The Coercive Utopians

...Democracy is, by the author's admission, a failure...

...After listening to Inez's sister Janet make conspicuously-consuming chat about childhood servants on a "CBS Reports" during the '72 campaign, Harry's adviser says: "Ask Mort how he thinks the governess from Neuilly tests o u t . . . Possibly Janet could make Mademoiselle available to do some coffees in West Virginia...

...It got written when Didion detoured from the novel she originally intended to write about Inez's family in Hawaii...

...You know she's finally going to bolt...

...To offer pragmatism to the American people as an intellectual antidote to the seductions of socialist "idealism," is to concede that socialism is idealistic, and that capitalism has no moral rationale...

...Indeed, 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 what's the difference...

...Because, in fact, spending matters...

...To work, an assault on activist "idealists" must start with a repudiation of their "ideal"--and it must offer a counter ideal...

...Prominent leaders of the Center for National Security Studies, for example, were on the speakers bureau formed by the publishers of CounterSpy--the antiCIA periodical which printed names of American undercover agents abroad...

...deficits do promote inflation fears, they do crowd out the private sector...

...As for the media, the lsaacs' indictment of bias is devastating...

...The authors detail the penetration of government agencies by the "utopians" and how media pundits shield and promote them...

...At its core, supply-side is a graph masquerading as a crusade...

...Through these painstakingly documented pages scurry the termites Robert James Bidinotto is a contributing editor of On Principle, and a frequent reviewer for the Boston Herald...

...In turn, the Foundation for National Progress spawned Mother Jones magazine...

...Still, the revolt against fat government needs more, and has more...

...a children's reading council whose story books reflect "the ongoing struggle between those few who control wealth and those many who are trying to share wealth...

...Politicians are barometers of public sentiment, not iconoclasts...

...Supply-siders have mistakenly (although, in a political world, understandably) tended to look at tax reduction as an economic all-purpose cleanser...

...DEMOCRACY Joan Didion/Simon and Schuster/S13.95 Thomas Mallon As an epigraph to her first novel, Run River, Joan Didion, sixthgeneration Californian, chose an observation from Peck's 1837 New Guide to the West: "The real Eldorado is still further on...

...I have not been so disappointed by a novel in years--partly because as Democracy clanks along Didion keeps giving brief reminders of her exquisite gifts...

...I n similar fashion, the far-left Fund for Peace foaled a stable of groups advocating a U.S...

...What she remembers from the aforementioned Indonesian grenade-throwing is "the green lawn around the ambassador's bungalow at Puncak, the gardenia hedges...

...But this simply turns savings into a burden that discourages work effort just as certainly as taxes on marginal income...

...No, this volume doesn't meet that challenge by explaining why the Left is evil or impractical...

...So, like the British Fabians, our homegrown socialists began to soft-sell their program...

...Yet, no one really takes the supply-siders' claim of a nocost deficit seriously...

...The Democratic presidential candidates embraced much of the Left's leveling dogma, iis rhetoric, and its proposals--all without public outrage or horror...

...They save for (future) taxes...

...This is plain wrong...

...It's no wonder Inez (not to mention Didion) prefers Jack to Harry, who has all the depth of a press release...

...Echoed flour-fortune heir George Pillsbury: "I want to spend my money to remake the system that created the fortune...

...In the 1970s, the graying remnants of the New Left realized that their overt hostility to America had spawned a conservative political backlash...

...My only reservation regarding the book arises from its analysis of why the Left has met with so much success...

...Pardon me, miss, but haven't we met before...

...The Foundation has bestowed money, for instance, on the Bay Area Institute, an IPS offshoot, "for expansion of the Pacific News S e r v i c e . . . " Part of this funding is due to ignorance...

...A firm believer in the you-are-what-youown theory of characterization, Didion stocks the Victors' Central Park West apartment with the ideological and careerist clutter of a lifetime: _9 . . the Canton jars packed with marking pencils, the stacks of Le Monde and Foreign Affairs and The Harvard Business Review, the legal pads, the several telephones, the framed snapshots of Harry Victor eating barbecue with Eleanor Roosevelt and of Harry Victor crossing a police line with Coretta King and of Harry Victor playing on the beach at Amagansett with Jessie and with Adlai and with Frances Landau's Russian wolfhound...

