The New Direction in American Politics
Chubb, John E.
age bracket. At the same time, unemployment and the percentage of the population that was poor both declined. In one of his most perceptive chapters, Tucker does much to discredit the notion that...
...Something on the order of supply-side economics, which, by the way, is the single Reagan idea to get any sort of hearing in the book...
...In criticizing television, however, intellectuals tend to fix on a single pernicious aspect and let the rest off easy...
...After all, most people view the world through their television screens...
...But as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about...
...There is nothing he does that his opponents could not learn to do as well...
...Planted axioms haunt every page of Amusing Ourselves to Death...
...Its most important service is to undermine the claims to moral superiority and superior wisdom of liberal intellectual elites...
...These murders usually occur in the course of other crimes, such as armed robbery and rape, that already carry stiff sentences...
...Not that there aren't a few sharp moments in Amusing Ourselves to Death...
...Does the Communist ideology present any obstacle to the salutary effects of realignment...
...To what extent have his two landslide elections occasioned a reassessment of issues on the left—the sort of ideological repositioning Democratic politicians have been talking about the past few years...
...that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play...
...But their conclusions are broad, too broad to be made without examination of genuine issues...
...agenda, a concrete set of objectives...
...he'll go away soon, and we can learn from his methods...
...Or that he should devote four pages of a slender book to the group discussion which ABC appended to "The Day After" without having anything to say about the show itself—a prime specimen of the bizarre and extraordinary phenomenon of "docudrama," a subject which would certainly seem to be right up Mr...
...For Mr...
...He can turn to John Steinbruner's essay on political security and learn that "One can guess, and hope, that the two political systems (U.S...
...If there were no music—as is the case when any television program is interrupted for a news flash—viewers would expect something truly alarming, possibly life-altering...
...Rather, Reagan's successes are variously attributed to favorable workings of the business cycle, the South's belated embrace of the Republican party, Reagan's performance on television, the Republicans' financial advantage and superior party organization, politicization and centralization of the White House, a Republican bias in the electoral college, and deficit spending...
...The volume can, in other words, probably be taken as an effort by Ronald Reagan's critics to pin him down and dissect him...
...All these elections were about ideas...
...When the Wallace vote of '68 is added to Nixon's total, it makes four conservative landslides in the five elections...
...Vigilante has both the virtues and Not to speak of...
...Its opponents will not be reinvigorated until their frivolous fascination with the processes of government gives way to an agenda that can win broad approval...
...As Tucker points out, in the absence of a death penalty, the additional risks attached to killing one's victim are not that great, and the criminal stands to gain by eliminating a principal witness against him...
...in the case of rape, they may even exceed those for some degrees of homicide...
...He is lucky—the business cycle, for example, happened to be on an upswing in 1984, as D. Roderick Kiewet and Douglas Rivers point out, their thesis being that one need look no further than the business cycle to predict the outcome of presidential elections...
...None of the highly touted rehabilitative methods has proved successful, and one study indicates that psychoanalysis may even increase recidivism...
...And the extreme triteness of his loudest complaints about television doesn't help matters any...
...They've got Reagan categorized, put into historical perspective, and rendered innocuous...
...Says Mr...
...But the realism they imagine themselves to be practicing explains very little...
...The neoconservatives signed on to lend the movement a bit of academic respectability and to lead the charge on a host of new issues, such as racial quotas, raised by a liberalism gone berserk...
...Critics are likely to seize on such minor lapses as the mistaken attribution to present U.S...
...they have been for years, and probably will into the next century...
...An unspoken message always comes through the jargon: "Rest easy...
...There is the obligatory huffy chapter on religious broadcasters which forgets to mention that Billy Sunday was preaching to huge audiences in true Graham-Roberts-Falwell style long before commercial television saw the light of day...
...By contrast, the idea that society knows how to rehabilitate criminals has been thoroughly discredited...
...Chief Justice Bird is unlikely to reconsider her views as to what justice en-tails, but the much maligned public may gain more confidence in its own judgment...
...As usual, it suffers the withering dismissal of being called "a dubious theory" that "remains on the edge of academic respectability...
...From these broad axioms have flowed a host of issues that have deter-mined every presidential election since 1968...
...Well-intentioned liberals overlooked the fact that those most in need of effective law enforcement are the poor, who are disproportionately the victims of crime and can-not afford to hire private security guards...
...The wounds of 1980 and 1984 are soothed in the balm of an Elizabeth Drew observation—quoted disapprovingly by Kiewet and Rivers but actually a fair summation of the volume's theme—that Reagan's electoral success was "above all a testimonial to the man as a political phenomenon...
...Every television pro-gram must be a complete package in itself...
...This is not the same as actively disliking television...
...a more "enlightened" succeeding generation of judges self-righteously declared that it was necessary for the enforcement of constitutional rights.criminal behavior of an absent or uninvolved father...
