HOW CRITICAL IS OUR CONDITION?"

...See Irving B. Kravis, Alan Heston, and Robert Summers, International Comparisons of Real Product and Purchasing Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp...

...Americans have, after all, increasingly abandoned the norm of lifelong monogamous marriage, so why should they cling to a goal of home ownership closely tied to it...

...After all his equivocations, however, Wrong does plump for pessimism...

...FABER'S BELIEF that the left will rise again rests on a curious combination of the classical economists' idea of the "insatiability of human wants" and the sociologists' concept of "relative deprivation...

...When the invisible hand fails to relieve our problems, the country will make a new try at taking charge of its own economic destiny...

...Another of Mr...

...Nor do the liberals seem to me so ill-equipped to deal with foreign policy...

...Reagan, 52 percent Mitterrand...

...34-66...

...It's hard to think of three more incompatible goals...

...But this sketch is surely historically deficient...

...Until the democratic left can come up with workable programs in this vein, liberalism will continue to decline to being nothing more than a humane voice from the past, irrelevant for today's realities...

...I am enchanted, nevertheless, by his quotation from Emerson and intend to appropriate it to brandish in arguments with colleagues...

...What are the implications for the left...

...108 absence of a socialist movement, are still present...

...0 Mark Levinson That Reagan's victory and the accompanying purposeful, systemic, and mean-spirited attack on the welfare state signify difficult times for the left should be so obvious as not to require comment...

...And all this may take place sooner than we think...

...Much has been written about the fact that Reagan's social conservatism on such issues as abortion and busing played a major role in his election...

...Does the author have a sufficiently clear picture of the left to address these matters...

...Even in this age of rampant conservatism polls consistently report formidable national majorities in favor of government as the employer of last resort, of national health insurance, of mandatory price and wage controls...

...Paul Weyrich, of the New Right's Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, put it this way: 1980 was not a watershed election...

...However, intellectual conservatism and social reaction have always been uneasy partners...

...Wrong's reasons for gloom is his belief that there has been since 1945 "a longrun trend to the right" as expressed in the decline in class voting and in the shrinkage of the reservoir of "social and economic underdogs...

...High interest rates have stifled the anticipated economic boom and inflation has gone into double digits...

...8 The available data suggest that the emergence of a political evangelical movement and the swing toward conservatism have been parallel developments, which have been mutually reinforcing rather than related in a cause-and-effect fashion...

...In both France and the United States, political commentators have emphasized the intellectual and policy weaknesses of the previously dominant tendency...

...107 trol within the context of national boundaries leads to parochial and oversimplified explanations...

...As Murray Kempton once said, the children have devoured the revolution...

...But it cannot do so by means of now discredited notions of aggregate demand management...

...q Seymour Martin Lipset The question posed by Dennis Wrong is whether Reagan's electoral victory in 1980 reflects a movement or a blip on the scorecard of history...

...But American intellectuals have for the most part ignored the impact of religiosity on the body politic...

...I'm not that pessimistic...

...Schlesinger notes the movement of American politics to the left since the New Deal, which, far from denying, I referred to as "leftward drift" and saw as the outcome of what Lipset once called the "democratic class struggle...

...Since I did not exclude the possibility that the Democrats might recapture the presidency in 1984, the important question is whether such an outcome would in itself amount to, or initiate, a renascence of liberalism and the left...

...in Seweryn Bialer and Sophia Sluzar, eds., Sources of Contemporary Radicalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977), pp...

...Surely any useful assessment of the left's prospects must spring in part from an appreciation of what the left can offer to the various electoral clusters...

...As Emerson wisely said, "In analysing history, do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial...

...and I would imagine that such a position would appeal to many more Americans than either extreme does...

...He thinks that present standards for assessing the latter will dissolve and the former will reassert itself...

...The right is seen as intellectually bankrupt, as advocating more of the same outmoded policies, while the left is credited with innovation and more analytical sophistication...

...31-149, 346-63...

...To the average voter's past economic state or to the present state of the under class...

...Does Reagan's victory signal a long-term shift toward conservatism...

...The best explanation, probably, is that his opponent was Jimmy Carter, easily the most conservative Democratic president in 50 years...

...If anything is predictable, it is that conservatism in its recurrent American waves should formulate itself on two levels—pretentious political and economic argumentation (the "New Era" philosophy of the 1920s, the "new conservatism" of the 1950s, the "neoconservatism" of the 1980s...

...In short, the Moral Majority may well turn out to be a greater menace to conservatism than to liberalism...

...And suppose the liberals counterattack from the left, opening a systematic assault on unearned inequality, demanding participation by workers and the public in the management of corporate enterprise, and challenging the cost-benefit ratio of an enormous military establishment...

...But one reason for the seemingly increased importance of social issues in the 1980 elections is that Carter's economic failure gave social conservatives no reason to vote Democratic...

...114...

...Hence, if a majority of the electorate is now "relatively satisfied" (Wrong's phrase), the left now has nothing at all except a once successful dotard's sweet memories...

