Thunder on the Right?
Lekachman, Robert & H., I. & McCarthy, Colman & Meyerson, Harold & Connolly, Peter & Avishai, Bernard
It's almost like completing a circle. Dissent marks its 25th Anniversary with an issue featuring articles on the swing to the right in American politics and intellectual life. When we started in...
...The contradiction here is that those programs are chronically underfunded...
...that engendered the barbaric policy still prevalent in some sections of the state of denying hospital facilities to sick or injured undocumented workers...
...A bitter, almost European-fascist ideology based on a warped concept of class struggle simply does not fit congressional behavior...
...Look for someone to blame, not someone to follow...
...They have learned (what better teacher could they have had than Begin himself) that they cannot, and should not, defy American interests in Egypt and the Gulf, nor foil American designs on Syria...
...The first seems to be a suggestion that existing rates are prohibitively high...
...and the mentally ill admitted on an emergency basis to Los Angeles public hospitals have endured day-long waits in jail before the proper facilities could be made available...
...Still, selfinterest requires respectable intellectual covering...
...the city of Oakland has managed to abolish an office and eliminate any prospect of citizen complaint in one and the same act: it has closed down its City Hall switchboard...
...national no-fault auto insurance...
...Howard Jarvis sometimes seems like a creation of Kevin Phillips...
...Commentary has featured in recent months articles retrospectively justifying the morality of America's Vietnam intervention and defending the motivations behind Proposition 13...
...They often strike a neoChestertonian, Merrie-America note...
...Its proponents, such as Congressmen Jack Kemp and William Steiger, and former Wall Street Journal editorialist Jude Wanniski, argue for a massive reduction in taxes and a general shrinkage in the size of government...
...Traditional conservatives do not now display, it is true, the venomous provincialism, anti-European isolationism, and anti-Semitism that distinguished their forebears...
...Sadat can, in practice, remain aloof from Palestinian demands for an independent state, but he cannot repudiate such demands nor be openly reconciled to an Israel that does...
...The one exception to this rule stems from the inadvertent conversion of the state into a laboratory for the failures of trickle-down economics...
...Every day's mail seems mainly to be composed of bitter letters decrying lesbian plots to extend the ratification deadline for ERA, strident calls for a balanced budget coupled with threats of defeat, denunciations of the "giveaway" of the "American Canal in Panama" at the behest of "New York bankers," and tirades on governmentasparasite...
...San Bernardino County parks, formerly open seven days a week, now are open five...
...q The emerging code word is "big-spending liberal...
...Liberals, it is being said, are the big spenders and wasters...
...Today this means the conservatizing of liberalism, a phenomenon at least as troubling as the rise of the right...
...Even the labor movement, though alarmed by what has been happening, has not been able to mobilize much political strength—not in Congress, not in the cities...
...Summer schools have been abolished for the foreseeable future...
...Begin would have the support of his current coalition to reject any suspension of settlement activity...
...and where the hiring freeze can be eluded, the wage freeze has put public institutions into a noncompetitive position with their private counterparts...
...During the 1970s, capital formation has been sluggish in all the 18 developed nations, whether like Japan they are kind to capitalists, or like Sweden egalitarian in tax policy, or somewhere between...
...Israel's signing of a peace treaty with Egypt will do little more than consolidate and extend the reciprocal interests that had evolved between them since Kissinger's shuttles (Israeli intelligence, remember, has served more than once both Egypt and the royal Saudi family against the conspiracies of Soviet clients, e.g., Libya...
...John Tower (R-Texas), John Rhodes (R-Ariz...
...Tradition is the only social source of health, and modern life itself is frequently envisaged as a kind of distemper...
...That Brownism is self-contradictory is not to deny (and perhaps is to assert) its appeal...
...A friend who works for Senator Bentsen told me that Bentsen's vote for the Canal Treaty 'not only prompted piles of vituperative letters from outraged Texas patriots but also many death threats...
...As yet, "only" 5,000 public employees have been laid off in the state...
...Laffer emphasizes the truism that tax rates, set too high, will discourage effort and promote so much evasion that actual receipts at punitive levels will generate less revenue than more humane alternatives...
...But the down-payment on peace that was extracted from Israel at the summit—i.e., the net cost of rebuilding the army and air bases in the Negev, the loss of Sinai oil revenues, the compensation to settler families, etc.—constitute a huge projected drain on Israel's budget (more than $4 billion...
...Brownism's reductio ad absurdum was reached last summer when Brown signed into law a bill granting collective-bargaining rights to community college staff workers—rights that had already been abrogated by the `fairly hard fiscal policy" of the Jarvis bailout wage freeze that Brown himself had devised...
...Much of this can be written off as the work of cranks, but it has a cumulative effect...
...that the marriage of selfindulgence and social penury that defines the '70s will not damage a perilously fragile society...
...The careers of Goldwater, Curtis, and Tower are Reprinted, with permission, from the Washington Post and International Herald Tribune...
...He is a man whose pragmatic conclusions with regard to the North Sinai settlements, Palestinian rights, etc., are still inconsistent with his transcendental premises...
...The 1.5 million recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children received no cost-of-living increases this year...
...Almost four-fifths of Israelis polled in September endorsed the two framework documents, and an even larger number approved the performance of the political leadership that engineered the compromise...
...The Laffer curve and Kemp-Roth are too much for that devoted (but intelligent) conservative Herbert Stein who found himself opposing them in the rare and presumably unwelcome company of Walter Heller...
...MORE TO THE POINT —and this may be Camp David's most significant result—the annexationist logic of Gush Emunim and the Land of Israel movement (settlements equal land equals security equals Zionism equals Redemption) has been ruptured by a stroke of Begin's pen...
...Self-interest as usual explains much of the business and media clamor for tax relief...
...Mental health programs have suffered in most cities...
...For similar reasons, rich individuals will buy new corporate securities only if they get to keep the bulk of the capital gains on their more successful ventures...
...In a party that treats Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford as major figures there is no reason for an ex-quarterback to be needlessly humble...
