Struggles for Justice

...Newly aware of the need for alternatives to the state and the market alike, we are drawn to the study of half-forgotten traditions prematurely discarded in the frenzy of progress and enlightenment...

...When it came to personal morality, "laissezfaire turned into its opposite, absolutist state control of private life...

...Their preferred form of expression, the "critique" of social conditions, is invariably "vigorous," "scathing," or "withering...

...Since every form of repression rests, at bottom, on the "nuclear family ideal," the failure to demolish it once and for all meant that injustice would continue to flourish...

...Often they speak "euphemistically," never boldly or scathingly or witheringly...

...Movements for sexual freedom and women's rights proved just as inconclusive as movements designed to increase the powers of the state over the economy...

...their ideas take the form of "bold departures...

...Secure in its privileges, increasingly unresponsive to popular opinion, it loses public support and has to rely more and more on coercion...

...Those debates have reached a dead end...

...He lacks the progressive historians' serenity, which tempered their moralizing and made it possible for them to acknowledge virtues even in those who fought on the wrong side of history...

...Their habitual attitude is "censorious," their habitual pattern of speech a "torrent of moralistic clichés...

...The Left wants to regulate economic activity, the Right wants to regulate morality...

...The progressive movement and the New Deal took a few "baby steps" toward the establishment of a welfare state, but "enfeeblements and exclusions" rendered these reforms ineffective...

...From Dawley's point of view, the "forces of movement" have been too weak to prevail against the combined power of corporate capitalism and popular bigotry...

...What we make of this familiar story, however, will depend on our reading of more recent events: the ideological attack on the welfare state and its intellectual underpinnings, the revival of neoclassical economics, the rise of the New Right, the worldwide collapse of communism...

...Neither side recognizes that such controls are inherently ineffective, Commonweal 14 February /992: 25 whatever their purpose...

...q 26: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...

...They are guilty of "yearning to restore a bygone age...

...If the forces of darkness are such a sorry lot, why do they always seem to be winning...

...Social democrats in the Age of Reform (Dawley's ideological ancestors) assumed that large-scale production was historically inevitable because of its superior efficiency, that only reactionaries tried to resist centralization and technological progress, and that economic centralization would lay the groundwork for a centralized state capable of enforcing a more equitable distribution of wealth...

...Democratic movements in the past often resisted the ideology of improvement, and this resistance no longer strikes us as irrational or quixotic...

...Radicals are "committed and toughened," "redoubtable," and "charismatic...

...They clung to "outmoded ideas" the biblical account of creation, strait-laced sexual morality, "conventional ruling notions of family life...

...and that a reconstruction of informal social controls, accordingly—the repair of our cultural infrastructure—is a more important goal of public policy than the regulation of activities deemed harmful to the public good...

...But Parrington and Beard were more confident about the imminent victory of enlightenment and hence more generous to their opponents, whereas Dawley, oppressively aware of the power they can muster (residual and reactionary as it is), gives them no quarter...

...Christopher Lasch he decline of laissez-faire and the rise of the welfare state will necessarily figure prominently in any account of American history that tries to offer a comprehensive view of the years between the Gilded Age and the New Deal...

...Historical narratives informed by these perceptions would put more emphasis on the erosion of informal self-government than on the "imbalance of state and society...

...Thus the Red scare after World War I, as Dawley sees it, was directed not only against the socialist threat to capitalism but against the "ultimate threat Ito] the middle-class family...

...We no longer regard progress and democracy as interchangeable terms...

...They had the effect of "taming erotic emotion," just as the welfare state served, in the end, merely "to save liberal capitalism from revolutionary overthrow...

...Their imagination is "super-heated," and their politics can best be described in clinical language: "paranoia," "obsession," "fantasy...

...The state is just as ineffective as the market in promoting the public good, unless it rests on casual public trust and on the mediating structures (families, churches, neighborhoods) that encourage trust...

...Their writings are "pioneering," "classic...

...Their favorite remedy for the nation's ills, needless to say, is "repression...

...They are a "sturdy band" fighting "gamely," often against "incredible odds," for social justice and sexual freedom...

