THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES: GREED, NOSTALGIA, IDEOLOGY & WAR WHOOPS
Howe, Irving
Taking the train from Westchester County to Grand Central Station, you pass some dreadful slums. The abandoned houses in these neighborhoods are boarded up, but some are adorned with fake...
...We are not in business to conduct socially responsible action...
...Equivalent figures for I.T.T...
...In 1968 Eugene McCarthy, having lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, still enjoyed a substantial following of ardent young people...
...For the segment of Reaganite operatives and backers that came from or represented the new rich of the West and Southwest—real estate developers, oil millionaires, movie magnates, in short the arriviste bourgeoisie—the policies of the Reagan administration were immediately helpful...
...We are not in business to conduct moral activity...
...in the surrender of the Koch administration in New York City to luxury developers...
...only that the moral styles, the tones of speech and qualities of symbol which this administration and its journalistic and intellectual allies encourage are pinched and narrow-spirited and sometimes downright mean...
...How then, you may wonder, did Reagan manage to get reelected...
...A few years ago they were helpful to the Reaganites, providing them with the theoretical gifts of Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...On some matters, such as the environment, not being a socialist may even render the criticism more effective...
...The policies of the Federal Reserve Board constitute a major intervention into economic life...
...The very tone of the opposition, such as it is, which the leading Democrats adopt seems clear evidence that the Reaganites have come to control the political turf—which means, above all, to set the terms of the debate...
...Reagan's most effective slogan has been "Get the government off our backs...
...Myth number two is that investment bankers somehow create value...
...Why, one wonders, has American liberalism suffered so severe a decline...
...In any case, we are paying now for the crude anti-Americanism, the feckless nose-thumbing and flag-burning that marked a good part of the counterculture in the late 1960s...
...And this, quite apart from their plushy connections with foundations, magazines, corporations, etc...
...Christopher Hitchens THE NATION, May 17, 1986 q 422 many of the techniques of liberalism's earlier, more heroic days...
...the investment house of Shearson Lehman flashes snappy statements on television about the virtues of capitalism...
...they lived with it faute de mieux, waiting for a chance to shake off trade unions, social measures, and economic regulations...
...How else do you explain the readiness of a 35-year-old arbitrager publicly to say that adding "a library and a room for the au pair girl" would come to four or five million dollars—and this at a time when thousands of New Yorkers had no homes last winter...
...in the disdain lining even the surface of official policy toward blacks...
...And in this, we must acknowledge, they often succeeded...
...had found 414 spiritual comrades in the White House, or even an office next door to, say, Michael Deaver...
...If writers are right in telling us that language reveals our deepest biases, then it is worth stopping over that phrase...
...New generations of profiteers, yuppies with clever brains and no minds, flourished in investment banking...
...Its editors have evidently chosen to make their magazine an arena for conflict, a forum for debate, which is a plausible option but does not enable a coherent, yet openspirited, advocacy of a resurgent liberalism...
...Does he really want to get us into a war...
...Bellow need only glance at some of the boxes in this issue of Dissent to learn about those "pockets of poverty...
...and this too contributed to the decline of its popular base...
...We see it in the systematic refusal of the Reagan administration even to consider programs that would provide jobs for the unemployed...
...The war whoop of chauvinism...
...As John Kenneth Galbraith tartly observes, "Senator Jesse Helms stands staunchly and rhetorically for the free market and for a uniquely rigorous quota and licensing system for the tobacco producers (or landowners) who help to assure his election...
...This would be comforting if true, but at the very least it requires complication...
...Whether intuitively or by calculation, the Reaganites grasped how deeply the collective imagination of this country responded to "pictures" of an earlier, often mythic America—"pictures" of small towns, rugged personal virtues, family stability, and sturdy yeomen cultivating their own farms...
...The less such "pictures" correspond to social reality, the greater their appeal, for it is obviously more pleasant to reflect upon the America of Franklin and Jefferson than that of Exxon and IBM...
...but that a timorous and unfocused retreat from liberalism must bring defeat is all too clear...
...By contrast, it should in honesty be said, at least some conservatives tried to engage in programmatic thought, speculating in their newly-developed think tanks on the problems and contradictions, some contingent but others perhaps fundamental, of the welfare state in a capitalist economy...
...There are times, however, when our corporate leaders forget all the babble about social responsibility and lapse into mere truth...
...These feelings were exploited skillfully...
...It appeals to Americans bewildered by the merger mania, known in earlier days as the concentration of capital...
...What might be called mainstream liberalism seems quite unable to attract talented new advocates who can speak to audiences beyond the confines of the academy...
...Newsweek, May 26, 1986...
...I don't claim to know how strong or lasting this shift will prove to be...
...Its authors, Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, produce an array of poll results showing that majorities of respondents still favor many of the programs associated with liberalism...
...It appeals to Americans whose small businesses have been squeezed or destroyed by giant competitors...
...The power of ideology (or: in America a little goes a long way...
...That the welfare state might have inherent contradictions was an idea that rarely, if ever, surfaced in liberal thought...
...but the bent of his policy, the tone of his rhetoric, the signals of his response have all enabled, indeed encouraged, the atmosphere of greed...
...THE CORPORATIONS HAVE DISCOVERED the importance of ideas, or at least the manipulation of ideas...
