On the Condition of American Liberalism
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR rv~ VOL. 18, NO. 4 / APRIL 1985 ON THE CONDITION OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM Has it cracked up? Will it rise up? How do the tame journalists of South Africa discuss...
...Woodrow Wilson once said, "They call me an idealist...
...In fact, because they were advanced against the backdrop of the Vietnam war most were never really tried, so rumors of the welfare state's death, as many a Head Start alumnus would attest, may be greatly exaggerated...
...Lost in this deeply satisfying melodrama, many American liberals could not face up to certain political realities of the eighties: the threat from the military ambitions of the Soviet Union, and the increasingly unacceptable cost of bureaucratized redistribution in pursuit of welfare will-o~the-wisps...
...The damage done to our political institutions, to our social mores, and to our cultural suppositions runs too deep...
...This accurately reflects the mental impulses of today's well-off young liberals...
...Delusorily they step right up to the problem...
...It is simply too expensive to cut the sort of deals that Johnson specialized in: bribes to doctors, hospitals, and health insurers to soften their opposition to Medicare and Medicaid, subsidies to builders to allow a flow of public housing, and so on...
...Indeed, liberal self-assurance grew throughout the Eisenhower years, and finally reached heights of dizzying exaltation after the election of Kennedy...
...I've spent time on politics because that seems to be the arena in which liberals have the most hope...
...Castro as "soft-spoken, shy, sensitive," or to "'the efficient rapacity of our raider-rulers...
...This year, the bill will reach $111 billion...
...Are they willing to give two years to the service of their country, or do they want to continue the present disgraceful system under which the rich conservative and the limousine liberal bribe the poor to do the serving for them...
...The pragmatism of the New Deal has become doctrine--if there is a problem, create an agency and throw money at the problem...
...They got elected...
...But whether or not I share their relish for rampage and mayhem, the point is that this book is about Liberalism, and they shall just have to wait for me to write a book about conservatism before they can praise me for my fairminded philosophical emptiness...
...Liberalism's remaining beneficiaries, and their sympathizers, add up t ~ the Mondale vote...
...Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly...
...But what liberalism needs is not new ideas...
...ROBERT D. NOVAK Even liberals admit they are in disarray and decline, but their explanation points to what truly ails them...
...My guess is that they discuss it in the same way this Republic's tame journalists discuss subjects that discomfit them, such us the present state of Liberalism...
...As with health, so with low and moderate cost housing...
...Robert L. Bartley is editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...In his first national television address he said: There were always those who told us that taxes couldn't be cut until spending is reduced...
...In the following symposium all sides are included, and in this our readers are better served than those who have to rely on the tame journalists...
...The hint that the drive for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution might trigger a constitutional convention excites horror among liberals, who fear less that the delegates might not reflect the popular mood than that they probably would...
...KENNETH MINOGUE Why has liberalism lost its place in the mainstream of American life...
...We will see liberals remember the virtues of the Truman foreign policy...
...NORMAN PODHORETZ As long ago as 1950, Lionel Trilling was saying that American liberalism had grown lazy and simplistic for lack of any serious intellectual challenge from conservative thought...
...you say...
...Neoliberalism is, at least according to the neoliberals, the high tech platform which will give candidates Hart or Bradley or Cuomo the edge over Vice President Bush in '88...
...And when at length they learn how much is demanded of those who would govern-we will be back...
...Some of these figures who call themselves neoliberals may lead their movement back to the prominence it once had...
...Into this vacuum of demoralization the ideas not of the right but of the New Left came pouring in...
...Using oldfashioned common sense and American ingenuity, we must devise bold THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 strategies rooted in our basic values and have the courage to carry them out...
...Were he inadvertently to blurt out the horrible truth, he might bring bodily harm to his person and possibly even lose his bar stool at the local whitesonly press club...
...But I know what is being attacked when I see liberalism being written off, and I know in particular what to expect from the reactionaries who affect to mourn a hypothetical liberalism of the past, when decent standards were observed and demands were made more modestly...
...Well, at The American Spectator we still want to know, and we are equally eager to hear from the left as from the right...
...materialism and selfishness on the other...
...Ask people if they really mean it when they wave those flags...
...You either join in a legitimate reduction in which both of us will reduce in such a way that neither one of us represents a threat to the other, or you face that kind of a race...
...Today, liberalism's political weakness reflects the shattering of liberalism's intellectual assumptions...
...Unfortunately, that critique still holds true for too many liberal thinkers and leaders--and the consequences have been severe...
...In the realm of ideas, the condition of liberals is far worse...
...The conservative tide in American politics derived its force from assimilating many of the ideals of New Deal liberalism--growth, optimism, opportunity...
...The efforts of such people as the editors of the New Republic to come up with some are interesting and honorable, but trivial: the intellectual equivalent of policing the area for butts and beer cans...
...However, liberalism also has identified itself with an agenda of "social programs" that amount to uneconomic subsidies for the middle classes...
...And Ronald Reagan would be doing Lite beer commercials...
