A class act:

...Panels on health, law and the courts, values, entitlements, national security, and economic growth similarly sweated the symptoms, not the system...

...nowhere, in the sense that we will be left with a handful of valuable reforms which lack the potency to check the pathologies of greed and war exacerbated by corporate-dominated priorities...

...Since civil rights gains, for example, have become mired in litigious acrimony (litigation "makes people feel and act ugly," one of the panelists put it, because it overstates their malevolence), we should look to economic growth to foster social justice, and hold the line against the expansion of legal services to the poor...

...The neoliberals seemed strangers to Reinhold Niebuhr's observation that the astute social pedagogy of middle-class reformers is almost always swamped by the self-interested behavior of the rest of their own class (what else is Reaganomics...

...The writer Ken Auletta had to remind overzealous neoliberals that lots of teenage mothers have their babies not because of welfare but in order to claim the man, or escape a violent home, or simply because they didn't know enough about birth control...

...But will neoliberals seek curbs on multi-billion dollar advertising which tells the worker he's a chump for not consuming more with his smaller paycheck...

...So doing, those movements encountered and faced down remarkably brutal counterforces which seem to have been expunged, as if by a censor, from neoliberal history books...

...Against the roseate glow of such nostalgia, no wonder the excesses of unions and affirmative action seem mean-spirited encroachments rather than defensive and admittedly often self-defeating reactions to deeper systemic meanness...

...Monthly editor Charles Peters opened the conference with his "Neoliberal Manifesto," a preachy, down-home, populist appeal to transcend the politics of selfishness, whose chief perpetrators would seem to be entrenched liberal interest groups and not the underlying power relationships in a world of large-scale capitalism, relationships which have incited, shaped, and limited those liberal interests...

...Without quite knowing it, neoliberals are doing the corporations' fence-keeping...

...That closes them to the truth that the liberal status quo they pretend to attack needs more than their tinkering with new curbs and policy instruments, and more than middle-class appeals for a new voluntarism and faith...

...as much as by the festival of greed and delinquency whose rumblings some conference participants detected among working stiffs and the poor...

...phenomenal growth of his non-union, "worker-owned" People's Express airline, will reward flexibility and innovation among employees...

...Deborah Fallows, who's writing a book about motherhood, told the audience almost testily, "Let me rave about children for a few minutes...

...The latter begin with the "We Do Our Part" voluntarism of the NRA, invoked by Peters, and they discover our finest hour in the Peace Corps, cited often if with some critical hindsight by its many alumni at the conference...

...Yet too many conference-goers saw entitlements as a cause, not a symptom, of pathology...

...Since elite labor unions have become stodgy and exclusive, blocking innovation and grabbing too much of the pie from other workers, we should temper their excesses with pay cuts and give-backs to allow management greater flexibility in restoring growth and creating more jobs...

...Except for a few gritty liberals like Senator Tom Eagleton, who told the assembled neoliberals off, the conference-goers exuded an almost virginal innocence of American history's massive, often crude struggles for labor and civil rights, waged by movements of people whom the economy and the culture had rendered otherwise powerless despite the passionate good intentions of earlier generations of reformers...

...Or will a peacetime draft socialize and militarize us into accepting those commitments as they've already been defined for us, our sacrifices themselves conferring new legitimacy upon them...

...Can Western capitalism really end unemployment through labor discipline...

...forcing everyone to share the sacrifice will increase critical participation in the formulation of those commitments...

...In the end, the neoliberals' attraction to symptomology may prove fatal...

...Of course, they insisted, we should also curb the over-lawyering of the rich...

...It's hard to see how curbing welfare would affect this behavior, which reflects a range of experiences from cultural dismemberment to the grinding poverty of chronic unemployment itself...

...Or maybe of the late night bull-session where under-grads press their notions of social reform...

...Neoliberals did bite the bullet on the draft, James Fallows arguing that it must be reinstated out of fairness and as a corrective to affluent liberals' disdain of tough military and foreign policy questions...

...If we've transcended selfishness in the past, it's because the exploited got together in movements whose impolite, sheer force wrested from our political economy such minimal decencies as health care and education, along with the disposable income which ironically saved capitalism from itself...

...Neoliberals are easily disarmed by such nonsense because, for all their celebration of the unencumbered entrepreneur who cuts his workers into the deal, they accept as fundamentally benign the givens of corporate life, so firmly entrenched in our society that executives can afford to be "apolitical...

...But they forget that genuine social and economic gains have sometimes congealed into cumbersome abuses because the social movements that won them, once vibrant with community and sanctified by enormous bravery, were stymied by entrenched resistance, and so began to jockey for position defensively, reactively, within constraints they'd modified but not fundamentally altered...

...Of forty-seven panelists at the conference, four were women, and three of these discussed the virtues of motherhood, voluntarism, and traditional religious education-all valuable in their own right, but perhaps not as answers to feminist "excess...

...When those givens are challenged, we find the captains of industry becoming very political, indeed...

...But guess whose sacrifice of legal assistance is really the more likely...

...The conference never addressed these systemic issues...

...It's a simple statement of the conditions without which neoliberalism will remain a middle-class bubble on the surface of national history...

...we neoconservatives have the corporations, but they're less a problem because their leaders are so apolitical...

...As a movement, neoliberalism will go everywhere and nowhere: everywhere, in the sense that any new middle-class idea is buzzed about by the media (the conference was covered widely if superficially) and is mouthed by politicians running for election...

...To say that the cure for the problems of democracy is more democracy isn't sentimental...

...Or is the nature of corporate investment, distorted by a variety of factors including what Robert Reich calls the ' 'paper entre-preneurialism" of mergers, more to blame...

...Neoliberals have been rubbing their noses against the institutional encrustations which have formed at the high water marks of the great social movements-the overregulation, litigiousness, featherbedding, and questionable entitlements...

...She ventured that women with young children who insist on working when they don't have to are copping out on their real responsibility to stay home...

...It needs something they can't provide, a reinfusion of the economic and political democracy which dissident new unions and new movements for social justice will have to embody...

...Similarly, feminist excesses, from separatism to power-hungry corporate ladder-climbing, were treated as self-generated evils to be curbed, not as symptoms of a deeper powerlessness in so many traditional relations...

...For better or worse, he noted, America's worldwide commitments preclude the traditional ' 'peacetime'' dismantling of large armies...

...Of course, management will take symbolic pay cuts, too, and some executives like Donald Burr, who told the conference about the...

...A pity, since serious analysis would suggest that unemployment, not welfare as such, induces dependency and passivity...

...Among the three hundred writers, academics, consultants, congressional staffers, politicians, and entrepreneurs attending the Washington Monthly's "Neoliberal Conference" in Reston, Virginia, last month, there was an elan embarrassingly yet irrepressibly redolent of John Kennedy's best and brightest...

...Your greatest stumbling block as neoliberals is the labor unions," the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol told the conference...

...JIM SLEEPER...

...And do they really think labor concessions can carry us closer to the full employment which is the only long-range solvent of crime, dependency, and labor defensiveness itself...

...They are right in calling attention to these encrustations and to their stifling hold on the Democratic party's policies and performance...

...Will it...

...Neoliberal Conference' A CLASS ACT TOO FAR FROM PITTSBURGH IF THE would-be "neoliberal" movement has an Achilles heel, it is an over-reliance on the honor and perspicacity of a few upper-middle-class young men (and a very few women) who think they can regenerate an ethic of social responsibility in America by persuasion and bright ideas...

...In the end, I think fairness mandates a draft, but these other questions remain-and remained unexplored at the conference, which also never focused on America's commitment to nuclear weaponry...