...One needn't be a socialist to engage in such criticism...
...Reagan himself need not say, like Richard Nixon, "I am not a crook," since no one supposes he is...
...Dow Chemical let its investment decline by 34 percent and its work force by 13 percent...
...Much of the Reaganite reaction, though eventuating in concrete socioeconomic policies, drew upon feelings of hurt and outrage that were held by people not necessarily reactionaries or even conservatives...
...But to scan our society from the perspective of democratic socialism offers at least this advantage: it enables a deep-going criticism of the imbalances of wealth and power in our corporate-dominated society, so that we can see those imbalances not as mere blemishes but as injustices built into the very structure of capitalist economy...
...And up to a point it has worked: many Americans do "feel better about their country," if only because they have a president who says what they wish to hear...
...Month by month the neoconservative organs, especially Commentary, have been driven by some inner fury, almost a kind of madness—we saw the same thing in the late 1960s with certain New Left journals—to keep raising the ante by making increasingly wild and indiscriminate attacks on anyone suspect of liberal heresy and radical sin: which means not only predictable targets like Mike Harrington and me, but relatively innocent figures like the Italian novelist Primo Levi and the American sociologist Paul Starr...
...He has taught American businessmen, at least some of them, the elementary lesson that social struggle takes place, perhaps most of all, in people's heads and that just as dropping some change into the cultural programs of public broadcasting helps create an "aura," so the interests of the business community may be served by subsidizing magazines like the New Criterion and the Public Interest, as well as the network of institutes, committees, foundations, and journals in which the neocons flourish...
...It appeals to Americans who, feeling more and more helpless as employees or clients of corporate giants, transfer their frustrations *1 have tried to do this in a recent little book The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986...
...If individualism has often been used to justify economic depredation, it has also provided support to social critics standing alone, and independently, against government and mob, from the Mexican to the Vietnam Wars...
...And he ends with a cry of anguish: Are the politicians "aware that in the name of compassion they are giving social sanction to what can only be described as brutish degradation...
...What credence does the "free market" rhetoric of a Jesse Helms merit when set against his insistence on government privileges for his tobacco constituency...
...Stockman, we always knew, was fantasizing—we hardly needed his self-important confirmation of the fact—but the Chamber of Commerce people and the host of supply-side propagandists seem at least to have believed their own line...
...Poofand the far-out segments of the New Left were gone, consumed in their own rage...
...It's interesting to note that a legal opinion drafted by lawyers in the civil rights division of the Justice Department (not exactly a hot-bed of radicalism) "tentatively concluded that people with AIDS are 'handicapped individuals' entitled to protection under the federal civil rights law...
...But that would not necessarily demonstrate that there has been no important shift to the right or that we are enjoying a turn back toward liberalism...
...That there should have been losses...
...Is this not an emblem of life in the America of Ronald Reagan, the New York of Ed Koch...
...For example, Boeing paid no taxes, cut its capital spending by 38 percent and reduced its payroll by 18 percent...
...There was Calvin Coolidge who declared, "The business of America is business...
...It signified not a society egalitarian or even just, but at least one that modulated the harshness of "rugged individualism...
...This style becomes annoying when it tempts him into cozy good-fellowship with William Buckley, a reactionary snob who merits no more than the coolest of civility...
...There were Drew and Fisk, Morgan and Rockefeller in the days of and after the robber barons...
...Galbraith aims his neatly ironic shafts against Reaganomics, but with a world-weariness that seems to despair of ever again striking a blow that will tell...
...The sensibilities of the country's elites, all those who make policy and shape opinion, harden...
...As the political scientists celebrated the ascendency of "pragmatism" (a term that relieves many people of the need for thinking), another triumph was in preparation, that of the ideologically-aroused Reaganites...
...The very idea of a national health act, for example, was no longer 413 even mentioned by the few remaining liberals in Congress...
...Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Richard Darman says in a moment of candor: "We've been in the business of economic planning as long as we've been in the business of practical politics" (New Republic, May 5, 1986...
...To live under an administration that featured such notables as James Watt and Rita Lavelle...
...Exposing the cant about "getting the government off our backs," while necessary, is not likely to suffice...
...When was the last time that even Senator Kennedy spoke out in favor of his once-featured project of a national health bill...
...Such movements are hardly symptoms of a "mass society...
...As for other social analysts who defend liberal measures and values—writers like Robert Kuttner, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington, Robert Reich, Jeff Faux, etc.—they are mostly spokesmen for the democratic left who have been forced, in these trying times, to pick up the slack of liberalism...
...Indeed, it could not...
...Badly shaken by Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the countercultural excesses of the late 1960s, many Americans have come to yearn for a return to "traditional values," even if that return was being sponsored politically by a nouveau riche class which in its pinched little heart aspired most of all to conspicuous consumption...
...For this is a phrase of evasion, the euphemism of apologists for the status quo, it is the language of those who gloss over the reality of millions of people living in poverty and millions of others (some near to Bellow's own Chicago) who have worked in basic industries and are now having their lives torn up...
...In any case, it is clearly probable that a collapse of liberalism will benefit the right far more than the left...
...The time had come for policies of a social democratic slant but these an increasingly insecure liberalism would not approach...
