FROM ROOSEVELT TO REAGAN

...There is a little something to this, but not much...

...All Roosevelt really wanted was to find ways of coping with the immediate crisis...

...Part of the left collapsed uncritically in admiration of the New Deal—especially the Jewish trade unions, about which someone quipped that they believed in three worlds, di velt, yene velt, un' Roosevelt...

...Most immediately troubling, the welfare state satisfies its constituencies to different extents and at different rates, so that their variations of interest become sharper and often conflict, or are seen as conflicting...

...The phrase "welfare state"—that is, a state assuming some direct responsibility for the socioeconomic welfare of its citizens—was not commonly used in the early 1930s...

...The American right was still in the grip, as it remains today, of what I'd call right-wing Emersonianism, a vision of things that may have had some point in 1830 and perhaps not even then...

...The new president was far from certain where he wished to go, but he grasped intuitively that it would be disastrous simply to wait for those mysterious workings of "free enterprise" in order to bring the country out of the depression...

...We oppose Reaganism because we find its vision of life nasty and brutish...

...Another part of the left took up a posture of intransigeant sectarianism, the rectitude of the pure, which has been so heavy a curse of American radicalism...

...What mattered, then, in the New Deal was not this or the other economic measure but a new social principle—new, at least, for the United States...

...No doubt, it was mere tinkering, and at least some of Norman Thomas's criticisms were right...

...The ideology of the New Federalism is nothing but a device for dumping the poor...

...As late as 1941, there were still 6 million unemployed, and it was really not until the war that the army of the jobless finally disappeared...

...A few days ago a Texas professor, whose major claims to distinction are that he was nominated to head the National Endowment for the Humanities and that he dislikes Abraham Lincoln, said that he opposed egalitarianism on the ground that, since men could never really be equal, it was likely to foster constant restlessness...

...but since he was imaginative and impatient—two qualities essential for the moment—he found himself moving in a sort of zigzag pattern toward the welfare state...

...Most of the New Deal economic measures were ineffective...

...I think this constitutes a historic advance: from the early years or first phase of the welfare state undertaken mostly by economic interest groups—the workers and their unions—to a later phase undertaken by "status" or "value" constituencies —such groups as the women's movement, the environmentalists, the gays—which all speak in far-reaching moral terms...

...The right dreamed of a glorious time in the past when government allowed the free market its imperial way...

...Issues are precisely formulated, troubles are strongly felt but hard to dramatize into a slogan or demand...

...There is a pervasive sense of malaise, there are sudden new and puzzling modes of discontent, and there is a tendency for insurgencies to break up into smaller sects and one-issue movements...

...In the second stage—that's where we are now—things are not so clear...

...For several decades a significant part of American political thought had been devoted to envisaging the kinds of social change that a ruthless capitalist economy required, changes that would not involve a total transformation but might at least introduce a measure of humaneness and responsibility...

...It rejected the New Deal as a mere tinkering with a broken-down system...

...There also remains the lack of democratic participation in the life of the corporation and factory...

...These "invaders" don't try to change the basic rules, but in wanting more, in staking out their claim for an entitlement, they gradually modify the basic rules...

...Where else could he have gone...

...From the Progressives to the Socialists, from Paul Douglas to Frank Norris to Norman Thomas, in the New Republic and the Nation, proposals for social legislation were being tested out...

...Let me suggest a very rough distinction between what I call the first and second stages of the welfare state...

...Basic inequities remain, such as large disparities of income and wealth, from which flow major differences in political power...

...Far more consequential is that in this scramble it's usually the dispossessed, the oppressed, the underprivileged who now speak up—those who were mute now find their voices...

...The welfare state operates within an economy geared to maximizing profit, and often there are deep, if little-noticed, conflicts between the policies of government and the dynamics of the economy in which it is the latter that proves dominant...

...Roosevelt was open to many severe criticisms: his refusal to support legislation admitting refugees from Nazi Germany was a scandal...

...so was his attitude toward Loyalist Spain...

...Sometimes the welfare state is so pinched in its financing that its measures must necessarily fail...

...There followed the alphabetical agencies, from NRA to TVA— some lasting and others forgotten, some valuable and others mere nonsense...

...As the son of Jewish garment workers who suffered the full weight of the Depression, I know how much it meant to my parents when they could receive Social Security at the age of 65: it meant the difference between humiliating dependence and a modest independence...

...What characterized the Roosevelt administration was a readiness to improvise and occasionally listen to eggheads...

...Neither the right nor the left understood very well what was happening...

...I loved that, since it's one of the reasons I favor egalitarianism—for it provides norms and goals, visions of a practical utopia, toward which to strive...

...There is another vision, and that is of a humane community, a widening democratization of economic life, a greater equality for all citizens...

...And there are always unforeseen negative consequences to the most positive actions...

...I'd say that it represents a phase in the development of capitalist society...

...No one said: we will now establish a welfare state...

...We oppose Reaganism not just on concrete socioeconomic grouns, nor because we believe it won't "work"—in some sense, it may "work" only too well...

...The welfare state operates mainly within the limits of each national economy, and hence finds it very hard to cope with the increasing number of socioeconomic problems that seem soluble only on an international level...

...It is here that we come upon the lasting contribution of the Roosevelt era—the socialization of concern, the vision of society as a community, not based as yet on truly egalitarian principles but at least modulating the heartlessness of "rugged individualism...

...Many things went wrong with the welfare state, and it would be feckless to deny it...

