TheDanger of Egalityranny

...To a large extent, the current of ideas which propels democratic socialist thought was clearly foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville...

...Even as I laugh at the Bridges, and one laughs at them and not with them, I at times have the uneasy feeling that I am laughing at myself...

...Furthermore, economic reforms are virtually impossible when every economic decision must be made by central political authorities...

...Who would not like to see a sort of Utopia in which all human beings were equal, cooperative, brotherly, sharing...

...Yet serious doubts arise about the democratic socialist dream whenever it is put into practice...

...National Planning Boards or local autonomy...

...for the party of equality, any true respect for equality will entail significant reductions of liberty for those whose talent, applications, or luck bring them unequal fortune...

...At least two of Willa Cather's novels--My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop--move me in much the same way...

...pure slavery has no hope...

...This was before the birth of Solidarity, although the air was already electric with anticipation...

...If a Polish engineer loses his job with the state, there is no other employer that can hire him...

...All over Poland --once a prosperous, food-exporting agricultural land, its entire flat plain a bountiful farmland (indefensible to cavalry or tank assault) - - t h e b'reakdown of the agricultural system was causing shortages of dairy and other products...

...men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting...

...Firing often means losing o n e ' s trade forever...

...The principle of equality has prepared men for these things...

...It was also widely recognized that in the societies known to the past many people lacked the opportunity to prove themselves...

...Theology, in this sense, is rather more concerned with the imagination, sensibility, and world view within which philosophical thinking relates itself to the self, to others, and the world...

...In this way, control over jobs and wages has become a form of police power...

...For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness...

...Total control is awesome...

...Whether the business has customers or not, the wages of employees remain the same...

...That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident , and mild...

...Economic stagnation hurts the poor most of all...

...Thus, members of the party of liberty and members of the party of equality tend to experience, understand, and judge in remarkably opposite ways, even when confronted with the same materials...

...it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits...

...A people entirely wards of the state simply lacks means to resist the state...

...The theory of capitalism is left mostly to economists: to Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises...

...Experience shows that arguments among people whose convictions about political economy are different are at least very like arguments about religion...

...Quite the opposite, its intention was to make socialism true to itself: democratic, observant of human rights, and faithful ~o the principles stated in the (socialist) Polish Constitution, the Helsinki Accords, and the rest...

...I t is important to stress that this debate is carried on at two quite different levels of explicitness...

...I think it is fair to say that the arguments put forward by the party of liberty and the arguments put forward by the party of equality, until now, have not been similarly formed...

...Similarly, Solidarity itself had first addressed the need for free associations of individuals, able to link themselves together in groups independent of the state and Party...

...A few years later, in a n o t h e r f r a g m e n t , Lincoln s p e l l e d o u t another fact of American life quite clearly: Equality in society alike beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort...

...It seems easy to move from political democracy to "economic democracy' '--in theory...

...It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood...

...On both sides, there are some who argue from principle and a fully articulated ideology...

...I visited Poland in December 1979, to participate in some discussions with Polish intellectuals about socialism and capitalism...

...This is particularly true in the case of Mr...

...Nonetheless, the ideal of democratic capitalism is seldom s t a t e d and even more rarely confronted...

...10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 By c o n t r a s t , the ideals of democratic capitalism are seldom articulated...

...Under the impact of European socialism, a q u i t e d i f f e r e n t i d e a l o f e q u a l i t y was gaining momentum even as Tocqueville wrote in 1831...

...Such novels are more preoccupied with the significance of life than they are with its phenomena...

...What does seem clear is that "equality" is its chief symbol, and that its first steps require a national incomes policy and the imposition of political controls on private investments...

...They felt they were living on a new frontier, trying to build a genuine democracy from within a system of total state control--and trying to do so bloodlessly, gradually, with the pressure of ten million members of Solidarity (and their families) behind them, but facing the awesome power of the military, the police, and the Party, over which the massive presence of 100,000 Soviet soldiers on Polish soil presided...

...Only a productive, inventive, growing economy provides the means not only of progressive social legislation but also of popular hope, mobility, and serendipity...

