The End of Equality

...For civic liberals," he says "the overriding goal is to mix the classes...

...We are returning to the past, but by way of a global economy—to a pre–New Deal past, to a nation in which loosely connected states and special interests make their way in the world independent of either a shared vision or a guiding governmental authority...

...Kaus doesn't mention the anti-meritocratic tendencies set off by the civil rights and feminist movements...

...Nor does he explain how, without the sense of national emergency which empowered the New Deal, he's going to turn parochial city governments into agencies of public purpose...

...Unlike conventional liberals, though, Kaus recognizes that the trend toward greater inequality and a shrinking middle class "began around 1970," well before Fred Siegel is professor of history at Cooper Union and an editor of the City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute...

...A neo-WPA would have to learn to work with the dregs of the labor market...

...Instead, Kaus gives two other answers...

...Kaus fears not economic but social inequality, the inequality Orwell wrote of when he described the lower orders in Britain as unable to look its "betters" in the eye...

...The New Deal solidarity he takes as a benchmark was the exception to the broad sweep of American history...

...The empirical evidence is in," says the Washington Post's Paul Taylor...

...There is, however, no going back...

...Committed in the name of compassion to expanding social benefits, liberals "tried to eliminate the perverse incentives of welfare by broadening its coverage...

...Examining the various explanations, he suggests that the "bad jobs thesis"—the notion that inequality is a product of the low-level, unskilled, and often part-time jobs created under Reagan—fails to explain why "money inequality appears to have grown among full-time workers" as well...

...For Kaus, the market will and should reign supreme in the economic sphere...

...And the only evidence Kaus can point to is assortive mating, the tendency for high-income, high-IQ couples to mate...

...Correspondingly, in what Kaus calls "the fairness trap," the more the economy operates free of social prejudice, the more it operates on true merit, "the more the losers will tend to feel that they deserve to lose . . ." The logic is impeccable, but the problem is nothing new...

...T he solution to the underclass problem is, for Kaus, the key to our secular salvation...

...They failed...

...Like his mentor Charley Peters of the Washington Monthly, he wants to encourage both entrepreneurship and community...

...Kaus aims his sharpest shafts at "Money Liberals," people who assume that questions of values and individual character, particularly as they pertain to the underclass, can either be ignored or overcome by taxes and transfer payments...

...Kaus's vision, while inspiring, is more a testament to the emotional emptiness of modernity than a guide for the future...

...Rather he thinks that fairness is finally futile—a debatable point...

...For Kaus, liberalism's PAWEWTH, its "point after which everything went to hell," was the moment in the sixties when "money liberalism" lined up "on the side of welfare rather than work...

...Where Robert Reich writes simplistically of the rich "seceding from the cities," Kaus sees how the underclass has driven out much of the remaining urban middle class by itself seceding from middle-class values...

...Like Charles Murray he wants to eliminate welfare, but unlike Murray he wants the government to guarantee WPA-style jobs in a frank effort to "acculturate" the underclass...

...Young's book, required reading for several generations of college students, describes how a feminist revolt led by the wives of scientists overturns a meritocratic "utopia" by attacking the mathematical measures of objectivity that meritocrats had depended on...

...THE END OF EQUALITY Mickey Kaus Basic Books (A New Republic Book)/293 pages/$25 reviewed by FRED SIEGEL The American Spectator September 1992 57 Instead they act on their anger, or explain it away in terms of conspiracy theories designed to show that objectivity is just another mask for power...

...Second, he argues that cities are central to our civic life, but that we can't restore our cities until we undo "the perverse degradation of public life" imposed by the underclass...

...Reagan recaptured the White House for right-wing Republicanism...

...Having decided that the passion for money is unconstrainable, he sets out to purge us of any other anti-public passions...

...Like Bill Bennett, he suggests society will have to construct "new" institutions—such as orphanages for the children whose parents fail them...

...Government's inability to eliminate extreme inequality, argues Kaus, must be counterbalanced by an interventionist civic liberalism, in which government "democratizes life instead of the tax tables...

...Part of the program would have to be "relatively authoritarian, even a little bit militaristic...

...n a revealing passage near the conclusion, Kaus confesses that his ultimate aim for "civic liberalism" is a "public sphere [which] will eventually have the sort of primacy to which religions have aspired...

...The perceived identity of success and virtue was at the core of what Max Weber described as the cultural engine of capitalism, the "Protestant ethic...

...Kaus the policy pro is, it turns out, a seeker after the feelings of fraternity shattered in the 1960s by the nihilism born of the marriage of upper-middle-class romanticism and ghetto violence...

...The process has been most visible in baseball, where free agency has undermined team solidarity but enriched once obscure athletes beyond their wildest dreams...

...Had he looked abroad he might have also noted that the trend toward income inequality has accelerated across the industrialized world...

...Nor was it primarily a matter of tax policy, since pre-tax income shows the same inegalitarian trends...

...By re-establishing the work ethic for thelumpens, he proposes to re-establish it for the country as a whole...

...The first is a rehash of the now-familiar neoliberal arguments for both the draft and "the draft in a weaker dose"—mandatory national service...

...And once the swamps of underclass pathology are drained, civic life in the city and thus the country will once again re-emerge for both blacks and whites...

