America's Neo-Whigs

...Psychoanalysis, for example, was incorporated in the new liberalism in a strangely truncated form: the language of Freud was adopted together with the method of analysis (and a large proportion of such liberals who could afford it were into, in, or under analysis) but the Freudian social philosophy, with its insistence on the paternalist family and conservative politics, was ignored...

...Reaganomics" can perhaps be described as a modified form of supply-side economics, so vividly explained by Jude Wanniski in The Way the World Works, of which a revised and enlarged edition has lately been published by Simon and Schuster...

...European liberals dreaded democracy because they believed that the rule of an uncultured majority would sweep away the rights of individuals and the toleration of minorities...

...Sexual liberation sounds good...

...The method, powerfully expounded by Martin Luther King, was no less morally compelling...

...The books I have been discussing in these columns afford some welcome confirmation of his argument...

...But this is also an area where Thomas Sowell is able to point to alternative strategies for black education, which actually do work...

...What is more, the sexual freedom afforded by the new liberalism has been severely limited by the introduction of a new crime, sexual harassment...

...and we really do not know how much more sexual pleasure—or less—is enjoyed by the present generation than was enjoyed at any time in the past...

...In the universities, Sowell is a staunch adherent of academic standards, which is something he has had to fight for at a time when the ideologues of liberation have been as busy overthrowing things in the schools and colleges as they have been elsewhere...

...This particular piece of nonsense George Gilder nails most skillfully, and he is to be congratulated for doing so...

...Reaganomics"--to use the word invented in jest by the liberal critics of the present President—has succeeded where the economics of Jimmy Carter failed largely because it cut the ideological cackle and put the nation back in business...

...Europeans are a dying race...

...a private vice, he suggested, was a public benefit...

...In Black Education he tells the story of his own experience of rising from the humblest origins to the highest ranks of the American academic establishment...

...Anything that was not conservative could claim to be liberal...

...Sexual activity, again, is interesting to talk about...

...In part this state of affairs was the consequence of the absence from the American scene of the kind of Communist parties and Socialist parties which in Europe whipped and dragooned their adherents into habits of order and obedience...

...The recipients are assumed to be, as were the recipients of Victorian charity, its grateful beneficiaries...

...The arm of radical intolerance is long...

...W hatever happened to liberalism...

...People have been reluctant to join Mandeville in openly praising greed...

...Indeed, he adds, "a finer breakdown shows disturbing counterproductive trends...

...Only where it is possible for a woman to hold her mate for life through affection, companionship, and moral bonds which transcend the fading of libidinal passion...

...How has this happened...

...Black women are also four times more likely to be murdered than white women...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 women and older women, that is to say, the majority of women, are out of the race...

...The national economic recession did much to wake people up to the folly of such an endeavor...

...It provides a striking contrast to that other and better-known form of liberalism, the radical liberalism which dates from the age of FDR and which had its apogee in that of Jimmy Carter...

...then Communism went underground in America, without however ceasing to present itself, and having itself accepted, as just one more form of liberalism...

...Here we may look to the authority of one of the few people qualified to give a serious answer, Thomas Sowell, an economist of international renown, who is black...

...and black women are 50 percent more likely to be murdered than white men...

...And fortunately in America today a number of writers are recovering, so to speak, the insights of Tocqueville to provide a better understanding of America's present predicament...

...Sowell's conclusions, moreover, arebacked up by the statistical research embodied in Charles Murray's important book Losing Ground (Basic Books, 1984), which studies the effects of American welfare policies aimed at helping blacks: the consequences have proved too disastrous for poor people of all races, but for poor blacks especially and most emphatically in all-black communities—precisely that section of the population which was the object of the most unremitting sympathy...

...To any argument that is at variance with their own their rejoinder is that it is not a genuine argument at all, but an illusion that originates in false consciousness or bad faith...

...In the event, no kind of left-wing extravagance or whimsy was unwelcome, and no coherence between one doctrine and another was imposed as a condition for acceptance...

...If this suggestion sounds too pious for readers more attuned to Mandevilles cynicism, it must surely be agreed that capitalism entails investment, that investment entails abstinence, and a readiness also to contribute to the economic development of one's own community...

