What Comes Next
Pinkerton, James P.
j ames Pinkerton is the huge, imposing figure who was the ideas man for the Bush administration. Highly respected for his original thought, he was also pretty much pushed to the periphery during the...
...Highly respected for his original thought, he was also pretty much pushed to the periphery during the disastrous re-election campaign...
...To explain, Pinkerton opts for an elaborate computer metaphor, and this is where things get really hard to follow...
...What gives Pinkerton's manifesto its true air of seriousness is the feeling that the real choice is no longer between Republicans and Democrats...
...Yet Pinkerton's overheated, needlessly obscure verbiage is not much of an alternative: "After Reagan, the domestic deluge hit Bush...
...Like BUREAUCRAT, it suffers from the "five bugs of software"—Parkinsonism, Peterism, Oligarchism, etc...
...Stripped of the neologisms and jargon, Pinkerton's analysis is pretty standard, fitting comfortably beside that of Robert Reich, Newt Gingrich, Mickey Kaus, Michael Lind, and dozens of others...
...But is it worth the effort...
...As Pinkerton puts it, "Cyberpunk hears the call-of-thewild cacophony that howls beyond the cold comfort of platitude...
...Nothing that would be unfamiliar to readers of publications from the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation...
...If these kinds of problems plague today's relatively small Job Corps, what would a massive, nationwide CCC be like...
...A footnote points out that today's Job Corps camps are plagued with "a pattern of uncontrolled violence...
...We are experiencing "the Hollywood effect" in the distribution of income...
...Seventy years later, FDR created his new paradigm: the welfare state and its vast, expanding bureaucracy...
...Why have we fallen into this trap...
...Twenty-three Job Corps students have been convicted of murder in the last three years...
...America will become two societies...
...Pinkerton, of course, has his own version of what the next "big offer" should entail...
...Pinkerton posits that there have been three "big offers" in American history...
...H. G. Wells shocked the Victorian world with The Time Machine, in which future humanity had devolved into two species, one of which kept the other as cattle...
...Even members of the teachers' union would be romanced with the promise of starting their own "charter schools...
...He established the Land Grant colleges and the Agricultural Department to benefit farmers...
...2) Lincoln's vision of a middle-class nation led by a prosperous yeomanry engaged in free enterprise and unfettered labor...
...he was totally unprepared for the arrhythmic bump of the reformatted, core-dumped, snow-crashed, dog-deletes-dog nineties...
...Like Symbolist poetry, it all makes sense if you're willing to study it long enough...
...At least Pinkerton is willing to try...
...What does he have in mind...
...In the face of this responsibility, Pinkerton has done a satisfying if sometimes needlessly obscure job of defining the "vision thing...
...The "Big Tent" is getting pretty big already...
...Yet he is also a victim of society who's merely trying to stay alive in a Thomas-Hobbes-in-hell world that's nasty, brutish, and shorted out...
...From this book, it is easy to see why...
...Although Pinkerton has a clear and original grasp on the political scene, he also has the habit of expressing himself in neologisms and tortured metaphors that often make it impossible to figure out what he is talking about...
...Or this: "In contrast to the New Deal/Fair Deal days, AMERICRATsters had no great reservoir of good will to draw upon when they needed to drench the populist prairie fires of bureaucuphobic Limbaugh-lash...
...The idea is that we are headed for an era of "hypercrime," in which those who are left out of the mainstream become increasingly alienated: The Cyber Future is also a criminal future...
...They were: (1) the Founding Fathers' republican vision of a nation of free individuals capable of governing their own affairs...
...He wants to cut taxes, deregulate, and crack down on crime...
...Every seventy-five years or so (Pinkerton is not above suggesting a Kondratieff wave), some politician comes along offering something so WHAT COMES NEXT: THE END OF BIG GOVERNMENT— AND THE NEW PARADIGM AHEAD James P. Pinkerton Hyperion / 404 pages / $24.95 reviewed by WILLIAM TUCKER 74 The American Spectator December 1995 completely new that it sweeps away nearly all that has gone before it and becomes the basis of everything that comes next...
...Somewhere, something new is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born...
...The BOS also has an American version, AMERICRAT...
...The real choice is between a Republican future and chaos...
...Lincoln signed new banking, tax, and tariff laws...
...You can take the boy out of the ghetto, but can you take the ghetto out of the boy...
...The movie Blade Runner and Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash—two other "cyberpunk" classics—are also summoned to display their dark vision of the future...
...The CCC, he says, gave millions of young men a military-type experience in discipline while encouraging useful work in park creation and reforestation...