...Dare I whisper the words, a state-salaried service...
...The soil," I concluded, "is worn out...
...Reagan had proposed to abolish during the 1980 campaign...
...Only the economically and militarily strong can lead, and the trick is to eliminate pockets of poverty amidst widespread affluence and bring the underdeveloped world along, without losing any of our own wealth or strength...
...Gary Hart in his resumed presidential bid is a call for "sacrifice...
...I'll tell you what world...
...They acknowledge the essentials~" Ronald Reagan again hoodwinked the popolo minuto...
...And that is what he did in the 1981 tax act...
...If the Jackson liberals were the dominant force in liberalism today, the dawn of conservative America would never have broken...
...At another level, it is too absolute, at least for my tastes as a liberal...
...This hypocrisy has its consummation in the grotesque attempt by Ronald Reagan to claim the "mantle" of Roosevelt...
...RET FRED BARNES It ain't dead yet, no matter what conservatives would like to think...
...This mood of righteous hysteria became, in its periodic frustrations, profoundly anti-American, and was led, step by step, into absurdities...
...Liberals should encourage us to laugh at these absurdities and challenge America to rise above our individual and group interests for the good of the national community...
...Well, what does this mean...
...That depends on the capacity of its self-appointed apostles to realize that theirs is a political philosophy, not a religious movement, and that politics in America is a pragmatic calling, not a search for doctrinaire angels on the head of an ideological pin...
...In the intellectual world the hot magazine of the last year, with due respect to The American Spectator, has been the New Republic...
...Too late...
...And as the creativity of American liberalism has worn out, the Republican right-wing has rushed in--with appeals to self-interest, and promises of ease and comfort, at least for today...
...That this hectoring has been more ignored than resented is probably due to the fact that the patient seems to be doing so well (now that the doctor has been dismissed), and that time is healing some of the doctor-made wounds...
...It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it and liberals did...
...and only one big solution: the intervention of the government, preferably waving dollars...
...Even Gov...
...It was too general a statement...
...The deficits are going to kill that...
...They never confronted the book's thesis...
...Michael Kinsley, writing as TRB in the New Republic, contends opportunists--meaning Ronald Reagan & Co.--2"managed to convince the citizenry" that Mondale's tax increase was "an outrageous imposition...
...The new breed of right-wing snobs tends, not very admirably, to distance itself from the boorish Christian bigots who would undo so much of the last two decades...
...The sacrifice demanded of the worker, for example, must be shared by the employer...
...urging that to the contrary things were getting out of hand, that the President needed to impose a measure of restraint: "In the last few days something like an auction of the Treasury has been going on...
...They were the majority...
...These liberals are tough on defense, want a restrained welfare state, and detest all the trendy enthusiasms like feminism, environmentalism, and isolationism...
...The United States of America in the American Century has become a debtor nation...
...They don't want to be suckers...
...Since this catastrophic conversion was consummated, liberalism has if anything become even more morally smug than before (only liberals are "compassionate"), but it has suffered both a decline in intellectual standing and an even steeper decline in political power...
...Nor wouM these notables complain, at least as long as they were not aware that when some of us hear the term New Age we larf and larf...
...What world...
...Rarely does a pundit blurt out that Liberalism has become sozzled on radicalism, lost touch with the people, and even with the New Deal--a Gay and Lesbian Caucus, indeed, t Because the analyses of Liberalism" condition remain so vacuous, my col ~ leagues here at this venerable journal of scholarship and the arts have put together this symposium...
...They've got to exorcise their self-destructive urge to impose the culture of the fringe on the mainstream of the many...
...That's how I know I'm an American...
...Robert Lekachman is the author of Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics...
...In the eighteenth century, when America was still a series of colonies, American liberalism was something big, directed to great principles such as the rights of man and liberty and self-government...
...Walter Mondale's message played well in the District of Columbia and in progressive Minnesota, but in the outlying provinces it suffered a mysterious rejection...
...It may be that Democrats have sometimes paid too little heed to Marshall's qualification...
...In the time of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, liberalism generally meant public programs of assistance to those unable to assist themselves, advocacy of equal opportunity, and respect for productive enterprise...
...In this time of dramatic social, economic, and global change, my party--and our nation-has failed to keep pace or move ahead...
...when it does look out into the world, it refuses to see what is there...
...As for the last charge, I plead guilty...
...If there are still Americans who were poor and uneducated, then the social structure must be even more devious and powerful than previously suspected...
...The Republic needs such a resurgence of liberalism...
...Alfred Marshall once wrote: "Government is the most precious of human institutions...
...In this vision, the poor would frankly become lesser breeds needing largesse, but apart from them, government would let the good times roll...
...They are now compounding, exactly as we said they would do...
...GARY HART American liberalism is not dead...
...We will see lower marginal tax rates as the best way to advance the poor...
...What of the future...
...Liberalism is what Americans have instead of European social democracy or European socialism...
...Nor did conservative criticism have much to do with the collapse of this self-confidence a few years later...
...too indiscriminate...
...The 1980 election was more lost than won...