...They should listen carefully to what Gilder has to say, for he makes very clearly the point that the class of human beings which must suffer most as a consequence of sexual liberation is the class of women no longer young...

...is the title of one of the chapters of Tyrrell's brilliant book, and it is a question which he himself, together with such writers as Murray and Alonzo Hamby in Liberalism and its Challengers (Oxford, 1985), tries to answer from the historical perspective...

...His latest presentation of the argument may expect a warmer welcome, if only because the leading exponents of feminist journalism, including Betty Friedan and Germain Greer, have matured with age and affluence into champions of moderation...

...Fortunately, the ordinary American public has already rejected liberation;it is the task of political science to formulate a criticism and point to something better...

...He even goes so far as to say that "capitalism begins with giving...

...It is just not chic for a woman to stay at home...

...A number of laws, social customs, union contracts, and civil service rules set a minimum level of wage—which is another way of saying that anyone whose work is not up to that level in value to the employer will be denied employment altogether...

...In another book, The Spirit of Enterprise (Simon and Schuster, 1984), Gilder provides many examples of the means by which entrepreneurs in Japan as well as in America have made those countries rich...

...The method also changed into racialistic assertions of Black Power and the threat of violence...

...He is himself the product of the system which has already existed on a small scale, and ought rightly to exist on a universal scale, of equal access to learning, of what is known in France as la carribr ouverte aux talents...

...Education is another area where the supposed beneficiaries of liberation have proved to be more often its victims...

...Whereas Ken Galbraith came down from a privileged home in Ontario to enlarge his private fortuneand teach Americans the European doctrine of public spending, Tom Sowell came up from a poor home in the South to remind his fellow countrymen of the value of thrift and urge them to build their policies on their own best traditions of justice...

...Indeed their ideas and proposals had by the early 1980s become so extreme and irrational that a political satirist such as the editor of this magazine, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., in his book The Liberal Crack-Up (Simon and Schuster, 1984), had only to expose their nakedness for the absurdity of it all to reduce the reader to tears of incredulous mirth...

...Tucker notes that the most numerous victims of crime in America are blacks: Black men are six and a half times more likely to be murdered than white men...

...Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...

...Radical chic is no longer chic...

...But are they grateful...

...but in practice such liberation offers its joys only to those sorts of people who were already having sexual gratification enough under the old regime...

...It is marked by the appearance of a series of books which restore something worth the name of "thought" to American political thinking...

...A year or two later, American liberals turned pacifist and protested that the war in Vietnam was wrong...

...Sowell writes with eloquent bitterness of this assumption and these innovations...

...undermine it because its rulings violate the ordinary person's sense of what justice is...

...Students, keen to think for themselves, are simply not interested in Marx or Lenin or Marcuse, but they respond to Jefferson and Lincoln, Locke and John Stuart Mill (and Tocqueville, too), for the good reason that what does interest them above all else is freedom, and as a clean, fastidious generation, they want the best, most rigorous formulations of the problems of freedom, as opposed to the emotive slogans of liberation...

...We are witnessing the emergence of this more classical form of liberalism based on an appeal not to "liberation" but to liberty...

...Sexual freedom, he points out, favors only privileged minorities—the young and pretty women, attractive young men, and rich older men who can use their wealth to seduce the young and pretty women...

...He will doubtless be accused of a reactionary attitude, but in fact his whole book is a restatement of what Locke and Montesquieu and the other founders of classical philosophy considered to be a basic principle of freedom, namely that the positive law enforced by the judiciary should coincide with natural justice as perceived by the eye of reason in everyone...

...does it really do them long-term good...

...Even though blacks are only 12 percent of the population, they make up 45 percent of the murder victims . . . and 90 percent of rapes against black women are by blacks...

...they no longer wanted peace but victory for the Vietcong...

...Male professors on the campus and male executives in the office are nowadays in peril of dismissal if they do as much as give the glad-eye to a coed or a female colleague...

...I doubt it...

...But somehow capitalism seems to have been half ashamed of itself since Bernard Mandeville argued in The Fable of the Bees in 1714 that capitalism was motivated by greed, and that greed was therefore no bad thing...