...The linchpin of that conservatism in pre-13 days was Brown's unwillingness to spend any of the state surplus (which was reaching $6 billion) on job creation, even though the state's unemployment rate was steadily I percent higher than the nation's...
...These are expenditures that would seem justified only if they were a prelude to the opening of the Egyptian market to Israeli manufactured goods, professional services, and technology, and if defense costs could be substantially reduced...
...Both unconventional Jerry Brown and bland Evelle Younger, the Republican challenger, ran a campaign of cutbacks each proclaiming his commitment to a constitutional "spending limitation," attacking his opponent for "overspending," preaching the gospel of cheaper is better, less is more...
...Copyright© 1978 by the Washington Post Company...
...A partial listing of progressive measures that failed to survive the Capitol Hill obstacle course would include any type of welfare reform, tax reform, labor reform, or national health insurance...
...There are a few exceptions to this trend...
...These common suspicions are not groundless...
...Such, at least, is the hope of the urbane and cerebral young officers of "Peace Now" who are broadly seen to have been vindicated by the actions of Israeli leaders at Camp David and who now personify the "national consensus" in Israeli editorials more readily than the messianic settlers of Gush Emunim...
...He has, with 23 Carter's encouragement, been promoting Camp David as the foundation of a comprehensive peace: both are eager to entice Hussein and West Bank Palestinians to participate in the autonomy plan and thus ensure that this plan will yield the alternative Palestinian leadership it was conceived to evolve: both are eager to secure Saudi patience...
...Not the least important consequence of the summit is that most Israelis are asking themselves why she did not...
...This trend culminated in the Senate's 5828 vote in July for a balanced budget by 1981—a pledge that, if kept, will doom all meaningful social legislation for the indefinite future...
...ALL OF THIS is dangerous nonsense...
...They believe that at the end of the Laffer curve lies electoral dominance, and they may be right...
...Since the passage of Jarvis, both state and local governments have been devising alternate means of collecting revenues, but the plans that have been enacted have been preponderantly regressive...
...The Palestinian issue appears to keep the whole deal in jeopardy, while Israel's economic hardships, and nerve-racking dependence on American aid, continue to grow...
...At last...
...The unions don't know what has hit them...
...The comparable figures for California's 58 counties are an 11.3 percent average increase over the last 10 years, a 5.3 percent increase this year...
...We have no McCarthyism today, and that is good...
...The poor and the rich pay slightly higher percentages of gross income than the vast majority...
...he has enacted by executive order a state spending limit...
...Even before 13's passage turned public policy overtly against the young, the old, and the poor, the fiscal conservatism of the Brown administration had given rise to episodes of extraordinary social meanness...
...The reasons for this semistrike by capital are nearly as numerous as the theorists, an essay for another occasion...
...But White House emissaries to Capitol Hill do often combine elitist arrogance, political tone-deafness, and simple lack of knowledge so as to retard the progress of the President's programs...
...Then, with everyone thinking petty together, we won't notice how small we have become, 0 The choice confronting California voters in November's gubernatorial election was between Jarvis hip and Jarvis square...
...His support from the majority of the Likud—i.e., from the more sycophantic members of Herut, the doveish Liberal faction, etc.—is firm, and he could increase his hold on the growing Israeli center by digesting Yigael Yadin's weakened "Democratic Movement" and purging the Likud of frenetic and chauvinist hawks such as Geula Cohen and Moshe Shamir...
...How much encouragement do the rich need...
...Despite a $5 billion bailout from Sacramento, Jarvis-Gann has cut deeply into municipal services...
...The Haydenistas have been wooed by his commitment to solar energy...
...Still, it helps to account for Israelis' earnest celebration of the Camp David agreement despite their skeptical attitude toward its provisions...
...The second is an econometric flight of fancy, a promise that, relieved of tax oppression, talented, energetic, and avaricious individuals will invest with abandon and work with unwonted enthusiasm...
...It is, I believe, a revivified conservatism, which draws strength from two older and two new kinds of right-wing attitudes...
...This was to be a conservatism based not so much on laissez-faire economics as on cultural hostility...
...Were they to accept autonomy they would quickly preside over a political faction greater than any combination of Jewish settlements and would be in an excellent position to press for full independence, achieve international recognition, and, given a manifest demonstration of peaceful intentions toward Israel and Jordan, earn the goodwill of the Carter administration...
...It is said that one reason George Wallace decided not to run for the Senate was a correct perception that he would be radically out of place there...
...The final wellspring of the conservative revival is that strain of ideology now known as neoconservatism...
...Even now, Labor-affiliated agrarian movements are agitating for the protection of their settlements in North Sinai, the Golan, and the West Bank...
...Every analysis of Proposition 13 affirms that citizens are willing to think big...
...they gave too much credence to all the talk about social harmony...
...He sees this as evidence that the rightward trend is rather superficial, not deep-going...
...Public-spirited as the men at the head of our great corporations notoriously are, they do get discouraged by the exactions of the Internal Revenue Service...
...LIBERALS, such as economist Walter Heller, have generally been content to skewer the faulty economic arguments and lack of historical perspective of those entranced by the "Laffer curve...
...On the other hand—and this is an accomplishment that eluded Dukakis and continues to elude Carter—Brown has been able to move right without substantially alienating the bulk of his progressive support...
...Moreover, since the early 1960s the trend has been in the direction of especially gentle treatment of profits and large individual incomes...
...The moderates no longer need hesitate to attack the "realistic" image of monolithic Arab enmity and perpetual war...
...Our saviors, once their hearts are uplifted and their purses fattened, are of course the business community and their affluent allies...
...The most widely instituted regressive levy has been the pay-at-thedoor user fee, which scores of municipalities have imposed not only on visitors to museums and parks but also on those who call ambulances or paramedics...
...Such a peace treaty is not a small achievement...
...Over the past decade, California's 417 cities have had an average yearly increase in expenditures of 11.4 percent...
...As finally enacted, the Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment bill is an empty gesture that mocks the hopes of those whom social scientists refer to as the "structurally unemployed...
...As with all political code words—"law and order," "national security," "peace through preparedness"—a legitimate sentiment is being garbled by shorthand...