...But he did say this with respect to the crisis...
...And they've latched on to the best way of achieving a strong economy--the free market...
...Or we can cut their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance...
...which President Reagan had not done...
...Are our pessimistic findings sound, or are the liberals and radicals correct that the situation is still retrievable...
...Such sentiment is increasingly expressed by liberal journalists and politicians...
...How's that...
...I think the people will respond to this challenge to their altruism...
...Many liberals came to see anyone who disagreed with them as no better than the agents of some sinister interest...
...We live in a World more One than liberal Wendell Willkie ever dreamed of...
...Gary Hart is the senior Senator from Colorado...
...Such leaders seem to revel in Simple-Simon statements about the most intricate and confounding issues of our day: arms control, revolution and guerrilla war in Central and South America, trade imbalances, drug addiction and street crime...
...but the subsequent, increasingly insistent, and then frantic efforts of contemporary liberalism to minister to an ailing social order made the conclusion to be drawn ever more clear: Contemporary liberalism, like eighteenth-century medicine, offers a cure worse than the (ostensible) disease...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the senior Senator from New York...
...In his column in the Washington Post of February 10, David Broder wrote: The deficit is eating us alive...
...What this is doing is taking a tax bill we could afford and transforming it into a great barbecue that we can't afford...
...Fruitless to say to the President: That commode seat cost too much...
...As the District goes, so goes Minnesota...
...The only pity will be if today's conservatives fail to recognize what they themselves have achieved...
...For none could...
...Some, not all, neoliberals have, at any rate...
...government is not the solution to our problem...
...American liberalism today has narrow horizons, something you would expect to find in an oppressed people, concerned no longer with the rights of man, but the rights of minorities, no longer with universal ideals or principles, but with local grievances...
...CHARLES PETERS American liberalism has fallen victim to the politics of selfishness to which American conservatism succumbed long ago...
...The audience looked left and right, each expecting to see a neighbor's hand raised...
...the coming figure in the House is Rep...
...When they do, they will find the Democratic Party on hand to help...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 VIC'IOR NAVASKY What is this "American liberalism as we once knew it...
...Can its citizens reconstruct its institutions...
...Similarly, during my first Senate campaign, I maintained that liberalism had failed to move pastthe New Deal...
...Such timorousness is perfectly understandable in authoritarian South Africa, but how does one account for it in the land of the free...
...Medicaid, food stamps, and allied interventions were tolerated in the 1960s and early 1970s so long as the economy grew at a pace rapid enough to finance them without imposing new tax burdens on the more prosperous...
...Liberalism has got to come to terms with the harsh economic realities of post-industrial America...
...They feel there must be, as I said in a recent speech, "a higher purpose for a great nation than outdated political arrangements on the one hand, or...
...And in 1972, "the fields of liberalism failed to provide a crop...
...In this symposium readers can decide for themselves...
...As I wrote in A New Democracy: "During the remainder of this century, America must recreate its revolutionary and pioneering spirit...
...Can it renew its vigor...
...But there is another side to Americans...
...as a political position, though, it strikes me as incoherent...
...All we have is a doctrine of government waste, and a theory of Soviet conduct...
...The Jackson liberals are closer to matching American public opinion than Reagan is (he's more conservative than most people), but they lost out to the New Politics liberals...
...In their anti-populist mood, liberals do not so much criticize Walter F. Mondale for proposing higher taxes as they indict the voters for rejecting them...
...A chief condition to that end is that it should not be set to work for which it is not specially qualified, under the conditions of time and place...
...Obviously the typical South African journalist-does not truly want to know about the state of relations between the pale face and the caliginous...
...one big cause of all troubles, namely the structure of society...
...Reagan's campaign was not notable, and probably wisely so...
...The bioregionalists held their first conference ever in 1984--an achievement that many observers thought as absurd as the early gatherings of the Buckley-Goldwaterite National Review crowd a generation ago...
...he'd be arguing that it's great because it's less filling...
...All credit to Ronald Reagan, who is not a devious man: He stated his plan straight out, sixteen days after the Inauguration...
...I don't think he did (and am not sure he does), for in short order he set in place a basic strategy--still in place--of reducing the size of government itself to the condition of bankruptcy...
...government is the problem...
...Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson understood this, which accounts for the success of much of the New Deal and Great Society, and explains why liberals so irritated both Presidents...
...I write this after reading in my local newspaper that the city of Athens, Ohio, is requesting $4.4 million in federal grants to facilitate the private construction of a retirement community, a shopping mall, and a chain drugstore...
...Of course, such people will no longer be liberals as we have known them the last generation...
...The key question today is not the condition of liberalism but the condition of the nation...
...ROBERT L. BARTLEY Underestimating the regenerative power of American liberalism would be a mistake of the first order...
...If respect for the honorable traditions of the Democratic party had become the property of those who betrayed that party in order to re-elect Richard Nixon (and who now falsify that record in the pages of Commentary and the Public Interest), we would be worse off still...