...The neoconservatives have developed a "theory," as odd as it is groundless, according to which leftist and liberal critics of Western bourgeois democracies are guilty of the dark sin of "equivalence," that is, of believing that the two great blocs, the Western and the Soviet, are equally oppressive and equally to be opposed...
...If so, the situation of the American left, precarious enough already, is_ far worse than we might suppose, for every lesson of American history teaches us, I believe, that the left in America flourishes mostly during the times when liberalism flourishes...
...In a country where only two decades ago a sizable portion of the population registered distrust of corporate America, the Reaganites have largely succeeded in restoring popular confidence in the virtues of capitalism, the mystical beneficence of "the free market," and the attractiveness of a "minimalist state," even though that state, faithfully attending to corporate needs, has never been close to being minimalist...
...After all, to be an ideologue doesn't necessarily mean to commit political suicide: as a Washington hand is quoted, "Reagan has never been one to go over a cliff for a cause" (Newsweek, April 7, 1986...
...The truth is that where investment has risen, it has been among companies that consider themselves taxpayers...
...David Stockman judged Reagan to be "a consensus politician, not an ideologue...
...But there's not much to say about this, beyond noticing what has already been noticed—that American intellectuals are scattered and dispersed, no longer forming any sort of coherent force, let alone being able to act as an "adversary culture," or critics of established power...
...Between 1981, when Reaganism took the glove off the invisible hand, and 1984, some forty-four companies at the top of the league, which among them shared $2.1 billion of tax rebate money, declared $53.6 billion in pre-tax domestic profits and paid no tax at all...
...in the mere fact that a rag like the New York Post can survive...
...In short, just as he had previously attacked the administration for not being jingoistic enough in foreign policy, he now undercut it for having "rushed to accommodate this fantastic demand...
...It will take some years before we know the whole story of this jolly interpenetration between officialdom and corporations, but it takes no gifts of prophecy to foresee that, in its subservience to big money, the Reagan administration is likely to equal or surpass those of Grant and Harding...
...Which in practice comes down to assaulting anyone who ventures to exercise the rights of criticism that the neocons praise as the blessing of democracy...
...Indeed, they think of themselves as a beleaguered minority guarding the pass against spineless liberals who are preparing the downfall of Western civilization...
...A few may end in jail for "insider" trading...
...I SUSPECT THEIR MOMENT HAS PEAKED...
...When the limits of this perspective became clear to the president's managers (most starkly after the administration's defeat in Congress when it tried to tamper with Social Security), the Reaganites fell back, shrewdly enough, on their minimum program...
...there is only an interweaving of many elements in complex, confused, and often contradictory ways...
...We are living in a moment of moral smallness, a curdling of generosity, a collapse of idealism...
...in the steady efforts of the civil rights division of the Justice Department to sabotage affirmative action...
...Criticism of an administration that exalts greed and ignores need...
...Credit for enticing the corporations into ideological battle must go in part to Irving Kristol, who has made himself into a sort of backroom broker between the corporations and the Republican party on one hand and some available intellectuals on the other...
...Since writing this footnote I have come across a report (New York Times, June 28, 1986) that "Heterosexual intercourse is now the predominant route of the spread of AIDS in Haiti...
...New York Times, June 2, 1986...
...The primacy of `success," the release of greed...
...As long as they can alarm themselves with fairy tales about "equivalence," they can also persuade themselves that, their visible prosperity notwithstanding, they are fighting a desperate last-ditch defense for freedom...
...After all, few human experiences can be as satisfying as the simultaneous discharge of low desires and high sentiments...
...Two examples, both venial, neither worldshaking, yet symptomatic: At the recent PEN Congress Normal Mailer invites as a major speaker Secretary of State George Shultz, architect (or developer) of Reagan's Nicaraguan policy...
...Perhaps not an advantage in the immediate tactical sense, but very much so for serious intellectual work...
...It's quite possible that the Democrats will score victories in the 1986 congressional elections and may even win the presidency in 1988...
...But if anything of the sort happens, it will be a sharp break...
...Criticism of all those who, in the name of an abstract equality, would deny blacks a few steps toward equality through affirmative action...
...Some nine or ten years ago I noticed, in one of those institutional ads that corporations print on the New York Times op ed page, a quotation from the literary critic Lionel Trilling...
...One of the saddest aspects of recent intellectual life has been an all-but-universal indifference to the defeats suffered by American labor and the worsening conditions of the American working class...
...Walter Mondale, a decent but not very strong figure, chose—until the last few weeks of his campaign, by which time it was too late—to run for the presidency as a hesitant compromiser hoping to minimize his earlier associations with liberalism...
...Any bets on what he'll pay the au pair girl...
...and second, we're the strongest country in the world (as was proved once and for all in Grenada) and we're going to straighten things out, even if we have to call in John Wayne to help out Ron...
...In H ow deep and durable is this shift in public sentiment...
...We are paying for its insensitivity to native speech and sentiment, an insensitivity that, strangely, is itself part of American tradition...
...There's something grotesquely comic, almost Dickensian, about these people...
...Will the rightward turn continue after Reagan...
...that veterans would grow tired and step aside—all to be expected...
...Now, in the Reagan era, it's acceptable...
...But the right has no historical ground for the exclusiveness of its claim within the American individualist tradition...