...On the other hand, the agency established to enforce the rollback in Los Angeles's 638,000 rental units has a staff of seven: tenant protection, Jarvis-style...
...others I have tried to grapple with in a long essay, "The Right Menace," in the New Republic, September 8, 1978...
...But progress toward full normal relations, Israelis instinctively know, will continue to be impeded by the Palestinian issue about which Begin and Sadat remain ideologically incompatible and to which each leader seems more vulnerable at home...
...President Carter's legislative proposals have been moderately liberal and his Administration, at the staff level, is largely composed of veterans of past liberal campaigns and the public-interest law community...
...The Democrats possess sizable margins in the Senate and House, and the Democratic leadership in both bodies is more liberal than it has been in a generation...
...but mostly it seems the result of genuine bewilderment...
...The second strain is the right-wing populism, which was reborn in the '60s...
...Yet, populist conservatism has not yet made a major impact in Congress...
...Ninety-two percent approved the comportment of Defense Minister Weizman, who is most identified with the American-backed land for peace strategy in the Sinai...
...Much more likely is a scary inflation, which frightens the Federal Reserve into the sort of monetary policies that precipitate a disastrous new recession...
...It perfectly suits the genial, selfabsorbed, fashionable, "laid-back" callousness of the late '70s...
...In so doing, they have missed the enormous potential appeal of this idea and the political shrewdness of its proponents...
...Lower rates applied to a much larger tax base will work this magic...
...For the question to be asked is: which of the conflicting sociopolitical impulses ("antispending"/" more social services" in shorthand) is the stronger now...
...It is symptomatic that Irving Kristol, perhaps the most influential neoconservative intellectual, has become a leading advisor to Jack Kemp, the fast-rising congressman from New York...
...Balance the budget, less money for social welfare boondoggles, more for worldwide anti-Communism, praise for the farmer, distrust of the city, and, above all, hatred of the "bureaucrat" and love for the businessman...
...In Congress, it is the knees of hearty conservatives like Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz...
...We show no more than proper gratitude when we encourage Congress and the President to lighten imposts on capital gains, soften the bite of the minimum income tax, reduce still further the progressivity of personal income-tax schedules, and shave a few percentage points off corporate profits levies...
...You can see it also in the steady shift of the Carter administration rightward—in its willingness to accept "compromises" on energy and taxes, which yield windfalls to the rich, in its chosen stance of chilly distance from the labor movement...
...But even if a few more pennies are squeezed out of Congress, only about 25 percent of the eligible children will be served...
...How strong is the rightward trend...
...No need to hold as many New York City bonds and notes so long as other modes of sheltering earnings were available...
...This effect has recently been reinforced by the defeats of Congressman Fraser in the Minnesota Senate primary and Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts by strident reactionaries...
...Any reduction of taxes threatens social programs...
...The labor movement had been held in his camp by his extension of collective-bargaining rights to farmworkers and public employees and by his many prolabor appointments...
...Partly this may be due to an aging leadership that has lost its combative elan...
...For while Proposition 13 rebated over $4 billion to corporations and landlords, prices and, more spectacularly, rents have continued to 21 rise...
...Next to this fear of the public mood, the incompetence of some Administration lobbyists is not that important...
...The income tax reduction is regressive and unjust...
...The percentage of federal revenues derived from taxes on corporate profits has steadily declined...
...Even more equitable tax reduction is inferior to enlightened use of the same sums on job creation, welfare reform, urban revival, and the beginnings of national health...
...smaller cities have closed their branch libraries...
...The sharpest cuts have come at the expense of the most vulnerable...
...Only Switzerland and Japan inflict lighter taxes than the United States...
...The message from this mix of ironies and contradictions is that you are a big spender if you want to lay out government money for people, but you are fiscally responsible if you pump money into weapons, dams, nuclear power plants...
...It would be foolish to delude, or console, ourselves with mere scannings of public-opinion polls and even electoral results...
...And if a leader does emerge—perhaps a president who dares cut money for useless water projects or defies the military by halting funds for a bomber—cut him down to size...
...Since, as Stein observed, comparatively little unused factory capacity remains available, a tax cut of $50-60 billion each year will vastly enlarge consumer spending and impart a decidedly unneeded additional impetus to inflation...
...Laffer himself concedes that the point is speculative...
...Daniel Boorstin, a premature neoconservative, has written at length on the "genius" of American politics...
...They honor him for his tax cut proposal of 1963, which was enacted into law in 1964...
...AS FAIRY TALES GO, this one ranks comparatively high...
...No doubt, intense resistance to further withdrawals of settlements or to the suspension of plans for new ones will persist: the West Bank elicits much more passion than the Sinai, not only from Scripture hawks, but also for the more reactionary wings of the old labor movement (Tnuat Hamoshavim, Kibbutz Hameuchad, etc...
...So many loopholes have been thoughtfully written into the tax code that some of our largest multinationals pay almost no taxes...
...Apparently, libraries are widely regarded as the most frivolous (or dangerous) cultural amenity...
...As we make up this issue, that is decidedly less certain...
...If Great Society liberalism is increasingly moribund in Congress, what is supplanting it...
...Nor can this bleak legislative box score begin to convey the squalid atmosphere of the Senate floor, where increasingly confident conservatives dominate all discussions with endless reiterations of the need for an end to "wasteful" social spending and ceaseless crocodile tears on behalf of oppressed suburbia...
...The social meaning of the bizarre partnership is wonderful to contemplate...
...The most significant new legislation is indicative of the present conservative mood in Congress...
...Correspondingly, Israeli moderates and, it turns out, there are many when events engender optimism—are now in a postion to argue for the preservation of an established peace, for which the terms were negotiated by muscular nationalists...
...Yet, it is precisely when Israelis are pressed to speculate on developments entailed by their own broader views that they are most troubled...
...There are differences, of course...
...Nor is there any guarantee that the state will continue to amass the kind of surplus that enabled it to rebate $5 billion to localities this year...
...Investors suffer the losses from ill-advised decisions...
