Why Amricans Hate Politics

...Dionne argues that the Democrats need their own version of"fusionism," a coalition of liberals and "populists," still committed to state regulation of the economy, but adopting some of populism's concern for family, community, and civic obligation...

...It also calls attention to our vulnerability and lack of power, especially since, as Dionne notes, our more fragmented society means that we are more isolated and more likely to be addressed in essentially private terms...

...a tougher stance on law enforcement, and a recognition that "neighborhood" is not simply a code word for racism...

...The rationalizing impulse tells us we can lethally intervene in the creation of human life--minimizing uncertainty and ambivalence-and still preserve a belief in the sanctity of life...

...Lemann is at his best when he is describing--life in the South under segregation and the sharecropping regime...

...Our legitimate fears, our feelings of artificiality and loss, reflect a world where the most fundamental human relations are being relativized by an idealized rationality...

...Conservatism defends the free market and the autonomy of the private sector, but it upholds a whole set of "traditional values" that stand in need of public support, not the least against the corrosive effect of the market itself...

...Dionne, Jr...

...It is a cliche to say that a childish fear of change is at the heart of our present dissatisfactions and insecurity...

...Human dignity, emotional depth and authenticity, however, inhere in what is given, what is unearned, what is passed on--like the care one bestows, literally without reason, upon children...

...Five million blacks joined the northward trek between 1940 and 1970, making theirs the biggest migration in world history...

...True, abortion levels the field...

...All these intellectual currents were reinforced by resentments at the slowing of economic growth, the inflation-prodded rise of taxation, and the failed opportunity of Jimmy Carter's presidency...

...free market policies have reinforced selfseeking and may have speeded the disintegration of society...

...Until human reproduction becomes a factory operation, women will carry a disproportionate burden--and should be accorded a disproportionate regard...

...The transformation of the erstwhile Soviet empire has already softened the old anticommunist glue and revived conservative isolationism...

...I i NORTHERN BOUND THE PROMISED LAND The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America Nicholas Lemann Knopf, $24.95,416 pp...

...The upshot is that liberalism and conservatism, in their different ways, are engrossed with the defense of their favorite individual and group "fights," seeking to exclude politics from large areas of life, so that we "hate" politics, in part, because so often it is unable to solve, or even address, the things that matter...

...He has an oldtime journalist's ear for humbug, and he knows the importance of interests and power in political life...

...Moreover, even if the right is as "exhausted" as Dionne believes, it draws strength from the structural, longer-term reasons that, beyond his argument, contribute to the public's growing distaste for politics...

...So it was at first for the AfricanAmericans who, during the middle decades of this century, streamed out of the rural South with its racial oppression to the urban North and its relative freedom...

...The Promised Land is not a perfect book---what book is...

...there has been no serious dent in crime...

...How does unrestricted abortion, with its hyperindividualized and overly rationalized morality, fit into Gordon's more humanitarian vision...

...but Dionne also recognizes that at bottom, politics is speech, a quarrel, more or less civil, about the just and the unjust...

...He pursued that inspiration brilliantly, and the result is a powerful, absorbing book, so well-researched and well-written that it reads at times like a good novel...

...So it was at first--and then something happened...

...But at what cost...

...No place in the South contributed more eager participants than the Mississippi Delta, that vast, richly fertile area where cotton truly was king...

...So it was for the Europeans who, over many decades, came in waves to American shores...

...True, reason and technology enable us to manipulate nature to much benefit...

...Dionne does justice to the New Left's crazy-quilt of radical democrats and countercultural individualists, but he points out that the theme and legacy of that complex movement was suspicion of institutions and of authority...

...None of these traditional social ties are based on equality in the strict sense BOOKS of the term, however...

...It is a sensible program, but one that asks liberals to moderate or shelve a number of cherished doctines, and before they are ready to do so, liberals may need another, more terrible dose of defeat...

...Liberalism, willing to support energetic government, especially in economic life, hesitates to use government to promote civic virtues, and in fact is so fearful of seeming repressive that it appears to have WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS E.J...

...All the disturbing qualities of modem politics, however, strengthen Dionne's case: ff speech and argument are our best---or only--hope for a revitalized civic life, there is every reason to seek words strong enough to challenge the dorn~ inations and powers of the time...

...It was Nicholas Lemann's great inspiration that the best way to tell the story of this black migration would be by focusing on those two places and on a representative few actual migrants...

...Both ideologies, Dionne indicates, contain a contradiction...

...Simon & Schuster, $22.95, 430 pp...