...One thinks (or at least I think) of Adlai Stevenson lying his way through the Bay of Pigs, Arthur Schlesinger seeking cover during the McCarthy period, and all the bright sparks who combined to put the torch to Vietnam...
...Michael Kinsley of the New Republic assures me this is like saying that a frog could fly if it had wings...
...The result was the conversion of liberalism from containment to neo-isolationism, from antidiscrimination to preferential "treatment, and from economic growth to redistributioni~m...
...Abuses still exist in various welfare and poverty programs, but there is a need for such activities, if in a cleanedup form...
...In exculpation, a number of us--myself, Sen...
...We stopped spending for the sake of defense and started spending for the sake of spending...
...The result has been a gradual and a grudging acknowledgment that something has gone wrong and a search for "new ideas...
...This is no big discovery on my part...
...The responses were a classic manifestation of denial...
...Are they--union members, managers, and stockholders alike--willing to forgo wage and salary and dividend increases in order to make our factories more competitive with the rest of the world...
...Yet neither the emergence a few years later of the National Review nor the increasing influence in the fifties of such conservative thinkers as Leo Strauss, the early Hannah Arendt, and Russell Kirk had much effect on liberalism...
...Mondale surely believed, as much as his mentor Hubert Humphrey before him, in the common good, and in the government's duty to provide it...
...The world in which the American government was not only solvent, but was the symbol of the stability and prosperity of democratic government...
...But the New Deal, and then the centralizing experience of World War II convinced many liberals that there was only one big problem facing the United States--the problem of the underprivileged...
...Mario Cuomo, fresh from castigating the Reagan Administration for heartlessness toward homeless mental cases, returns to Albany to cut the tax rates for his state's upper-income wage-earners...
...In 1980, the Treasury spent $52 billion in interest payments...
...To be sure, the New Left would probably have failed in this campaign if not for the fact that the three wars launched by liberalism in the sixties-the one against Communism in Vietnam, and the two at home against racial discrimination and poverty-were all felt to have been lost, thus discrediting in the eyes of most liberals themselves their own ideas about foreign policy, about social policy, and about economic policy...
...Hart (who did not vote for the tax bill)with another budget proviso to manage money growth to promote economic growth...
...Let me dream no more...
...Yet perhaps we are wrong...
...It starts slowly, then explodes...
...When our turn comes again there really will be a crisis, but at least we will take it seriously from the point of view of government...
...A liberalism that once again unhesitatingly advocated genuine liberal democracy and the American mission in this world, while understanding the practical limits on both, would be a formidable force in our political life--one that all rightthinking conservatives should welcome...
...We lost...
...Even while debating precisely what tax rate will maximize government revenues, they will ridicule Arthur Laffer...
...Here he is in the Wall Street Journal of February 8: And I think the fact that we go (to Geneva) now with our own military build-up, with them seeing that the alternative to legitimate arms reduction could very well be an arms race with an industrial power that they know they cannot match...
...Finally, and most sadly of all in this historically liberal nation, liberalism has become nearly synonymous with anti-Americanism...
...In that first term, for the first time since World War I, the United States became a net debtor, owing more to foreigners than they owe us...
...But more often we have prevailed because at heart we have embodied a great idea which is that an elected government can be the instrument of the common purpose of a free people...
...But we have never failed to respect his premise...
...DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN Shall we begin at the beginning...
...Remember when liberals yearned THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 for economic growth, favored the welfare state in moderation--they tried to aid folks without indulging in social tinkering--and were enthusiastic internationalists, even hard-line antiCommunists...
...That is not unusual in elections...
...Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...
...In 1973, in Right from the Start, argued that American liberalism was near bankruptcy: "In recent decades, progressive ideas and innovative proposals have sprung in large part from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party...
...When his crack-up comes, we won't disappoint you...
...The bill got worse yet, the likes of me voted for it, and the President signed it...
...Whether left-wing liberals are any THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 more likely to do this than right-wing conservatives is doubtful...
...The deficit began to change character, to become a built-in feature of the political economy rather than a policy choice incidental to the economic (or electoral) climate...
...it's running away with us...
...We have near to doubled the national debt in his first term, we will near to triple it in two terms...
...MAURICE CRANSTON What is most striking to the foreign observer about American liberalism today is its provincialism...
...The Democratic political party, the vessel of American liberalism, remains predominant in state and local government, and its mayors and governors are quite free from the horse-blinders liberals wear inside the Capital Beltway...
...some beneficiaries must be preferred, at the expense of others...
...it needs to rediscover the "old" ideas to which it was committed before it began groveling at the feet of the radical young of the sixties...
...Welfare state liberalism is said to be dead on the theory that the social and economic justice schemes of the Great Society were tried and failed...
...Sacrifice" is the key word...
...During the last two years, I have argued that liberals and the Democratic party must offer an innovative, cohesive vision for America's future...
...Rather than withdrawing to regroup, happy to let bygones be bygones, many liberals have felt no compunction about hectoring the people for daring, at last, to seek to do without their ministrations...
...The nation dropped into the first depression in a half century...