...Had Neil Postman been content to criticize television on an ad hoc basis rather than to engage in grand theorizAMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH: PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN THE AGE OF SHOW BUSINESS Neil Postman/Viking/$15.95 Terry Teachout 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...
...Postman's approach is a bit too casual...
...cognitive foundations of that long-lost Arcadia and is making us "sillier by the minute...
...Postman should be full of good words about "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report," which he praises as "an unusual and gracious attempt to bring to television some of the elements of typographic discourse" without stopping to wonder why a television show should even at-tempt to ape the forms of typographic discourse...
...The single exception, Jimmy Carter, ran as a social conservative, a virtual walking morality play...
...Apparently Mr...
...Any real, live issues in there...
...Perhaps conservatives are just still What do heavyweight intellectuals of the liberal establishment make of Ronald Reagan...
...No new directions of any substance are discerned...
...The liberal-academic intelligentsia has kept itself largely free of the taint of substantive belief dating back at least to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who allowed that he would be unconcerned if the United States were heading toward hell in a handbasket so long as proper constitutional procedures remained in force...
...Maybe they really are engaged only in value-free efforts to stake out tiny areas of knowledge...
...Giving him more credit for policy victories than conservatives do, they suggest that he has all but dismantled the welfare state, presided over an immense military buildup, and dramatically altered the terms of discussion in Washington...
...In the seventies their arguments were conveyed with superb style by an array of opinion journalists unmatched on the left...
...Postman to acknowledge the influence of Marshall McLuhan doesn't make his literal recycling of McLuhan's ideas about the relationship between form and content in television any fresher...
...Chesterton observed that an organism usually is healthier when it focuses on ends rather than processes...
...There is the obligatory huffy chapter on political advertising which argues that "history can play no significant role in image politics" without stopping to point out that Ronald Reagan, the consummate image politician, uses his skills to advance the agenda of the most historically aware movement in recent American politics...
...The book is yet another occasion for liberalism to lament the unhappy marriage to academia, with its almost religious devotion to procedure...
...One suspects these gentlemen of per-forming the prudential function of turning up the alarm bell as counter-point to the sanguinity of their colleagues...
...The greatest noticer of our time, of course, has been Peter Drucker...
...I would gladly testify before the Federal Communications Commission as to the manifold merits of this excellent idea...
...Ronald Reagan is a retired actor, Tom Brokaw uses makeup, Pat Robertson has a talk show, Jerry...
...The Brookings offering is no help...
...It is with these effects in mind that Neil Postman, a professor of "communication arts and sciences" at New York University and the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity, has written a new book called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business...
...No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure...
...People vote for or against these ideas...
...Postman: Entertainment is the supraideology of all discourse on television...
...Why, in these circles it's just a drollery...
...Falwell's mother wears army boots...
...He has a winning personality...
...It would have been graceful for Mr...
...To be able to carry such a process very far, each will have to undergo considerable internal political realignment...
...America in the age of the founders was an intelligent, even intellectual society where everybody read and took reading seriously...
...Postman to confess them, even more graceful for him to have let them rest in peace...
...No previous knowledge is to be required...
...Reagan conservatism is alive, well, and popular because it engages a specific I have yet to find anybody who thinks the ubiquity of television in America is a good thing...
...They downgraded the importance of punishment and denigrated traditional views of personal responsibility, without having any empirical basis for the belief that they could reduce the incidence of criminal behavior by rehabilitation or psychotherapy...
...Among the Brookings crowd it all gets summed up by the phrase "a highly ideological President"—one small factor among many to be included in the model and fed into the computer...
...In retrospect, it is the hubris of liberal jurists and social theorists that seems most striking...
...The public, if not the California Supreme Court, seems convinced by the evidence: Approval of the death penalty rose from only 45 percent in 1968 to 75 percent today...
...Part of the answer can be found in The New Direction in American Politics, a collection of thirteen essays written under the auspices of the Brookings Institution, each dealing with a different aspect of the political landscape left in the wake of the Reagan electoral juggernaut...
...In its zeal to curb police abuse, the Warren Court rendered decisions that could not help but impede law enforcement to some degree, even though there seems to have been no systematic evidence of the extent of police misconduct...
...They credit Reagan with already having accomplished significant political realignment...
...The Brookings scholars are indeed rigorous scientists...
...How, for example, might a Mario Cuomo respond to Republican charges of Soviet malfeasance...
...In one of his most perceptive chapters, Tucker does much to discredit the notion that the death penalty does not deter crime...
...He is very good on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, equally good on the network evening newscast as art form: All television programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music...
...Neil Postman praises Lewis Mumford for having been a "great noticer...
...All this is fine for the faculty club, but elections ultimately hinge on real issues and arguments, and the Democrats need to sink their teeth into afew...
...While Brookings makes its usual disavowal of partisanship, the conclusions of its writers, nine of whom are staff members and the other six academics (two of the articles are by co-authors), betray that clinical haughtiness toward Reaganism characteristic of liberal academia...