...Well, you replace it with another one...
...How much can the Republican Party deviate from its core message without losing focus...
...He signed the legislation that led to the Transcontinental Railroad...
...Nor is there anything especially new about science-fiction pessimism...
...We still inhabit it...
...In this future world, the frightened "haves" will increasingly retreat to private enclaves in the suburbs, while the have-nots are left in the "worn-out husks" of the cities...
...In the opening chapter he invokes Neuromancer, a 1980's cult novel by William Gibson that describes a world where "the well-off have left the poisoned—as well as crime-ridden and dangerous—external world for the safety and serenity of cyberspace...
...p inkerton is definitely looking for a hip, upbeat audience...
...This transformation, says Pinkerton, usually comes in the form of a "big offer...
...As Lincoln said, his aim was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all...
...America is splitting into the haves and have-nots, particularly the information haves and have-nots...
...Wall Street experts are making astronomical salaries while the run-of-the-mill employee is treading water...
...Pessimism doesn't guarantee that you've diagnosed the problem or found the right answer...
...It was welfare that traded work for pay rather than handing out money to unwed mothers...
...and (3) Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930s vision of a government big enough to take care of the unemployed, the elderly, and just about everyone else...
...He wants to woo blacks by endorsing Afrocentrism, which he calls a "twentieth century version of Methodism" (although it may end up a twentieth century version of Islam...
...What do you do with an outdated paradigm...
...The middle one is probably the most unheralded...
...The average goes up, but only because inequality is greater...
...His Homestead Act opened millions of acres to penniless immigrants, converting peasants into burghers—and Republican voters—via the transformational experience of real property ownership...
...That paradigm once described the world adequately but is now breaking down under the weight of new, undigested information...
...W hat is the current paradigm...
...Following Thomas Kuhn (as have so many others before him), Pinkerton argues we are living in an outdated social "paradigm...
...He wants to sanction gay marriages in order to lure gays into the Republican Party...
...Pinkerton even suggests that Biosphere 2, the Arizona experiment in other-planetary living, was nothing more than an advanced form of "white flight...
...S till, there are problems...
...Not many people have paid attention to the domestic side of Lincoln's agenda...
...they eventually become ripe for replacement by something completely new...
...Lyndon Johnson frittered away much of his Presidency striving for near-unanimity at a time when he had the largest Democratic majorities in the last fifty years...
...I wonder how much of this betrays an anxiety about leadership itself rather than an effort to be tolerant and inclusive...
...He also joins hands with Kaus and other liberals in calling for a revival of the Civilian Conservation Corps...
...As befits cyberpunk's roots in the seventies outlaw culture of protohacker "Captain Crunch" and the original Ma Bell-beating "phone phreaks," high-tech ripoff is a major motif of the genre...
...William Tucker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...
...He wants education vouchers, welfare vouchers, and a national health program that would give everyone a tax credit to buy a $3,500 medical savings account...
...Historian James McPherson writes that his domestic legislation "did more to reshape the relation of the government to the economy than any comparable effort except perhaps the first hundred days of the New Deal...
...Although BUREAUCRAT can actually be traced back to the Pharaohs, it has gone through a series of recent "upgrades"—BUREAUCRAT 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc...
...CI The American Spectator December 1995 75...
...It is easy to understand his frustrations under Bush, who, he says, "lacked respect for words" and whose "notoriously weak and lazy verbiage was a leading aural indicator that he had little in mind" when chosen to lead the country...
...Just how big does the Republican Party have to get in order to take the initiative...
...Republicans must realize that, now that they are governing, the weight of the world is on their shoulders...
...That seems far-fetched...
...But Wells's solution was socialism, another popular delusion of the day...
...But there is nothing permanent about these paradigms...
...Pinkerton argues: The second part of Lincoln's Offer was the building of a business-minded, propertyowning middle class...
...In assembling a national consensus for the next big offer, he is willing to make many concessions that not all Republicans would be willing to make...
...Over 100 state legislators have switched from the Democrats to the Republicans in the last eighteenth months...
...Case, the protagonist of Neuromancer, is an amoral, anomic techno-grifter...
...Or what is to be made of this: "Also more manifest were the five Bugs in the Bureaucratic Operating System: Parkinsonism, Peterism, Oligarchism, Olsonism, and information infarction...
...The Democratic Party is not only void of ideas, it hardly exists outside the fossilized remains of the special interests tied to the old bureaucratic welfare-state...
...The Bureaucratic Operating System, or BOS, runs its own special software, called BUREAUCRAT...
...Realistically, today's CCC recruits will be almost entirely underclass blacks...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