...His own writings are all the more impressive, and moving, because he appeals unfailingly to reason...

...He also suggested that the Americans, with their greater experience of politics, were less responsive to the charm and excitement of ideologies, and that good sense could be relied to reassert itself among them...

...A book published in 1950 by the literary critic Lionel Trilling entitled The Liberal Imagination gave a clear warning to those of us in Europe whoassumed that liberalism excluded Marxism, that American liberalism had taken Marxism on board while at the same time making room for anything else that might develop on the left...

...It is a fascinating autobiography, which it is interesting to compare with that of his fellow economist, John Kenneth Galbraith...

...The great French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this in the early nineteenth century and set out to explain it in his Democracy in America, first published as long ago as 1835...

...This is not the first time Gilder has written on the theme...

...Can we look forward to a dialogue...

...only, in a word, in the family, and only in a society where sexual activity is subordinate to the exigences of family life can the majority of women hope for emotional satisfaction and happiness...

...he defines and creates capital, lends value to land, and offers his own labor while giving effect to the otherwise amorphous labor of others...

...Much has been written about crime and race, either asserting or denying a connection between the one and the other...

...Those were the days when the press was dominated by militant and supremely self-satisfied feminists, and Gilder's book was ungraciously received...

...He is not chiefly a tool of markets, but a maker of markets...

...The ideology of liberation had no systematic theory, only the capacity to fill its voids with bits and pieces of conflicting theories...

...During the very same span, black males who had completed college and had more than six years of work experience rose from 75 percent of the income of their white counterparts to 98 percent...

...A book which stands out among the crowd is William Tucker's Vigilante (Stein and Day, 1985) which frankly confronts the danger of a popular backlash if America is unable to sustain effectively the rule of law...

...George Gilder's Men and Marriage' deals with a subject to which Tocqueville assigned the highest priority in explaining the success of democracy in America: the strength of the family and the superior moral qualities of the American wife and mother...

...The capitalist," he writes, "is not merely a dependent of capital, labor and land...

...In practice, sexual liberation offers its joys only to those sorts of people who were already having sexual gratification enough under the old regime...

...Liberation criminology might have done less harm if it had not been reinforced by another element in new liberal thinking, to which Tucker draws particular attention: legalistic pedantry in defense of the rights of that group known as the accused...

...The history of liberal attitudes to the civil rights movement is hardly less bewildering...

...What happens when sex is liberated," says Gilder, "is not equality, but a vast intensification of sexual competition, from which there is no sure haven except impotence and defeat . . . competition in which the only sure result is an even larger band of vindictive losers, of fatherless children and childless fathers...

...Despite the fact that empirical research has shown such women to be actually happier than most, liberation ideology insists that domestic life must be unhappy...

...Incoherent in its structure, the ideology of liberation was apt to contradict itself from one moment to another...

...ocqueville, in the second great work he wrote, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, suggested that radical intellectuals as a class were much to blame for the upheavals of the 1790s in France, because they were unrestrained in their pamphleteering by any real grasp of the practical...

...These are hard words, but one cannot deny the substance in them...

...Radical reforms of the American criminal justice system in recent years have enabled defense lawyers to use such trivial issues as a typing error in an indictment, or an irregularity in the wording of a search warrant, to secure the release on technical grounds of criminals whose guilt was fully established, even in the most odious cases of injury to defenseless persons...

...It seems to me clear that it began when Franklin Roosevelt opened the door of liberalism to the Fellow Travelers in the 1930s...

...A new generation of Whigs has appeared on the scene: and the left-wing liberalism of yesterday's liberation movements is confronted by a serious challenge...

...As for kids, they fool around in school and all too often run away, to turn up in photographs of missing children on cartons of American milk...

...Sowell shows that in measurable terms, there is no positive evidence of affirmative action programs in the United States benefiting the people they were designed to benefit...

...It seems to me that it does, and the evidence I have is in the response to it among young readers I have met in my most recent visits to America, and especially undergraduates, who do not care for the worn ideas of 1960s radicalism that are recycled by many professors...

...George Gilder sees this happening in America less from economic causes, since the Reagan Administration is correcting fiscal oppression, but from a perverse choice imposed on young American wives and mothers by feminist propaganda...