...Disappointed expectations already litter the scene...

...Since I foresaw no such trend to the left, why should I be expected to pyramid improbabilities by speculating about a full-fledged fascism...

...I doubt it...

...The conservative parties of Weimar dispensed it with considerable success, in the meantime preparing the way for the Third Reich...

...The short-term prospect for reform has looked and has been awfully grim in the early years of every conservative epoch...

...The far more probable result of increasing inflation, interest rates, and unemployment, of deteriorating services and spreading poverty, will bring about a marvelous change in public attitudes, even in Sunbelt attitudes, toward government intervention in the economy...

...whether he goes very far is another matter...

...Wrong is committing the sociologist's fallacy in erecting a formidable structural explanation of the early Reagan successes...

...Particularly in conjunction with appeals to chauvinism and intolerance, this can be a formidable brew...

...If, on the other hand, satisfaction arises from the relatively deprived state of racial and ethnic minorities, then conservative ascendancy might be maintained by cultivating fear of under-class ascension and middle-class descent...

...The decline in class voting is a result of two parallel developments...

...the well-publicized supply-side economics (which postulates that a tax cut will increase investment and expand the economy, thus reducing inflation and eventually making up for the lost tax revenues...

...Emerson's warning against being too profound also applies, it seems to me, to theorizing about the Dennis Wrong Replies All four critics think that I overestimate the long-range significance of Reagan's election...

...I guess I agree with Mr...

...Yet the process has surely moved the whole nation to the left...

...They no longer can hope to dominate the country, but they are still sufficiently large (30 percent of Americans are born-again Christian) to have a significant impact...

...Wrong admits, General Haig's effort to make a big production out of El Salvador went down like a lead balloon...

...As affluent culturally concerned people, the supporters of the New Politics have voiced disdain for materialistic concerns, for economic growth and higher standards of living...

...Wrong more pessimistic at the start of his paper than at the end...

...the rejection of materialism in favor of noneconomic values by trend-setting "postindustrial" elites is noted by Lipset, although I think he exaggerates its depth...

...In the second place, because the revolt evidences the possibility of spontaneous action by workers, cooperating with dissident intellectuals, against repressive bureaucracy in an industrialized society...

...This brand of conservatism, calling itself a new liberalism, is best typified by Felix Rohatyn...

...q Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...Whether that hegemony can survive the frustrations of a slow-growth world and whether conservative remedies can restore regular income appreciation for the middle classes are questions central to the future of capitalism as we now experience it...

...The more aggressive the Moral Majority becomes, the more it threatens to split the Reagan coalition...

...that its historical weight gives liberalism an enormous cultural presence that cannot be readily exorcised, and that developments in other advanced capitalist states (including Mitterrand's election and the diminishing body of Thatcherites) demonstrate the continued force of liberal-left ideas...

...4 This decline is associated with a falloff in the proportion of the electorate identifying with a political party and reduced voting participation...

...They have also benefited disproportionately from noneconomic issues...

...In the first place because I do not regard Poland or any other Warsaw Pact state as a "socialist" society...

...If liberalism is to regain ideological predominance during the 1980s it must reestablish a rational connection between prosperity and social justice...

...On the other hand, Farer thinks blocked expectations may move many Americans far to the right...

...In both nations, sufficient numbers of voters held the existing government responsible to elect the opposition by small majorities (51 percent ' Edward Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978...

...A word on the importance of social issues...

...Both Reagan and Mitterrand won for the same reason, the American and French economies each were experiencing high rates of inflation (12 percent) and unemployment (7-8 percent...

...My own attitude is closer to Schlesinger's, if only because I think Rohatyn's proposals, reminiscent of the early New Deal, are probably the best we can hope for in the immediate future and are infinitely preferable to Reaganite half-baked supply-side economics, pinch-penny monetarism, and redistribution in favor of the rich...

...Besides the corporatism of Rohatyn, there is the "new liberalism" of Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas...

...The victorious French left, of course, is identified with the extension of policies that, seemingly, were rejected in Britain in 1979 and the United States in 1980, an expansion of the welfare-planning-regulatory state...

...The emergence of a powerful antimilitarist and anticapitalist left may, he argues, arouse a fascist response on the right...

...Many of the factors that gave rise to American "exceptionalism," to the 4 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981...

...Does he really believe this...

...and an evangelical social reaction from the grass roots...

...But a perusal of the French press yields comparable commentaries from precisely the opposite perspective...

...We are now witnessing a contest that will decide the future of liberalism...

...The idea of a tripartite directorate of business, government, and labor (labor being, of course, the junior partner), planning in a most undemocratic 106 way the allocation of society's resources, is a frightening prospect...

...If Levinson, Lipset, and Schlesinger think I make too much of the Moral Majority and the New Right, he charges me with not taking seriously enough the "fascist potential" I attributed to them...

...After the 1980 contest, he said, there is nothing wrong with the Democratic party that a significant increase in the unemployment rate will not repair...

...First, why did Reagan win...