...For present purposes, it suffices to repeat that American taxes are on the low side, the tax code is especially kind to business, and the attempt to explain a puzzling global phenomenon by an inaccurate representation of domestic policies intellectually shoddy...
...otherwise he will face a crisis within the coalition...
...Much of this is almost laughable: the Goldwaters and Curtises in costume as fiscal watchdogs, when offstage they are lapdogs of the special interests...
...The framework agreements thus provide the makings of an intense test of strength between the Israeli Prime Minister and American leaders with, Israelis readily understand, the issue of Jewish settlements in "Judea and Samaria" dominating and subverting bilateral relations between Israel and Egypt...
...On one hand, Brown has imposed freezes on wages, hiring, welfare benefits...
...Its ideologists, Kevin Phillips and William Rusher, dreamed of uniting the white working, middle, and "producer" upper classes into a ferocious crusade against bureaucrats, planners, foundation executives, and welfare recipients...
...Few political dialogues have so closely approached 20 a monologue, few have offered so little hope to those most in need of public services...
...But it has none of the pinched, narrow qualities of traditional conservatism or the bitter, off-putting resentments of Wallaceism...
...Has the Treasury really crowded out the private borrowers...
...As for the powerful and wealthy—those already standing tall—Western conservatives protect them well through their work on the Senate Finance Committee...
...The number of traditional conservatives in Congress was blessedly reduced by the antiGoldwater landslide of 1964 and the Watergate election of 1974, but they still form the bulk of the disciplined Republican minorities and the solid bloc of Southern conservative Democrats...
...For there is a "law" of democratic politics: whichever side pushes back its opponent not only gains a practical advantage in the shifting relationships of social power, it succeeds in significantly transforming its opponents' thought, style, language...
...q Howard Jarvis stumps the country preaching salvation through lower taxes...
...Such endorsements should, however, not be construed as support only for the obviously seductive peace with Egypt: Camp David's autonomy plan for the Palestinians (i.e., the recognition of their "legitimate rights," the termination of the military government and corresponding dependence on Jordanian police to keep the peace on the West Bank, the contraction of the I DF to 6,000 troops in specified enclaves, the plan's "transitional character," the seeming discouragement of new Jewish settlements) all were contrived to accommodate the goals of the Brookings report, not Likud's platform, and most Israelis seem to know it...
...I have seen Senator Jesse Helms, an ultraconservative, put his arm around George McGovern and talk to him as though McGovern were a North Carolina tobacco farmer...
...q The 95th Congress has been a disaster for American liberalism...
...and others that jerk when tapped by the rubber hammer of a money bill for their expensive favorites—weapons, perhaps, or dams, agribusiness subsidies of power plants...
...The fact is that Americans are less burdened than the residents of most other advanced communities...
...Begin could probably overcome such future difficulties by calling an election soon after the pact with Egypt is signed...
...You can see it in the undignified retreat of liberal (or "liberal") politicians, who announce that they can "cut spending" better than the conservatives...
...Oh, incidentally, after a short pause tax receipts will rebound to previous levels and beyond...
...Corporate planners, pondering speculative outlays on research and development, plant retooling, and product innovation will take more chances when the corporation stands to keep more of the profits...
...You can see it not only in the enormous increase of corporate advertising that praises the virtue of "free enterprise," or the growing number, influence, and prosperity of the conservative intellectuals...
...On current form, what the boys do spend flows either overseas or into acquisitions of smaller companies...
...These are sums that would otherwise be available and at lower rates of interest to corporate borrowers for productive purposes...
...BAD AS 13's socioeconomic consequences may be, its effect on the political climate has been even more dismal...
...For the message of Brownism is simply this: that you can be liberal and concerned and hip and not have to pay for it...
...According to an authoritative Brookings study, the American tax system is, except at the very top and the very bottom, roughly proportional...
...Voters are sick of government waste, weary of politicians who solve problems by throwing money at them, and bloodied in their hides by vicious tax bites...
...every library department in the state has had its book-purchasing funds cut at least in half...
...The Nobel-anointed prestige of the peacemaker, in which he seems to genuinely delight, may not finally attract him as much as the birthright—which, he thinks, the Americans would induce him to sell for a mess of pottage...
...Over 60 percent expressed doubt that a comprehensive peace would finally be concluded...
...In some cases, like that of Nebraska's benighted Carl Curtis, they are literally the same people...
...For we may suspect that the right will soon reach its natural limit in American politics, with a few Republican victories and more Republican losses, while an increasingly pusillanimous American liberalism will acquiesce in a Democratic party Carterized into a "pragmatism" without substance...
...Anti-red lining, antismog regulations, and farm labor laws—all these are compatible with a fairly hard fiscal policy...
...From attacks on WPA "leaf-raking" to gleeful exposes of artists getting CETA grants, this mentality has withstood the ravages of time...
...Government social action is generally seen as stemming from naive and destructive meliorative impulses, which sometimes mask a thrust for power by the "new class...
...If you want more nuclear aircraft carriers or missiles, you are everything a fine American cowboy should be: tough, hard-talking, and not one to be shoved around by the effete feds in Washington...
...Over the horizon is a noninflationary era of full employment, better things for better living, smaller government and unbounded individual freedom...
...Moreover, the President, at least prior to his (perhaps short-lived) Middle East summit triumph, has not been able to inspire trust, respect, loyalty, or simple liking in Congress, even among those Democratic centrists who ought to be his natural allies...
...I have no quick or certain answers, but a few questions can at least be posed: are we witnessing a revolt of middle-class and skilled-working-class beneficiaries of the welfare state, those helped by it to a modest affluence enabling them, say, to buy modest homes and now, hard-pressed by taxes and inflation, unwilling or unable to accept a politics that would help other, newly arising segments of the population...
...Prior to the accords there existed no definite political program to which moderate Palestinians—i.e., those angling for a Palestinian state at peace alongside Israel—could honorably subscribe without laying themselves open to charges of defeatism and treachery...
...Begin may never agree to such a prospect, but he will certainly not do so now, that is, while the PLO, to which virtually all West Bank leaders defer, refuses to renounce terror against Israeli civilians, let alone accept the terms of the Camp David agenda...