...but its moral ideals lack contemporary s t a t e m e n t . To say that George Gilder in Wealth and Poverty has singlehandedly done more in this direction than any writer for some generations would in many learned audiences evoke snickers...

...It invariably leads to lesser liberties for all and intensifies the power of political elites...

...This point was harder for them...

...Yet Madison had scorned mere "parchment barriers," since the real existence of human rights is to be found in the habits of the people, in free associations able to compete under due process, and in commercial and industrial diversification...

...But let me use Poland as a case in point...

...In his own study of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski is obliged to make a similar point: Marxism offers a sort o f " t e m p l a t e " for seeing reality, not a simple argument over facts or concepts...

...It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd...

...Their intentions are highly moral...

...In real life, each individual operates within a distinctive and limited horizon, understanding some things quickly and clearly, and others only with difficulty, if a.t all...

...Amidst all the faultless details of the novels' landscapes one discovers that sense of the past which alone William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...

...Genuine democracy depends on economic liberty...

...To put the matter starkly, the arguments of the party of liberty have so far been put almost wholly in the idiom of philosophy, whereas the arguments of the party of equality have been put much more fully in the language of (secular) theology...

...In this sense, liberty and equality would go together...

...Yet this idea of "economic democracy" is by no means clear...

...On the contrary, those socialist ideals which are communitarian and almost medieval in their sensibilities have long had an almost native appeal in Poland...

...Thus, they say, the nineteenth-century "liberal" revolution achieved the democratization of the political order...

...They believe that they are motivated by the highest human ideals...

...Life was not imagined to be a morality play about equality of results...

...They pay little attention to the corruption inherent in governmentally managed economies...

...Tocqueville saw t h e f u t u r e o f t h e United S t a t e s a s a b a t t l e ground between these two different horizons...

...The battle of ideals is, therefore, quite unequal...

...Popular political slogans caricature these differences: "People not profits...

...Democratic socialists stress the corruptions and faults of relatively free economies...

...You arc not lazy, and still you are an idler...

...To move from one view to another is more difficult than simply making a fresh pragmatic judgment based upon facts...

...By politicizing everything, they think they will achieve unprecedented liberty and equality...

...Solidarity discovered that t h r e a t s of firing employees could be as efficient as police threats...

...We know Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us...

...Nonetheless, one cannot properly speak of economics and the public i n t e r e s t without considering the two g r e a t rival ideals, within whose horizons political efforts are conducted...

...Advancement--improvement in condition--is the order of things in a society of equals . . . . Free labor has the inspiration of hope...

...Gordon W. Allport once reported in his studies of psychology that religious convictions lie at the deepest level of personality, with convictions about political economy running a close second...

...Malcolm Muggeridge and George Will, to name but two, prefer a Tory vision...

...There were ominous heavy maneuvers to the west in East Germany, to the south in Czechoslovakia, and to the east on the Soviet frontier in Lithuania...

...Nonetheless, in actual practice, Solidarity kept encountering p e r s i s t e n t roadblocks...

...Moreover, the characters--not just the Bridges but the wide assortment of individuals with whom they come in contact--are rather ordinary in the main, solidly lodged in their social milieu, the Midwestern upper-class of the thirties...

...What k can and must offer is that everyone without exception should have opportunities, the failure to seize which would properly be ascribed to himself...

...our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories . . . . The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives . . . . Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon i t s e l f alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate...

...Consider, for example, the relatively remote and cerebral quality of the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick, on the one hand, as compared with those who describe the necessities of compassion, the condition of the world's poor, and the scandals of inequality, on the other...

...So far as possi.ble, every employee is made to work for the state...

...Indeed, Robert Heilbroner appealed to exactly this sort of difference in his recent book on Marx, pointing out that Marx must be read not as a factual, conceptual thinker but as the creator of a new way of seeing reality--a different way of looking at things...

...My own training, it will be clear, lies both in philosophy and in theology...

...Just why they provide me with such delight is hard to say, but there it is: I read them from front to back every two or three years, always with the same interest and wonder...