...I am not certain, however, that I understand fully what distinguishes them from neoconservatives...
...But by the late sixties, "the traditional sources of invigorating, inspiring and creative ideas were dissipated...
...They have not had a first-rate political idea since Woodrow Wilson, or a first-rate moral/aesthetic one since Swinburne, maybe Shelley...
...The "True Patriotism" coined by Sen...
...There are limits, to be sure...
...In earlier days, whatever reforms they championed, liberals were at one with other Americans in a fervent loyalty to cherry pie, motherhood, the Constitution, and the expanding frontier...
...We have known good times and bad...
...Riegle-quickly warned, and proposed as a budget proviso, that the Federal Reserve must not clamp down on money growth in response to the now inevitable deficit...
...At the edges, both movements are in the hands of leaders who get their jollies sparring on a set of issues better suited to parents and churches than politics and caucuses: God, abortion, homosexual rights, teenage sex...
...In the meantime, Mr...
...but the proof will be in the pudding...
...The President truly wants arms reductions and will pay anything to get them...
...WILLIAM KRISTOL Only thirty-five years ago Lionel Trilling could plausibly claim that "in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition...
...There are grounds for hope that such a reformation is possible...
...Thus here we are, months after poor Walter was led to the hecatomb, and still the pundits of the Republic have made no headway in deciding Liberalism's condition...
...Conservatives, brushed aside by the voters, muttered about the need for a balanced budget...
...Carter's presidency had not succeeded, and someone--almost whoever was nominated by the opposing party--was going to succeed him...
...Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist and publisher of the EvansNovak Political Report...
...Republicans offer to make the rich richer...
...The fault, say today's liberals, is with the people...
...Today, liberalism has confused equal opportunity with equality of condition, has little regard for productive enterprise, and seems to believe the Department of Defense a greater menace than the Soviet Union...
...Already we can see the liberal forces regrouping to reclaim their lost heritage...
...Daniel P. Moynihan wrote that, "The interest deficit has begun to go out of control...
...It recognized totalitarianism of all stripes for what it was and accepted it as an implacable enemy...
...This makes their provincialism doubly disturbing--not only has it given up the universal perspective of earlier liberalism...
...These assumptions were shattered in the most damaging and irretrievable way possible: The movement based on them finally overcame all remaining obstacles and put its program into effect...
...Fortunately for liberals, a strike force of young Turks like Tim Wirth, Dick Gephardt, and Bill Bradley is moving to save their cartilages from their worst instinctive kneejerks, just as Jack Kemp and his cohorts are moving to deliver the conservative right from itself...
...Our children, grandchildren...
...Then of course there are those R. Emmett Tyrrell really means when he refers to New Age liberals--the smallis-beautiful American Greens...
...They ruled the country...
...He left it to the voters to ask if they wanted four more years of Carter...
...They are small now, but their beauty grows increasingly alluring...
...and do great things...
...I have no doubt that had I scrutinized conservatism and scoffed at its ideas and sacred mysteries my critics would be pleased and some would even toast me...
...The new President said the nation faced a crisis...
...CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS It is in the nature of reformist and radical movements to be in crisis, because they cannot, or should not, become too "well-adjusted...
...They created change and prosperity, and they promoted freedom around the world...
...It was the Vietnam war which completed this slide into simplicity and political melodrama...
...was President Johnson's Special Assistant for Domestic Affairs and was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare from 1977 to 1979...
...That is the key to awakening an active, effective, and pragmatic liberalism--the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy--and it is also the key to building a better future for America...
...Both Glenn and Hart, it turned out, had nothing to offer...
...Reagan's gingerly treatment of Social Security attests to its powerful constituency...
...In all versions, it means the ordinary citizen sacrificing more of his paycheck so that the government may spend it as it sees fit...
...Democrats have a caucus for every conceivable racial and sexual group--the sadomasochists will no doubt be recognized at the next meeting of the DNC...
...Universal health coverage is affordable only within the context of a transformed system of health delivery...
...He has repeatedly said in public (and by accounts fs even more explicit in private) that the only way to bring the Russians to their senses about arms reductions is to persuade them that if they get in a spending contest, we will still be spending when they go broke...
...We will see the liberals, and especially the blacks, embrace the virtues of the family...
...Over the next few years--four, probably--we will witness the liberals assimilating the lessons of the recent conservative surge...
...Then came the inaugural address and an extraordinary proposition...
...As a result, many Americans now feel dissatisfied with both liberals and conservatives...
...and, in all fairness, one must add that our society's susceptibility to the "cures" of the sixties suggests that its fitness was not all it could have been beforehand, either...
...It remains to be seen whether they will ever recover themselves enough even to try...
...Liberalism was therefore also dominant politically-since, as Trilling pointed out, "everything begins in sentiment and assumption and finds its issue in political action and institutions...
...One of the main reasons is that it became infected with the righteousness of its leftwing ideological neighbors...
...That is why it is essential that the programs liberals propose must be fair to all...