...The inner circles of Reaganites and their managerial supporters throughout the country were sublimely untroubled by the cautions of certain skeptics (Felix Rohatyn, for one) in the Eastern financial establishment...
...But above all, it appeals to the executives and managers of Big Business whose institutions were rescued from probable collapse by the welfare state but who never reconciled themselves to the agents of their rescue, and who now feel free to release their yearning for the good old days of "rugged individualism" and union busting...
...There was Charlie Wilson who said, "What's good for General Motors is good for the United States...
...For that matter, is there a turn to the right...
...Ideological in a primitive way, they would have stared with incomprehension if you had suggested that their survival as a class might well have been due to the very social measures they despised...
...420 bered the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act...
...This liberalism has seen bad times, but found itself again...
...There is room at the moment for an aggressive liberal journal that would rally scattered cohorts, freshen up received wisdom and venture on new ideas, and enter into intellectual combat...
...There's always someone who makes more than you do...
...423 Yet they feel unloved...
...Love it but don't use it, is their slogan...
...The new rich, tasting power and lightheaded with a whiff of ideology, could now have it both ways...
...At the same PEN Congress Saul Bellow, a writer of sensitivity who may well remember what it was that drove us in our youth to radical criticism, got involved in a debate with Giinter Grass...
...They could persuade themselves that it was quite legitimate, indeed "the American way," to grab as much as they could, and "Screw you, Jack," if yOu suffered the consequences, while they were also morally comforted with the fairy tale that the sum of their selfishness would, through a sleight of "the invisible hand," come out as a public good...
...emphasis added...
...Let people of determination, steady workers with some humor and no fanaticism, keep saying: "This is not what America is supposed to be, this is not how human beings should live...
...Under Reagan America experienced, let us say, a quarter-counterrevolution...
...And then— then we will see...
...found that there was an inverse relation between companies maximizing tax breaks and companies making new investments in plants and employment...
...It's as if they needed to keep alive the psychology of their radical past and now to link it with the politics of the far right—a rather unsavory combination...
...To recall Lionel Trilling's oncefamous remark of the 1950s—that in America liberalism is the only viable political tradition— is to thrust oneself back into another world...
...But this ideology does not speak honestly or realistically to these facts of modern life...
...In the New York Post (September 24, 1985) Norman Podhoretz (editor of Commentary, a magazine sponsored by the American Jewish Committee) had a peculiarly brutish article on AIDS...
...Pick up any leading intellectual journal and you will find critiques of Reaganite policy in Nicaragua or Star Wars, but barely a peep about what has been happening to the unions and the workers in them...
...To these notes it's worth adding a few words about liberal failures of leadership...
...Wealthiest two-fifths of all 67.3 Highest percentage recorded (since families 1947...
...It is released in the vulgar, unsportsmanlike displays at the Los Angeles Olympics...
...They brought about a measurable redistribution of income and wealth in behalf of the rich, and they repelled any attempt to pass further social legislation—not that the chicken-hearted Democrats made much of an attempt...
...VI C riticism and more criticism—that's the need of the moment, the need for tomorrow...
...Criticism of every deal or accord with authoritarian dictatorships...
...The polls do not measure intensity of commitment, or which of two conflicting sets of opinions held simultaneously may be the stronger...
...Or that any of the leading Democrats remem*A small example, though repulsive enough...
...Let me try briefly to sift out the main elements of the Reaganite vision...
...This contrasts, to say the least, with the boastful predictions made in 1981 by David Stockman's Office of Management and Budget, and by the United States Chamber of Commerce...
...Here is Hamilton James, 35, of the firm Donaldson Lupkin, who shovels in over a million a year but says that "if we [his family] want a library and a room for an au pair girl, it could cost a couple million dollars...
...From the point of view of Podhoretz's new fundamentalist morality, this conclusion was sheer romanticism...
...If, as I believe, we are paying for the irresponsibility of the countercultural left, we are also paying for the desiccation of liberalism, which in the figure of Jimmy Carter was reduced to a technological cipher...
...In the last decade, under the shrewd guardianship of the neoconservative intellectuals— who offer their thoughts to the corporations, though not for free, not for free—corporate America has discovered the pragmatic uses of ideology, the importance of entering intellectual debate, and consequently has poured millions into foundations, magazines, conferences...
...Newsweek (May 26, 1986) quotes a disillusioned Wall Streeter: We have created two myths in the 1980s...
...It would be foolhardy in a few pages to try to sort out the many strands of American individualism, still one of the strongest components of national myth and belief.* The Reaganites do have some claim upon this tradition: there is a clear line of descent from a corrupted late Emersonianism to the "rugged individualism" of Herbert Hoover to the "possessive individualism" of today (to possess: to grab...
...416 Pastoral nostalgia, individualist appeals, traditional values, religious fervor—it is the mixture of all these into one stream of collective sentiment that the Reaganites have managed...
...Does this mean that Mailer approves of this policy...
...q 425...
...We are in business to conduct business...
...THE FEVER SPREAD...
...A few years ago our national heroes were men like Jonas Salk and Martin Luther King and Walter Reuther, but now it's an industrial manager like Lee Iacocca, of Pinto fame, whose book is supposed to show even morons how to become millionaires...
...New York Times, April 23, 1986...
