The Real America
O'Lessker, Karl
"The Real America" What is it about the middle class that arouses otherwise mild-tempered leftist intellectuals to such furious disdain, to such prodigies of denunciation? Granted most members of the middle class are...
...Is that bad, unworthy...
...How would black radical leaders have ordinary black people comport themselves...
...The present state of things, he finds again and again, is "better by far than what it replaces...
...And the question arises, what are you selling...
...Back then to the situation for black Americans...
...But no sooner does it appear that whites will stop resisting and resenting their progress than they hear themselves excoriated by other blacks—young, articulate, media-conscious blacks, who condemn their movement into the suburban middle class as being somehow a cop-out, a violation of the essential spirit of negritude, a headlong lemming-like rush into the same materialist wasteland in which white Americans have long since mindlessly imprisoned themselves...
...By his own showing it is not only malechauvinist pigs who question whether "progress" is exemplified by women fleeing home in droves to take up employment as "secretaries, computer programmers, key-punch operators, and social workers," relying then on McDonald's and Colonel Sanders to do the cooking for their families...
...Just as Wattenberg's hard economic data show real advances for black people, so the soft attitudinal data show a massive turning away from racial bigotry on the part of whites...
...That may be you peeping out of the corner of the canvas with an entirely unself-conscious, hundred-percent American grin on your Archie Bunker face...
...I point out only that, here as too frequently elsewhere in the book, Wattenberg's declaration that a present state of things is better than what it replaces may rest on a less solid evidentiary and analytical base than he imagines...
...In Wattenberg's case the answer is, Senator Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson...
...To a decent job, a comfortable home, education for his children, some at least of the material amenities...
...And not only material...
...Not a bit of it...
...It's good...
...Okay, but in what sense is that superior to suburbia...
...Irrelevant and immaterial...
...Blocks of Moscow apartment houses as fay as the eye can see...
...To a decent job, a comfortable home, education for his children, some at least of the material amenities...
...Q,E.D...
...Equally curious is his position on the increase in the number of working wives...
...But then he immediately goes on to declare the "strong trend toward working women...a plus...
...Hardly...
...in short, to precisely those goals which the middle class today espouses and which earn for it the contemptuous opprobrium of the elite...
...They want those material comforts and they think it entirely appropriate to work for them...
...Politics Ain't Beanbag Taken all in all The Real America can be read as a celebration of the American middle class, its condition and values...
...Moreover in most tracts the author serves up not only propositions but evaluations—Wattenberg does so in abundance—and it helps to know the value position from which he proceeds...
...The reason he thinks so is that poverty in America is disproportionately located in rural areas ("Ruralia," in a typically inelegant Wattenberg neologism—and, yes, those who live there are "Ruralians...
...To what then should the black (or white) workingman aspire...
...I return to the central point of this thesis...
...Is that bad, unworthy...
...Is this judgment (which of course puts him squarely on the side of the Women's Lib ideologues) based on analysis, or even consideration, of those possibly harmful consequences to family life...
...Can Wattenberg deep down be so uncritically accepting of whatever happens to be the mass opinion of the moment...
...The great majorit^ of the earth's population would...
...The second is that the best hope for continued progress is a Democratic Party purged of its McGovernite poisons and committed to the lib-lab policies of the Kennedy-Johnson years...
...Instead, after some irrelevance about options for jobs as opposed to jobs per se he concludes: "The increasing number of women who make the choice to work now feel...that it's worth it...
...But it is nowhere clear that Wattenberg has ever troubled to clarify his own thinking—or ever recognized the need for clarification--about the consequences of social change ("progress," if you will...
...That means that the data have to be interpreted always and only in conformity with the candidate's positions...
...still less is he politically naive...
...The great majorit^ of the earth's population would...
...But that belief, no matter how wrongheaded, need not and should not deter you from looking at this fascinating statistical portrait of Middle America...
...Dooley, "Politics ain't beanbag"—presidential politics least of all...
...After first heaping contempt on "Women's Lib ideologues" for wanting women to become economically independent, he sanctimoniously reports that "American women—many, many of them—feel that wives at work are not the best of all possible circumstances and can, in fact, cause detrimental side effects, side effects that are particularly harmful to family life...
...That means that the data have to be interpreted always and only in conformity with the candidate's positions...
...But these critics never define just what glorious state of being it is that the masses are so easily misled from...
...So poverty is diminished somehow when white hillbillies emigrate from Appalachia to Cincinnati and black sharecroppers leave Mississippi for Manhattan...