...Theological disciplines, especially as they have come to be developed in settings concerned with comparative religions (in regions of experience close to those of anthropology), teach one to ferret out as well the symbols, stories, and liturgies through which the human subject experiences, imagines, and judges the world...

...the aim of the twentieth-century "democratic socialist" revolution is to achieve the democratization of the economic order...

...By and large, literary conservatives, however sour they might be about socialism, do not like capitalism either...

...Bridge, whom I cannot help liking (rather more, I suspect, than Connell does) even though I know his prejudices differ markedly from my own...

...On the other hand, they also knew that they lived on the front line--the world's first nonviolent attempt to create a revolution within a Socialist State...

...As studies in character the novels have no more plot than life does...

...it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd...

...But I intend not so much to criticize the democratic socialist ideal as to try to sketch the difference in horizon between a democratic socialist and a democratic capitalist...

...In Connell's highly skilled hands the commonplace is given weight and texture...

...Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer...

...Children under the age of two were suffering malnutrition...

...L i k e Will Rogers, I have never belonged to an organized political party...

...it was only a typical fact of life...

...They a r e among intellectuals a t least (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) part of the conventional wisdom...

...Solidarity next addressed the issue of peaceful competition under due process, in a new civic " s o c i a l compact" formulated at Gdansk in August 1981 and expected over time to be carried further...

...It must be said from the outset that Poland has almost no capitalist traditions...

...In Rome in November 1981, Solidarity leaders described how they were following James Madison's instruction in The Federalist...

...The security forces had individual keys to each hotel room in which they arrested the sleeping leaders of Solidarity, gathered for a convention...

...Let me cite but one example, from the letter of Abraham Lincoln to his stepbrother John D. Johnston on January 2, 1851: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 9 DearJohnston: Your request for eighty dollars I do not think it best to comply with now...

...There was great expectation that liberty under law would provide a sort of equality the human race had never before experienced...

...Some of these roadblocks consisted of ideas...

...There are noble people of high moral q u a l i t y on b o t h s i d e s o f t h i s s t r u g g l e , p e o p l e o f g r e a t i m a g i n a t i o n , e n e r g y , l e a r n i n g , and s k i l l ; few g r e a t conflicts in history are otherwise...

...The genius of democratic capitalism of the American type is that it divides power into three systems: the political system, the economic system, and the moral-cultural system (the press, the universities, the churches, etc...

...Liberty would be constrained by both law and circumstance...

...The Democratic party is accustomed to many internal strains, of which one of the most important but seldom discussed is a dispute concerning its own ideals...

...For this reason, to describe them as arguments between different horizons, rather than as arguments easily settled by appeal to commonly accepted facts or principles, seems to do justice to their psychological intractability...

...it is not economically productive...

...Few defenders of Soviet socialism are to be found...

...In some ways, this conflict is more important for the future of the Left than of the center or the Right...

...There are, then, two approaches to equality...

...III No short essay, of course, can hope to resolve this conflict of ideals, or, perhaps, even to pose it exactly in its complexity...

...Once upon a time I shared this view...

...Some of the Polish intellectuals in Rome said wryly that they were, in a sense, reinventing the wheel...

...So total is" socialist control that the government cut all telephone and telegraph lines, closed all gasoline stations, and halted all communications internally and with the outside world...

...Now, this can only happen by some defect in your conduct...

...It was believed to be a morality play about the opportunity of all to better themselves and their condition, according to their own efforts and their own luck...

...On December 13, 1981, most of the intellectuals who had been in Rome (six weeks earlier) were under arrest, in detention camps, whereabouts unknown...

...The methods required by these two disciplines are complementary...

...but it seeks, on tile contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is welt content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing...

...Philosophy, in this sense, is rather mole conceptual, analytical, and logical...

...And for a v e r y good r e a s o n : F r e e men make d i f - ferent use of their freedom...

...Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent...

...just as one came to expect almost universally hostile reviews in the prestigious magazines...

...Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to believe that this pragmatic argument does not have its intellectual, conceptual, and symbolic components...