...and John Kenneth Galbraith are still heard from on occasion, but they are understandably intent upon writing their own books and perhaps, again understandably, are weary of polemic...
...If a majority of Americans favor liberal measures yet a majority of voters chose Reagan, doesn't this suggest that the appeal of the president and his slogans was deeper, more telling than any (perhaps fading or residual or formal) attachment to liberal programs...
...Perhaps most important, the Reaganites managed to create a political atmosphere in which the social forces favoring the welfare state were forced onto the defensive...
...A purism of destructiveness is at work here which afflicts all extremist groups, right and left...
...But when it comes to real influence and even power—the ability to mold policy in the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Times and even, partly, the State Department—the neoconservatives are doing rather well for themselves...
...FUNDAMENTALLY, I'D SUGGEST, we have been witnessing the all-but-inevitable disintegration which affects every party or movement that 421 has held power for a length of time...
...They shuffle around value other people have created...
...That average is misleading for several important cases...
...A tradition that in the past had at least partly drawn upon social idealism and popular commitment now dwindled into the outlook of an intelligent technocrat...
...Finance is easy...
...Deaver's squalid story —his exploitation of White House connections in behalf of his lobbying firm, with the winking connivance of his old boss—was just a minor instance of the by now commonplace shuttling between high governmental posts, especially in the Pentagon, and corporate board rooms...
...August 1985...
...As long as the American economy was expanding and Keynesian prescriptions were more or less working, New Deal liberalism and its offshoots could retain some vitality...
...One need only look at the dominant style of opinion within the Democratic party to see that the rightward shift has all but overcome those who are supposed to resist it...
...Is it being swept off the historical stage, as dogmatists of right and left gleefully assert...
...The one thing that might save the neocons from this fate is the big money behind them...
...Even if the criticism is not as "fundamental" as we might like, let it be heard...
...The readiness of the federal government to bail out Lockheed, Chrysler, and Penn Central is quite as decisive an intervention as a program, if there were one, to help bankrupt farmers and create jobs for the unemployed...
...They promised a rise in business investment of 11 percent per annum, adjusted for inflation, from 1981 through 1986...
...in which the head of the Civil Rights Commission is part Uncle Tom and part, it seems, huckster...
...As liberalism lost its charge of innovative energy, the conservative movement appropriated I am impatient to see the reply of the supplysiders to a little-noticed report by Citizens for Tax Justice, which tracked the performance of corporations as they basked in Reaganite fiscal forbearances...
...They have more political influence today than any other intellectuals, but they indulge in more self-pity also, complaining about being outside of, and scorned by, the cultural "establishment...
...Can you imagine any liberal more than a half century later introducing such a bill in Congress...
...Where in the 1930s liberalism was at least in part based on mass movements, notably the trade unions, and could claim a large popular suffrage, by the 1970s it had narrowed into an electoral apparatus or "political class" getting on in years and too much at ease with itself and its received ideas...
...But consider also that phrase "pockets of poverty...
...And the result is likely to be a grand climax of self-destruction...
...American liberalism at its best has a rich tradition: a worldview devoted to political freedom, pluralist ways of life, and programs for social change...
...Success breeds complacency, obtuseness and corruption, and these in turns make for an incapacity to see, let alone confront, the problems created by success...
...When lined with religious passion and cast as agent of traditional values, right-wing politics takes on a formidable strength—ornamented with such fawning testimonials as William Buckley's comparison of Nancy Reagan with the Piet...
...BUT THE MAIN ACHIEVEMENT of the Reagan administration has not been institutional or programmatic...
...That's wrong...
...Liberalism, once at least occasionally linked with social insurgency, now came to be identified with a troubled status quo: a government that had dragged us into an indefensible war in Vietnam and by the mid1970s was encountering economic difficulties (stagflation, unemployment) for which it knew no remedies...
...Reprinted from Building America's Future (Detroit, Mich.: United Auto Workers of America, 1985...
...In bad shape right now, it could regain cogency if it were to confront socioeconomic problems more complex, and requiring more radical answers, than those of the New Deal era...
...Earning around a million dollars a year, some of these arbitragers and deal-makers live by a scale of values that can only repel Americans who still keep a fraction of the republic's animating values...
...He argued against the demand that the Reagan administration "undertake a crash program to develop a vaccine" to prevent AIDS...
...The neocons want, so to say, the sensations of affluent apocalypse...
...Middle fifth of all families 17.0 Lowest percentage recorded (since 1947...
...The only question, but a big one, is whether the government's economic role will be progressive or regressive...
...And then their moment came—with the inner disintegration of liberalism under Carter that opened the way for Reagan...
...Now, there were sectarians—the right is blessed with them as well as the left—who complained that Reagan did not go far enough...
...A new national mood has been programmed...
...That human beings, whatever their earlier deviation from the strict morals Podhoretz would enforce, are dying from this disease and therefore require help, is a consideration that nowhere enters Podhoretz's argument...
...Of course not...
...in the admiration shown a guntoter like Bernhard Goetz...
...Criticism of military chauvinism...
...many of us on the left quite underestimated the power of vague, incantatory appeals to "tradition"—just as we also warned, to little avail, that the hijinks of "the young" in the late 1960s would be paid for later by the workers, the poor, women, and minorities...