...This the supplysiders have done with great vigor, and reasonable success...

...He's even stuck her with a kid named Adlai...

...It is, however, less agreeable to realize that, having borrowed her title from Henry Adams, she has lifted almost everything else from her earlier novels...

...All four women have the same frayed psychic wiring...

...When she finally washes up in Kuala Lumpur tending to refugees (remembering Charlotte Douglas inoculating the population of Boca Grande...

...There's a sort of desperation to the device, and as this unholy marriage of author's biography and characters' non-lives proceeds, the reader winces and, finally, wearies...

...Tax reduction, of marginal and average rates, should form part of a serious economic reform package encompassing significant spending cuts and extensive deregulation...

...Ignoring the fact that the budget had Basic Books, $17.95...

...Cant is cant, on whatever political wing it flies, and Didion's ear has in the past performed synesthetic miracles that let the reader hear the stench...

...In Democracy, her latest novel, she can still rise to the occasional smell...

...Republican constituencies ("strong claimants") with bald-faced grabs for subsidies ("weak claims") ran the show from Day One...

...I--1 THE COERCIVE UTOPIANS: SOCIAL DECEPTION BY AMERICA'S POWER PLAYERS Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac/Regnery Gateway/S18.95 Robert James Bidinotto Collectivism doesn't spring from the grass roots of society...

...Certain supply-siders simply deny this outright: Wanniski and Laffer, Roberts notes, were in fact pushing for higher federal spending (cut marginal tax rates and let the good times roll...

...By successfully permeating the hated "establishment," they have given new meaning to Pogo's lament that "We have met the enemy, and he is us...

...disarmament, since "the number one enemy of peace and justice in the world today is the United States...

...Reagan himself seems to feel obliged to pay reassuring obeisance, in word and policy, to "fairness"--another euphemism for redistributionism...

...And it is that "idealism" which has increasingly immunized the Left from public criticism...

...Roberts has a more plausible rationale for ignoring spending and, hence, deficits...

...the caressing of scientific diction as an appalling antidote to the abstract ("Technical death would n o t occur until they had n o t one but three flat electroencephalograms, consecutive, spaced eight hours apart...

...This book is their comprehensive survey of the methods and personnel of modern collectivist groups--a virtual Who's Who of the post-New-Left Left...

...that the bombing of the embassy commissary was an isolated incident and did not reflect the mood of the country...

...It's on page 25 of Democracy, which, in addition to its other problems, is a novel about novel-writing...

...The simple notion that higher marginal tax rates create "substitution effects" tending to take people out of work and investment and into leisure and tax dodges is universally acknowledged by all educated analysts...

...She doesn't do it until one of her kids has run away from a methadone program to Saigon (in the spring of 1975) and her father has killed her sister, but she gets around to it, and when she does Jack is there to go with her...

...A putupon ambassador is playing host to Harry Victor, a liberal Democratic congressman, during riots in Jakarta in 1969: "The ambassador was interviewed and expressed his conviction Thomas Mallon teaches English at Vassar College...

...There are the innumerable interlocking "think tanks"--the Institute for Policy Studies, the Fund for Peace, the Center for National Security Studies, the Center for Defense Information-which consistently whitewash Soviet aggression, denounce U.S...

...that we must "return to the balky pragmatism for which Americans were famous...

...I'm not surprised that the blurb to Democracy gives no hint of its format...

...Denouncing those who point to the cost of federal spending programs, which under Reagan have bulged from 23.3 percent of GNP to 25.7 percent, is a task better suited to old-fashioned Keynesians...

...A narrative alert...

...The authors apparently believe that it is enough to name names and quote quotes, counting on the notion that the public will automatically reject the views of collectivist utopians once these are made explicit...

...41 There are the "public interest" populists--mainly, the fleet of "consumer" groups launched by Ralph Nader--who would nationalize corporations and create an economic system "broken down into as many small parts as are economically possible...

...and Environmental Action, publishers of Ecotage, a primer on using sabotage tactics against "enemies of the environment...

...Didion even decorates the failure with her own supposed presence in her characters' lives: "The first time I ever saw Jack Lovett was in a Vogue photographer's studio on West 40th Street, where he had come to see Inez...

...Three times, in fact...

...Examples: A fivehour CBS documentary on national defense relied heavily on information supplied by the Center for Defense Information and other leftist outfits...