...Until some time in the sixties, we all took it for granted that not every human problem could be solved and that the resources realistically available even to soothe the misery of the afflicted and infirm were barely adequate...
...RICHARD BROOKHISER Politically, the condition of American liberalism is grim...
...Will remarked that it seemed he was never going to get rid of that toaster...
...We believe that the more piously one adheres to the ideas of late twentieth century Liberalism the more apt one is to suffer the psychological condition described by Anna Freud in her masterpiece, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, namely: denial This is sad news...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...
...But it now acquired a wholly different rationale...
...Liberalism's reaction to its failures has been rather ungracious, even impolitic...
...For the first few months they said nothing whatsoever, making The Liberal Crack-Up a truly historic book--one of the few developments in this century ever to render the Liberals speechless...
...Mario Cuomo seems determined to do Walter Mondale one more time, only as a good performer...
...Fred Barnes is national pofitical reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick has resigned but her perspective lives on in the assumption that the Third World is either an epithet or a pawn to be played in the effort to contain the Soviet superpower...
...The point is to make the point that it doesn't matter what things cost, or how much we duplicate: We can afford it...
...In Congress, we are witnessing the swan song of Tip O'Neill...
...True, liberals have been on a bender for years, getting more lathered up about the plight of the snail darter than the prospects for economic growth...
...For months now they have been tiptoeing rather prudishly around one of our most critical news storie_~ the breakup of American Liberalism...
...Sasser, and Sen...
...in other words, we're saying to them, "We're not going to let you get a monopoly on power to the point that you can start winning by simple ultimatums--threats of" 'Surrender or die'--so make up your mind...
...To bounce back, liberals must build on their most conservative strength-their commitment to the dignity and freedom of the individual...
...Good for them...
...There were indications right away , that all was not going smoothly in the brave new liberal world...
...Conservatives have our own problems, and time and chance happeneth to us all...
...We are borrowing to pay interest: More and more of this interest goes abroad...
...Then the criticisms drifted in...
...I have recognized for some time that they admire the nihilist...
...It was an assault from the left rather than a challenge from the right that undermined the liberals...
...How do the tame journalists of South Africa discuss the state of race relations in their incomparable land...
...American liberalism has become the ideology of protest: diffuse, illtempered, and often rather cynical...
...Well, you know we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath...
...The discourses are earnest, long-winded, and strenuously beside the point...
...Victor Navasky is editor of the Nation...
...For ours is the oldest political party on Earth...
...One is the Henry Jackson wing, a pathetically small fringe group of liberals who have bravely resisted the newfangled ideas and crazed fads to which liberalism is always so susceptible...
...As a result, it has infinite elasticity of membership and definition...
...Homosexuals should not be persecuted, but nor should they be assertive...
...In the President's new budget, we are told that next year, 18 percent of our revenues will come from borrowing, 15 percent of our outlays will go to interest payments...
...Joseph A. Califano, Jr...
...Jesse Jackson had something, but the Democrats are not yet willing to become a Third World party...
...Black Americans are equals, but only since about 1963, so no need for affirmative action...
...Maybe it will dawn on liberals, as dopey as many of them are these days, that something interesting happened when this was their ideology...
...bureaucracy rather than buoyancy...
...I should like to add, however, that the Liberals" reception of The Liberal Crack-Up, my recently published report to the nation on the present condition of you know what, fortifies my colleagues" conclusions...
...Your mannered Tory says--women's rights, yes, but no feminism...
...A Bismarckian notion of the citizen in service to the state is an ironic and intolerable burden for liberalism...
...Indeed, many of today's conservatives, the editors of The American Spectator for example, are likely to find they have more in common with the world's Gephardts than the world's Falwells, not all of whom are as erudite and cosmopolitan as the Rev...
...that if we have a B-1 bomber, maybe we don't need a Stealth bomber, or the other way around...
...But no matter, this is progress, as it is counted off in the intellectual/ political world...
...By 1989, $214 billion...
...George McGovern...
...What are the scriveners afraid of...
...Too often in the past decade, the creative, pragmatic energies of liberalism have become co-opted by constituency agendas and special interests instead of directed toward creating a new economic order in an era of great change...
...ALONZO L. HAMBY "Liberalism," as commonly understood at present, has reached a state of political and intellectual exhaustion...
...No one I know has much trouble comprehending my meaning when I refer to them as Liberals of the New Age...
...It does not need a British Labour party flight into the hopeless left, and happily, American liberals are far too sturdy for that...
...Rather they leveled three charges against m~" 1) I had written a profane book, shocking in its violence" 2) my terminoloev was inaccurate, confusine the morally upright humanitarians of the moderate left with the less sober types," and 3) I only derogate Liberals, not conservatives...
...They will rise to fight again, and maybe even win...
...Given that the United States, which liberals had earlier thought a moral force in the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 world, was actually the inspiration of worldwide imperialism, then the Soviet Union must be innocent...
...JOSEPH A. CALIFANO, JR...
...Was I really profane...
...In such a world our nation needs all the energy, creativity, persistence, genius, and guts a free enterprise system can muster...
