The Dream and the Nightmare

...That the way to treat blacks and other minorities fairly is to provide preferential treatment to them because of the group they belong to...

...The salient fact is that we—and I mean all who agree with Myron Magnet's "stop . . . stop . . . stop" litany, which includes me—do not have the power to change those incentives or to be heeded when we say "stop...

...Magnet embraces a commonly held view: Acting out of good intentions, those who make social policy embracedideas that, when implemented, had disastrous, unintended consequences...

...This view, it seems to me, is questionable on at least two fundamental points...

...Some don't care...

...In fact, it is central...

...That Western culture has no particular claim to our allegiance, since it is founded on injustice and has wreaked havoc on others wherever it has spread...

...The importance of culture explains why some do manage to escape from grinding poverty...

...Some want government to do more, perhaps with the same good intentions...

...As for now, it is truly horrible to think that anyone could look at the condition of psychotics living on the streets, of wrecked lives in the inner cities, and pronounce it acceptable...

...This slender volume traces the growth of an underclass stubbornly resistant to opportunities for self-improvement, the rise of crime and drug use that has made vast stretches of the urban landscape into places of terror for those unable to escape, the birth in the 1980s of the appalling social pathology that goes by the name of "homelessness," the debilitating effect of racial quotas, and on and depressingly on...

...Laing on mental illness to Michael Harrington on poverty to Norman Mailer celebrating criminals as rebels, in an effort to figure out why we are where we are...

...Here, again—much in the fashion of the argument that perverse economic incentives account for our problems—we have a structural explanation...

...Or, at least, rule over more of it, in the case of an expanding state sector?while creating a political constituency (and I do not mean merely welfare recipients) that will vote to keep in power people who want to expand government...

...They have rejected the ideas of the 1960s, devoting themselves instead to such older ideas as family, hard work, discipline...

...And surely it is not wrong to look to culture, in the sense in which Magnet uses the term, as the source of the ideas that have governed and now govern how we organize our affairs...

...But, as well, many politicians saw in such issues as these the opportunity to shape a political order more to their liking, an order in which their role would be greater...

...He wants us to look to a prior cause of our alarming social condition, a changed cultural landscape that is the legacy of the radicalism of the 1960s...

...He has read them carefully and interviewed most of them besides...

...Magnet, a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, draws heavily on these people...

...That was then...

...These "incentives to fail," as Murray called them, do indeed exist...

...the majority, however, fall into a different category...

...I am prepared to concede that many politicians and policy makers did act out of a sincere desire to help the poor or the homeless...

...When you say little or nothing about the how and why of the politics of that transformation—and Magnet is by no means the first to gloss over the matter—you have failed to offer an adequate explanation...

...is to stop doing what makes the problem worse...

...The problem is that, on the basis of the evidence, history is not listening...

...Both of these questions are, at their core, political...

...Yet Magnet mentions no one else...

...And the second is whether policy makers really survey the current landscape—the one that reflects the presumably unintended consequences—and think it is so bad as all that...

...Oddly missing from Magnet's sources is George Gilder, who has probably done more than anyone to educatepeople on these matters, and whose Visible Man remains the single most riveting account of the human cost of social welfare policy I have read...

...His attack on the narrow economic explanation for the emergence of an intractable underclass is surely on target...

...Their intentions were above reproach...

...How about those who make a living as advocates for the homeless...

...In any case, the process seems somehow self-propelled, and Magnet doesn't find it very interesting...

...Here, for example, is Magnet asking a question that ought to point us in the right direction: "Who has profited by allowing the homeless to occupy and debase public places...

...What is society for...

...To those who have read Charles Murray on welfare policy, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling on crime, Thomas Sowell on affirmative action, Robert Bork on judicial overreaching, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza on campus politics—or for that matter, those who have been regular readers of The American Spectator—this book's account of "the sixties' legacy to the underclass" will no doubt sound familiar...

...Ideas become policy by means of politics...

...No book has been written with more dedication to the proposition that ideas have consequences than The Dream and the Nightmare...

...He says, first, that it was surely not the advertised beneficiaries, namely, the homeless themselves, especially the homeless mentally ill who need medical care...

...But when the Have Nots too came to believe what the Haves told them, they found that rather than being liberating, these ideas only made things worse...

...That the very idea of "mental illness" is questionable in a society that is, itself, very sick...

...In descriptions like the above, cultural ideas propagated might have been useful in the service of fulfilling political ambitions...

...He also attacks the left's version of the economic argument, namely, that what the poor lack first of all is economic opportunity...

...That there is no distinction between the deserving poor (the old, the sick, the widowed) and the undeserving poor (the able-bodied but indolent...

...So we will now think about how we can change this culture...