...For all of David Stockman's political ineptitude in his candid talks with his Washington Post breakfast pal, he at least could call it straight...

...Those who had been tossing rhetorical bombs at the System now found themselves at its helm...

...and the Bay Area Institute hatched the Pacific News Service--a left-wing propaganda source whose stories are dutifully carried by such media iegitimati as the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times...

...How have ideas supposedly alien to most Americans come to dominate their lives, seize their institutions, and undercut the vision of their nation's Founders...

...He admits that tax cuts will prompt deficits, at least temporarily, but will mitigate this problem by encouraging savings...

...This is fair enough, but why an author who has in the past written with ethical brilliance about cutting one's losses and burying one's dead chooses to advertise her failure in this awful oldhat nouveau way is mysterious and sad...

...There are the environmental gurus--Amory Lovins, Barry Commoner, Jeremy Rifkin--who would coercively impose a "conserver society" and a "frugal or Spartan lifestyle...

...They seem to forget that America's Founders were sons of the Enlightenment --system-building theorists who united experience with principle...

...These specialize in rationalizing Soviet aggression and paralyzing American defense preparations...

...It is a pleasure to find her still able to do this in Democracy...

...What surprises me is that Didion expects us to care about a story she apparently ceased to...

...Indeed, the classical economic argument for increased private saving is that consumers rationally predict higher future tax payments, and put aside for them...

...But why would David Stockman, who drank from the very same cooler as Roberts, be such a hard sell...

...That line says a lot about pioneering, an endeavor and state of mind that for a long time preoccupied Didion, who has registered suspicion of any code of conduct other than "wagon-train morality": " I f we have been taught to keep our promises--if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is good enough --we stay with the body, or have bad dreams...

...And if one has to identify the single aspect of American life they find most repugnant, it is our economic system...

...Under different auspices and to different ends lnez Victor and I were both working for Vogue that year, 1960 . . . . " Didion was in fact working for Vogue then, but if she thinks it's somehow imaginatively interesting to claim that the demonstrably unreal Inez was as well, she's wrong...

...and is pressed by Harry's adviser for a reason why, she writes back: "'Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air...

...But not only has the conservatives' fiscal agenda proved as extravagant as the liberals' (as George Will has gleefully pointed out), but the limit of Mr...

...Capitalism is finished if, in the face of a moral challenge, all we can offer in reply is Murphy's Law...

...But how can "social engineering" be fought with pragmatic experimentation...

...but it does provide an abundance of startling facts for those willing and able to defend themselves philosophically...

...Collectivism is the acid rain of academia...

...A native of Hawaii, she "believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon...

...The Reagan electoral landslide was a window of opportunity in the battle to reduce government, a window which has now been slammed shut THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 (and perhaps broken in the closed position...

...The godfather of American political pragmatism in this century was Franklin Roosevelt, who prided himself in having no consistent or identifiable philosophy, save "whatever works...

...The Coercive Utopians may not provide a philosophical defense against today's collectivist activists...

...I lost nerve...

...It's a matter the authors don't address...

...But the idea that needed pushing was this substitution effect's prime import, relative to other factors, in explaining economic activity...

...Four f---ing reasons...

...And so on...

...In this it succeeds brilliantly, and cons~tqtes a reference no informed reader can afford to be without...

...but pragmatists...

...Like all the rest of the heroines she can be tough, both practically and morally, during certain emergencies, but she spends most of her life drifting in the wake of second-rate men and almost remembering something ineffable that somehow got lost...

...The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation likewise "donates heavily to environmental organizations, including the most militant of them...

...Like Maria Wyeth of Play It As It Lays, she learns to ask why not instead of why...

...And there is the fraudulent "peace movement"--Women Strike for Peace, Mobilization for Survival, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Clergy and Laity Concerned--which promotes unilateral U.S...

...The story is that there are those who want to cut defense spending...

...It was kind of the place to be" for Jack, who years before played regaling Othello to Inez's allears Desdemona, and whose right if shady stuff never lost its appeal for her during her long marriage to Harry, who can't even win something as worthless as the 1972 Democratic nomination...

...But despite the philosophical chasm in its thesis, the Isaacs' book is an invaluable study of how today's Left is undermining the free society...

...This implies that the public would find the views of the Left intolerable, if such views were openly admitted...