...Enough of this smug revisionism...
...Martin's...
...Last September, Sen...
...I leave it with you to ponder:r There are some people in this town just now who remind me of that character in one of Disraeli's novels who is described as a man "distinguished for ignorance as he had but one idea and that was wrong...
...The Mondale campaign was the terminal moraine of the common good...
...I made this argument to the President at the Gridiron dinner in March 1981, his third month in office...
...In Europe--even in Australia-liberalism is clearly distinguishable from socialism, but American liberalism, obsessed with American "social problems," seems to have no enemies to the left, but rather to have assimilated any and every section of opinion that seeks to "change society...
...that government can embrace great causes...
...This made me nervous...
...The trouble with government provision is that if it is unlimited, it can no longer be common...
...you say...
...If the civil rights movement had had to depend on the sympathy of National Review, we would be in very poor case...
...Intellectually, liberalism needs to regain its earlier identity and to achieve a sense of limits...
...Did this man understand just how much government has to do...
...The citizenry is indicted for succumbing to Reaganite "selfishness...
...And it can't be cured on the spending side, even if you swallow all Reagan's medicine...
...At least they had an excuse of a war...
...He is currently senior partner in the Washington law firm of Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer and Wood...
...I have heard George Will offer a door prize of one electric pop-up toaster to any member of an audience of bankers who could recall a single federal program Mr...
...On July 27, 1981, as the bill neared passage, I found myself on national television responding to a presidential plea to get on with it...
...Listen to the President...
...The War on Poverty was waged in behalf of a fifth or sixth of the population, the folks below the poverty line...
...These young political warriors hold the promise of a debate that will redefine liberalism and conservatism into the best each has to offer...
...Norman Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary...
...When OPEC in 1973 and again in 1979 precipitated that nasty combination of inflation and unemployment dubbed stagflation by Paul Samuelson, the Great Society, already weakened by Vietnam rivalry for resources, was ripe for comparatively gentle trimming by Jimmy Carter and serious assault by Ronald Reagan...
...We tried again--myself and Sen...
...4 / APRIL 1985 ON THE CONDITION OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM Has it cracked up...
...President-seriously--good luck...
...Don't hold your breath, but don't rule out a liberal resurgence either...
...A free government is indeed the most precious of institutions...
...Unfortunately for the liberals, Ronald Reagan, a former liberal himself, has carried most of these ideas with him into the Republican party, which means that the liberals will have to steal back something they once owned and then precipitously and prematurely threw away...
...That last reference came not from me but from Professor Garry Wills during a learned discourse on capitalism...
...It was in World War I that Britain got into our present situation by selling off its assets...
...There are two groups of liberals-I'm talking small bands of liberals, not masses--who have figured out what happened...
...Money supply went negative...
...But the idea that there has been a liberal crack-up--as if the women's movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement are history rather than harbinger--is a conservative fantasy...
...Today, programs abound for every objective and interest group...
...But it has been asleep...
...This break with the Jeffersonian populist tradition means that the liberals are aping the aristocrats of a century ago in confronting the people as a great beast to be feared and controlled...
...Khomeini as "some kind of saint, "" or to Dr...
...Such are those who think they've seen the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party...
...Kenneth Minogue is author of The Liberal Mind and the new book Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology (St...
...The first two are quotations from the Hon...
...It means that if either of these groups reached a critical mass where it was the moving force in American liberalism, conservative hegemony would be imperiled...
...That, Kinsley continues, helped "create a political atmosphere in which politicians dread to propose anything that requires the least degree of sacrifice...
...None was...
...Cold War liberalism is alive and well in the Reagan Administration...
...Alonzo L. Hamby is professor of history at Ohio University and author of the new book, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (Oxford University Press...
...Do the critics have in mind the reference to the Rev...
...They will remember, correctly as it happens, that economic deregulation started under President Carter...
...But the point is that this frog really did have wings once...
...The word conservatism hardly appears in the book, but the book is not about conservatism, as prolonged reading of its title will reveal...
...We believe in American government and we fully expect that those who now denigrate it, and even despise it, will soon or late find themselves turning to it in necessity, even desperation...
...It will be frustrating, of course, since the latter-day liberals will give no credit to their conservative forebears...
...The Democrats acquiesced in this losing position because no better one was available...
...Liberalism is, without question, in semantic trouble...
...By now, the President had commenced his celebrated arms buildup...
...In national politics, it would be astonishing if Walter Mondale failed to prove the last New Deal presidential candidate...
...The~ were precisely what I had expected...
...We wanted to know what adults drawn from across the political spectrum think of the position we have taken at The American Spectator Our position is that Liberalism has cracked up into a riot of enthusiasms radical, contradictory, and remote from the concerns of the American people...
...They've got problems, one being a tendency toward isolationist foreign-policy positions, but they have figured out that people want a booming economy one heck of a lot more than they want to preserve every last snail darter or guarantee the right of lesbians to adopt children...
...Legacies of the populist mechanisms for direct public participation in the political process--referendum, initiative, recall, public review of judges--are under liberal attack...