...And in its own way, the welfare state enables that striving...

...The sociologist C. Wright Mills once made a keen distinction between issues and troubles...

...But a beginning has been made, a ground for further advance...

...The vision of "free enterprise" that it articulates hides a thrust of greed...

...Yes, but a capitalist society partly transformed and humanized through the pressures of internal, democratic insurgencies...

...So that even before the New Deal was begun, there was a program waiting for it...

...In the first stage conflicts seem relatively clear: we need elementary social benefits, we need them to survive, we need them to have a halfdecent old age...

...The welfare state preserves the essential traits of the capitalist economy in that the interplay of private or corporate owners in the market remains primary, but it also modifies the workings of that economy in that the powers of free disposal by property owners are politically regulated...

...The world view of the new conservatism is that of a conglomerate of Captain Ahabs rushing blindly to destruction in pursuit of a White Whale of power and profit...

...Reagan has not really cut down the amount, he has only changed the direction...

...THAT is where we are today...

...These did "purge" the economy, though at terrible human costs, and each time with a greater need for governmental "medicine...

...so too the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War...

...Without the speculative coherence of earlier thought, there could not have been the useful confusion of the early Roosevelt years...

...What do we mean by a welfare state...

...In the second stage we express our sense of trouble but still have not 47 succeeded in transforming that sense into clear or dramatic issues...

...Lt me turn a little more abstract...

...It creates a climate in which new values of communal responsibility can flourish ("Yes, I am my brother's keeper" rather than "Screw you, Jack...

...As for the left, it had become so accustomed to responding to this ideology during the Coolidge and Hoover years that it could not adapt 45 itself readily to the sophistication of Roosevelt...

...Coalitions break down through which electoral victories had been won...

...We want it not just because it will enable people to survive but also because it embodies a worthy sense of how people should live...

...Some theorists of morality bemoan the loss of national unity and purpose that follows from the scramble for group privileges within the welfare state...

...For such sincere primitives the New Deal meant the end of the world they cherished—a world without social legislation or trade unions, a world in which individualism signified the free reign of robber barons, where freedom rested on the ethic of social Darwinism...

...Creating thereby a certain tension between government and economy, state and society, the welfare state acts to save capitalism from its own self-destructive excesses...

...It may be that we are living through a systemic crisis in the welfare state, one caused not by accidental or transient factors but by its intrinsic characteristics...

...But here we must note a crucial point: there was improvisation, yes, but it did not come out of the blue...

...But more...

...Historians have often remarked that major historical actors do not really know what they do until they have done it...

...I put all this abstractly, but those of us who have reached a certain age can also testify from our own experience...

...None of this is utopia...

...But the social measures of the New Deal were of the greatest consequence—things people now take for granted—Social Security, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, the right to organize unions...

...BUT SUCCESS, as we know, also breeds failure...

...The traditional economic crises of old-style capitalism had a selfregulating character—market glut, overexpansion, plunge into depression, reserve armies of unemployed, "disciplining" of labor, depressed wages, gradual lowering of inventories, reopening of factories, a new boom, and then the same thing all over again...

...Straddling these two phases of the welfare state are the blacks, who rightly speak in behalf of both interests and values...

...Necessarily experimental, the welfare state makes mistakes...

...And a last point...

...Now under the welfare state there occurs a politicizing of crisis, so that fiscal, monetary, banking, employment and investment policies undertaken by the federal government turn out to be the political equivalents of those aspects of the relatively autonomous workings of the economy that under traditional capitalism hastened or slowed economic crisis...

...In the first stage of the welfare state—the Roosevelt-Truman stage— the liberal/left groups were able to articulate issues effectively...

...But there ought to have been a way—I speak with the assurance of retrospective wisdom—for democratic radicals both to support what was valuable in Roosevelt's program and criticize the rest...

...One thing should be clear: a modern industrial society must accept a large amount of governmental intervention in socioeconomic life...

...All that remains to be determined is whether this intervention will occur in behalf of the underprivileged, the modestly paid workers, the bulk of the population, or the national and multinational corporations...

...46 Society is "invaded" by those it has kept down or out...

...People like us should have been criticizing Roosevelt on these grounds, while supporting the social legislation that he was nonetheless introducing...

...Whenever I hear that reactionary snob William Buckley on TV drawling his distaste for "government handouts" I fly into a rage and want again to mount my old soapbox...

...Always, there is tension, imbalance, struggle within the welfare state...

...THE CENTRAL TASK of the next several years, then, is to work out the programmatic basis for this second stage of the welfare state—to be bold enough to move forward conceptually and not retreat, like Senator Tsongas, into a holding pattern that will neither solve social problems nor arouse renewed enthusiasm...

...A simple distinction suggests itself...

...The New Deal," writes the historian William Leuchtenberg, "certainly did not get the country out of the Depression...

...It is a vision of a new liberalism with a tincture of social democratic policy, or to use another vocabulary, a social liberalism...

...Behind Roosevelt there were constituencies in turmoil, especially the rising industrial unions...

...Big business customarily regarded Roosevelt as its enemy, while in fact he was its (somewhat oppressive) savior...

...Out of this confusion and improvisation emerged the welfare state or, as I would say, the semi-welfare state that we have had, far less generous or comprehensive than that of poorer countries in Europe...

...Their behavior confirmed the wisdom of the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter who once said that if capitalism was to be saved, it would have to be saved from the capitalists...