The First Universal Nation
Wattenberg, Ben J.
BOOK REVIEWS rri here are only two nations on this 1 earth that are simultaneously fantasies and realities, those two being, of course, the tremendous United States of America and tiny Israel....
...They're moving to Zion not because they're Zionists, but because it's the only place that will take them in...
...This trend worried Wattenberg sufficiently to inspire an entire book...
...Reprinted here are prophetic items on the collapse of Communism and how America can hasten it...
...What's clear is that most of these Jews are coming here only because the U.S...
...This is what he does also in his new book...
...He also has an appointment at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the too-many think-tanks in Washington that churn out position papers for presidential hopefuls to brood on...
...Even if they did, these drastic ups and downs betray something feverish in the American psyche...
...ultimatum to Saddam comes due...
...The first law passed by the first Knesset was the Law of Return, giving all Jews the right to enter Israel and get citizenship at any time...
...members might be, "Look Up, Better Yet Come to Me...
...The visitor finds America enormous, abundant as always, and wacky...
...Today, this means a million or more refugee-immigrants from the disintegrating Soviet Union...
...Crime...
...Not for the first time in its short history, America is trying to reconcile its pieties with its interests, its past with its future, its dreams with its nightmares...
...While the Japanese may make and sell all the VCRs, almost all the software is redwhite-and-blue, and it's Kojak and Madonna who are members of the family on every continent...
...The illiteracy produced in most high schools is the direct though not necessary consequence of an admirable decision to try to educate everyone, not just an elite "as in Europe and Japan...
...It was because his mother and father left what was then Palestine in the 1920s that he could become a model of that type of first-generation American whose pride and belief in his native country is permanent and never, ever a secret...
...It might also brace the American psyche, which, God knows, needs a tonic...
...Similarly, the Israelis and others who continue to sneak into America do so not because it's better than ever, as native son Ben Wattenberg would have it, or because its prospects are great, but because, Saddam dead or alive, it's the only America around...
...The fact that the culture exported by the U.S...
...When Wattenberg and others who feel and hope as he does about America—one thinks of George Will in his most recent book Suddenly, Joseph Nye in Bound to Lead, and Alfred Balk in The Myth of American Eclipse—marshal their figures and rhetoric, they're trying to make history by persuading their fellow citizens to think, and therefore act, like winners, to explore again the power of positive thinking...
...Wattenberg is less admirable, because less forthright, in his new book, when confronting what is basically the same subject...
...American taxpayers didn't spend trillions [on the Cold War] to create more Swedens...
...A fter a delay of only a few months, American bestsellers reach Israel, giving reviewers here a pretty good idea of the intellectual atmosphere Wattenberg and his allies have to contend with...
...And predictions that the best is yet to come for the "first universal nation...
...Commercial TV is idiotic, noncommercial creepy, and no one under thirty-five can form a complete sentence...
...Decline" and "eclipse" seem to be the catchwords...
...The whole world seems to be getting the message...
...these days...
...There are claims that most Americans are healthier and more confident than ever...
...AEI was at one time something special, helping give intellectual cachet to the Reagan Revolution at home and abroad...
...Has the U.S., functioning as the Benign Empire, brought the heavenly Jerusalem down to earth...
...will be able to tell him], `Thanks Saddam, we needed that' [and can go ahead fashioning] a new world order...
...The number of visas granted yearly has been raised from 500,000 to 700,000, with the stipulation that most of the added number be not for relatives of earlier immigrants, but for skilled or rich people...
...Put another way, just as there are two Jerusalems, the heavenly and the earthly, there are two Americas, the real one usually but not invariably falling somewhat short of the ideal...
...Historians who are now no more than a glimmer in their parents' eyes will either agree that the American Century, an abbreviated one, started with Hiroshima and ended with the evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon, soon after which Germany, Japan, and Iraq took their places in the sun, or that the empire, rallied by Reagan and mobilized by his successor, struck back masterfully...
...is unrivaled, and "it's culture that counts...
...Illegal immigration, running into the millions and stemming mainly from the Third World, would be suppressed through enforcement of existing laws...
...22.95 Edward Norden 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 Kevin Phillips...
...The people who looted the S&Ls "ought to go to jail...
...For years now, Wattenberg has been airing his views by means of TV appearances, his newspaper column, and books...
...There doesn't seem to be any sort of ruling class anymore...