...If I live to see liberal revival, it is likely to focus on programs with universal appeal and tax policies more equitable than those of recent experience...
...We radicals, I mean...
...Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for the Nation and the Spectator of London...
...Well, most new Presidents do that...
...One thinks of the Renaissance oath: Fiat justitia et pereat mundus-"Let justice be done, though the world perish...
...There is a way out of this moral abyss...
...And with that fairness, the generosity and openness that is at the heart of the American character will triumph over the politics of selfishness...
...They will have to achieve not only an intellectual but also a political coup that will free them from the "activists" of the left, the anti-American intellectuals, the professional grievance mongers, and the manifold special interest groups that now control access to Democratic presidential nominations...
...ROBERT LEKACHMAN New Deal liberalism was epitomized by the Social Security Act of 1935 which offered universal coverage to the elderly and unemployment benefits that over time evolved into a nearly universal entitlement...
...Are the critics referring to the line describing our returning POWs as "hypocrites and lia~ " or our defense of South Vietnam as "an indescribable atrocity, "or Idi Amin as an "outstanding figure...
...What if a cloud passed over and liberals sobered up...
...What Lord Keynes called the 'magic of compound interest' works with debt as well as with savings...
...They also seem to recognize no danger to freedom in Soviet expansion in Africa and South America...
...Liberals had learned the wrong lesson from the New Deal, and embraced institutions rather than innovation...
...Here again I believe we see what Miss Freud had in mind" When placed in an anxiety-causing situation the patient denies that which makes his palms sweat and his stomach churn...
...William Kristol teaches at the John E Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University...
...They talked of Republican Presidents (and even some Democratic ones) in the same tone of voice they had learned to use about Hitler...
...it is no accident that since the second Reagan landslide, its brightest stars have been hired wholesale by The Washington Post Co...
...Whenever politicians or parties calling themselves liberal have done so, the result has been "crack-up" on a scale far greater and more demeaning than the one so fancifully caught by your Mr...
...The other group with its ideological head screwed on right is the neoliberals...
...This was needed, and it had begun under his predecessor...
...Those are merely quotations from Jane Fonda, Professor Noam Chomsky, ,as well as the lawyer Florynce Kennedy as she declaimed at Yale Law School in 197Z Inaccurate...
...In a society whose members have come to view government as the problem rather than the solution, "neoliberals" Gary Hart and Michael Kinsley are demanding deference to the social engineers and professional politicians who have proved the bane of modern times...
...Is there a Phoenix hidden in the ashes of American liberalism...
...In foreign affairs, American guilt remains the vocal force of the liberals, but chiefly because the Reagan Administration hesitates to challenge it frontally, despite the clear lesson of Grenada...
...From the ideological imperatives of the New Deal, Liberalism has devolved into a mental disorder...
...Andrew Young and the Hon...
...They admit things are not as they were in halcyon yore...
...Stranger things have happened...
...What Gary Hart was attempting may be achieved by Bill Bradley or some other fresh face--to make liberalism the rallying cry of yuppies with compassion...
...It is to appeal to the people's idealism and generosity instead of their self-interest...
...But what if that changed...
...Give me the authentic bully-boys, who really elected Ronald Reagan, every time...
...They will celebrate the New Republic for discovering that the Sandinistas did not have in mind Brook Farm...
...Cuomo is good, but not that good...
...Affirmative action hiring and busing for school integration objectives accelerated the flight of the white middle class to the suburbs...
...Can its people rehabituate themselves to virtue...
...By contrast, Great Society liberalism focused on specific groups, neither terribly popular with the general public nor as active politically as the broad middle class who are the major beneficiaries of New Deal liberalism...
...Well, say I, there you go again...
...Are they willing, in order to avoid the national bankruptcy threatened by continuing growth of the entitlement programs, to, give up the government benefits they don't deserve--whether they are welfare cheats or the affluent receiving Social Security that is both beyond their needs and the amounts plus interest that they and their employers contributed to it...
...Democrats lost an election last year but we did not lose a tradition...
...Sometimes we have merely endured...
...Falwell himself...
...Indeed, as Eugene McCarthy remarked as we strolled away to lunch after the ceremonies, most new Presidents declare war in their inaugural address...
...Tyrrell...
...In some versions, it means restoring the military draft or establishing universal service...
...and no care can be too great to be spent on enabling it to do its work in the best way...
...Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor of National Review, L~ writing a book about the 1984 elections to be published by Doubleday...
...I perceive little hope of liberal revival in its Lyndon Johnson style...
...Richard Gephardt, with Senator Bill Bradley co-sponsor of the Democratic version of the flat tax...
...At one level, this is a kind of genial potlatch...
...Mr...
...But it would be a mistake to assume that real health will be easily restored...
...One must hope for its revival, if for no other reason than the need for a genuine mainstream political dialogue in this country...
...As what I take to be a reaction against the persecution of Communists in the McCarthy era, American liberals are curiously protective towards Communism...
...Oh, how we shall pay for this...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