...That may be you peeping out of the corner of the canvas with an entirely unself-conscious, hundred-percent American grin on your Archie Bunker face...
...Very puzzling...
...Try offering the Hong Kong coolie, the black South African miner, the Sicilian peasant a chance to live among his own kind in a neat suburban community, a car in the garage, a color TV in the family room, and plenty to eat, all in exchange for forty hours a week in an office or on the assembly line, and see whether he reacts like Eldridge Cleaver or like Archie Bunker...
...No doubt one can agree with the first while rejecting the second...
...still less am I suggesting that all women ought humbly and dutifully to eschew professional aspirations and economic independence...
...Middle-classvalues are not only widely shared throughout at least the industrialized world, they are eminently defensible...
...I return to the central point of this thesis...
...For black people, then, America in the mid-seventies is beginning to look like that land of promise they had heard about for so long...
...Granted most members of the middle class are neither leftist nor intellectual...
...But of such gentle skepticism no whisper is heard in this utilitarian celebration of consumer sovereignty triumphant...
...He thinks it "very much a plus," for example, that so many people have quit farming and moved "to a whole new life in an urban or suburban area...
...No, I'm not either, but Wattenberg has a weakness for truth by assertion...
...But if like Wattenberg you approach the data in so determinedly upbeat a frame of mind as to be able to discern no trace of wrongdoing or wrongthinking on the part of the statistical majority of Americans, some of your readers may be forgiven for regarding you as neither a reporter nor an analyst but a salesman...
...In Wattenberg's case the answer is, Senator Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson...
...The response to that is that if you cannot comprehend the difference between total opposition to integration of any kind and opposition to a program that buses one's kids into violence-ridden, drug-infested, academically disastrous schools, you either don't have kids or do have trouble thinking...
...Pray let me emphasize that I am not myself arguing one way or another...
...they decorate their homes in execrable taste and spend far too much time watching television...
...If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us...
...To the extent that middle-class values spread, human savagery diminishes and, in Camus' piercing phrase, fewer children are tortured...
...though Wattenberg himself evidently believes that the causal chain is too strong for that: progress was made precisely because of those policies, and is unlikely to be made in their absence...
...This is because, unlike the closed universe of the syllogism (no matter how extensive and complex .that syllogism may be), the political tract is an exercise in selectivity...
...Ten years later the proportion was more than reversed: only 21 percent objected as against 78 percent who did not...
...The air is full of words like "authentic" and "life-enhancing" and "human dignity" and all, but I have never seen a description by any of these critics of a set of material conditions appropriate to sup- porting life for some four billion souls...
...white-collar and skilled-craftsman employment among blacks rose by 79 percent, as against a 26 percent increase among whites...
...Especially in that what this view condemns as the quintessential character of the American middle class comes as close to being a universal aspiration of struggling peoples everywhere as one can likely find...
...And in many instances few if any of us would disagree with him...
...As most of you know, Wattenberg is a member of the innermost circle of Jackson presidential campaign strategists...
...though Wattenberg himself evidently believes that the causal chain is too strong for that: progress was made precisely because of those policies, and is unlikely to be made in their absence...
...The first is that we have as a nation made great material and social progress over the past decade and those who say otherwise are monstrously, sickeningly wrong (the adverbs I have chosen with some care to convey the emotional coloration of Wattenberg's pitch...
...Or is it instead, as I have suggested, that he is a high-level technicianin the service of a centrist, labor-oriented presidential candidate...
...It is better than what it replaces...
...Let me try to put the problem into perspective...
...The masses arc so easily misled by materialistic lures...
...For that vast majority of mankind who are incapable of sainthood, a life lived according to middle-class precepts can be a generous, humane, and satisfying one...
...and they seem lamentably unwilling to offer up their own children on the altar of racial balance in the schools, or drastically to change their eating habits in order to feed the starving millions of the world...
...This is the explanation, I believe, for what several reviewers found most puzzling in the book—its relentlessly Panglossian tone...
...As examples: black family income just about doubled during the decade while that of whites went up by 69 percent...
...Put another way, unwillingness to volunteer one's own children as shock-troops in the battle for equalized education may be morally deplorable, but it is a very long way from being, in one of Wattenberg's rare good phrases, "ethnic, beer-swigging, pot-bellied, raw, stonewall racism...
...For that vast majority of mankind who are incapable of sainthood, a life lived according to middle-class precepts can be a generous, humane, and satisfying one...
...But why should one be quite so savage toward the sales representative and his way of life...
...Can Wattenberg deep down be so uncritically accepting of whatever happens to be the mass opinion of the moment...