...But here as elsewhere in the essay imprecision provokes doubt...

...Most workers, by contrast, remain interested in material questions...

...Reagan voters, especially the 44 percent of unionized workers among them, are unlikely to have doubted that any redistribution of income and power achieved by a Reagan administration would favor the rich and the corporations...

...Not only is the correlation between class position and voting lower than at any time since election surveys were first taken, it is much below that of other industrialized nations...

...Expanded Edition), pp...

...That is, the politicization of the evangelicals did not contribute much to the GOP victories, except possibly in the South where it probably helped to increase electoral participation, especially in the primaries...

...Seemingly, in both countries, people were initially disposed to give presidents of diametrically different orientations a chance to demonstrate that they can improve the economy...

...When you add to this crisis of liberal policy a very effective Republican candidate who quotes FDR and speaks proudly to workers about his days as a union president, we have the beginning of an explanation of Reagan's victory...

...He conjures up for the umpteenth time the old fantasy of an American reenactment of Weimar...

...For if the average voter is satisfied now because he thinks he is 103 better off than he used to be, satisfaction should diminish as recollection fades and a new generation without any memory at all joins the electorate...

...French polls reveal less than 50 percent approve of Mitterrand's performance in office as of October, while Reagan's disapproval rating, around 40 percent, is the highest any American president has received so early in his term...

...On the other hand, liberals can take the advice offered by Robert Reich in the New Republic (February 21, 1981...

...Satisfaction" relative to what...

...Dennis Wrong may be correct in tracing the origin of such groups as the Moral Majority to a backlash against social reform, but I think he greatly magnifies their importance...

...Admittedly, the Polish revolt differs from the other events I listed in that it posed no direct challenge to prevailing political sentiments, the New Left never having vested its hopes in the Soviet and East European Communist states—that is, after all, what was supposed to be "new" about it...

...A look at both American and Western electoral developments suggests that recent attempts to link election outcomes with economic performance are well founded...

...In effect, cross-pressures deriving from varying commitments to economic and social values have reduced the salience of loyalty to parties, previously tied to the structural sources of cleavage in industrial society...

...Wrong's grounds for pessimism is his fear that conservatism has captured foreign policy as a political issue, and that this will make a material difference in years to come...

...I tried to apply the idea of a cyclical left/right political rhythm to the present and found it no longer compelling, but scarcely because of the unprecedented potency of the Moral Majority, which resembles, I agree, past and ultimately unsuccessful traditionalist reactions against change and reform...

...Historians, more simplemindedly, thought the salience of these factors was not the cause but the consequence of the failure of presidential leadership, and that there was little wrong with the presidency that a competent man in the White House could not cure...

...To make his gambit interesting, therefore, Wrong must argue one or both of the following propositions: • that unlike its predecessors, this conservative era will be one of profound regression rather than mere consolidation...

...I do not see undue difficulty in the Democratic party's establishing a position between the rigid and frenetic anticommunism of the Reagan administration and the guiltridden masochism of the New Left...

...Farer chides me for failing to present a "consistent program" for the left that might win elections...

...It is their answer that is wrong, not their question...

...Another of Mr...

...I suggested that in policy terms a new Democratic adminis"causal explanation" of the cyclical rhythms in our politics...

...The hysterical efforts of such intellectual fellow travelers as Gilder and Podhoretz to rationalize the status quo are a sign of right-wing pessimism about the prospect for affirmative answers...

...One great unresolved issue is whether such a program can be conceived within the conventions of American politics about the distribution of income and wealth (about which nothing much is to be done) and about the control of corporate power (no significant participation by labor, government, or the general public in boards of directors) and 104 about foreign policy (American interests require a continuing effort to frustrate violent or revolutionary change everywhere in the Third World...

...Conversely, societies with prosperous and relatively price-stable economies have witnessed the reelection of their governments with increased majorities—the Socialists in Austria in 1979, the conservatives in Japan in 1980, and a Socialistdominated coalition in Germany in 1980...

...There is little evidence that the American electorate —or, indeed, any other electorate—is passionately aroused by relative inequalities in wealth and income or the absence of "workers' control" of industry...

...Its invocation implies concern...

...The spectacular performance of the American economy during this period led many to believe that conservatism was finished, and that the economic problems were solved...

...It should be noted, however, that the evidence does not sustain the frequently voiced fear that the country is about to be captured by right-wing cultural extremists, organized in the Moral Majority and kindred groups...

...Wrong about the draft...

...So I urge Dennis Wrong not to despair...

...Farer is free to define "socialism" as an unsullied ideal independent of all "actually existing socialisms" (in Rudolph Bahro's phrase) and I, too, find his ideal attractive...

...If I interpret him correctly, no mean task, Wrong inclines toward the latter proposition only...

...that even if they do not manage to dismantle the welfare state, such as it is, our new conservative masters will achieve a record longevity and that we may, indeed, be present at the end of egalitarian reform as a powerful impulse in American politics...