...A visitor who wishes America well and always despised Henry Adams has to wonder at Wattenberg's confidence It takes some reading between the lines in The First Universal Nation, and a look at an earlier, less happy book of his, to realize that Wattenberg has secret doubts himself...
...There is still plenty to do...
...Possibly, if a fresh sounding were taken, the optimists would prevail again...
...The second he leaves to be inferred...
...Interestingly enough, Congress has now rewritten the immigration laws roughly as Wattenberg suggested...
...He forgets, however, to break the American figure down into its white and non-white components.-Instead, he plumps for more immigration, along lines a reader has to think about before understanding the likely demographic upshot...
...Propagandize white women to have more babies...
...There are two possibilities, equally plausible as this review is being written, days before the U.N...
...There are statistics according to which poverty in America is down, income up, and the high school drop-out rate at an all-time low...
...As an ex-American who moved to Israel years ago, who still roots for the Pittsburgh Pirates and pays occasional visits to the Old Country, I find the streets of New York and Washington meaner with each visit...
...Otherwise, no matter what the burden, no matter what the pain, cost, or confusion, no matter what the economists or snobs say, all the Jews who knock on Israel's doors are welcomed...
...In fact, America has sometimes been pictured as a bigger if not better version of Zion, for example by John Winthrop, who is quoted in Ben Wattenberg's happy new book as comparing Massachusetts to "a city upon a hill...
...Likewise, a Time/CNN survey in October, asking the question, "How well do you think things are going in the U.S...
...The retirement of Ronald Reagan was followed by books deploring the effects of his revolution stateside—the best known is The Politics of Rich and Poor, by THE FIRST UNIVERSAL NATION: LEADING INDICATORS AND IDEAS ABOUT THE SURGE OF AMERICA IN THE 1990s Ben J. Wattenberg/The Free Press/418 pp...
...Israel is the other fantastic country in formation...
...His figures say that the American birthrate is rising, but that Western Europe's is stuck at below replacement level and Japan's is below RL and tumbling...
...Far from being reassured by the reviving birth rate, Wattenberg is ready to try to use the laws, those on the books and those to be added, to keep America basically white...
...Statistics then showed that Americans of European ancestry were having fewer than the 2.1 children per woman needed to replace themselves, while those of non-European ancestry, including blacks THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 33 and immigrants from the Third World, were having more...
...Not that Wattenberg is a Republican—like many of the patriots who backed and guided Reagan, especially the Jews among them, he's a refugee from the Democratic party who still prays that it will someday come to its senses...
...Optimism and pessimism are always, of course, mostly in the mind...
...That book was The Birth Dearth (1987...
...Wattenberg's point is that Americans are different, and, yes, better, deservedly still the envy, ideal, and hope of the world...
...Not that Wattenberg wants the readers of his book to relax—this is a pep talk...
...The blacks are in trouble, but there are more and more black university graduates and a growing black middle class, which will give those left in the slums a model of healthier behavior...
...The historical proof of it was the outcome of the Cold War...
...His solution...
...E pluribus unum, yes, but only to a point...
...The motto of both of these very peculiar UN...
...If America connotes new beginnings, fresh starts for one and all, the meanings of Zion are too well known to mention...
...Some 65 percent of Americans," Edward No/den is a writer living in Jerusalem...
...America has some severe problems," he concedes...
...Having won it, the U.S...
...The homeless, the strung-out, the menacing leap out at you...
...As the last superpower we ought to try to shape evolution...
...Among these are the level of ordinary schooling, which is awful, the agonies of a "black community [which] is clearly a troubled one," the deficit, and the Savings and Loan debacle...
...Meanwhile, laws or no laws, the Mexicans, Filipinos, and, yes, the Israelis keep seeping and sneaking in...
...got only 42 percent of a representative sample to reply "very well" or "fairly well," compared with 67 percent half a year before...
...You have to be a very important parole-breaker, a Morton Sobell or Meyer Lansky, to be turned back...
...Maybe that is what makes them, even when they're wrangling, such a nice couple...
...The coastal downtowns and Detroit have become black homelands, no-go zones reminiscent of certain parts of certain Middle Eastern cities—it would be interesting to know when the last time was that Wattenberg walked home from the AEI...
...is ensconced—politically, militarily, and, most important, culturally—as "number one" everywhere, to use his language...
...And in Eastern Europe today, it's said that the newly free countries should go Swedish...
...A Gallup poll last November discovered that 64 percent of Americans were "unhappy about how things are going...
...Not really...