...To Magnet, the success of this radicalism—and, as well, the eclipse of such older ideas as personal responsibility, individual rights, and so on—is the real explanation for so many wrecked lives in the inner city, as well as the spiritual impoverishment he diagnoses in those better off...

...Indeed, the proposition would be so obvious as to verge on tautology, had it not come under attack from Marxists and others who see "culture" as a mere reflection of existing objective conditions...

...As Magnet notes, "The whole welfare package provides a living often equal in economic terms to a $20,000 a year job, payable, if not quite on demand, then very nearly so...

...The first step in getting it is realizing we need it...

...But it is not sufficient to identify a changed culture as the problem and those who have created and propagated it as the guilty parties, and leave it at that, as Magnet does here—or rather, leave it with that urgent appeal to change the culture back...

...He does this, moreover, with evident feeling for those whose lives have borne the brunt of judicial activism that lets criminals go free, of welfare policy that encourages dependency, of ideas about personal liberation that turned the seriously mentally ill loose on the streets...

...Less crassly, how about those who saw in homelessness a magnificent cudgel for beating the Reagan administration in particular and an unjust capitalist society in general...

...That social conditions make crime inevitable, and that crime is a kind of rebellion against oppressive social conditions...

...Why do we need it...

...Welfare has, after all, expanded the power of the government...

...So Magnet revisits some of the leading texts of the counterculture, from R.D...

...To answer them, we need to consider such things as political ambition and whether the ideas the culture How legions of the mentally disordered ended up on the street, cold, sick, fearful, and in harm's way, is an object lesson in how the cultural revolution worked—how advanced ideas about personal liberation came together with advanced ideas about political enfranchisement to create a climate of opinion and a body of social policy that harmed those at the bottom of society in the name of doing them good...

...But it is hard to find any, indication that politicians find it intolerable...

...The change entailed the triumph of some singularly badideas and some even worse answers to the basic question of what society is for: the notion that the poor are powerless to do anything about their poverty, that their poverty is shaped by forces utterly beyond their ability to influence...

...Yet exactly how and why ideas come to have consequences is a subject on which the book is oddly silent...

...The "Haves" of the "majority culture," Magnet argues, adopted these ideas wholeheartedly and in the expectation that they were doing the "Have Nots" a service...

...Stop the current welfare system, stop quota-based affirmative action, stop treating criminals as justified rebels, stop letting bums expropriate public spaces or wrongdoers live in public housing at public expense, stop Afrocentric education in the schools...

...Only when we have it can we be done with saying "stop," and start the stopping . I do not intend to try to settle the question of motives and the other political questions here...

...More broadly, we must recover our belief in the "few fundamental ideals" that constitute "the soul of American society...

...But whether it's welfare or criminal behavior or whatever, he wants us to get beyond narrow cost-benefit analyses of incentives: In the ongoing debate over the misery index, the illegitimacy rate, the income distribution, the labor market, the true number of the homeless, or the fit between jobs and job seekers—generally framed in sociological, even statistical, language—the most basic question is never so much as raised, much less examined...

...And culture explains why others remain mired in poverty despite such opportunities as exist to escape it and the vast sums society expends in their behalf...

...Our perverse culture is responsible...

...Take away the mentally ill, who did not benefit, and who is left...

...Unintended consequences in all their horror...

...The first is whether the intentions of the policy makers were really so good...

...How about those who would like to remake this society in such a fashion that they and their friends rule it...

...At any rate, it does not stop...

...Magnet's cultural critique, though valuable, is also a kind of straitjacket...

...The biggest contingent is that miscellaneous collection of alcoholics, drug users, petty criminals, and dropouts who used to be called bums...

...M agnet's principal claim to originality (though others, including Gilder, have fished in these waters as well) lies in his comprehensive attack on the notion that the economic incentives created by social policy are adequate to explain the growth of the underclass...

...But his answer stops well short...

...Without this large question as a beacon, how is it possible to judge whether policies are aimed in the right direction, directed to producing the good society...

...Here is a typical formulation, in this case on homelessness:seem to turn into social policy rather naturally, almost mechanistically...

...Some do, of course...

...Stop . . . stop . . . stop" is an echo, conscious or not, of William V. Buckley, Jr.' s famous description of a conservative as someone whose role is to stand athwart history, shouting "Stop...

...He comes to it only very late in the book, and it arrives as little more than an impassioned plaint: "The first answer...

...But we should take into account the possibility that some of those who say they want to do more, or express little reservation about how things are, do so because it serves their ambition to do so...

...M agnet's prescription for undoing the legacy of the 1960s is less well fleshed out...

...Just as we sometimes expend much energy thinking about how we might change those perverse economic incentives...