...In the past four years unions have been losing a majority of National Labor Relations Board representation elections, in contrast to their ability to win most of them in all previous years...

...A depression on the scale of the 1930s or a military defeat like Germany's in 1918 might conceivably lead to a situation as threatening as the last years of Weimar, but that is to consider a few additional improbabilities...

...Unfortunately, the deeper underlying problem was not just Jimmy Carter but rather the nature of New Deal liberalism and the principles on which it is based...

...At that point, we should start negotiating...

...Wrong agrees, I gather, that it would take a miracle to produce this result...

...Skepticism as to whether a left program of "soaking the rich," placing workers on corporate boards, and cutting defense spending would restore the economy and appease the Soviet Union need not indicate subjection to capitalist "ideological hegemony"—my nomination for the most self-deluding (and self-serving) fashionable click* favored by left-wing intellectuals in the past decade...

...TRADITIONAL NEW DEAL LIBERALISM is programmatically dead, but it is not yet clear what will replace it...

...For if Reagan's program fails, there is waiting in the wings a much more sophisticated kind of conservatism, more in tune with the problem of modern society and for that reason more dangerous...

...Resentment about a declining British economy brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 (although further economic disasters have reduced support for the Tories in the opinion polls to around 25 percent in 1981...

...It has often been observed, of course, that the New Deal has been undone by its own success...

...Moreover, Farer seems to think this polarization of a socialist left against a fascist right could develop even if the economy does no more than remain in its present "doldrums...

...Moreover, doldrums (like the ones we are now in) following a period of progress frustrate accrued expectations of continued good thiAgs and thus generate unusually intense hostility to the established order...

...The difference is fundamental...

...Second, there has been a corresponding move to the right on the part of some workers who reject the social and cultural changes fostered by the New Politics left...

...Wrong is right to warn that the new turn might, as a theoretical possibility, be toward big business "corporatist" planning...

...Then middleAmerican cultural ressentiment could coalesce with the practical anxieties and frustrations of soldiers and the owners and senior managers of capital...

...6 The United States still has the highest per capita income (controlled for real purchasing power) and standard of living in the developed world, and post-World War II economic growth and technological developments have fostered an increase in opportunity, in rates of social mobility...

...As Gary Orren and E. J. Dionne argue in Working Papers (May-June 1981), Reagan's victory can best be understood as a repudiation of Carter's performance in office...

...Voters, being sensible people, often decide to vote for or against incumbents based on a judgment of their past performance...

...Yet the same pattern occurred in France following the election of Mitterrand and a Socialist majority in the Chamber...

...Just as big businessmen and their acolytes in the 1920s 110 opposed prohibition and accepted evolution, so their counterparts today regard the passions of the Moral Majority as both distasteful and divisive— which is why Senator Baker, the Republican leader in the upper house, did his best to stave off congressional consideration of abortion, school prayer, and other Moral Majority issues...

...Nor need we worry then about a shortage of underdogs nor about the absence of discontented groups capable of sparking a new turn to the left...

...I continue to prefer the more simpleminded explanation—that, after a season of action, passion, idealism, and reform, a country simply gets worn out, longs for respite, retreats from responsibility, and enters into a season of drift, hedonism, cynicism, and laissez-faire...

...7 Various studies, which purport to show that the per capita income in the United States is below that of some Western European nations, have used direct equivalent monetary exchange rates for comparisons...

...Modern electorates have a funny habit of reacting to the state of the economy...

...One reason why Mr...

...q tration might resemble that of Carter, whom Schlesinger once called "the most conservative Democratic president since Cleveland," rather than the old welfare-state liberalism upheld by Senator Kennedy...

...But what does require a great deal of attention, and Dennis Wrong contributes notably to the discussion, is: Why did Reagan win...

...In short, he tells us that most of the evil and tyrannical regimes of the past half-century—Hitler's, Stalin's, Mussolini's, and military dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere —are manifestations of capitalism...

...In any event, I do dissent from his initial impression of the dimness of liberal prospects...

...Today the National Association of Home Builders calculates that only 5 percent of the people in this country could qualify for a median priced home...

...The evidence is ambiguous, but it can equally justify a description of "a long-term trend to the left...

...and Robert Summers, Irving B. Kravis, and Alan Heston, "International Comparison of Real Product and Its Composition: 1950-1977," Review of Income and Wealth, March 1980, pp...

...Of course, one would like to know whether he sees it simply as a potentially aggravated case of majoritarian intolerance operating within established political structures or as a creeping coup d'etat...

...But he surely cannot be unaware that, virtually since 1917, the record of any and all of the regimes calling themselves "socialist" has been a far greater obstacle to the success of socialist parties and movements in the democratic world than any alleged penetration of "popular consciousness" by "capitalist ideology...

...It is a contradictory mixture of traditional conservative economics (whose primary concern is with balanced budgets...

...109 cans, while challenges to traditional religiously linked values activated the political concerns of many fundamentalists...

...504-505...