...Where sex is free, plain 'Pelican Publishing Co., $15.95...

...not a scout of opportunities, but a developer of opportunity . . . not chiefly a user of technology, but a producer of it...

...This patronizing policy is, of course, politely known as affirmative action or positive discrimination...

...However, as time went on the demand for civil rights turned into a demand for what were called social and economic rights, and for an overOne cannot fail to notice that it is just those American institutions which Tocqueville identified as holding the key to the success of democracy in the United States which the left-wing liberals have been most eager to abolish in the name of "liberation...

...it was that of racial cooperation and nonviolent resistance...

...democracy had succeeded there and had actually enlarged men's liberties because of the existence of certain distinctive sociological factors, notably the strength of the American family, the high moral virtue of American wives and mothers, the experience-of ordinary American menin local self-government, and the power entrusted by the U.S...

...Liberation criminology argued first, in the spirit of the eighteenth-century enlightenment, that criminals were not responsible agents to be punished, but sufferers from a psychological disorder which should be cured, so that they should be assigned not to prisons but special hospitals, where they could be at the same time given therapy and kept in a place where they could do no more harm...

...they are unwanted...

...but apart from the exhibitionism of stage and screen, it is something which is still, mercifully, actually practiced behind closed doors...

...What we do see, and can count, is the number of broken homes, of divorces, of wives and mothers who reject the domestic life, the number of children who go home from school to empty houses, and the number of husbands whose only chance of a dinner is to buy one in a restaurant or a take-away...

...Harry Truman, a President much underrated (but given a very fair appraisal in Hamby's book), was never fooled by Stalin...

...It is new, but it has its roots in a form of liberalism which reaches back to the foundations of the American republic...

...Radical, left-wing liberalism is, by contrast, highly color-conscious, regarding blacks in particular as people unable to stand on their own feet and therefore needing a preference, or a push-up or a priority to set them on a level with whites...

...These figures point to something which, George Gilder suggests, is profoundly unnatural in the liberated strata of modern American society...

...are they even, in the strict sense, beneficiaries...

...In the welfare states of Western Europe, income tax is so high that young wives in the productive classes have commonly to go to work to supplement their husbands' earnings in order to live, with the result that the birthrate in such countries is now only 60 percent of reproduction level...

...so it is hardly surprising that crime should flourish among them...

...By contrast the American entrepreneur who plows his money into productive enterprises in his own country, gives before he receives and may well give more than he receives...

...Departments of Black Studies, he observes, tend to be staffed with "faculty that no African or Indian University would hire," and to impart to their students not scholarship but ideology...

...In a more unsophisticated version, the basic idea was already discerned by the very earliest theorists of economic science...

...enterprise, industry, productivity, investment, and work being the only effective creators of wealth...

...indeed he probably had a better understanding of Communism than any other President...

...The black community is dominated by unattached males...

...When the cash dries up, you have to stop and think...

...Will the radicals come back with an answer to their critics...

...Crime was a bourgeois myth which needed to be demystified...

...George Gilder—to cite once more that tireless champion of the democratic tradition and rugged individualism—is one of the few economists toattack Mandeville's thesis head-on: "Capitalism does not spring from greed, avarice or even self-love," he argues in Wealth and Poverty (Basic Books, 1980), "but from a spirit closely akin to altruism, a regard for the needs of others, a benevolent, outgoing and courageous temper of mind...

...By 1980 college-educated black couples were earning more than college-educated white couples...

...George Gilder performs a valuable service in re-examining the moral dimension of the system, if only because it is so much the present habit to say of socialism, Communism, or any other form of state ownership that it is morally superior to capitalism, and that even if it does little visible good for the people who live under it, perpetuating low living standards in Communist Eastern Europe and causing starvation in the Marxist African countries, state ownership is more pleasing to God, more fully Christian, more agreeable to conscience than capitalism because it is based on sharing instead of selfishness...

...In the early stages, the objective was at once clear and noble: the extension to the black Americans in the South of the civil and political rights which the rulers of the Southern states denied them...