...They're quite willing to deal with gray-flannel angst, thank you very much, so long as they have a chance to enjoy first its material accoutrements...
...still less am I suggesting that all women ought humbly and dutifully to eschew professional aspirations and economic independence...
...There are, then, two principal theses in The Real America, one proclaimed in the brassiest of tones, the other suggested just above a whisper...
...Here Wattenberg displays some of his fanciest footwork...
...The point is that it at least comes closer to being a plausible goal than anything the critics of the middle class are able to devise...
...I don't for a moment suggest that the world's entire population will one day be able to c in Happy Acres...
...So he must know that the statistical majorities on whom he lavishes such moist-eyed, tremulous admiration haven't been and aren't always right...
...It remains eternally true, of course, that a fact is not disproved by reference to the reporter's political biases or sexual habits or taste in soft drinks...
...But if like Wattenberg you approach the data in so determinedly upbeat a frame of mind as to be able to discern no trace of wrongdoing or wrongthinking on the part of the statistical majority of Americans, some of your readers may be forgiven for regarding you as neither a reporter nor an analyst but a salesman...
...For all his defects as a stylist, far too many to cite here, Wattenberg isn't stupid...
...One striking example: in 1959, according to Gallup Poll data, white Southerners objected by a proportion of 72 to 25 percent to "sending your children to a school where a few children are colored...
...Convinced...
...All this is true, some of it no doubt is morally discreditable, and it certainly helps define the difference between a suburbanite sales representative and Noam Chomsky...
...the fact that the nomads of Kurdistan wouldn't give you a plugged kopek for an eight-room house in Happy Acres doesn't dull the point...
...As revolutionist shock-troops, no doubt...
...And the question arises, what are you selling...
...The overwhelming majority of blacks share not only middle-class aspirations but middle-class values...
...Who, after all, could be displeased by a decline in the high school dropout rate from 55 percent in 1940 to 25 percent in 1972...
...the proportion of black families with annual income in excess of $10,000 increased from 13 to 32 percent...
...And I should add...
...Thus it seems to me not only permissible but necessary to bring ad hominem considerations into account when dealing with political writings, be they of a Wattenberg or a Tyrrell or a Julian Bond...
...Now if all this has too much of an ad hominem ring to those of you trained in logic, I can only plead guilty and then go on to report my conviction that a political tract, such as the work under review clearly is, requires not only analysis of the truth-function of its propositions but inquiry into its author's motives...
...Very puzzling...
...What, one wonders, do the haters of the middle class want people in mass society to be or to do...
...After the revolution...
...The first is that we have as a nation made great material and social progress over the past decade and those who say otherwise are monstrously, sickeningly wrong (the adverbs I have chosen with some care to convey the emotional coloration of Wattenberg's pitch...
...But then...
...In fact he ignores the question...
...Okay, but in what sense is that superior to suburbia...
...the proportion of black families in poverty (by federal definition) declined from 48 to 29 percent...
...So he must know that the statistical majorities on whom he lavishes such moist-eyed, tremulous admiration haven't been and aren't always right...
...Politics Ain't Beanbag Taken all in all The Real America can be read as a celebration of the American middle class, its condition and values...
...Here Wattenberg displays some of his fanciest footwork...
...New Mexico communes...
...Eighteenth-century Virginia freeholds...
...and so on and on, adding up to a nearly unblemished record of material progress...
...As most of you know, Wattenberg is a member of the innermost circle of Jackson presidential campaign strategists...
...The air is full of words like "authentic" and "life-enhancing" and "human dignity" and all, but I have never seen a description by any of these critics of a set of material conditions appropriate to sup- porting life for some four billion souls...
...New Mexico communes...
...The overwhelming majority of blacks share not only middle-class aspirations but middle-class values...
...They want their kids to study and do well in school...
...If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us...
...Quite the contrary: a man in Wattenberg's position vis-1-vis a leading presidential candidate simply could not permit himself the luxury of writing on sensitive political matters unless it were clearly perceived as advancing the candidate's cause...
...After the revolution...
...rare good phrases, "ethnic, beer-swigging, pot-bellied, raw, stonewall racism...
...What, one wonders, do the haters of the middle class want people in mass society to be or to do...
...But any of these may help to explain why he selected that fact and ignored those four thousand others...
...Equally curious is his position on the increase in the number of working wives...
...The point is that it at least comes closer to being a plausible goal than anything the critics of the middle class are able to devise...
...I have no doubt that this is worth doing, especially at a time when the mood of the reigning intelligentsia is sourly if not bitterly antibourgeois...