...Dismayed by the resurgence of the Right, they look back on the first half of the twentieth century as a series of abortive and ultimately unsuccessful "struggles for justice...

...The result fell deplorably short of "full-scale state planning," even of an "age of reform...

...Reformers made little headway against racism, nor could they bring themselves to "disturb gender relations...

...It can't even address the obvious question all this abusive rhetoric inadvertently raises, a question that is bound to occur to any open-minded reader who plods through Dawley's relentless disparagement of those who get in the way of progress...

...Those who still adhere to the social democratic faith of our fathers, on the other hand, have learned from recent reversals only an exaggerated appreciation of the reactionary forces in American society— the forces of darkness against which progressives have allegedly had to struggle all along...

...The structure of Dawley's narrative recalls Parrington and Beard, who shared his conviction that "struggles for justice" pit the forces of light against provincials and reactionaries who want to "turn back the clock," as Dawley puts it...

...Americans remained largely indifferent to "social responsibility," sealing themselves up in their "isolated private homes...

...When they are not "spinning webs" of "escapist" fantasy, they are "waving the flag," advancing "hare-brained" schemes for turning back the clock, or simply reciting "small-town verities...

...If Americans grudgingly accepted the welfare state, according to Dawley, it was not because they believed in social justice but because they hungered for security...

...Recent events have led some of us to question the social democratic faith in which we were raised...

...But it is more important to reexamine the assumptions behind debates concerning "state control of private life...

...that formal supervision cannot take the place of the informal understandings that hold a community together...

...Most of this has been said before, with greater subtlety, by historians who treat the reform tradition as the triumph of "corporate liberalism...

...But the inevitability of centralization was challenged, both in theory and in practice, by populists, single-taxers, syndicalists, and guild socialists—good democrats, for the most part, who nevertheless remained skeptical about "progress...

...Rapid social change leaves them "aghast," and they suffer "fits" and "spasms...

...Reformers in the Age of Reform were less interested in social democracy than in "social purity...

...When they suffer defeat—all too rarely, alas!—their defeats are "humiliating...

...In the face of change, their initial reaction, "intransigence," gives way to "consternation" and finally to "hysteria...

...When the state enjoys so little public confidence, it would be the height of folly to add to its powers, as if a more highly developed form of social engineering could overcome the demoralizing effects of social engineering in a more primitive form...

...The public begins to regard it as an alien power, not as the instrument of collective purpose...

...On both sides, resistance to state controls is highly selective...

...He seldom misses an opportunity to attribute unworthy motives to people who hold objectionable views, to show his contempt for "conventional opinion," or to add rhetorical flourishes designed to enable dim-witted readers to distinguish the heroes of his story from the villains...

...In order to save the family, the same Americans who rejected interference with private property welcomed the state's interference with sexual freedom...

...They are engaged in a "long march for woman suffrage" and other noble causes...

...Dawley's moralizing, on the other hand, is relentless and shrill...

...The reactionaries, on the other hand, are a contemptible breed...

...Unless we see these developments simply as temporary setbacks, minor interruptions in the march of social democracy, we will begin to wonder whether the period covered by Alan Dawley's narrative can be adequately understood as an "age of reform"—Richard Hofstadter's designation for the same period...

...A narrative structured around the "imbalance of state and society"— around a unilinear conception of history in which a "modernizing," centralizing, and cosmopolitan impulse can be expected to prevail, in the long run, over the residual opposition of the unenlightened—cannot possibly recreate the vitality of public debate in a time when the available possibilities seemed more varied than they seem today...

...The only novelty in Dawley's account—rather a predictable novelty, in view of recent academic trends —is the emphasis on "gender roles" and the attempt to show that sexual and political repression go hand in hand...

...In the absence of workable structures of this kind, the state becomes the plaything of rival interest groups...

...Dawley's debunking of the reform tradition, because it is so moralistic and onesided, may prompt some readers to come to its defense...

...They alternately "rail" and "drone...

...This kind of thing may inspire the party faithful, but it can't very well pass for historical analysis...