...This historically shaky line of reasoning is not quite as bold and original as the author seems to think...
...Now, it should be mentioned that the introductory essay, by the book's editors, John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson, takes a slightly different position...
...Holmes and his intellectual heirs can perhaps be understood to see the American polity as primarily a secular creation of the Enlightenment—a set of clean pipes—while Reaganites regard the nation as the beneficiary of the Judeo-Christian heritage—liquid gold running through the works...
...Whatever their purpose, they come a little closer than their colleagues to viewing Reaganism as conservatives understand it—a triumph of ideas...
...Although its deterrent effect is difficult to prove statistically, the drastic increase in "stranger" murders offers strongly suggestive evidence...
...Ronald Reagan rode into office on this tidal wave of ideas, of words that register with deep, gut-level meaning for voters...
...Television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing...
...He is absolutely correct, for example, in claiming that "the best things on television are its junk," though not quite right (or grammatical) to add that "no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it...
...Internal political realignment can do wonders, no doubt...
...In any event, while Democrats starve for issues, the idea manufacturers give them only bloodless academese...
...Conservatives invariably harp on the mortal sins of Dan Rather, liberals on Ronald Reagan's amazing Teflon coating, sociologists on the consummate vulgarity of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous...
...tributors see it...
...Reagan is, simply, an effective tactician—he knows how to play to a TV camera, how to work Congress, how to raise money...
...In an earlier era, judges recognized the inequity of such a result...
...Postman himself is capable of some pretty trenchant noticing from time to time...
...Even Lionel 'frilling was a "Kojak" fan...
...the invention of television undermined the Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...This, roughly, is the conservative catechism regarding the Reagan phenomenon...
...About the time Barry Goldwater was going down to a bitter defeat, William Buckley and the early National Review writers, having wed economic libertarianism to Burkean traditionalism, were nailing down the theoretical case for conservatism...
...need to grapple with the proposition that between about 1964 and 1978 most Americans came to believe certain things about the federal government: that it was under-taking more than it ought to be, claiming too large a share of the nation's resources, eroding the autonomy of individuals, states, and municipalities, principally through the courts, and threatening national security with a feckless reluctance to keep pace militarily with the Soviets...
...There are the obligatory fatuous meliorist solutions attributed to all the usual suspects...
...That decade also saw the discrediting of Keynesianism, and the introduction to Congress by supply-siders of an idea novel to Capitol Hill—wealth has to be created before it can be redistributed...
...Generally speaking, though, Mr...
...Postman has never seen "Hill Street Blues...
...Residents of high-crime, low-income neighborhoods tend to suffer the most when "the criminal goes free because the constable has blundered...
...Postman's argument is simple—almost simple-minded...
...They retreat from the task, however, into a bastion of proceduralism...
...Issues aren't what defects of its nonscholarly genre...
...On the whole, however, the book gives a balanced appraisal of trends in criminal justice during the last two decades, and introduces the general reader to some of the best literature in the field...
...Their essays are replete with graphs revealing such arcana as the amount of money appropriated by Congress compared to that requested by the President...
...It is characteristic of this book that Mr...
...Postman's alley...
...The cultural significance of television, however, goes much deeper than the sticking points of any particular interest group...
...Chubb, Peterson, et al...
...I am particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestion that political commercials be banned from television...
...To focus narrowly on the effects of a single (and obvious) phenomenon like biased news coverage is completely to overlook the personal effects of television on its viewers and the neighborhood effects of television on society as a whole...
...Postman has examined real-life television programming with any genuine sympathy or thoroughness...
...He is given to wild generalizations that collapse under gentle prodding...
...Oc- Reagan is about, as most of the concasionally, Tucker's speculations outstrip the available evidence, as in his Gordon Jackson is an aide to Con-discussion of the effects on future gressman Beau Boulter of Texas THE NEW DIRECTION IN AMERICAN POLITICS Edited by John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson Brookings Institution/$26.95...
...It is "far larger . . . than any political party...
...One would think that Reed Irvine had never watched an episode of "The Cosby Show...
...lb enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms...
...Nor does one get the feeling that Mr...
...and Soviet) are in the process of realizing the consequences of their interaction and of developing the wisdom and discipline to manage it safely...
...9.95 paper Gordon Jackson THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 41 grumpy about having to say goodbye to the fine, old, value-laden academic discipline of political philosophy, subsumed decades ago by the far less ambitious political science...
...The secrets of his success lie elsewhere...
...Dan Rather visits us for a mere half-hour each evening, but Captain Furillo and Joan Collins and Kermit the Frog are with us always...
...Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens of former Justice Potter Stewart's famous dictum about pornography, "I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it...
...They know what they know about art, politics, manners, even the lifestyles of the rich and famous, solely from having seen then) on television...
...They too take little account of the President's issues, but for his political skills they hold an almost reverential awe...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