...D uring the presidency of Jimmy Carter it looked very much as if the administration was responding to the signals of this radical left-wing liberalism, a confused man trying to make sense of a confused ideology, and act upon it...

...There is also the better known side of the story, that blacks represent a very large proportion of those accused of crimes...

...and that was the best that liberation criminology had to say...

...I say "we" are witnessing this, but it may be that a distant European observer like myself is more aware of the development than many residents of the United States, who may be deafened on the one hand by the trendy media and the gurus of the campus repeating the jejune and nugatory doctrines of the left and, on the other hand, by the shrill cry of Bible-punching fundamentalists claiming that the only alternative to radical liberalism is to restore the pillories and prejudices of seventeenth-century Massachusetts...

...In a word, the civil rights movement had taken up the liberation ideology, repeating in Washington almost word for word the cries of the Third World militants who were demanding financial subventions from the European regimes they had just kicked out...

...It may well be that modern capitalists are content to have their activity attributed to greed since it is embarrassing to have to scrutinize one's own motives and, in any case, conservative and liberal and Marxist economists seem to be generally agreed that self-interest is the driving force...

...However, things are changing...

...It began as an important ingredient of Kennedy's liberal crusade: the reactionary regime of Diem was overthrown to make way for a more progressive junta, and American forces were sent to Vietnam to fortify resistance to the totalitarian invader...

...If the system fails, then those feelings, he suggests, will be repressed until they erupt energetically in vigilante action...

...Why, he asks, can there not be academic institutions where black people are seen not as "problems" but as "creators of something admirable...

...When did the rot set in...

...One cannot fail to notice that it is just those American institutions which Tocqueville identified as holding the key to the success of democracy in the United States which the left-wing liberals have been most eager to abolish in the name of "liberation'!—breaking up the family, discarding the traditional morals of wives and mothers in the name of sexual freedom, putting local government under the tutelage of federal authority, and using the judiciary to override the rights of individual citizens in order to satisfy the newly discovered social and economic entitlements of groups...

...Such legalistic pedantry, writes Tucker, "has made it harder to convict criminals and easier for people to get away with crime...

...More than half of those arrested for murder, two-fifths of those arrested for aggravated assault, three-fifths of those arrested for robbery, andhalf those arrested for rape in a recent year were black...

...The plea for civil rights was transformed into a plea for reparations...

...Murray also suggests, convincingly, that those policies were always the product of condescension on the part of the intelligentsia and the polymaths towards the blacks, whom they "treated in ways they would never consider treating people they respected...

...and it must be said that the entertainment industry which dominates contemporary culture diffuses unending propaganda for it...

...It is the unflattering assumption of the radical liberals that blacks can only be incorporated in the university system if they are given bonus grades and assigned to easy disciplines, or even corralled in special departments devoted to Black Studies...

...He published in 1973 an earlier and shorter version of his present book which he called Sexual Suicide, drawing attention to the catastrophic decline in population that must result from a sexual revolution which generated more orgasms and less reproduction...

...Sowell has much the same to report on the effects of positive discrimination in the field of employment: Many social and institutional developments in recent times have had the net effect of making it harder for low-income people to be fully employed...

...Tucker argues forcefully that a justice system will only work if it "vigorously embodies the public's instinctive sense of right and wrong...

...Unfortunately the reaction against Stalinism went haywire with McCarthy's inquisition, which only led to people who were not Communists being denounced to the committee by people who were Communists...

...not something to be reasoned with, but simply to be "demystified" as an expression of a hostile, and probably a bourgeois, interest...

...he takes all and gives nothing...

...these writers are producing a new Whig literature...

...Some 60 percent of black men are single, and 22 percent of those nominally married live apart from their wives...

...Hence, until society was cured by reform or revolution, there was no case for imposing any constraints on delinquents...

...You need to be rich and prosperous to afford to toy with radical innovations, either as an individual or as a nation...

...A question worth asking is whether all this neo-Whig literature adds up to a "new wave" and marks a real turning point in American thinking about politics and morals...

...Even Martin Luther King himself moved well to the left, hailed Ho Chi Minh as a great national leader, attacked American imperialism, and, as Hamby puts it in his book, "sought to spread the mantle of civil rights over the problem of poverty" by "preaching a message of collective guilt to a liberal culture that had hitherto assumed guilt to be individual and specific...