...Carter's almost total lack of program also helped Reagan by contributing to the perception that the Republican party was the party with ideas...

...And given 6 For an extensive discussion of the literature on the subject, see Seymour Martin Lipset, "Why No Socialism in the United States...

...Under those conditions American politics could get very ugly indeed...

...After 1945 home ownership became the norm for Americans...

...According to all, the postelection surveys we've done, the people' wanted change in this election...

...Liberalism was synonymous with the modern welfare state based on principles of Keynesian demand management of the economy...

...so perhaps do more liberals than he thinks...

...Support for this view comes in a recent Village Voice interview from none other than Ralph Nader, who is certainly closer to the political scene than I am...

...Calling attention to the fact that the deployment of a new generation of Soviet missiles and the development of the Backfire bomber by the Soviets have upset the military equilibrium, Mitterrand stated in Reaganite language, "I will not accept this, . . . we must arm to restore the balance...

...Wrong begins with the ominous announcement: "I do not recall a time when the prospects for the left in America have looked quite so dim...

...This ideological hegemony, together with steady growth and the welfare state, have muted class conflict despite one of the largest income disparities and most pinch-fisted welfare systems to be found among high-tech capitalist countries...

...But why should home ownership, a quintessentially "bourgeois" value if there ever was one, be regarded as an unchanging aspiration of Americans, let alone one whose frustration will move them to the left...

...No one who remembers the fundamentalist campaigns of the 1920s to abolish liquor and Darwin, or the Norman Vincent PealeBilly Graham essays in the 1950s in what Justice Jackson called "compulsory godliness," could conceivably have been surprised by the eruption of the Moral Majority in the next conservative period...

...Indeed he leaves us in doubt as to whether he takes the risk seriously...

...Compare, for example, the first sentence of his piece with the last...

...He proposes a Reconstruction Finance Corporation that would shore up ailing companies and rejuvenate regional economies...

...Yet it would be an error to interpret recent American politics solely as a national expression of international patterns...

...Conservatives are credited with having the only original policy-relevant ideas and analyses...

...Wrong correctly calls attention to the "decline since 1945 in class voting" in the United States...

...Carter simply forfeited the one issue that, traditionally, the Democrats could count on: economics...

...The first is the emergence of the postindustrial New Politics or New Left groups, whose roots are in the university, the scientific, and intellectual worlds, who are disproportionately represented in both the public sector and the professions, which have sizably increased the proportion of the middle class who vote left...

...Certainly, as Mr...

...Unions are weaker in the United States than in other economically developed democracies...

...Indeed it was...

...His program, which explicitly states the need for centralized planning, is based on active government intervention in the economy to serve capital's needs...

...But the resort to affirmative government to bring about economic coordination, and especially to deal with the problems of inflation and energy, necessarily involves system-wide policies along lines that Galbraith, Rohatyn, and others have been proposing for a considerable time...

...25-31...

...If toward the end of the article I strike a somewhat more upbeat note, my closing declaration of faith in the weight of the American liberal tradition leaves me more emotionally than intellectually satisfied...

...My purpose was to examine some dispiriting possibilities running counter to the conventional formulas and pieties of the American left...

...Beware of "deep" explanations...

...If Wrong has little to say about the right, he has less to say about the left, and some of that little is wrong...

...The middle-class recruits to left politics, as Wrong notes, have pressed noneconomic or social causes—a cleaner environment, a better culture, a more permissive morality, particularly as affecting familial and sexual issues, and a change in the status of women and homosexuals...

...At the time I wrote, Solidarity had avoided demands for workers' control, which have since been forcefully raised by the rank-and-file membership against the leaders' more cautious advice in what is obviously a highly fluid, even revolutionary, situation...

...Richard Scammon commented following the 1976 election that there is nothing wrong with the Republican party a 12 percent inflation rate will not cure...

...3 ) IN ADDITION to the propensity to vote out the incumbents as a reaction to economic difficulties, there are other consistent changes occurring across national frontiers, which suggest that basic structural developments are affecting the bases of support for varying political forces...

...Often the causes of things are quite superficial...

...To answer it requires the ability to predict both the short-range and long-term future of the American economy, along with the worldwide developments that affect these, an ability I lack...

...We have this great opportunity in the next years to show that what we stand for works...

...Yet liberals and radicals as different as Galbraith, Marcuse, and Daniel Bell have questioned the universality, even in America, of ever-rising expectations...

...Wrong's own "explanation sketch" has the cycles turn on the conflict between egalitarianism and patriotism/ evangelism...

...To a considerable degree, therefore, how they vote depends on the larger circumstances under which an election is held...

...Conservatives are right when they focus on the supply side of the economic ledger and ask what conditions will generate growth and productivity...

...American analysts, including many liberals and Democrats, point to tthe exhaustion of the intellectual capital of the left, of its continued reliance on what have become traditional responses to social and economic problems —more government intervention, more spending...

...I am not much impressed with Farer's outline of such a program, which does no more than reiterate familiar left demands for greater equality, participation in corporate decision-making, and a more pacific foreign policy, and then tags on the requirement that "above all stagflation" must be mitigated...