...First and most powerfully, he argues that the internationalization of the American economy, the increasing percentage of domestic goods subject to foreign competition, has broken down the protective barriers that made it possible to pay workers near-monopoly-level wages...

...Kaus paints a pretty picture...

...Free trade, suggests Kaus has produced the danger of a brain-based elitism, in which those who are the most highly paid think of themselves as not only wealthier but also more worthy...

...Gordon Green of the Census Bureau has found that changes in household structure—the increasing number of people who are single or divorced—explains half the growth in income inequality over the past twenty years: families without fathers are six times more likely to be poor...

...Kaus tells us that the public employee unions are sure to be an obstacle, but he doesn't tell us how the problem is to be circumvented...

...With a neo-WPA maintaining highways, schools, playgrounds, and subways, with libraries open everyevening and streets cleaned twice a day, we would have a common life more people would find worth reclaiming...

...Nor is the phenomenon temporary, a product of "the pig in the python" problem produced by the baby boomer bulge entering the work force in the 1970s...

...Exact thinking . . . or mastery of something," explains a spokesperson for the American Association of University Women is a danger to our "relationship with the invisible elements of the universe...

...But before Kaus can be convincing, he has to explain how a new neo-WPA will fare better in the hands of competing interests than the Great Society version which lost its focus on productive work and became a tool of the theatrical politics of "community development...

...He's more wild-eyed in his schemes for a Rousseau-like revival of American nationalism at a time when the United States is less and less a nation-state...

...It's not that he's defending the Social Security tax that unfairly drains the young and the middle class...

...But Kaus is braver in his willingness to confront governments' inability to equalize income and more forthright in recognizing liberal responsibility for fostering the underclass...

...When marriage atrophies, so does fatherhood and so does society...

...Kaus, who would have done well to have read Madison's implicit critiques of Rousseau, proposes to "beat the selfishness out of us" in three stages...

...Like Robert Reich in The Wealth of Nations, he recognizes the regressive redistributional effects of a globalized economy and proposes a "new nationalism" as the antidote...

...Young was prescient...

...By openly attacking the idols of his own liberal tribe, Kaus is already drawing widespread attention...

...It was based on both a widely shared and deeply held nationalism, impossible under the conditions of contemporary multicultism, and a sense of Protestant rectitude imparted by the Bryanite wing of the Democratic party but inconceivable in the age of therapeutic religion...

...Kaus ignores the impact of a largely unskilled immigration, and the fraying of the American family...

...But the change is more than economic: the rise of radical individualism on the left and the right has eroded the solidaristic mechanisms "that once prevented the most talented members of a skilled trade from extracting their full measure of worth...

...His quest for redemption through work is nothing less than a neo-Protestant scheme to reharness the emotionalism of the vacuously hip middle class and the lost souls of the cities to a new vision of American nationality...

...Thus while unskilled workers no longer shielded from foreign competition have seen their wageserode markedly, the talented tenth, those who have businesses around the world bidding for their brain power have seen their salaries rise starkly...

...WPAstyle jobs would be open to everyone and would thus have no perverse anti-family incentives...

...Now that the collapse of Communism should have convinced most everyone that capitalism is here to stay, liberals, leaning on Michael Waizer's Spheres of Justice, should "try to restrict the spheres of life in which money matters...

...In the smug superiority of today's test-taking classes, Kaus sees the dangers of a meritocratic future in which the cultural classes will be set off from each other in a sharply terraced inequality...

...Parts of this Frank Capra–like tableau are so appealing that Bill Clinton and some of his aides have begun quoting Kaus virtually verbatim...

...t's surprising that Kaus makes no reference to Michael Young's influential late-fifties fable, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033...

...A draft, Kaus argues, even if the military continues to contract "would do more to promote social equality than all the `transfer payments' liberals might conceivably legislate...

...In American culture the "losers," as the Los Angeles riots make more than clear, don't necessarily take their losses lying down...

...But, then, of course their children are to regress toward the mean...

...Once work is the norm, and the subsidy of AFDC has been removed, the natural incentives toward the formation of a two-parent family will reassert themselves...

...Evoking the lost legacy of New Deal solidarity, he quotes FDR's 1935 State of the Union speech, the founding document of the welfare state, on how "dependence on relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre...

...Welfare served to anchor the poor to the imploding economy of the inner cities, while other Americans responded to changing regional incentives by moving to where the jobs were...

...What, then, caused the growing gap between rich and poor...

...Sidestepping the certain opposition of both the ACLU and black nationalists, Kaus argues that you have "to unplug welfare, the lumpen culture's life support system," by replacing welfare with guaranteed work...

...In a period when some of our top schools of education are teaching that math is a matter of "self-concepts," and Pennsylvania is replacing grades with "learning outcomes" for fear of damaging the self-esteem of poor students, a far better case can be made that we're sinking into the swamps of an anti-meritocratic subjectivity...

...It's not that Kaus opposes a progressive tax code...

...CI 58 The American Spectator September 1992...

...In the emerging fight over the underclass—a fight that is not between liberals and conservatives but between paternalists and libertariansKaus uses FDR to line up with the paternalistic Lawrence Mead...