The Conservative Majority Myth

...this the circumstance of economic power in the economy has already decided for us...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 123 THE SUCCESS of the conservative syndrome depends on four motivating factors, all powerful in our time...

...There would be contractive effect, in fact, for the tax savings are not as reliably spent as the proceeds of the outlays so curtailed...

...And you will notice that I use the word incomes...

...In any case, we must take people's dislikes as they are...

...It must also keep living costs effectively stable or otherwise protect real wages...

...Highly regressive taxes were raised...

...In buying tax reduction as the magic of the establishment economists, Democrats have bought a slightly modified version of the Hoover trickle-down doctrine...

...This is not combined, unfortunately, with the companion revelation that people of means are infinitely more articulate than anyone else, their spokesmen and intellectual sycophants alone excluded...

...The first is the susceptibility of much of our political comment and many of our political commentators and sages to the rediscovery of the wheel...

...The ultimate tendency (and hope) of our politics is toward two equally conservative parties competing for the great conservative majority...

...But before long we began to find ourselves depicted as "conservatives...

...We are learning, finally, that federal tax reduction, taken by itself, is an inefficient form of stimulation...

...These scholars tell of the intended action, note that it is a potential cause for popular indignation, maybe even mass anguish...

...q Well...

...It is not possible to persuade people—as some economists would—that inflation is an overrated evil...

...For the person wondering how to stretch limited income or savings over urgent needs, who is in anguish that on the next trip to the supermarket there will not be enough in their pockets, inflation is not an overrated evil...

...This is the history of the last seven years...

...It is federal taxes that are reduced...

...In New York it would be caused by the idle and the unions...

...I am speaking of the work of conscientious and -intelligent men, excellent citizens, good friends...

...For they can attack government for indifference, callousness, or incompetence and then justify the attack by making it so...

...The conservatism of contemporary economics manifests itself in two major matters, both vital for the Democratic position...

...That money would have been spent...

...Some inevitably are confined by the institutions they serve...

...We have even had our political labels changed for us...

...That excellent woman, you will recall, was also unblack, unpoor, definitely uninterested in anything as unrefined as women's rights and, you can be sure, deeply concerned about taxes...

...218 million would be from taxes on sales and on meals...

...These instruments of persuasion are brought to bear at all times and with much success on the Congress...

...We won't be worth electing...

...There is only joy for the affluent...

...We know they dislike inflation...

...The only sophisticated policy is their appeasement...

...Government was not thought callous or indifferent or even incompetent in the days of Roosevelt or, for that matter, Lyndon Johnson...

...The only problem is that if Democrats continue on course they will have deserted their natural constituency...

...The original progenitor reads their story and is affirmed in his fears...

...We have only to test our policies by the affluent applause, seek respectability before all else, assume that government must be as bad as under Nixon and Ford, and be guided on controls and taxation by the established economics...

...Its source was the tax reduction and refunds...

...We remain cheerful about all this for one simple reason—the guiding principle which illuminates the essays in this volume...

...Thus the lesson: Liberals can become conservatives, Democrats can become Republicans, we can have not one conservative party but two...

...Thereafter let us spend instead for needed services as a substitute for regressive taxes...

...We must never minimize the importance of good public management and administration...

...If anything, the reverse...

...That is unemployment and recession...

...When Republicans attack government, let us be sure as many as possible know that the government of Richard Nixon or that of Gerald Ford or—let me be nonpartisan—that of George Wallace in Alabama is not our model...

...We should have a name for this phenomenon...

...There is no political future for Democrats in such a debate...

...some additionally are sustained visibly and directly by the banks and corporations they assist or advise...

...Alfred Marshall's warning has been forgotten even here...

...The reduction in spending inevitably affects the services and support of the poor, for defense and business needs are always exempt...

...While the House Ways and Means Committee was discussing the extension of the cut in income taxes last autumn— now I agree inevitable—Secretary Simon, in one of his typically compassionate moods, was urging New York City to raise its sales tax to 10 percent...

...At Last — Something We Agree On...

...that was its last manifestation...

...The purpose is always the same...

...The result, so far as this guidance is accepted, is to divide our political life between conservatives who prefer unemployment over inflation but do not say so and liberals who prefer inflation to unemployment but do not say so...

...In recent years its remedy has become the reduction of federal taxes...

...It is, broadly, whether speech and action are consistent with the comfort and well-being of the affluent, including, needless to say, the people who lead the great financial institutions, man the large corporations...

...This remedy—I speak very deliberately—is a liberal and Democratic disaster...

...A radical is anyone who causes discomfort, or otherwise offends such interests...

...Reprinted, with permission, from New York magazine, copyright © NYM Corporation...