...Realists, yes...

...In fact the only "incentive kick" from tax cuts without commensurate spending cuts is had by financing today's programs on the backs of future taxpayers-hardly a moral or democratic argument for tax "cuts...

...Let's suppose, says Roberts, that if one dollar of tax reduction is granted, it will result in forty cents additional tax payments (the work incentive effect) and forty cents more savings, thus leaving just twenty cents of that dollar tax cut to enlarge the deficit...

...George McGovern, buried in 1972 as too radical, has been disinterred as an "elder statesman" of his party a dozen years later...

...Walter Cronkite told an interviewer, "There are always groups i n Washington expressing views of alarm over the state of our defenses...

...Indeed, the tax cut ball was sent rolling by California's Proposition 13, the tax cut heard 'round the world...

...Rather than pressuring Volcker for a little quick inflation fix, we would be better served by some Reaganesque fiscal restraint...

...Harry was interviewed and expressed his conviction that this isolated incident reflected only the normal turbulence of a nascent democracy...

...But how, concretely, has an ivorytower elite acquired practical power and influence...

...Reagan's deregulatory efforts has been to exile Rita Lavelle to federal housing, and James Watt to Siberia...

...For instance, the Institute for Policy Studies has sired and fostered the Foundation for National Progress, the Cambridge Institute, and the Bay Area Institute of San Francisco...

...they have about as little effect on shortrun economic incentives, in the supply-side sense, as any tax on the books...

...Yet the Center has worked closely with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and helped frame the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978...

...The pigs were really feeding," the boy budgetcutter observed to Mr...

...some of it stems from a wish to be trendy...

...In selling their soap as painless, costless, and even selfcleaning, and by crucifying those who have had the guts to tackle the more rugged clean-up jobs of ending inflation and scouring government pork barrels, the supply-siders run the risk not of burying the corpse of Keynes, but of joining him...

...The common neck connecting the many faces is the belief that American society "is deeply flawed, indeed hateful," the Isaacs write...

...Call that a travel advisory...

...No, this is not something Didion said in an interview...

...While the diversion of tax money to overt collectivists reached its hey-day under Jimmy Carter, entrenched leftist bureaucrats have made sure that the parasitism has continued under the Reagan Administration...

...Its useful contribution was to push economists and policy-makers into re-emphasizing the financial incentive effects of the tax code...

...The problem is implicit in the book's format...

...As for the subsidies from private foundations such as Ford and the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Isaacs remark that Lenin was imprecise in claiming that capitalists would "sell the rope with which they would be hung...

...Her dialogue is wonderful...

...The supply-side theory is a bright and beautiful lady who needs persistent reminders not to behave like a harlot...

...The Issacs are not conspiracy theorists...

...They were the heroines of Didion's first three novels, and they're still the heroine of this one...

...Of the daughters I was at first more interested in Janet, who was the younger, than in Inez...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 43...

...Guilt-ridden Marxist heirs to capitalist fortunes are instead "donating the rope...

...When, in 1944, Friedrich von Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom " t o the Socialists of all parties," he recognized a fact that seems to escape the lsaacs, and many conservatives, even today...

...Hardly...

...The Administration was never serious about across-the-board spending cuts...

...This book is principally about Inez Victor, Harry's wife, who has never gotten over Jack Lovett, an adventurer who spent much of the two decades before the fall of Saigon dealing in arms, currency, technology, and maybe drugs...

...And they adopted a strategy of corroding, not confronting, the System, by penetrating influential institutions...

...Economic democracy" became their new euphemism for "socialism...

...Inasmuch as deficits are a promise of future taxes, any positive incentive effects deriving from lower current tax rates will simply be cancelled by the expectation of higher future tax rates--when today's investments pay off...

...But in the chapter most likely to raise one's blood pressure, the Isaacs document how the U.S...

...Try as supply-siders might (and Arthur Laffer certainly has), property taxes do not strike at the margin...

...Their "coercive utopians" are diverse groups and individuals who think an "ideal" social order must be imposed by government coercion...

...Inez has a "capacity for passive detachment" that proves to be "the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory...

...Inez Victor has in the past gone by the names of Lily Knight McClellan, Maria Wyeth, and Charlotte Douglas...

...The measure slashed property taxes by 57 percent, costing the state about $7 billion in annual revenue...