...To win again the left must come forward with a consistent program that seems likely both to reduce inequities and to mitigate difficulties, above all stagflation, which transcend class and ethnic groupings...

...In view of Reagan's notable success in making the Republicans more vividly the party of the rich than it has seemed since the days of Coolidge, Hoover, and Andrew Mellon, the Democrats can hardly avoid becoming once again the party of the general welfare...

...Both historical and contemporary evidence indicate that the United States is the most religious country in the Western world, Ireland apart...

...Nader saw John Glenn as the most probable Democratic candidate in 1984 and was depressed by the prospect...

...112 I plead guilty to Schlesinger's charge that I am a sociologist predisposed to look for "deep" structural trends...

...Estimates based on actual purchasing power, however, show the United States still ahead by significant margins...

...As he gets into his case, it seems to me, he argues himself out of a good deal of his preliminary gloom, thereby reducing the differences between us...

...Their contradictory mixture of social liberalism and economic conservatism is bound to fail—indeed it amounts to little more than a watered-down version of Carterism...

...35-38...

...He argued that the crisis of liberalism has reduced its call to social justice to . . . something akin to charity, to be balanced against the more compelling goals of growth and productivity —a moral luxury to be afforded when and to the extent we can...

...He will have to answer for promises of jobs and prosperity that were not delivered...

...The thesis achieves an initial tug of credibility and at least anecdotal support (for example, the South Dakota woman who, as she exchanged food stamps for groceries, told McGovern she would not vote for him because he had helped to give away the Panama Canal...

...After Reagan's triumphs in Congress last spring, we have heard little about the inevitable decline of the presidency...

...And toward the essay's conclusion he quite fills the air with caveats: his pessimism relates to the "immediate prospect...

...Wrong's dislike of sentimentalism about Cuba, China, Vietnam, and the Third World...

...But if hard times continue under a conspicuously conservative Administration, how long can that theme work...

...5 The existing political parties have found it difficult to link positions on the social issues to their past socioeconomic bases of support and hence class correlations with voting, party loyalties, and rates of voting participation have declined...

...The Moral Majority is largely a media creation...

...Even with respect to it, his backing and filling leave a residue of doubt...

...Wrong, for all his determined moderation, raises the fascist specter only to leave it squatting— ugly, unattended and undefined—while he passes on to other things...

...In contemporary America the strategy is already being tested by the sort of clercs who lament affirmative action, bash homosexuals, and extol Third World fascists in the pages of Commentary...

...But other attempts to reduce inflation—for instance, tight money—lead to high interest rates, discouraging investment, which is what the tax cut was supposed to stimulate...

...Why am I delighted...

...While Reagan's economic program will not lead to economic prosperity, it will increase the inequality of income, make life more precarious for the poor and the old, increase hazards for working people, and foul up the environment...

...I share Mr...

...They are all frozen into ugly patterns of state capitalism or bureaucratic authoritarianism, call it what you will as long as you do not invoke the image of a democratic, relatively decentralized, society where economic and political democracy are mutually reenforcing, the image that occurs to most American and West-European non-Communist leftists in association with the word "socialism...

...More noteworthy as an indicator of the declining influence of class is the fact that the proportion of the nonagricultural labor force belonging to trade unions has fallen from around a third at the start of John F. Kennedy's term to about a fifth today...

...The prospects for the left are a matter quite separate from the success or failure of the Reagan administration...

...Yet an examination of voting patterns on a comparative basis documents that "there has been a discernable decline in 3 Frank J. Prial, "New Mood is Foreseen for ParisBonn Meeting," New York Times (National edition), July 12, 1981, p. 4. class-linked voting across a number of advanced industrial countries...

...Without the promise of prosperity liberalism's argument to the majority has become a paean to the status quo...

...Nevertheless, by tying the threat exclusively to Moral Majority frenzy over the revolution in morals and then disparaging the notion that Reagan's majority wished to codify that frenzy, Wrong implies that there is little basis for concern...

...These are, in fact, quite small in membership and following and had little direct impact on the 1980 presidential and congressional elections...

...5 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp...

...Wrong offers not even a substantial hint about the circumstances in which whatever he means by fascism might materialize...

...Disproportionately drawn from the less educated and poorer strata, they are torn politically between their socioeconomic interests, which press them to the left, and their religiously based moral values, which pull them to the right...

...He says at one point that "talk of 1980 as a 'critical' or 'realigning' election is wildly premature...

...FOR THE SAME REASON let US not get too complicated about the future of liberalism...

...An important part of Rohatyn's program is the intent to discipline labor...

...7-23...

...The RFC would have the power to withhold investments until significant "concessions" could be extracted from labor "in the form of wage concessions and changes in work rules...

...Wrong may possibly be correct in saying that the Democrats cannot expect to win future elections if they make the interests of the poor and the minorities their primary cause, though even this need not be true if we ever regained a plateau of middle-class affluence...