...The more hard-bitten and fanatic Reaganites brought to office a maximum program: to undo the New Deal, which meant to demolish the fraction of a welfare state we have...
...America is a volatile country and it's possible that we are indeed moving to the sort of sharp break in public sentiment, this time a turn away from Reaganism, that has occurred three or four times since World War II...
...Well, yes, in part it is...
...Iacocca stars in a television commercial that wonderfully articulates the spirit of the times: he strides through a factory in heroic style, blaring out the virtues of his product, while behind him follow a group of auto workers, mute and cheerful, happy with the beneficence of Lee the First...
...In light of this news, one awaits further guidance as to sexual morality from the editor of Commentary...
...On the other hand, strong new popular movements that mobilize previously silent segments of the population to struggle over issues like abortion, prayer in the schools, the death penalty, etc...
...It's symbolized, half in myth, half in parody, by Rambo...
...One reason this intellectual scam has worked is that so far, with perhaps the exception of Mario Cuomo, no political leader in the opposition has grasped emotionally the power of native speech and symbol...
...any critic of social arrangements in, say, Reagan's America or Thatcher's England who has a gram of brains and isn't besotted with Trotskyist formulas of 1937, knows quite well that the evil of totalitarian societies, whether Soviet or otherwise, is qualitatively different from, that is, worse than, that of the West...
...On the one hand, a managed passivity, submission to television captions, apparent indifference to social suffering, political chicanery, and a blundering president—the expected elements of a "mass society...
...A young arbitrager reports that everyone seems to want to make the quick buck...
...but can you imagine what some of the boys in the White House say to Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams when they read an attack by Abrams's fatherinlaw, Norman Podhoretz, on the pusillanimous policies of Reagan in the Cold War...
...Mobil and Exxon, borrowing apparently from the pages of the Public Interest, offer solemn essays on political economy...
...Neither success nor failure is ordained: men and women still make their history, at least some of it...
...SOURCE: Bureau of the Census, Money Income and Poverty Status of Families and Persons in the United States: 1984...
...All later administrations, at least until that of Reagan, more or less accepted the New Deal legacy...
...Yet something is new, at least for the years since 1933, and that's the social and moral sanction that Reaganism has given to the ethos of greed...
...As it was, McCarthy petulantly resigned his Senate seat, left his followers high and dry, and speedily entered oblivion...
...New York Review of Books, June 26, 1986...
...There is, in reality, no single tradition...
...Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal constituted, let us say, a quarter-revolution...
...New York slumlords can buy these decals from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (100 Gold St., NYC) for $10 apiece, thoughtfully ranged in color from "Full Shade White" to "Black & Grey...
...We ought to be skeptical about theories of liberalism's "exhaustion," if only because they bear an embarrassing resemblance to earlier, dubious theories about capitalism's "inevitable collapse...
...If only homosexuals would give up their "buggery," the problem of AIDS would soon be solved...
...That an aggressive and principled liberal effort would have brought him victory is doubtful...
...The bureaucratization of liberalism, perhaps an unavoidable cost of its success, also meant that it came increasingly to depend on the intervention of the judiciary, especially on such difficult matters as school busing...
...One is that you need to be smart to be an investment banker...
...to "the bureaucrats...
...While leaving intact the external structures of certain programs, they proceeded, with firm ideological malice, to cut out and cut down a good many other programs...
...WE LIVE IN A CURIOUSLY MIXED SITUATION...
...The favored tone of worldly, or sometimes macho, indifference to the plight of the jobless and the homeless cuts through the whole range 419 of the people in power and their intellectual allies...
...Shrewdly seizing upon a popular reaction against the often vulgar and mindless anti-Americanism of the late 1960s, the Reagan administration has succeeded partly in blotting out memories of 418 Percent of Population Total National Comparison to Category Income Received Past Percentages Poorest two-fifths of all 15.7% Lowest percentage recorded since the families data collection began in 1947...
...The ideology of a reclaimed laissez-faire is having a "run" in some parts of the industrialized world, especially because of social democratic and liberal inadequacies, though only in the United States and Great Britain has it had a modest economic success...
...C.T.J...
...And criticism of "our side" too, of the sluggishness of portions of the labor movement, of the collapse of the hopes raised by the French Socialists, of the intellectual drabness of much social democracy...
...They received not so much a tax holiday as an outright subsidy from taxpayers...
...They strike upon our nerves...
...A certain worldview, not exactly fresh but with some clever decorations, has come to dominate public discourse...
...It is embodied, more fiercely, in the indefensible Reaganite policy of intervening in Nicaragua...
...still, you would suppose that intellectuals, supposedly endowed with historical memories, would remember something about the role of the unions in creating our semi-welfare state, perhaps even remember the no doubt delusionary but not entirely unworthy feelings that intellectuals had about the working class a few decades ago...
...What such critics believe is simply that if, as the neoconservatives say, the right to criticize in the West is a precious one—which, of course, it is—then it is a right that improves with intelligent use...
...It's a parasitical industry...
...They would weaken, reduce, cripple, starve out the welfare state...
...Serious conservatives know this...
...Nevertheless, especially when fused with nostalgia for American individualism, this ideological gambit is going to be effective, at least until put to the test of crisis—What can it say to continued high unemployment, the increasing poverty of even these boom years?—as well as to the test of deceitful practice...
