from liberal policies, liberal politicians have reacted to Administration initiatives with little more than obfuscation and negativism, and thus have fallen into the "me too, but better" trap that hindered Republicans for so many years...
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...And so liberal Democrats find ~hemselves insisting that they are as committed as is the Administration to cutting taxes, reducing the role of government, building a stronger defense, rejuvenating the private sector, and upholding traditional values relating to family, work, and church...
...Nor do they spend much time discussing the actual deeds of the Reagan Administration...
...Eisenhower defeated the Taft Republicans...
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...A prosperous capitalist economy is one that, for liberals, is always in danger of losing its political and moral soul...
...Reagan has occasionally displayed in the pas...
...Conservatives and neoconservatives (who have their own differences) have been engaged in nothing less than a thoroughgoing disenthrallment from the dominant liberal categories for perceiving political, social, cultural, and intellectual reality...
...Liberals want to increase military strength but reduce military spending, restore America's position in the world but not endanger detente, encourage equality of opportunity but retain racial and sexual quotas, support traditional values but champion unrestricted individual liberation and self-expression...
...From the liberal perspective, an America in (non-inflationary) economic trouble is more likely to recognize its enemies--the capitalist elite --and more inclined to demand the kind of redistributive and regulatory governmental activism that liberals identify with social health...
...They understand the depth of public alienation from the liberalism of the past decade...
...The man who came through the assassination attempt last March with so much wit, courage, and simple decency could hardly be the mindless, uncaring lightweight of liberal mythology...
...the old liberal in him still looks to government to preserve that egalitarian version of social justice to which he remains committed...
...He is no intellectual, but he has unmatched political gifts and charm...
...On this matter, the NCC is preaching to empty pews...
...Liberals, for example, berate conservatives for their heartlessness in cuttingsocial benefits at the same time that they outdo the traditional Right in their alarms over projected budget deficits...
...Investit...
...If capitalism works too well, it dulls the appetite for liberal reform...
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...The notion of Reagan as an amiable (but dangerous) boob has for so long been a staple of liberal discourse that liberals seem themselves to have been taken in by it...
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...The Administration's continuing temptation will be to assume that the failures of liberalism require an overnight transformation of American society...
...Liberal politicians, closer and more sensitive to public opinion than are liberal intellectuals, have been the most restrained and frustrated of Reagan's opponents...
...In a sense, these church leaders have been the last ones to get the message of the decline of liberalism...
...When they encounter such a phenomenon, they can only attribute it to invincible ignorance (or to some preternatural evil force...
...Outstde the U.S.,imllpricesiim~ g_9 hlgilmhel~ J ~'I-IE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 21 missed as ideologues and fanatics, as in fact not a few of them were...
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...Or it was, that is, until quite recently...
...Ike was a manager, a conciliator, a preserver of the status quo...
...Reagan resembles Eisenhower in his method of administration but hardly at all in his philosophy of government...
...Shelter it...
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...In the end, the radical attack on liberalism was seen as a family quarrel, with the young radicals berating their liberal elders not because the elders had been mistaken in their principles, but because they had been unwilling to follow those principles to their James Nuechterlein is editor of the Cresset and Associate Professor of American Studies at Valparaiso University...
...Manage it...
...Those in the fifties who were unmistakably conservative never managed to break into the political/intellectual exchange...
...Liberals would therefore object to the Reaganite vision of minimal government even if they thought it could sustain economic prosperity...
...The ascendancy of the new Administration, together with the resurgence of the Republican party in Congress, disturbed the natural workings of the political universe...
...It leaves people content with diverse, non-public leadership and insufficiently critical of the moral workings of society...
...But even the slowest-learning liberal should have caught on by now that Reagan is the most extraordinary political figure of modern American history...
...if he did little to extend the New Deal, neither did he attempt to dismantle it...
...they were simply dis20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 GiveYour Money the Understanding It Needs...
...It comes down to a style of politics that denies the necessity of choice...
...What does or does not work plays no part in moral calculations...
...They speak with a sophistication quite astonishing to those who have until recently known conservatism as an intellectual embarrassment...
...One recalls Oliver Wendell Holmes's summary judgment after meeting FDR: "secondclass intellect, first-class temperament...
...They have broken with the liberal mystique and found their own voices...
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...By contrast, liberalism as a system of ideas is under attack as never before, and many liberals themselves concede that they have not only lost the intellectual initiative but have run dry...
...ultimate conclusions...
...In any case, it made little difference what they said or how they said it: The culture was not prepared to listen...
...9 If you want the Main Selection do nothing...
...Some of the people around the President--though not, apparently, his closest advisers--encourage the tendency to ideological rigidity that Mr...
...The unexamined hegemony of liberalism over the post-New Deal American mind first came under challenge from the Left...
...One does not have to share the Left's fantasy that the Administration is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the radical Right to concede that Reaganism would benefit from an intelligent and responsible opposition...
...These contradictions--they could be expanded indefinitely--add up to what might be termed supply-side populism, a program of political economy that is all benefit and no cost, all desire and no discipline, all wish and no reality...
...He does not want to preserve--he wants to turn things around...
...One has to realize that many liberals genuinely cannot understand a political perspective that departs significantly from liberal assumptions...
...Assuming that intelligent and informed people of decent intentions must be liberal, they are truly perplexed when they come across individuals who are neither stupid nor ignorant nor malicious, yet who do not share their politics...
...If it would be excessive to argue that liberals today constitute the stupid party, it would not be too much to suggest that they are not a very interesting one...
...it was enough, apparently, that the Administration's concern for the poor and disadvantaged did not follow the prescriptions of collectivist liberalism...
...If the Reagan Administration finally fails--and there is no indication that it will--it will be because the true believers have triumphed over the political realists...
...To listen to a speech by, say, Walter Mondale is to observe a man at war with himself...
...Eisenhower's style of governing, however, was entirely different from Reagan's...
...Today things are entirely different...
...But all this must be accomplished, it turns out, without anything really changing and with no group or individual having to sacrifice any existing advantage...
...Even those of us who have concluded that liberalism is an unserious way of perceiving the world might wish that it were less feckless...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