...And if it does, it is not the conservatism of Reagan...

...Conservatives are the initial beneficiaries of frustration because they have succeeded in portraying the status quo as the culmination of a liberal ascendancy...

...AS LONG AS CONSERVATIVE ECONOMICS is the only game in town, concern will seem premature...

...Since he locates it at several removes from the present, his version is even less convincing than those popular in the early 1950s and again in the late 1960s...

...In line with Dennis Wrong's criticism of the American left for "making a free gift to the right of the issue of resisting Soviet expansionism," it should be noted that François Mitterrand has taken a foreign-policy position close to that of Ronald Reagan...

...They haven't necessarily ratified what we stand for...

...If Reagan's economic remedies should by some miracle work, if they should succeed in stabilizing prices, reducing interest rates, and stimulating employment, then conservatism will be in the saddle for a considerable time...

...He offers several reasons for regarding these prospects as unprecedentedly grim—even though, as he readily concedes, Reagan won in 1980 with a much smaller proportion of the popular vote than Eisenhower received in 1952 or Nixon in 1972 (and far, far less than Harding in 1920...

...Wrong may be right...

...One wonders, as we slide into a recession, whether the economists at the NBER have not worked themselves into new jobs...

...Schlesinger and Levinson concede my point that a Democratic return to office might not involve a restoration of the old liberalism when they acknowledge the appeal and relevance of the kind of corporatist planning associated with Felix Rohatyn...

...it is not even a coherent economic doctrine...

...Americans are more disposed to believe in God, attest to the importance of religion in their lives, and attend church than the citizenry of any other economically developed society...

...Whether Reagan's or Mitterrand's victories represent movements or blips will probably be determined by what happens to the world economy, as much or more than by their policies or the views of their populations on economic or cultural policies...

...I think that Mr...

...As is becoming increasingly clear, Reaganomics doesn't work...

...Does Reagan's victory signify a long-term shift in American politics toward conservatism...

...2 Trying to account for changes in political con2 Only Israel has managed to confound this pattern...

...9 For an elaboration on some of the themes discussed here see S. M. Lipset, "France's Warning to the Reagan Administration," Journal of Contemporary Studies, Fall 1981, pp...

...But every exit poll in 1980 showed domestic economic concerns, and not foreign policy, to have been decisive in electing Reagan...

...Like all intellectual artifacts, his pessimism rests on a theory, in this instance the theory of the left's autodiminution: that is, through its successful leavening of robberbaron capitalism, the left has progressively drained the pool of discontent on which it must draw for sustenance...

...Yet enough of them were willing to take a chance that his touted economic program would restore prosperity and check inflation, just as the electorate in the 1930s was ready to give Roosevelt's reforms a chance...

...the special character of Christianity here, the fact that most Americans have adhered to Protestant denominations that never were state churches, while in other parts of Christendom state religions were dominant, Americans have been more prone to link moralistic concerns to political behavior than people elsewhere...

...I suspect that if Reagan's foreign policy doesn't lead to disaster and if the world still exists in 1984, then Reagan (or the candidate that runs on his record) will be defeated—defeated for the same reason Reagan was elected...

...But Mr...

...monetarism (which, through a policy of tight money, attempts to squeeze inflation out of the system no matter what the cost...

...Am I alone in finding Mr...

...21-98...

...Out of this amalgam a dilemma has arisen...

...The moralistic reaction to the extensive cultural changes introduced in the 1960s and '70s, to which Dennis Wrong calls attention, has been centered in the more religious, more fundamentalist sectors of the population...

...Yet it must be noted that continued economic difficulties have resulted in a fall-off in support for both presidents...

...But my aim was not to lay out a possible political strategy but to try to foresee what seemed most likely to happen, a more modest task though not a simple one—hence the "caveats" and "equivocations" to which Farer takes exception...

...Discussion of the evidence and factors relevant to a low level of class consciousness in America is, of course, basic to any analysis of American politics...

...Doubts about the creation or recreation of a Politically powerful and effective left-liberal coalition were the crux of my argument rather than insistence on the depth and tenacity of the tides of opinion that elected Reagan...

...Reagan has committed himself to huge tax cuts and increased military spending and a balanced budget...

...As far as Wall Street is concerned the emperor's clothes started disappearing months ago...

...Wrong aggravates doubt about his understanding of the American left when in enumerating the shocks it has received since 1975 he includes "the revolt of the Polish workers under the banners of free trade unionism, Catholicism, and nationalism rather than for a vision of 'socialism with a human face.' " I do not think I am unusual among leftliberals in being heartened by the workers' revolt...

...In the third place, because what Wrong passes off as a demand for free trade unionism is actually a radically broader demand for worker control or at least participation in decisions about investment and the selection of senior managements, for a more open society and for much greater equality...

...And, finally, because it makes nonsense of the right's claim that right-wing dictatorships are always preferable to those spouting Leninist slogans because only the latter exercise an unassailable dominion...