...By world criteria, Americans get off lightly...
...Carl Curtis (R-Neb...
...It remains to be seen if responsible Palestinian leaders have the courage and guile to reinforce such images before they are blown apart by some terrorist's bomb...
...The danger is that the whole country will come to the same conclusion...
...that public expectations can and should be lowered and personal aspirations raised without injury to conscience...
...Curtis and Clifford P. Hansen (R-Wyo...
...But the intellectual level of present-day conservatism is decidedly lower than that of its '50s predecessor, and politically the current rightward trend is deadlier, nastier, and more dangerous than what we had in the 'SOs...
...THESE PROBLEMS CONSIDERED —and Israelis consider them—it is still an open question whether Palestinian autonomy can be put into practice at all or whether Israeli-Egyptian peace can thrive in its absence...
...Conservatives like Milton Friedman who did support Proposition 13 and now favor Kemp-Roth do so precisely because their unconcealed major objective is contraction of the public sector and enlargement of the private economy...
...These people view the prospect of retarded settlement as further evidence of their having been swamped by the urban, bourgeois, and largely Sephardic "other Israel" that swept the Likud into power in the last election, and who are further demoralized by the collapse of their own self-congratulatory equation of national security with collective pioneering in the West Bank and the Golan...
...WHY THIS RIGHTWARD SHIFT...
...While libraries are generally forbidden to charge for their services, museums are not: the Los Angeles County Museums of Art and of Natural History both have instituted admission fees, with resulting declines in attendance of 44 and 62 percent, respectively...
...in their first post13 budgets, that increase fell to 4.6 percent—a little over half the annual inflation rate...
...There is little doubt that Begin would win a substantial parliamentary majority were he to adopt this strategy and, along with Dayan and Weizman, commit the country to the peace process he helped to initiate...
...He would not get much of a fight from the Labor party, which is still hopelessly divided under the unlikely leadership of Shimon Peres, Dayan's old political fixer who, were pedigrees to count, would also be more at home in the Likud...
...Los Angeles City libraries have moved their closing time from 9 to 8 P.M...
...If money is to be gambled, the punters must be assured of a golden jackpot for the winners...
...The Dutch, Swedes, French, British, West Germans, Canadians, and Italians all pay more...
...Neoconservatives emphasize the fragility of democratic institutions, the problem of unanticipated consequences of social programs, and the mysterious and precarious qualities of healthy communities...
...Its nature has been discussed at length in these pages and elsewhere and one need mention its central tenets only cursorily...
...He has been promoting Camp David among his hard-line allies in Israel as a separate peace, which will permit him to avoid doing so...
...In the interim, a state-imposed hiring freeze is contributing to a reduction in public services...
...Albert Shanker, an intelligent man, has recently written that the polls indicate many of the people who have yielded to the "antispending" furor also favor continuation, perhaps even expansion of social services...
...But the preeminent political consequence of Jarvis fever is the supplanting of liberalism by Brownism, a doctrine that the Governor defined in the October 23, 1978, issue of Time: "It's what I call mixing frugality with compassion," Brown stated...
...Is this a last spasm of social sullenness before we are dragged inexorably into that centrally managed economy that Robert Heilbroner foresees as the next stage of capitalism...
...But if Brownism is a stunning success as a political strategy, it is ultimately self-negating as an ideology...
...That such displays of bad faith are equivalent is of little consolation to those in Israel for whom peace has become a tangible hope and Camp David, they fear, an elaborate trap...
...a bill establishing a consumer protection agency...
...One of the reasons why Citibank, Chase, and the other major New York money-market banks lost interest in municipal securities and thus precipitated the 1975 local crisis was the abundance of tax-avoidance devices otherwise available...
...But this was not their fear before Camp David in light of Egypt's permanent interests...
...Investment appears to be a no-win proposition...
...Besides, Labor never delivered a peace treaty during the "ancien regime" and it is not clear that moderates within the party would ever have been able to do so if Begin remained in command of the opposition...
...The cutbacks made by the municipalities (or mandated by the state as a condition for receiving the bailout) fall into two categories: "unessential" services, with particular emphasis on cultural and recreational activities, and any services that disproportionately benefit the powerless...
...This movement's hero is, of all people, John F. Kennedy, whom conservatives loathed when alive...
...You are a screwy-headed liberal if you want money for projects to feed children or to clean the filthy air...
...It worms its way, so to speak, into the mind of the other side...
...Sadat is also expecting American pressure on Israel to continue to serve as the operative link between the Israeli-Egyptian peace and Palestinian autonomy and to prevent any further Jewish encroachments on Arab areas of historic Palestine...
...And, just to make matters worse, congressional and executive profligacy have combined to crowd private borrowers out of credit markets...
...A skilled worker who has to make his mortgage payments on his own home may still favor national health insurance, but if he is swept along by the current demagogy—to say nothing of the reality of his skewed local taxes, which makes life hard for him—then, in behalf of political realism, it must be acknowledged that there is a significant turn to the right...
...By so doing, the left may also provide some support to its allies in Congress, who are just now greatly in need of any evidence that the U.S...
...In a stunning ideological coup, the two groups have been reconciled by the magic of the Laffer curve and its legislative embodiment, the Kemp-Roth proposal to slash federal taxes by a third over a three-year period...
...Nevertheless, I think there is a danger of underestimating the progress that was made at Camp David on this most abrasive question, particularly if we ignore the summit's less perceptible but substantial effect on each side's political discourse...
...To be sure, the seething resentments that Phillips discerned and vainly hoped to mold into a coherent outlook still exist in the country...
...Above all, you can see it in the fact that the right has seized the political and intellectual initiative, so much so that whatever political debate we have is taking place on its chosen terrain...
...In fact, over 50 percent expect that the plan will lead to an independent Palestinian state in spite of Begin's assurances to the contrary...
...Most important, Lafferism casts liberal Democrats in the role of nay-sayers, advocates of the need for "responsibility," of maintaining a not too unbalanced budget, of a duty to help the poor, of promoting growth-inhibiting environmental standards, of defending an unsatisfactory status quo...