...but much sprouts from ideological sympathies--and worse...

...With so much to offer with integrity, why should she cheapen herself...

...You see the shards of the novel I am no longer writing," the author tells us...

...foreign policy of wimpsmanship--including the Center for International Policy, the Center for National Security Studies, and the Center for Defense Information (Admiral Gene LaRocque's outfit...

...No "exposd" is possible if the audience you wish to inform shares (or at least tolerates) your target's values...

...Rather, it condenses within the philosophical smog layer enshrouding the universities, and descends upon society in a corrosive downpouring of proposals, experts, and organizations...

...Coercive utopianism is a loose intellectual coalition, not a monolithic plot--a many-headed hydra with a shared body of premises...

...Ford," report the Isaacs, "has almost singlehandedly bankrolled the public interest and environmental movements and has contributed substantially to the radical institutes...

...We don't carry those stories...

...Two-thirds of the way through the book, Didion writes: I plan to address Jessie [lnez's daughter] presently, but I wanted to issue this warning first: like Jack Lovett and (as it turned out) Inez Victor, I no longer have time for the playing out...

...How nice it is to read that, even after the "Reagan Revolution," federal departments continued to fund (among many others): a training institute which calls economic development "genocide...

...ABC newsman Geraldo Rivera told Playboy how "we downplayed the whole incident" of Panamanian National Guard violence at the time of the Senate vote on the Canal treaties, "because I could defeat the very thing [passage of the treaty] that I wanted to achieve...

...Roberts, in a telling omission, says not a word of Reagan's embarrassing failure to liquidate the departments of energy and education or of the scandalous boosters to agricultural subsidies (now at $60 billion annually, according to the Economist --$30,000 per farm family...

...l lost patience with it...

...There are the various denominations of the National Council of Churches, which--like their Catholic brethren who spout "liberation theology"-"sanctify revolution" by funding and backing Marxists and terrorists at home and abroad...

...the Cambridge Institute fathered the Center for the Study of Public Policy, the Center for Community Economic Development, and the Huron Institute...

...Greider...

...The Coercive Utopians is an eyeopening guided tour of the world of intellectual and political manipulation...

...Under Carter, hundreds of consumer, environmental, and public interest activists were given White House and sub-cabinet positions...

...Conservatives may have been annoyed by her recent book on El Salvador, but irrespective of administration policy toward Central America, they would be hard put to read her twenty years' worth of books and not conclude that she is among the most fundamentally conservative writers in America...

...One Rockefeller heir, asked how she'd pass her wealth to her children, answered: "1 hope the social revolution will come soon and take away from us the necessity of having to deal with it...

...In trying Io explain the Left's successes, the authors suggest that idealism itself may be to blame...

...of pluralism: those who use the very virtues of American society--its tolerance, liberty, and generosity--to transform it into a collectivist "utopia...

...returned to balance the year after the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut precisely because government spending did not increase, they clung to the scant hope of the Immaculate Reflows...

...Some of the true believers still held tight...

...And all the Reagan mandate threw back at them was more taxpayer slop...

...If anything, however, the Left has become more explicit than ever in its goals and aims--and the public has become far more tolerant of it all...

...taxpayer and capitalistic foundations have been financing their system's adversaries...

...Such a concession, by capitalism's supposed defenders, is the chief reason for the success of the Left--particularly in attracting young people...

...But some of the techniques that have served her so well in the past are worked too hard for the sake of lighting up these by-now-too-familiar faces: the litanies ("By which I mean to suggest" opening three paragraphs in a row...

...If government deficits bore no cost, it would be foolish for the feds to tax us a red cent: simply borrow the entire federal budget...

...Twist as supplysiders might, every dollar spent by government will be expropriated from a taxpayer somewhere, sometime-with interest...

...The authors, Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, have already left their mark in magazine exposes of the "peace" movement and efforts by American churches on behalf of international terrorists...

...The Isaacs show how these Trojan Horses interbreed...

...imperialism," and aim to destroy our military defenses and intelligence agencies...

...As Michael Evans recalls, in his most convincing The Truth About Supply-Side Economics': With no major spending cuts in sight, the entire hope of the Reagan administration for a balanced budget with higher defense spending then hinged on some miracle that tax receipts would somehow bridge the gap...