...Back then to the situation for black Americans...
...Or is it instead, as I have suggested, that he is a high-level technicianin the service of a centrist, labor-oriented presidential candidate...
...in short, to precisely those goals which the middle class today espouses and which earn for it the contemptuous opprobrium of the elite...
...But then...
...And never, never, never must the author call into question or even look askance at Middle America's values or attitudes (at least as measured by the polls...
...They are opposed to handouts...
...Instead, after some irrelevance about options for jobs as opposed to jobs per se he concludes: "The increasing number of women who make the choice to work now feel...that it's worth it...
...But these critics never define just what glorious state of being it is that the masses are so easily misled from...
...They're quite willing to deal with gray-flannel angst, thank you very much, so long as they have a chance to enjoy first its material accoutrements...
...The case can be made, and has been made ad nauseam, that present-day opposition to school busing is simply white racism in new garb...
...And for my part I find it impossible to believe that he would have spent so much time and energy so close to the campaign writing a book that bore no effective relationship to his leader's aspirations...
...Not, I think, quite...
...How would black radical leaders have ordinary black people comport themselves...
...They want their kids to study and do well in school...
...The colors arc (to put it mildly) garish, the draftsmanship often leaves much to be desired, but who knows...
...And never, never, never must the author call into question or even look askance at Middle America's values or attitudes (at least as measured by the polls...
...black home ownership increased...
...Q,E.D...
...Try offering the Hong Kong coolie, the black South African miner, the Sicilian peasant a chance to live among his own kind in a neat suburban community, a car in the garage, a color TV in the family room, and plenty to eat, all in exchange for forty hours a week in an office or on the assembly line, and see whether he reacts like Eldridge Cleaver or like Archie Bunker...
...They are opposed to handouts...
...Convinced...
...Hardly...
...By his own showing it is not only malechauvinist pigs who question whether "progress" is exemplified by women fleeing home in droves to take up employment as "secretaries, computer programmers, key-punch operators, and social workers," relying then on McDonald's and Colonel Sanders to do the cooking for their families...
...This is the explanation, I believe, for what several reviewers found most puzzling in the book—its relentlessly Panglossian tone...
...For black people, then, America in the mid-seventies is beginning to look like that land of promise they had heard about for so long...
...It's good...
...Especially in that what this view condemns as the quintessential character of the American middle class comes as close to being a universal aspiration of struggling peoples everywhere as one can likely find...
...Who, after all, could be displeased by a decline in the high school dropout rate from 55 percent in 1940 to 25 percent in 1972...
...Thus it seems to me not only permissible but necessary to bring ad hominem considerations into account when dealing with political writings, be they of a Wattenberg or a Tyrrell or a Julian Bond...
...Not a bit of it...
...The colors arc (to put it mildly) garish, the draftsmanship often leaves much to be desired, but who knows...
...Now if all this has too much of an ad hominem ring to those of you trained in logic, I can only plead guilty and then go on to report my conviction that a political tract, such as the work under review clearly is, requires not only analysis of the truth-function of its propositions but inquiry into its author's motives...
...Is this judgment (which of course puts him squarely on the side of the Women's Lib ideologues) based on analysis, or even consideration, of those possibly harmful consequences to family life...
...To what then should the black (or white) workingman aspire...
...And I should add...
...still less is he politically naive...
...Dooley, "Politics ain't beanbag"—presidential politics least of all...
...The reason he thinks so is that poverty in America is disproportionately located in rural areas ("Ruralia," in a typically inelegant Wattenberg neologism—and, yes, those who live there are "Ruralians...
...This is because, unlike the closed universe of the syllogism (no matter how extensive and complex .that syllogism may be), the political tract is an exercise in selectivity...
...So that even though every single proposition in it may be empirically true- and logically consistent, the propositions taken all in all may have been so selected as to cumulate to a greatly distorted picture of reality...
...Blocks of Moscow apartment houses as fay as the eye can see...
...After first heaping contempt on "Women's Lib ideologues" for wanting women to become economically independent, he sanctimoniously reports that "American women—many, many of them—feel that wives at work are not the best of all possible circumstances and can, in fact, cause detrimental side effects, side effects that are particularly harmful to family life...
...The second is that the best hope for continued progress is a Democratic Party purged of its McGovernite poisons and committed to the lib-lab policies of the Kennedy-Johnson years...
...Eighteenth-century Virginia freeholds...
...I don't for a moment suggest that the world's entire population will one day be able to c in Happy Acres...
...For in the accurate and oft-repeated words of Mr...