...If responsible liberals can no longer promise a boundless future, Lafferites can and do...
...Kennedy has his extraordinary family charisma to rely upon, and this provides him some protection from the current temper that most other politicians don't have...
...This is, I suppose, a subtle distinction...
...Different versions of a college tuition tax credit, long sought by congressional spokesmen for the upper middle class, were finally passed by both Houses, though neither version became law due to a credible and praiseworthy veto threat by the President...
...How much of our total income should go to government...
...Well, last September Business Week, no enemy of free enterprise, concluded that our 545 largest corporations had accumulated $80 billion in unused, ready cash...
...WHAT IS HAPPENING...
...For Lafferism attracts traditional conservatives who abhor government spending as well as hard-eyed, right-wing populists who hate to see their money spent on sex education, racial quotas, or soft loans to Tanzania...
...The Children's Defense Fund, for example, is fighting this year for several bills involving more money for education and health...
...enough to be able to ask the questions...
...Traditional conservatives make the same arguments now that they made in 1936...
...He has not prepared the Israeli public for further concessions...
...Senators Jackson and Moynihan hate the Soviet government and all its works, but they do not yet believe that federally assisted housing harms the moral fiber of those who live in it...
...The crowding-out plaint, a favorite of the egregious William Simon, stresses the undoubted fact that the Treasury finances federal deficits, recently in the $50-60 billion range, by selling notes, bills, and bonds to individuals and institutions in the private sector...
...One result has been the first significant tenant movement in the history of the state...
...To what extent—surely to some extent!—is there an element of racism in this reaction, a no longer veiled contempt for "welfare blacks...
...What is lost in the translation of "big-spending liberals" is that much for the opposite case can be made...
...that has given rise to one of the foulest pieces of social legislation in years: the Briggs initiative to remove gays and those who support their rights from the shrinking teaching market...
...Israelis do not fear renewed Egyptian involvement in a pan-Arab, pro-Palestinian Jihad...
...In foreign policy, neoconservatives are often the most 16 simplistic of anti-Communists and hold the strategic wisdom of George Meany in high regard...
...Successive revisions have transformed the numbers to a 14-50 range, covering wages and salaries, and a 14-70 range applicable to income from property...
...Golda Meir, who greeted the news from Camp David with thoughtless indignation, complained that she could have made "a peace like that" long ago...
...But meanwhile, let us not delude ourselves about what is happening: it's not good...
...At the end of the Korean conflict, personal income-tax rates ranged between 20 and 91 percent...
...IN A SIMILAR vein, the only corporations that have passed along their rebates to consumers are regulated monopolies forced to do so by the Public Utilities Commission...
...Seven countries, including the exemplary West Germans, start taxes on personal incomes at rates higher than our 14 percent...
...In the words of Nicholas von Hoffman, "The boys have got the money, only they won't spend it...
...It's all so simple...
...Code words about liberal spenders do no more than send the public back beneath its rock with the message "think petty...
...Some of these matters are touched upon in the articles that follow...
...And a record defense 14 budget of $116 billion sailed through Congress with minimal scrutiny...
...Jerusalem, November 15 I sraeli Jews assume diplomacy to be less the art of the possible than the ritual forestalling of disaster...
...But connoisseurs of American political malignity could catch a whiff of this old attitude in Senator Robert Dole's snide remark about "Democrat wars," including the one against Hitler, in his 1976 debate with Walter Mondale...
...We hope, of course, that a treaty will soon be signed: but whatever the outcome of the current impasse in negotiations, we think that Bernard Avishai's description of the Israeli scene remains valuable.—EDS...
...This movement toward coalition may ultimately be of considerable political importance...
...The Los Angeles City Council has been forced to enact an unprecedented six-month rent rollback and freeze, and rent-control ordinances were placed on the November ballot in San Francisco, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Davis, and Santa Cruz—a list suggesting students may at least be developing a tenant consciousness...
...No, more troubling...
...One might also argue that Begin and Dayan encourage Palestinian rejectionism—perhaps deliberately— by dismissing even the principle of Palestinian selfdetermination and promising new West Bank settlements to boot...
...It could all get much worse very quickly...
...The strategic concessions that Israel made at Camp David were insignificant: settlements are worthless in the face of modern weaponry, and a demilitarized Sinai is as good as one controlled by the Israeli army, maybe better...
...representation constitutional amendment) or, rightly or wrongly, when they perceived a genuine national, usually foreign-policy, interest to be at stake (Panama Treaty, natural gas pricing compromise, Mideast arms sales, ending the Turkish arms embargo...
...Senator 13 Edward Kennedy, clearly trying to look beyond the immediate moment, has staked out a position slightly to the left of President Carter (about as far to the left as the Russian Tea Room is from Carnegie Hall...
...Lafferites cast themselves in the image of JFK, genial but tough, wanting to let the people keep their own money to pursue their own happiness in their own way...
...Being Western-state conservatives, they are bolstered by the image of the cowboy: the selfreliant, hard worker whose boots have those sacred straps by which conservatives love the poor to pull themselves up...
...So Israelis cannot but consider Camp David to be a comprehensive diplomatic agenda that might eventually establish Israel's status in the Middle East and in global affairs...
...q 25...
...One may argue that West Bank leaders are impeachably shortsighted...
...However, in the intellectual sphere, there lately have appeared signs of a putative alliance between neoconservatives and other types of conservatives discussed above...
...Yet it was precisely this climate of scarce jobs and withheld public funds that fostered the Yellow Peril scare campaign against immigrant Vietnamese refugees (a campaign orchestrated by the Brown administration lest it have to foot the bill...
...One of the country's best congressmen, Don Fraser, loses to a millionaire convert to the same gospel, and Vice President Mondale travels to his home state to urge his fellow Democrats to back the winner in memory of Hubert and in deference to him...
...Lower taxes mean more economic growth and a return to the Golden Age of annual, automatic improvement in practically every family's standard of life...
...the state grows darker as street lighting is reduced in many cities...
...Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza (Kawasme, Shawa, and even pro-Jordanians such as Freji) have already declared that they will not participate unless they receive assurances in advance that autonomy will ultimately produce a Palestinian state...
...There is an additional foreseeable consequence of Kemp-Roth...
...This, they maintain, will unleash the productive genius of the American people, giving us painless prosperity and even higher absolute tax revenues for the hated government...
...they aren't, in many instances, ready to get back to the traditional postures of struggle, though it looks as if they'll have to...
...Conservative mood and ineffable White House maladroitness are both very real to liberal members of Congress...
...Tens of thousands demonstrated their apprehensions still more graphically by jamming the beaches of Sinai over the Succot holidays, as if to prepare for another prolonged struggle with claustrophobia...
...These elections may not have the national significance universally ascribed to them on Capitol Hill but they certainly are disquieting to congressmen with well-known liberal voting records...
...Certainly, Brownism itself is compatible with political popularity: it has enabled him to outflank his Republican opposition on both the left and the right...
...Congressional politics demands geniality and the blurring of distinctions...
...Nor do they now doubt— particularly after Undersecretary Saunders's explicit clarificiations for Hussein and some Palestinians—that the Carter administration views an effectively instituted autonomy plan as the hinge on its own long-term policy in the area...
...You can see it in the Congress, presumably elected as part of a liberal sweep but actually turning into a conservative swamp...
...Tax cutters and budget balancers appear superficially at odds with each other...
...State and local government employees had their cost-of-living increases abrogated at the Governor's insistence, although they subsequently managed to wrest from the Legislature a whopping I percent raise...
...still contains at least some inhabitants who care about justice...
...All 81 of Los Angeles County's branch libraries are now closed on Mondays...
...but if the wage freeze imposed by Sacramento in violation of union contracts is overturned by the high court (it has already been ruled invalid in lower courts), layoffs could rise a hundredfold...
...As hordes of analysts have tiresomely written, the weakness of the present recovery, the disappointing failure of productivity to improve, and the persistence of unemployment, all stem from a rate of capital formation less wholesome than is typical of business-cycle expansions...
...Consider the polls...
...Suffice it to say that the phenomenon is real and, whether long- or short-lived, dangerous...
...OF COURSE there is...
...For the very premise of Brownism—that policies of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism can be promoted simultaneously—has been refuted time and again during Brown's tenure as governor...
...Dial-a-Ride programs for the elderly and disabled have been discontinued in some smaller cities...
...Such expenditures hit hardest the already hardpressed, inflation-cursed wage-earners who seem to be the only ones paying taxes nowadays...
...The liberalism that remains the central tradition of American culture will sooner or later regather its energies for counterattack, and we of the democratic left must enable it to do so, indeed, persuade it that it can be most effective if it moves closer to a social democratic position...
...Berkeley has flatly eliminated its Recreation and Community Arts departments...
...Congressman Jack Kemp, who only a few years ago was throwing footballs for the Buffalo Bills, is one of the hottest Republican properties, mentioned by admirers as a 1980 Republican presidential possibility...
...After all, an Egyptian embassy in Jerusalem may be instructed to galvanize the Palestinians and to transmit ultimatums...
...As I have just, noted, the usual justification for rewarding the rich is the hope that their prosperity will trickle down to the remainder of the community...
...Nevertheless, the animus driving annexationist sentiment has been quelled...
...It may be that California voters adopted Proposition 13 out of cynical resignation to the belief that they could get a little only by giving a good deal more to their financial betters...
...for which can more public energy be summoned...
...and still others will be discussed in Dissent's future issues...
...One inescapable lesson of the Jarvis experiment is that trickle-down has worked only where government has intervened to make it work...
...AS A LATE Russian leader put it, shrimps will whistle on the day Mobil and Exxon devote their expensive ads to accurate depictions of the tax scene...
...It was the same 15 years ago when the Great Society programs began: Legal Services met only 15 percent of the need, Job Corps only 20 percent...
...Has it ever been acceptable to fund, say, weapons programs for only 15 or 20 percent of what the armed services committees patriotically define as the need...
...For them, Kennedy's historical importance lies in their seeing him as a precursor of Laffer...
...The tax rate on capital gains and the corporate income tax were lowered, disproportionately benefiting the wealthy...
...hospital cost containment...
...That a pure-bred of the species like Don Fraser was defeated in Minnesota makes it clear that the villains are being smoked out...
...However, despairing attempts by such people to accommodate to or sympathetically "explain" the new conservative consensus will only strengthen its hold...
...some have no funds for purchases at all...
...A new variant of conservative ideology rapidly gaining adherents in Congress might be termed Lafferism, in honor of its slapdash "theoretician," University of Southern California professor Arthur Laffer...
...In congressional politics, neoconservatism has until recently been important chiefly as a tendency regarding foreign policy in the Democratic party...
...Lafferites, unlike traditional conservatives, at least try to be at home at the truck stop as well as in the boardroom...
...He has also used his appointment power to secure the support of the women's movement and minorities: 30 percent of his 2,800 appointments have gone to women, 23 percent to minorities...
...In a state of panic, politicians of both parties hustle the voters with less and less credible assurances that they and only they can be depended upon to shrink the tax bills of the public...
...He had to order the "thickening" of existing settlements during the negotiations with Egypt in order to preempt the impending revolt of seven Herut and National Religious party ministers...
...Liberals are portrayed as hypocritical moralizers who wrongly believe they know better than the people how the people's resources should be allocated...
...He will probably see it as a vindication of his theory if America is ruled after 1980 by the former quarterback of the Buffalo Bills and a former Trotskyist...
...and a recent statewide poll has shown the public favoring Brown over Younger by 26 percent when asked which of them would do a better job cutting government waste...
...It is a warm and comforting lie...
...This is no longer the case: the letter of the framework agreement provides for the creation of an evolving Palestinian self-determination, which even those close to the PLO may help to fashion...
...and the most important aspects of the Administration's much heralded urban program...
...Ikeism" meant stagnation but not a serious effort to dismantle the welfare state, such as we witness today...
...I suppose that its current fashion requires a few words of comment...