...C lassical liberalism is colorblind...

...A very high proportion of such losers are to be found in black ghettos...

...Moreover, the situation is worse than it used to be...

...People are looking for something better, and they will find it...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 27...

...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 throw of white bourgeois supremacy in the nation...

...Crime has increased sensationally in America under the impact of liberation criminology, and the black community has suffered most from that increase...

...Isolated, unstimulated, sexually deprived, trapped by babies, frittering away their talent in boredom and drudgery, American suburban worn-en," writes Gilder, are depicted as "victims of male oppression in an exploitative capitalist culture...

...Here he pleads not for preferential treatment, but for fair and open opportunity...

...he is a mere moneylender...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 25 the name of the poor and the disadvantaged, those who were already well-off were made still better-off while the ostensible beneficiaries were either neglected or made worse off...

...The radicals, it seems, simply went too far...

...It follows that if Tocqueville's analysis of the situation was correct, the adoption of the program of liberation would lead to the ruin of democracy in America...

...The technique of the silent boycott is effective where radicals operate most of the stops on the organs of public opinion...

...Although one can well imagine he would rather be writing books about his academic speciality, the history of economic thought, he deals with the question of race in two recent works addressed to the general reader, The Economics and Politics of Race (Quill Books, 1983) and Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972), which are distinguished alike for their elegant literary style and their forthright presentation of the argument...

...Thus, whereas Tocqueville could see the exact enforcement of the law by the courts as a bulwark of democracy, the judiciary has started to act in ways that undermine democracy...

...Tucker has no desire to see such an outcome...

...Even in Tory England, where the government subsidizes various race-relations commissions and groups, the books of Thomas Sowell, for example, although published in the United Kingdom and recognized as the best statement by a black author of the problems of race and politics, are deliberately excluded from the lists of recommended reading circulated by institutions supposedly dedicated to the solution of those problems...

...American liberalism, even in its purest and most classical form, has always been different in certain respects from the liberalism of England and continental Europe...

...This was only one of many social programs -in which, in We are witnessing the emergence of a more classical form of liberalism based on an appeal not to "liberation" but to liberty...

...For example, Tyrrell shows how the Vietnam war was variously regarded at different stages of its history...

...When new ideas are in the air, the antennae of the public will somehow capture them...

...Sharing Tocqueville's sense of its importance, Gilder presents a carefully argued case in defense of sexual discipline...

...He points out that the least fortunate blacks grew worse off economically under federal affirmative action schemes, while those already fortunate rose rapidly: Black males with eight to eleven years of schooling, and less than six years of work experience, earned 79 percent of the income of white males of the same description in 1967 (before quotas) and this fell to 69 percent by 1978 (after quotas...

...But even more extensive is the range of human curiosity...

...The ideologues of liberation have taken over from Marxism one of its most useful weapons...

...He suggested that what the Americans had added to the European concept of free government was a concept of democratic government...

...Alternatively the radicals may ignore their critics altogether...

...women who are taken in by that ideology feel that they can express themselves and discover their identity only if they assume a role that has traditionally been a man's...

...Next, however, liberation criminology decided that the delinquents were not psychologically disordered, after all, but that society itself was sick...

...The Arab oil sheik who transfers all his money from his homeland to banks in Switzerland or London is not a capitalist...

...The imperialism of the Western European nations was anathema to Roosevelt, but he smiled on the ambitions of the Soviet Union as admirably progressive...

...Next, with a further reversal of opinion, they decided that Ho Chi Minh was not totalitarian after all, but was fighting a war of liberation which he ought to be allowed to win...

...Tocqueville argued that this had not happened in America...

...The American left had no hierarchy of institutional forms and no discipline of the mind...

...Statistically, this tends to raise the "average" unemployment rate, but the problem is not that the "average" man finds it harder to get a job, but that particular groups find it extremely hard to get a job...

...Constitution to the courts to safeguard the properties and other rights of the individual...

...Vigilantism, he says, can only lead to the kind of social chaos which must imperil democracy itself...