...Pray let me emphasize that I am not myself arguing one way or another...
...It remains eternally true, of course, that a fact is not disproved by reference to the reporter's political biases or sexual habits or taste in soft drinks...
...The question is even more puzzling when the sales representative happens to be black—which he is just now beginning to be in numbers large enough to be statistically significant—and when the denouncer is not a white university professor, so adept at calling on others to sacrifice, but a black nationalist out of the streets of Chicago or Oakland, who well knows that the alternative to middle-classness for black peopleis poverty and terror in the slums...
...The masses arc so easily misled by materialistic lures...
...their views on foreign policy tend to be fairly primitive when not downright jingoistic...
...As revolutionist shock-troops, no doubt...
...And for my part I find it impossible to believe that he would have spent so much time and energy so close to the campaign writing a book that bore no effective relationship to his leader's aspirations...
...the fact that the nomads of Kurdistan wouldn't give you a plugged kopek for an eight-room house in Happy Acres doesn't dull the point...
...In fact he ignores the question...
...I have no doubt that this is worth doing, especially at a time when the mood of the reigning intelligentsia is sourly if not bitterly antibourgeois...
...But of such gentle skepticism no whisper is heard in this utilitarian celebration of consumer sovereignty triumphant...
...Irrelevant and immaterial...
...So poverty is diminished somehow when white hillbillies emigrate from Appalachia to Cincinnati and black sharecroppers leave Mississippi for Manhattan...
...But no sooner does it appear that whites will stop resisting and resenting their progress than they hear themselves excoriated by other blacks—young, articulate, media-conscious blacks, who condemn their movement into the suburban middle class as being somehow a cop-out, a violation of the essential spirit of negritude, a headlong lemming-like rush into the same materialist wasteland in which white Americans have long since mindlessly imprisoned themselves...
...Moreover in most tracts the author serves up not only propositions but evaluations—Wattenberg does so in abundance—and it helps to know the value position from which he proceeds...
...But then he immediately goes on to declare the "strong trend toward working women...a plus...
...At the heart of Wattenberg's reflections on the American condition is an inchoate Idea of Progress...
...At the heart of Wattenberg's reflections on the American condition is an inchoate Idea of Progress...
...For all his defects as a stylist, far too many to cite here, Wattenberg isn't stupid...
...But that belief, no matter how wrongheaded, need not and should not deter you from looking at this fascinating statistical portrait of Middle America...
...So that even though every single proposition in it may be empirically true- and logically consistent, the propositions taken all in all may have been so selected as to cumulate to a greatly distorted picture of reality...
...To the extent that middle-class values spread, human savagery diminishes and, in Camus' piercing phrase, fewer children are tortured...
...But any of these may help to explain why he selected that fact and ignored those four thousand others...
...No doubt one can agree with the first while rejecting the second...
...Or so the critics of middle-classness would say...
...But it is nowhere clear that Wattenberg has ever troubled to clarify his own thinking—or ever recognized the need for clarification--about the consequences of social change ("progress," if you will...
...There are, then, two principal theses in The Real America, one proclaimed in the brassiest of tones, the other suggested just above a whisper...
...The present state of things, he finds again and again, is "better by far than what it replaces...
...I point out only that, here as too frequently elsewhere in the book, Wattenberg's declaration that a present state of things is better than what it replaces may rest on a less solid evidentiary and analytical base than he imagines...
...They want those material comforts and they think it entirely appropriate to work for them...
...the number of black college students soared by 97 percent, compared to a 26 percent increase for whites...
...Quite the contrary: a man in Wattenberg's position vis-1-vis a leading presidential candidate simply could not permit himself the luxury of writing on sensitive political matters unless it were clearly perceived as advancing the candidate's cause...
...It is better than what it replaces...
...In what may be the most striking and valuable of the mass of statistics Ben Wattenberg lays out in his new book, The Real America, we learn that while practically all Americans made great material progress during the decade of the sixties, the rate of progress for blacks was in most categories sharply higher than for whites...
...No, I'm not either, but Wattenberg has a weakness for truth by assertion...
...black infant mortality declined...
...He thinks it "very much a plus," for example, that so many people have quit farming and moved "to a whole new life in an urban or suburban area...
...And in many instances few if any of us would disagree with him...
...Or so the critics of middle-classness would say...
...Middle-classvalues are not only widely shared throughout at least the industrialized world, they are eminently defensible...
...Not, I think, quite...
...For in the accurate and oft-repeated words of Mr...
Vol. 8 • April 1975 • No. 7