...Replying to Grass's charge that he had ignored or minimized the magnitude of poverty in a speech he had delivered at the congress, Bellow said: "I did not say there are no pockets of poverty...
...By that I suppose they mean certain magazines like the New York Review of Books...
...A not-very-profound article in the Atlantic (May 1986) argues that there has not been one...
...New York Times, June 8, 1986...
...The ones that took the breaks did only that...
...Even to mention 424 such a matter--at a time when we could be discussing the finer points of theoretical conjunctures and phallocentrism—is to call down upon oneself the charge of being old-fashioned...
...I did not say this is a land of full justice...
...Schlesinger advances a consoling theory—consoling if true —about the periodicity of American politics, according to which the next swing of the pendulum will bring us happily back to liberalism *How dismal the current state of the Democratic liberals is I came to realize only after reading a major new history of the New Deal years, Kenneth Davis's FDR: The New Deal Years 1933-1937...
...Caught in illegal maneuvers, which in pleading guilty they now say were known to the top people in their firms, they seem like petty scapegoats, small fry who had not yet learned what the big fellows know: that you can evade the law without breaking it or can make yourself a bundle while remaining just this side of the law since, after all, it's your kind of law...
...Hardly a politician dares acknowledge himself to be a liberal, the very word itself having come to seem a political handicap.* Of the older intellectual spokesmen for liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...This new national mood draws upon two contradictory emotions held with about equal intensity: first, everybody has been kicking poor little America around...
...in the steady deterioration of OSHA-determined work safety regulations in factories...
...They] move out into the left lane, put it into overdrive and hope the brakes don't fail when they hit the first curve...
...IV Few things about the national condition are more depressing than the collapse of American liberalism...
...Segments of the American bourgeoisie had never accepted the general premise or sparse practice of what passed in America for a welfare state...
...He was merely trying to say that "by and large" America is "an example of prosperity...
...It introduced the rudiments of a welfare state and made "the socialization of concern" into a national value...
...The New Republic prints many cogent liberal pieces on domestic subjects, but—it almost depends on which week you open it—also many swaggering neoconservative pieces, especially on foreign policy...
...New terms entered our language: arbitrage, asset-shuffling, golden parachute, junk bonds, etc...
...What is sad is that, through a default of will and imagination, the speech and symbols of individualism have been allowed to fall into the hands of the right...
...While industrial America was being devastated and thousands of farmers trembled on the edge of bankruptcy, the corporate and financial "community" indulged in a spree of raids and mergers, almost all of them unproductive, sterile, asocial, but decidedly profitable...
...The Reagan administration did not "cause" the Wall Street shenanigans I've mentioned...
...The abandoned houses in these neighborhoods are boarded up, but some are adorned with fake windows—"Occupied-Look" decals—that are supposed to trick you into believing they are real windows...
...This struck me as a turning point in intellectual life, or at least in our public relations, coming as it did only a few years after some writers had proclaimed "the end of ideology...
...Is it possible, as some writers of the sectarian left have said, that liberalism in America has "exhausted itself...
...Now, no sensible person believes anything of the sort...
...So let me just offer a few notes on recent happenings: • The one disciplined intellectual group that, under Reagan, has a modest access to power, is the neoconservatives...
...The lure of an earlier America, or the corruptions of nostalgia...
...This chap might have felt the same way about housing costs at an earlier moment, but he would have been too cautious or ashamed to say it...
...In the long run, the brilliant manipulation of popular sentiment by Reagan and his men may turn out to be more important than their economic and social enactments...
...Evidently, for many Americans the appeal of Reagan and at least some of what he represents was stronger than the attachment to welfare-state measures...
...were 30 percent and 25 percent...
...Thompson has shrewdly described as an instance of American "individualism" gone berserk . . . the lone cowboy now ascending the heavens to clean up the rustlers...
...some of its leading figures have yielded to shoddy deals, others have stood firm by first principles...
...the disastrous and destructive American intervention in Vietnam...
...I don't, however, see such a journal...
...If it's anything fancy, four or five million...
...A PSYCHIATRIST, Samuel Klagsbrun, Who treats "a lot of lawyers handling mergers and acquisitions," says that for these people "business is God" (Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1986...
...Hey, Elliot, is your wife's old man off his nut...
...Sensible people know that the talk about getting the government out of economic life has not led to a significant decline in government intervention in the economy...
...After a time, the once-magical names of Roosevelt and Kennedy lost their glamor, new generations appeared that had little interest in the past and less capacity for memory...
...Still more important was the largesse with which these policies sanctioned appetites of acquisitiveness and greed that had been present, of course, before Reagan's presidency but not quite so blatantly or unashamedly...
...that the usual crew of opportunists should desert...
...The code word is "pragmatic...
...But meanwhile there are some new ideological wrinkles...
...There were the boys of Teapot Dome...
...In the face of the Reaganite victory, the organizational and ideological collapse of American liberalism has been astonishing...
...417 ABOUT ONE THING WE CAN BE QUITE CERTAIN: the interpenetration of state and society, government and economy is an inescapable fact of modern life...
...It was as if J.R...
...Perhaps inevitably, there occur in times of reaction small adaptations, failures of memory...
...About such things one can only speak impressionistically, but we all recognize them...
