America's Impasse/American Politics
Hixson, William B Jr.
Books: GROWTH & PARALYSIS A YEAR AGO public-opinion analysts were debating whether the long-awaited "Republican majority" had emerged; now they are asking how great the Democratic gains will be...
...No government can be all the things demanded of it by the American Creed and still remain a government...
...That successive groups of Americans have tried to realize those "core values" in their political institutions is of course a commonplace...
...The "disharmony" suggested in the title, the persistent tensions which have characterized American political life, come not (in Huntington's view) from class conflict on the European model but from the gap between institutions and what he (adapting Gunnar Myrdal's famous concept) calls "the American Creed...
...From such evidence, is it not possible to conclude that the contours of "growth politics" came not only from the need of its advocates to find influential allies but from far deeper constraints imposed by the voters...
...These growth advocates and their successors (especially in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) believed that establishing a favorable environment for investment would secure business confidence, while the surplus engendered by growth would permit the expansion of social services and even eradicate poverty...
...These considerations might seem to be far removed from the argument of Samuel Huntington's new book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, but in a number of ways that book nicely complements Wolfe's...
...But he has already suggested that the Republicans' victory in 1980 was due to their "more compelling case" as to which party could meet the public's expectations of economic growth...
...Why is this so...
...But, ironically, in this new situation governmental preoccupation with securing corporate profits could no longer bring about desired economic growth, a failure to which both ex-Presidents Ford and Carter can testify...
...and it is quite possible that he sees the American case as simply one illustration of a more general conflict between popular demands and governmental authority...
...The Republican triumph of 1980 seems destined to be followed by the Democratic resurgence of 1982...
...What makes Wolfe's book so illuminating is his exposition of the consequences of this strategy in all areas of policy: fiscal policy, social services, defense spending, international trade and monetary policy, and foreign aid...
...Consisting of those most interested in realizing the Creed, American reform movements embody this suspicion...
...That kind of electoral volatility and the protracted economic crisis which produces it are of course now common features in almost all the capitalist democracies...
...What Huntington asks us to remember is the degree to which they have persistently failed...
...Press, $15, 292 pp...
...Considerations such as these lead one toward the possibility that the anti-statist theme in American political culture played a greater role in shaping postwar "growth politics" than Wolfe realizes...
...He concludes his book with hopeful references to those who like him are currently devising alternate strategies to "growth politics...
...tive to the deeply flawed policies of the recent past...
...his American disciples had to abandon the latter goal and rely on the indirect effects of business expansion to achieve the former...
...Liberal and capitalist in sympathies though he may have been, Keynes came from a political culture with a clear concept of sovereignty...
...now they are asking how great the Democratic gains will be next November...
...His answer would appear to be, upon the imperatives of governing...
...Referring not only to the Revolutionary beginnings but to the Jacksonian and Progressive eras as well, and of course to the 1960s and early 1970s, Huntington concludes that all such movements tried "to cleanse and purify government, to open up government, and to make government more democratic...
...If Wolfe is right that the hope for our economic future lies in conscious government planning for a full-employment economy, and Huntington is right that our'' creedal'' hostility to political power forecloses such a governmental role, then how can we ever escape from "America's impasse...
...Now it is true that in much of his writing Huntington has been concerned (his critics would say obsessed) with the imperatives of governing...
...Keynes had assumed that a government could plan for full employment and redistribute wealth...
...The evolution of the urban programs of the 1960s is simply the most notorious case of this...
...Insofar as the arguments of both our authors are convincing, it is hard not to be pessimistic...
...The consequence of these reform movements was to weaken government, which may be one reason why the reforms so often seem inconsequential...
...William B. Hixson, Jr...
...Compelling in his overall analysis, Wolfe is less persuasive in explaining the crucial historical context...
...Recent studies have tended to stress Roosevelt's own reluctance to press for further reform and, more important, the conservatism of the electorate, the fact that (as one historian has put it) "the New Deal declined after 1937 because most Americans did not want to extend it much further...
...Opposition to power, and suspicion of government as the most dangerous embodiment of power, are the central themes of American political thought...
...This American departure from Keynesian orthodoxy which Wolfe describes is surely linked to the wider American hostility toward government...
...Wolfe has similar problems with the present...
...Upon what rocks do these waves of "creedal passion" break...
...We are, in other words, experiencing what Alan Wolfe describes in his new book- America's Impasse...
...He seems uncertain whether to blame the consequences of their policies on the advocates of growth strategy themselves or on the forces with which they had to compromise: the large corporations, the ascendant military, the establishment interest groups, and so on...
...One such is the New Deal: so intent is he on contrasting it with the "growth politics" since the Truman era that he exaggerates its interest either in mobilization or in redistribution...
...But his range is so broad and his comparisons so suggestive that even those who disagree with his biases cannot afford to ignore this book...
...The history of American politics is the repetition of new beginnings and flawed outcomes, promises and disillusion, reform and reaction...
...He finds the origins of this "growth politics" in the efforts of Truman's advisers to get around the existing stalemate between New Dealers and their conservative opponents...
...Again and again he makes the point that even in the quarter-century of prosperity after 1945 any strategy which began by simultaneously attempting to provide a secure environment for investment and a decent environment for the poor would end by emphasizing the former objective over the latter...
...Not surprisingly, in the more constrained economic situation of the 1970s, the latter objective would be abandoned...
...Wolfe has no doubts that Reagan's particular version of "growth politics," with its emphasis on "business freedom and military strength," will lead to the same end...
...the American economists, no less liberal, came from a culture premised on its denial...
...AMERICAN POLITICS THE PROMISE OF DISHARMONY Samuel P. Huntington Harvard Univ...
...What makes it particularly relevant to our discussion here of "America's impasse" is its exposition of the ways the American Creed moves in an anti-statist direction...
...The historical alternatives which he opposes to this strategy are less clear-cut than he acknowledges...
...Wolfe argues that our leaders are unwilling to abandon the premises of what he calls the "growth politics" of the post-1945 era...
...Anyone who has sampled the recent literature written on the 1950s and 1960s might regard this as yet another version of a familiar story...
...They would be wrong...
...But there remains something distinctive about the American situation, and to appreciate it we need only look at the growing number of Democratic politicians who seek to offer us what Sidney Blu-menthal has aptly called "Carterism without Carter.'' No major politician so far appears secure (or imaginative) enough to even articulate a clear alternaANERICA'S IMPASSE THE RISE AND FALL OF THE POLITICS OF GROWTH Alan Wolfe Pantheon, $16.50, 282 pp...
...In one of the boldest observations in America's Impasse, Wolfe argues that, contrary to the common impression, postwar economic policy was never truly Keynesian...
...Revealing again his extraordinary command of the political-science literature, Huntington amasses empirical evidence to demonstrate that Americans are deeply committed to the Creed and to its "core political values" - "liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, and the rule of law under a constitution"-so deeply in fact that allegiance to the Creed underlies our national identity...
...for in his view our society has already been "victimized by the program now being advanced to save it...
...Thus while in principle "Keynesianism implies the use of government to influence and direct decisions made in the private sector," in practice American Keynesians were forced to rely on "the private sector to influence the scope and activities of government...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 5