...Do-gooders versus realists...

...Democratic socialists have in mind an ideal society which democratic capitalists find a b h o r r e n t ; possibly, the reverse is also true...

...Socialist experiments in Hungary and Yugoslavia could be cited, at least...

...Therefore, although compromises must be struck with conservatives who favor a capitalist economy--compromises both in the name of social peace and in the name of economic efficiency--still, idealism demands (so say those on the Left) a transformation of the capitalist economy in the direction of socialism...

...Put another Way, those who live within the horizon of liberty cherish a limited state within which significant inequalities of result flourish, while those within the horizon of equality wish to strengthen the state so as to reduce inequalities...

...At the various times when I have helped you a little you have said to me, "We can get along very well now...

...In stores, r e s t a u r a n t s , and other similar areas, customers no longer count...

...I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work in any one day...

...What that defect is, 1 think 1 know...

...Let me cite here the main cultural organs such as the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the Nation, t h e New Yorker, Harper's, t h e Atlantic, and c i t e , as w e l l , t h e l i t e r a r y f i g u r e s who review most o f the books intended for the general literate public in t h e a r e a o f p o l i t i c a l economy: John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Lekachman, Michael Walzer, Michael Harrington, Irv i n g Howe, Eugene Genovese, P e t e r Steinfels, and a crowd of others...

...The power of hope upon human exertion and happiness is wonderful...

...It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it, easier than they can get out after they are i n . . . . Abraham Lincoln was born in poverty e q u a l to t h a t o f h i s s t e p b r o t h e r , b u t in c h a r a c t e r and a p p l i c a t i o n t h e two were vastly different...

...Philosophical disciplines, as they are practiced in northwestern Europe and the United States, teach one to ferret out the remgte principles of everyday thinking and to submit them to rigorous examination...

...The myth of Moscow as the vanguard of socialism remains strong in Italy, France, Spain, and other Western countries, but even Communist Party leaders in those lands have begun to say that the impulse of the Communist revolution of 1917 has been spent, and that Moscow no longer represents socialism but naked Russian empire, aggressive beyond its borders and hopelessly mismanaged within...

...In short, I think it may fairly be argued that the party of liberty has been affected by a certain rationalism, a rationalism which appeals strongly to some while alienating many others...

...Capitalism is much criticized in practice, as it prefers to be...

...The lessons I draw from this vivid personal experience are not contemporary lessons about Soviet socialism...

...Thousands of infants were breaking out in painful rashes...

...Their aim is to move the party in the direction of socialism...

...Democratic socialists in New York and at major universities like to describe themselves as "the conscience" of the Democratic party...

...I am a lifelong Democrat...

...In Poland, a cooperative spirit in economic matters is relatively rare...

...II Within the American tradition of political economy, whose formative years lie before the origins of socialism, there was not much doubt that liberty and equality go together...

...To put matters starkly once again, partisans of liberty tend to pride themselves on their hardheadedness, logic, and realism...

...There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us...

...Thus we have the famous "mixed economies" of most 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 Western states, from Sweden and the United Kingdom to West Germany, Japan, and the United States...

...There are convinced libertarians, old liberals, and free enterprisers on the one hand, and convinced Marxists, non-Marxist socialists, and antiSoviet Marxists of varying doctrines on the other...

...The aristocracy and the military, although sharing democratic aspirations, cherished traditions quite d i f f e r e n t from those of the commercial ethos...

...Writing before the word "socialism" had yet come into more than occasional use, Tocqueville believed that the two ideals of the American Revolution (and later of the French Revolution)--liberty and equality--are in radical conflict: For the party of liberty, any true respect for liberty will entail equality before the law but significant inequalities of fortune...

...he enables us to see and cherish the little markings that distinguish all of us...

...Rather, the lesson I draw concerns the practical dilemmas of socialism even of the democratic sort...

...In particular, the immediate purpose was humanitarian...

...it is a little more like (not exactly like) making a religious conversion...

...After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community...

...How little they know whereof they speak...