...The civil service of the United States is as honest, effective, and perhaps even as innova124 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS tive as that of any other country...

...Compare this with the volume of expression emanating from Chase Manhattan, Lazard Freres, and Secretary of the Treasury William Simon...

...This is a dull but important business, one that must always be part of our claim to govern...

...It is, I believe, the only successful closedcircuit system for recycling garbage that has yet been devised...

...This is a subtle but powerful influence in our time...

...It was stubbornly honest people in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the IRS, and elsewhere who frustrated the tax evasion, obstruction of justice, subornation of perjury, and constitutional subversion of Richard Nixon and the less imaginative felonies of Spiro Agnew...

...Nothing in recent times has so played into the hands of conservatives...

...The question is how to meet the required conditions of their equitable application and effective administration...

...There was always the danger that tax reduction would be seized upon by conservatives as the excuse for limiting public expenditures—always excluding defense and those in which business has a prime interest...

...In an earlier time it would have been called "The Dayton Housewife Discovery...

...It is to persuade all susceptible citizens, but Democrats, their legislators, and the candidates in particular, that the country has, at long last, moved sharply to the right...

...Let us not, above all, allow anyone to believe that we take the economic management of William Simon and Alan Greenspan—men, as I've often said, who see progress as escape to the 18th century—as our model of what intelligent macroeconomic management can accomplish...

...I propose that it be called "The Conservative Majority Syndrome...

...And the trickle is as unreliable a recovery instrument now as it was then...

...Later, his essay and others were collected in a volume, The New Conservatives: A Critique from the Left, edited by Lewis Coser and Irving Howe...

...He forthrightly communicates his alarm to Messrs...

...If you are in doubt on this point, recall how many welfare recipients you have heard on the question of the profligacy of New York City...

...The Boston Globe, noting the juxtaposition of these events, said they made no sense...

...And what is the test of sound, confidence-inspiring judgment...

...In the same week that the Committee reported out the tax-cut bill, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts agreed on a tax increase of $364 million, all of it in relatively regressive taxes for no others were available...

...THE FINAL BUTTRESS to the conservative syndrome is those whom we may perhaps call the liberal-establishment economists...

...Most economists serve within an institutional framework...

...In a Newsweek column on October 27, he could not have been more forthright: "I am in favor of a federal tax cut at all times—as the only way to exert effective pressure on Congress to keep down federal spending...

...No one, or not many, doubt the importance of this spiral...

...And, of course, by John Lindsay and Abe Beame...

...That is, the powerful and wonderfully persistent devices by which recurrently we are persuaded that conservatism is the wave of the future...

...This is because some inevitably yearn for the establishment applause, test their performance by its volume...

...Those of us who had feared this result must be grateful to him for clarifying a diffiCOMMENTS AND OPINIONS 125 cult point...

...It is offered all but automatically whenever the economy is operating at less than full capacity, which of late has been all the time...

...Next time it must be done seriously...

...And the services of a city already deep in public squalor have been ruthlessly curtailed...

...Most of you will be aware of the conclusion to which this leads me—there must be direct intervention on incomes and prices in the organized sector of the economy...

...That, in those mostly pleasant precincts, was the result of changing population structure, inflation, and recession...

...The prime enemy of the people is the state, save only as it involves itself in the exigent needs of national defense and bankrupt corporations...

...We are, I venture, well on the way...

...The established economics can, in principle, treat unemployment...

...Nor will we be elected...

...We cannot defend either...

...inflation hurts a larger number of people a little...

...it cannot be again, as it was in 1971, for the purpose of getting a Republican president past an election...

...And had the same standards of judgment been brought to bear, the failure would be accepted as a natural manifestation of the law of gravity...

...We should also be thankful to my friend Professor Milton Friedman, a man of great if inconvenient honesty, who also made the conservative position wonderfully clear...

...And once every four years, at about this time in relation to the election, they are directed at the Democratic party and the nation at large...

...But, alas, time, in its ineluctable march, has made them also pillars of the conservative edifice...

...When we began, almost all the editors and contributors would have described themselves as "liberals...

...We have a labor movement in the United States that, on this issue, is quite possibly more reasonable, modern, and nontheological than any other in the world...

...One of the editors would have described himself as a socialist, although not all his colleagues would have done so...

...But let us not join in the currently fashionable tendency to defame either government or those who work for government...

...Having achieved a recession, they are then allowed to attribute the recession to natural cyclical causes, and they are further forgiven for its not preventing the inflation...

...Evans and Novak...

...These statesmen have, we know, only one remedy for inflation...

...It is...

...The third strength of the conservative syndrome lies in the superb tactical position of the Republicans when they are in power—as now...

...DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN in "The American Experiment," Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Issue of the Public Interest, Fall 1975 q 126 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...