...Above all, he wants to dispel the stylish, dangerous, persistent cliche that there's something basically wrong, that America has lost its touch...
...The net effect...
...Indeed, if polls are to be trusted any more than statistics, the man-inthe-street is feeling lousy about his country...
...Wattenberg is an American who came this close to being an Israeli...
...What's important is that the sounds and images convey the message of freedom, of infinite tolerance and opportunity, the opposite of stultification...
...Don't legalize them, fight them...
...Genuine decadence is gaining, innocence retreating...
...Wattenberg is sanguine that America can do this if it even half-tries, because culturally the U.S...
...First, he reports that the children-per-woman figure in the U.S...
...is climbing, is up to 2.0, better than Western Europe's and much better than Japan's...
...we learn, "believe there is a personal God, compared with . . . 19 percent of Swedes...
...He feared that, while the melting pot could cope brilliantly with people from the area delimited by Ireland, Scandinavia, Russia, and Sicily, it was liable to crack if it had to assimilate the whole world in proportions such as would alter America's complexion from white to colored...
...quota is filled...
...The young and the old, the wicked and thegood, the capitalists and the Stalinists, the healthy and the HIV-positive, are all being allowed to stream in on principle, and Ben Gurion airport is a throwback to Ellis Island in the old days...
...Far from pulling in its horns, as Pat Buchanan would have it do, victorious America should embrace its destiny anew...
...About the first outcome, Wattenberg is explicit...
...The answer is to introduce higher standards and enforce discipline for everyone...
...Drugs...
...The deficit is shrinking...
...Even when it comes to making and selling, he's not depressed by the competition...
...In the meantime, he continues celebrating America and drumming up confidence in its future, justifying his feelings with statistics...
...So far, it sounds as if Wattenberg were a patriotic Pollyanna...
...No one, least of all an Israeli, can predict whether they'll be able to pull off this trick...
...T he term is Wattenberg's alias for 1 his country on the morrow of the Cold War...
...If America's symbol is the Golden Door, the Jewish state's is the Ingathering of the Exiles, an ideal somewhat similar and altogether different...
...But for Wattenberg, none of these "severe problems" arises from any basic failure of the American way, nor does he doubt for a minute that America can get over them...
...Which is to say that, although Wattenberg knows that things aren't perfect at home, he counts on America to pull its socks up as it has done before, to live up to its "remarkable record of dealing with our own problems...
...The American middle class, ever prey to the twin fears of getting mugged and getting fired, has long since adapted to them...
...In other words, he's pessimistic or realistic enough to believe that, while the first universal nation should go on exporting its ideas and software to every corner of the planet, it can't—nor should it—try to take in the huddled, mobile masses from Mexico to the Philippines to Bangladesh to Egypt, not if it wants to preserve a semblance of peace in its streets and remain number one...
...Victory in the Cold War has spawned books claiming with figures and rhetoric that America's time has come and gone—the one that stayed popular longest was Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers...
...The ongoingproof is, at one end of the continuum, all the foreign imitations of American schlock, and at the other, the "foreigners flocking to American universities because they know they are the best in the world...
...That their books and others on how to compete with the Japanese should be bestsellers says something about America west of the Hudson...
...Victory over Saddam would send America's stock soaring worldwide...
...A high birthrate and large-scale immigration ensure American economic supremacy, because shrinking, aging populations can'tcompete or grow...
...This means continuing to push for democracy worldwide, but not just any variety: Democracy American-style, a way of life as well as a political system, is not the same as, say, the pinched stultification of Swedish-style democracy...
...That was honest of him, indeed brave—he exposed himself to charges of racism...
...Meanwhile, legal quotas would be increased and criteria for admission reformed so as to give preference to people with education, skills, and capital...
...It's a collection of columns and speeches from the day Reagan took office through the day Saddam took Kuwait, always chatty, always upbeat, always contrary to the conventional liberal wisdom, spliced together by commentary, autobiography, and lots of numbers...
...More new Americans from Europe, fewer from elsewhere...
...to a fascinated and insatiable universe is mostly garbage doesn't matter...
...Wattenberg saw this back in August, and wrote, "If America acts firmly on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait [then the U.S...
...make it a paying proposition, as in Sweden...
...Whether Israel will rise on this tide or drown in it is a hard question...
...There's something of a defense of 011ie North, and an accurate prediction of the fate of the Sandinistas at the ballot box...
...Worse than that, my old friends are ever bitterer and more fearful, quite in tune with the polls...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