...Democratic socialists in Europe and the United States tend to believe that a capitalist economy is an embarrassment to a democratic society...

...Practical people, too, are human, finite, and limited in their vision...

...Neither industry nor commerce has played a large role in Polish history...

...attention to 150 years ago--the conflict between the party of liberty and the party of equality...

...This difference d i d not scandalize the one or the other...

...Democratic socialists wish to collapse this three-fold system into a single system of political power...

...it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break the habit...

...I no longer do...

...Now, in Rome, the intellectuals Were already beginning to think about the third requirement: the need for commercial and industrial diversification...

...Shortages of medicines and hygienic soaps afflicted clinics, hospitals, and homes...

...Socialism is supposed to breed cooperativeness...

...its cast was q u i t e d i f f e r e n t . So, a l s o , t h e concept o f liberty began to be grasped witbin an altog e t h e r different horizon...

...But the issues are elusive because they concern perceptions, ways of seeing, styles of judgi n g - t h e y are almost religious in their depth...

...All desirable human rights are granted to Poles--on parchment--both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the Helsinki Accords (to both of which Poland is a signatory...

...This difference in horizon makes it difficult for anyone who attempts to be neutral to mediate between the party of liberty and the party of equality...

...In particular, there is a profound conflict within American political culture--a conflict Tocqueville called Michael Novak is author, most recently, of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Simon and Schuster...

...One difficulty for the p r e s e n t generation o f i n t e l l e c t u a l s is t h a t t h e i d e a l s o f democratic socialism are b e t t e r known, more fully articulated, and more widely c e l e b r a t e d in s c o r e s of hooks...

...Conversely, the party of equality is frequently regarded, even by its friends, as inclined to a certain softness, muddledness, fuzzy-headedness, and sectarian passion...

...Indeed, given the secularization of modern life, such arguments often seem to occupy the place formerly held by religion...

...In the American tradition, they believe in inching toward their ideal pragmatically, democratically, slowly...

...Solidarity did not intend to destroy socialism...

...A pronounced and visible sullenness s e t t l e s over service workers...

...Neither one would be perfect...

...Their trivial details seem to take on an importance that before had gone unnoticed...

...Political power has a further liability...

...Equality under the law would not mean that the lad born poor would begin life as an equal--in capital, experience, schooling, culture, or contacts --to the lad born to an aristocratic family...

...Neither the Catholic Church nor the great p e a s a n t parties have experienced the capitalist ethos...

...Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence...

...It entailed private property, private management of enterprises, competition, and markets...

...Yet the one horizon is not simply different from the other but antithetical to it...

...This habit of uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty...

...But surely one can like a person without 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982...

...In Poland, there is little to achieve and little sense of accomplishment...

...But Solidarity intended to be socialist...

...It required a capitalist horizon...

...George Orwell, for example, at the stage in his life when he was still a fervent socialist, could not refrain from observing certain classic tendencies among his socialist colleagues...

...In the American system, equality was t i e d to hope_9 I t meant o p p o r t u n i t y - - opportunity which individuals would seize u n e q u a l l y . The i d e a l o f e q u a l i t y t h u s respected the ideal of liberty...

...Yet in a single lifetime, it was believed and--much more important--it was experienced, a lad born poor might outstrip in his accomplishments, in fortune, and in fame many who had been born in "better" circumstances...

...Tocqueville was quite explicit: _9 . . the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world...

...The ideals of democratic socialism are clear, although we have as yet no unambiguous examples of their practice...

...Indeed, they call their vision of morality "socialism...

...In short, one ideal of equality leads in practice to hope, while of the other one must write over the portal, in Dante's words, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here...

...The p a r t y o f e q u a l i t y - - indeed, of l e v e l i n g - - w a s in formation...

...Partisans of equality tend to pride themselves on their goodness, compassion, and sense of caring...

...It was widely recognized that human beings differ in talent, temperament, application, and virtue...

...it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself...

...For most pragmatic individuals, however, the ideological dispute is conducted less through sharp abstractions and pure principles and more through practical adjustments, compromises, and negotiated compacts, case by case...