...For so long as the established economics ignores the problem of controls, and its counsel is followed, Democrats are left with no viable alternative to conservative mismanagement of the economy...

...So it is not noticed that, by its sheer volume, the voice of the relatively affluenced in our land gets mistaken for the voice of the masses...

...The second support to the conservative syndrome is related: it resides in the deep desire of politicians, Democrats in particular, for respectability...

...Had men of similar competence been in charge of the space program, we would now be digging the boys out of the Grand Canyon...

...It will, as George Meany has reiterated, accept such a policy as long as it is fair and general—as long as it applies equitably to all incomes...

...Thus, in our politics, we test even liberals by their conservatism...

...Not having a cure for inflation, the accepted economics minimizes it as a problem, asserts that at any given time the real economic need is for more growth, more jobs...

...All seek to inspire confidence, convey an aspect of sound judgment...

...The problem for Democrats is not whether to have such controls...

...Alfred Marshall, the great founder of neoclassical (and now conservative) economics, once said that there is nothing an economist should so fear as applause...

...Specifically, it seeks to persuade them that, politically speaking, there are no poor, no aged, no sick, no black, no minorities, no people seriously squeezed by inflation, not many for whom unemployment is a major issue, no one whatever whose health, education, food, shelter, protection from economic abuse or exploitation or even survival itself depends on the services of government...

...How right...

...Certainly nothing should be so damaging to a Democrat as an approving editorial in the Wall Street Journal or the most primitive nod from Evans and Novak...

...Had our public servants not been honest, our case would have been hopeless...

...People who didn't need the money were not using it...

...And out of the service to corporations comes the rather less innocent desire to protect one's income...

...Unemployment hurts a smaller number of people a lot...

...Although the label was given us by the "left," it seems to have been welcomed by liberals and conservatives alike, the former evidently relieved to be rid of us, the latter glad for infrequent recruits...

...It has not had the attention from Democrats that it deserves...

...Out of this comes a largely innocent and natural desire to avoid embarrassing one's colleagues and institutions by urging policies that are at odds with the respectable view...

...So are others...

...that liberty was the first principle of this Republic, that it is the animating principle of the Con - stitution no less than of the Declaration, that it is this which makes us what we are, be we conservative or liberal or, for that matter, socialist—socialists, that is, of the synod with which we commerce...

...This would not have been the case if the money had gone instead to employ people on useful work, maintain or improve public services, provide help to the large cities, prevent lay-offs, ease the burden of state and local welfare costs...

...It cannot in its accepted form deal with such part of the inflation problem as is caused by the wage/price spiral in the industrial sector of the economy...

...He has made acceptance of tax reduction conditional on expenditure reduction, promised the requisite vetoes if the spending reduction is not made good...

...Any trade union leader is right to insist on these conditions...

...The second support to conservatism from the established economics, a very urgent matter, lies in its formula for expanding the economy, for curing unemployment...

...That danger Gerald Ford has now made explicit...

...And again there is no economic stimulation in a shift from progressive federal to regressive state and local taxes...

...In last year's second quarter there was a big bulge in private savings...

...Even those, and I am one, who are celebrated for our patience, our kindly tolerance of human frailty, must be discouraged at the reception that the prophets of the respectable view accord the Simon-Greenspan achievement...

...The self-reinforcing character of our conservatism works with particular force in Washington...

...This reduction comes at a time when states and cities, in consequence of the recession the tax reduction is to cure, are being forced to raise their taxes, and these invariably are taxes on the poor...

...Instead there are in this Republic only indignant taxpayers deeply angry about the willful idleness of the unemployed...

...Its special manifestation is the recurrent discovery, offered each time as a breath-taking revelation of only slightly less than scriptural impact, that people of means would rather not pay taxes...

...Much of what was once called liberal economics has become very conservative in our time...

...And if it succeeds, it also means—much more than incidentally—that there is no expansive effect at all from the tax reduction...

...Here I must proceed tactfully...

...For, as Harry Truman once observed, given the choice between two conservative parties, people will always choose the one that is honestly and deliberately so...

...I must add a special word here...

...As I've said, last year's tax policy is over the dam...

...The Westchester County budget, it was announced in mid-November, will rise by 22 percent in 1976...

...There some public official to whom Andrew Mellon would seem advanced identifies an action as likely to cause pain to the privileged...

...This had something of a New York "fraction" fight about it, as many of these writers were friends, and almost all were honorable men...

...In time, a new term"neoconservative"—was invented for us (more specifically, for myself, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Bell) by the socialist writer Michael Harrington...

...These in substantial though not exclusive part are levied on middle- and upper-income brackets of the personal income tax and on corporations...

...I have always thought that both she and Dayton were greatly libeled...