...But the trouble is, by whipping up the public to go after the Don Frasers, a national discussion is less and less possible on the full issue of spending and taxes...
...Begin will not want to negotiate away Jewish claims, however tendentious, to the West Bank and Gaza...
...Those who still long for a politics of social solidarity and moral seriousness can see few if any hopeful signs in the current moonscape of American politics...
...Strom Thurmond (R-S.C...
...When we started in 1954, we were polemicizing against a similar trend...
...indeed, the only politically visible groups to have bailed out on Brown this time around were a number of the wage-frozen public employee unions and the ADA...
...Even the promise of peace with Egypt—Israelis have compulsively recited the good arguments for it to themselves since the first disengagement agreement in 1974—seems no less fragile and fantastic today, for all of Sadat's reassuring consistency and Begin's reassuring inconsistency...
...The older varieties can be denominated by traditional and populist conservatism...
...The most notably progressive suggestion—to abolish homeowner property taxes altogether but restore taxes on commercial property to 90 percent of preJarvis levels—was cut down in the Legislature by the open opposition of conservatives and the veiled hostility of the Governor...
...From this unexceptional platitude, Kemp and Roth have extracted some breathtaking inferences...
...Five stop at rates 17 higher than our top figure...
...Such as it is, the case for aiding the unneedy begins with the hypothesis that the world as perceived by potential investors is riskier than it used to be...
...And what should we spend it on...
...Winnings must be shared in discouraging percentages with the voracious tax collectors...
...Israelis are concerned, rather, that they have exchanged "no war" for a peace that can be reversed, particularly if the apparent 24 rapprochement between Syria and Iraq leads to renewed fighting on the Golan and in Lebanon...
...While cities and counties have had their spending increases limited to 5 percent, the budgets of California's schools have declined by 2.3 percent—the first decline in school spending since 1934...
...For the figures are in on the condition of California's welfare state after only five months of "making Proposition 13 work," and they make melancholy reading, both in themselves and in what they portend...
...Israelis have shown that they can be pushed in for a penny and they will be pushed in also for a pound...
...No longer compressed by the weight of taxes, the springs of enterprise will be released...
...He may be right, but the evidence to which he points doesn't persuade...
...It would be foolish to pretend we know the answers...
...NO REPUTABLE REASON exists for new tax benefits to corporations and wealthy individuals...
...They might, like Sadat, even earn the goodwill of the Israeli public...
...Three searching questions are being asked by citizens: How do we stop inflation...
...These accords have produced, not a revolution in Israel, but something like a gestalt switch: Judea and Samaria, Begin's disclaimers notwithstanding, have again become the West Bank, the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael have become Palestinians, and the oil-thirsty gentiles in Washington have become the pillars of the Free World...
...It is the task of the democratic left to attack energetically those aspects of American life that continue to distinguish ours from a civilized society...
...Postscript November 9 THE RENT CONTROL MEASURES passed in Berkeley and Davis were defeated elsewhere...
...19 testimonies to their magical skills at earning reputations as being anti-big spending while having voting records of grand spending for military programs...
...When Lyndon Johnson bellowed, "We're for a lot of things, and we're against mighty few" at a Brooklyn crowd in October 1964, he gave expression to the fatuous but politically successful optimism that informed New Deal liberalism from the '30s to the recent past...
...have wielded the largest megaphones when some cheerleading was needed for tax breaks and shelters for the special interests...
...Most professional observers of the political scene tend to ascribe the liberal debacle to the inexperience/incompetence of the Administration and to the frightened congressional response to the national conservative mood...
...And this is an expensive, reversible peace...
...For neoconservative intellectuals will provide the burgeoning right-wing movement with a certain moral ballast and thus render it seemingly more fit to govern should destiny beckon...
...It is a matter of sheerest conjecture whether these tax cuts just might some time in the future, over the rainbow, evoke the greater investments and individual efforts that these partisans of free lunch anticipate...
...Neoconservative Ben Wattenberg is currently editing Public Opinion, a glossy new publication of the suddenly ubiquitous American Enterprise Institute, which seems to be straight business propaganda...
...The Administration has achieved its few victories in Congress either on issues when senators and representatives found it politically expedient to support the President (e.g., civil service reform, ERA extension, the D.C...
...It classically 15 represents the outlook of the construction worker with the American flag decal on his hardhat...
...This is just what Camp David seems not to promise...
...If conservative voices are saved for other causes, it is to denounce the "big-spending liberals" who back programs for inner-city housing, civil rights, food stamps, pollution control, or the welfare poor...
...Each even had his own Howard Jarvis commercial endorsement, and by election day, the injudicious or merely unlucky television viewer was likely to have seen Jarvis commending both Younger ("who brilliantly defended Proposition 13 before the State Supreme Court") and Brown ("Sure, I wrote Proposition 13, but it took a dedicated governor to make it work...
...q 22 The following letter from Jerusalem was written at a moment when it seemed all but certain that the Camp David agreement would lead to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt...
...A recession could wipe out both the surplus and much of what remains of municipal services...
...These reciprocal interests of Israel and Egypt are complemented by extensive political and journalistic contact between citizens of the two countries since President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem...
...If one sees everywhere in our society (and still more so, our culture) signs of a new "principle" of selfishness, a "me-ism" dressed in the old rags of individualism, how are we to explain its upsurge at a time when our society moves increasingly toward corporate bigness and the state intervenes more and more, as it must, in economic life...
...Kemp-Roth is big medicine among snake oil peddlers because blue- and white-collar workers have been increasingly squeezed between rapid inflation and incomes that often fail to keep pace...
...It is hard to imagine a similar scene between, say Aneurin Bevan and Winston Churchill, let alone Leon Blum and Pierre Laval...
...But Begin's unprecendented political independence may be beside the point: his potentially decisive contribution to peace may be confounded, not by the opposition of others, but by his own conscience...
...They take the risks, make the investments, gamble on new processes and products, and in enriching themselves, confer modest prosperity upon the rest of us...
...Billions of dollars of tax loopholes have been written over the years because Sens...
Vol. 26 • January 1979 • No. 1