...But this, as he concedes, is characteristic of the New Left, not of serious American liberalism...

...Undoubtedly, they did...

...But here I agree with Dennis Wrong...

...It takes its color from the present conservative resurgence, but it explains neither the conservatism of the 1920s (when William Jennings Bryan and the fundamentalists were mostly Democrats) nor the conservatism of the 1950s...

...Wrong thinks it all so different now is the emergence of the Moral Majority and the New Right, a phenomenon that, he claims, has "surprised" many liberals and leftists...

...Moreover, one strongly doubts whether sending American boys abroad is going to be more of a vote-winning issue in the 1980s than, say, arms control...

...In both Israel and the United States, the more well-to-do Jews are more inclined to back the left, while the poorer are more conservative...

...The democratic left must be able to articulate a program of democratic planning for jobs and public control over investment...

...The author alludes to great inequities requiring reform but says nothing about the shape such reforms could assume...

...As a result of structural changes, increased levels of urbanization and education, these groups are weaker today than any time in the past...

...The sum of the matter then is that while Dennis Wrong has opened the door to useful discussion about the future of egalitarian reform, he can number himself among those who have yet to walk in...

...Political terminology should be chosen with care...

...It is Farer's business if he sees this as a description of himself, but the category is certainly not inclusive of the "left-liberals" or "most American and West-European non-Communist leftists" to whom he then refers...

...In no other Western capitalist state has capitalist ideology so completely penetrated popular consciousness...

...Yet it surely applies more to events than to trends, to causes than to consequences, and the problem of historical understanding is largely to determine which is which...

...As moral concerns have become more salient than problems of unemployment, people have moved to the right politically...

...THE MAJORITY SUPPORT accorded Ronald Reagan's efforts to carry out his platform of lower taxes and cutbacks in government welfare functions in the 1981 opinion polls suggests a strong receptivity for conservative policies...

...Post World War II liberalism was based on an economy that seemed to be expanding without visible limits...

...Only a short time ago, for example, political scientists were learnedly arguing that the American presidency was in inevitable decline as a result of the fragmented and uncontrollable Congress, the decomposing political parties, the powerful lobbies, the fanatical single-issue movements, and so forth...

...But suppose Reaganomics' leap of faith demonstrably fails...

...Skyrocketing inflation and increased unemployment did not prevent the reelection of a conservative government...

...Farer thinks fascism is the result of the "frustrations of soldiers and the owners and managers of capital," he regards right-wing dictatorships in the "Third World" as fascist, and he is prepared to describe the Soviet Union and its Warsaw pact satellites as "state capitalist" (what about China, Cuba, and Vietnam...

...But then Jews have always contradicted efforts to correlate economics with politics...

...Endorsement of their program to nationalize more industries (raising the proportion from 12 to 16 percent) and to increase government spending for welfare purposes grew during the first few months after they took office...

...Lipset and Schlesinger write as if I had consigned the Democratic party to permanent minority status, but the question of which party wins the next election or the one after was not my major concern...

...At worst, it has become a demand for preserving economic relationships as they were when times were better: controlling price increases, erecting tariffs and quotas against foreign imports, regulating factory closings and relocations, limiting direct investments abroad and investing public funds in dying industries...

...Not even the most ardent supply sider believes that a tax cut will stimulate real growth sufficiently to cure inflation...

...Yet I doubt that I am alone in detecting a certain uneasiness in some radical circles over the Polish workers' preference for religious and national rather than "class-conscious" socialist symbols, as well as over the further dissipation of the spirit of detente resulting from their brave challenge to Soviet power...

...There are, alas, more formidable obstacles to the continuation of the left/ right rhythm of democratic politics...

...Economic and foreign-policy reversals pressed all segments of the American electorate to shift toward the Republi8 Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, "The Election and the Evangelicals," Commentary, March 1981, pp...

...Less educated, less cosmopolitan, less affluent, less secure, they are also more traditional, discernably more conservative in their social views...

...Schlesinger contemplates this with a certain equanimity, whereas Levinson sees it as "a frightening prospect...

...113 I mentioned the Polish workers' revolt as one of a series of events that had since 1975 disillusioned "American radicals nurtured by the New Left of the 1960s...

...Still few big businessmen are so intelligent and imaginative as Felix Rohatyn, and the Democratic party, with its Galbraithian economists, its Califanoesque managers, and its labor leaders, remains far more likely than the Republican party to become the vehicle of 111 policies of economic coordination...

...But prosperity has given way to stagnation and traditional Keynesian fine tuning of the economy is no longer 105 adequate as a response to simultaneously increasing unemployment and inflation...

...Indeed it was just 11 years ago that Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize winner in economics, announced that the National Bureau of Economic Research had worked itself out of its first job—business cycles...

...The conservatives have always had enormous financial and organizational advantages...

...I can't imagine why this phenomenon should have surprised anybody...

...in the 1950s, a few years before a great new surge of reform, liberals had joined their opponents in the belief that group conflict over the distribution of wealth and power was dead...