...Aiming to harmonize the right, the "fusionism" of the National Review focused on the negative commonalities uniting free marketeers and traditionalists like Russell Kirk: anticommunism and the agreement that capitalism is preferable to the "creeping socialism" of the welfare state...

...The same years, moreover, 17May 1991:331 inspired neoconservatism's doubts about the efficacy of state planning and its conviction that the bureaucratic "New Class" was undermining the civil and social decencies--a view shared, on the basis of rather different reasoning, by the religious right...

...Wilson Carey McWilliams no standard of the public good beyond the desire to conciliate conflicting groups, a kind of appeasement rather than an ideal of justice...

...But whatever the future holds, ultimately we cannot escape the chains--and one is sex--that fasten us to nature as well...

...At best, it will take superb rhetoric to construct Dionne's preferred coalition, the analog of Reagan's beguiling appeal to libertarians and cultural moralists...

...Don Wycliff ince the time of Abraham, migration has been an avenue to progress for those restless spirits who value the opportunity to advance over the comfort of familiar surroundings...

...The failure of John Silber's abrasive version last year in Massachusetts is instructive...

...the machinations of Chicago politicians like Richard J. Daley or William (Big Bill) Dawson...

...This fine account of the development of present-day conservatism shows that political coalitions are like geological formations, built up stratum by stratum out of the sediment of advocacy and events...

...a family policy that--upholding the equality of the sexes in the workplace and the home--regards the two-parent family as the standard for policy...

...In the beginning, however, were shared aversions...

...Similarly, he argues, it is now clear that, like Ronald Reagan, George Bush supports "traditional values" in only symbolic ways...

...Conservatism won with Ronald Reagan because it assembled a majority which, in radically diverse ways, agreed in its dissatisfaction with the liberal version of the welfare state...

...support for a positive American role in foreign affairs, and so on...

...Although both groups had at least a nodding respect for the magisterial authority of government, they made it their first goal to stop what they took to be liberalism's damaging interventions, making "at least, do no harm" a first principle of social policy...

...James Madison's familiar argument instructs us that in a large republic, majorities must always be coalitions, full of implicit tensions and patched together by compromise, unable to take a consistently high moral tone or, ordinarily, to last very long...

...No two places illustrate more vividly how the black migration changed America, North and South, for better and for worse...

...Of course, ideological incoherence is not always a disadvantage in American politics...

...Something has to seem important enough to justify setting aside other differences in the interest of victory, a principle that contemporary conservatives have applied much more successfully than their liberal rivals, and that is the greater part of Dionne's story...

...In fact, Dionne holds, the conservative movement is now exhausted...

...the intriguing confluence of inter332: Commonweal...

...Modem politics, baffling and full of technicalities, is bound to make us feel stupid...

...And the love received in return...

...But even on these terms, a majority needs some unifying principle or antipathy...

...And he argues that contemporary Americans hate politics because they are disgusted by the terms of debate, an "artificial polarization" defined by the contest between liberals and conservatives...

...The great increase in conservatism's strength, however, grew out of the turbulence and failed promises of the 1960s and '70s, which cast a shadow on the moral title of the state...

...Escaping the mystery and limits of that condition is what abortion too often promises...

...For Dionne, the real lesson of the Republican victory in 1988--1ike that of the GOP's defeat in 1976--is that conservatives can win only when they can mn against liberalism's weakened past (or when, as in the Iraq crisis, liberals themselves insist on reminding tlS...

...The book offers many suggestions for such a program: politics aiming at full employment at socially adequate wages for all Americans (and with them, following William Julius Wilson, a de-emphasis on affirmative action...

...It is another method of stamping out ambiguity, and should make any novelist as good as Mary Gordon suspicious...

...That, as Dionne suggests, is why the broad programmatic failure of the Reagan revolution has been essential to its continued political success: without the existence of the liberal state, the conservative coalition would lose its raison d'etre...

...The resulting tendency toward a fearful, serf-protective privatism works against any positive use of public authority and runs parallel to conservatism's mainstream...

...No northern destination was more eagerly sought than Chicago, "City of the Big Shoulders...

...Blessed are the coalition makers J. Dionne, now of the Washington Post and formerly of the New York Times, is what a political D reporter ought to be, a relentless seeker of that kernel of meaning that is the heart of fact...

...the building of the Chicago ghetto...

...Gordon rightly senses that a human life of real variety and emotional d~pth requires organic connection, particular attachments, and perhaps even parochial authorities...