...Some of t h e s e p e o p l e a r e moved by t h e i d e a l s o f democratic socialism, others by a system of hope, incentives, free labor, m a r k e t s - - i n a word, by the ideals of democracy rooted in capitalism...

...Each party sees and perceives, imagines and judges in a way so different from the other that the search for common ground--whether of fact, principle, or ultimate ideal--is "extremely arduous...

...or to businessmen like William Simon...

...T h i s n o v e l form o f d e s p o t i s m , whose "novel f e a t u r e s " Tocqueville here seeks to trace, I would call " e g a l i t y r a n n y " - - a love f o r l e v e l i n g so immoderate i t must b e imposed by comprehensive coercion...

...Socialism is supposed to give a sense of dignity...

...it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living...

...ml I * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * . . . . . o o * o o o o o o , o o o o o o o o * o o o o o o o o o o o * o o o o , , o o o o . . . . . ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 William H. Nolte EVENINGS WITH THE BRIDGE FAMILY On rereading Evan Connell's extraordinary chronicles of ordinary life...

...The Polish intellectuals in Rome pleaded with their Western friends not only for immediate emergency shipments of infant formula and other milk products, but also for entrepreneurial and other technical assistance, in order to establish small milk-product and hygienic chemical e s t a b l i s h m e n t s around the countryside...

...Like others, I have not been immune to the democratic socialist dream...

...Within both, the ideals of liberty and equality are supremely important...

...The aim was at THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 11 once humanitarian and structural...

...but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again...

...At every level of discourse, each person involved seems to experience reality in so different a way as to make direct one-to-one arguments, even on simple matters of fact, extremely wearying...

...Does it mean centralization or decentralization...

...In their eyes, the socialist ideal gives society its moral character...

...A free society cannot h o p e ' t o show equal results...

...and in which "scandalous" inequalities of wealth and power were banished...

...Trying to make incomes roughly equal, it can hardly avoid insisting that opinions be roughly equal...

...The horizon within which equality was to be understood was not American...

...I have introduced the term "horizon" to suggest the relation between the thinking person and the range of what such a person envisages...

...One of the key ideas of f Soviet-style socialism is to convert economic power into political power...

...The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided...

...While in the real world no man has complete charge over his own destiny, in a free society each has some personal responsibility for his own destiny...

...In practice, the politicization of all power concentrates authority and corrupts society...

...I f I were asked to choose the two novels written in the last twenty or even thirty years which I most enjoy rereading, I should without hesitation name Evan S. Connell's bittersweet portraits of the Bridge family...

...Indeed, in Tocqueville's view, a new form of " s o f t " tyranny was being b o r n - - t h e desire of men so to be equal that they would be willing to give up their liberty...

...The s t r u g g l e for the future of America is a s t r u g g l e between t h e i d e a l s o f democratic socialists and those of democratic capitalists...

...The hired laborer of yesterday labors on his own account to-day, and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow...

...soothes the hurt of mortality...

...We are never surprised by anything the characters do or say, having been prepared beforehand if not to expect then at least not to doubt their actions and speech...

...This essay is adapted from a paper delivered earlier this year at the Tocqueville Forum on Contemporary Public Affairs at Wake Forest University...

...for the rest of his life, he must cease being an engineer...

...The paper will appear in its original version, together with other papers from the forum, in a volume entitled The Promise of American Politics: Principles and Practice After 200 Years, edited by Robert Utley...

...You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it...

...Political power is even more prone to corruption than economic power...

...Again, in November 1981, just before martial law was imposed upon Poland, I had an opportunity to meet with some of Solidarity's intellectual leaders in Rome...

...An exception must be made for Irving Kristol, a political essayist with an uncommon zest for economics and morals, who gives "two c h e e r s " for capitalism...

...There is nowhere else for them to obtain similar services...

...One said they were like the early Americans, using Madison as a sort of how-to-do-it book to create a new democracy...

...Its clear purpose was to break up the state monopoly of the economy...

...It also makes it difficult for those within one of these parties to fashion arguments convincing to those within the other...