...One can almost hear Kristol gently remonstrating: Yes, yes, John, but do you have to say it...
...And, in this culture, what could be worse...
...Most intellectuals are, more or less, against Reaganism, but there has been remarkably little concerted opposition to it in those areas of public life that are or should be especially important to intellectuals: e.g., educational policy, cultural institutions, etc...
...Liberal proposals are virtually invisible at the Democratic top...
...So that such investment increase as there has been is not attributable to the supply-side nostrum...
...The comforts of office, the fears of yesterday's innovators before the risks of tomorrow's innovations: all disabled American liberalism...
...but why must the pendulum keep swinging...
...It has consisted of a spectacular transformation of popular attitudes, values and styles, though how deep or durable this will prove to be we cannot yet know...
...The corporate buccaneers who now felt free to act out the ethos of Social Darwinism could also preach that "the free market" brought plenty to all (which didn't, however, keep corporate America from pressing for every form of governmental handout that would further its economic interests...
...415 NONE OF THIS IS NEW...
...Investment banking is the new gold mine...
...The Nation is mired in the fellow-traveling causes and symbols of yesterday's Popular Front (Hiss, the Rosenbergs, etc...
...When it comes to political reality, Stockman has nothing to teach Reagan...
...But so utter a rout...
...One dominant style of intellectual, or at least literary, life these past several years has been a self-contented hermeticism of theory—sometimes, and this really is bizarre, in the form of a congealed academic Marxism (once it wanted to change the world, now to change the methodology...
...Meanwhile, we'd better give the devil his due if we want to resist his doings...
...The shrewder Reaganites understood that if they clung at all costs to their maximum program, they might not even get their minimum...
...There were figures like La Follette of Wisconsin and Norris of Nebraska who represented an old-fashioned militant progressivism of which we may well be envious today...
...in which the president dares to compare the Somocista contras, some of them proven killers, with Washington and Jefferson—is to recall again the force of Brecht's sentence about another (still more) evil time: "He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible tidings...
...And while much of this pastoral nostalgia is manipulated by political hucksters, who have apparently learned something from the commercials of Marlboro cigarettes and Busch beer, there is still, it is important to remember, something authentic being exploited here, a memory prettied up and sweetened but a genuine memory nonetheless...
...in which the attorney general declares poverty in America to be merely "anecdotal" and the president himself (ignoring massive evidence, some of it accumulated by his own administration), announces that people go hungry in America only if they lack information on how to get help...
...Fundamentalism is familiar enough in American history, but the political energies and moral virulence characterizing it today may be rather new...
...Simple, conclude our authors: the economic situation got better and most people vote their pocketbooks...
...For what the conservatives now undertook to do, and in part succeeded in doing, was to build articulate popular constituencies...
...Here is John Akers, chief executive of IBM, on divesting in South Africa: "If we elect to leave, it will be a business decision...
...Podhoretz, a military strategist, is also a medical authority...
...And it is raised to a pitch of madness in the Star Wars program (which E.P...
...But once they had to confront problems no longer soluble through the by-now conventional New Deal measures—problems like the Vietnam War, Third-World eruptions (Iran), the radical transformation of the world economy, new productive techniques, inflation, etc.— liberalism fell apart...
...Except in their response to Reagan's outrageous feeler about canceling SALT II, the posture of the leading Democrats is defensive— or worse still, acquiescent, as when Senator Bradley votes for aid to the Nicaraguan contras...
...And that would seem to signify a shift to the right, would it not...
...Reading about these young Wall Streeters, baby-faced creatures of the Reagan moment, one feels, almost, a kind of pity for them...
...they represent a shrewd appropriation by the right of methods and energies through which labor and liberals helped create a (sort of) welfare state...
...But would the Mailer of the late 1960s, who thought Dissent wasn't radical enough, have extended such an invitation...
...V I n first sketching out this article, I had planned a section here about the intellectuals and Reaganism...
...And more sedately, Ira Sorkin, the New York director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, says, "Greed knows no bounds...
...This was a dumb remark, since it has been Reagan's peculiar skill to combine the two roles—consensus politician and ideologue—just as he has put the politics of theater at the service of ideological politics...
...For the ideology behind such talk does speak to certain realities: the visible bureaucratization of large institutions, whether private corporations or segments of the state...
...Over the same period, these same forty-four companies reduced their aggregate capital spending by 4 percent and their labor forces by 6 percent...
...WITH JIMMY CARTER'S VICTORY in 1976, the disintegration of American liberalism quickened...
...I don't mean to suggest that most ordinary Americans have become morally bad, of course not...
...They don't...
...Davis makes clear that when Roosevelt first took office, one of his major problems (as he saw it) was to ward off a strong liberal thrust in Congress—for instance, a bill by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama to enact a 30-hour week...
...Had he been a serious political leader rather than a gifted dilettante eager to flaunt his cultural credentials, he might have kept his following and played a role in our time as oppositional spokesman somewhat like that which Robert La Follette played in the early 1920s...
...Well, then, is liberalism "exhausted"—not for the moment but historically, finally...
...The battle between advocates and opponents of the welfare state—which, like it or not, today has greater political urgency than an abstract counterposition between capitalism and socialism—will continue to the end of this century...
...But how long will it remain there...
...Or for that matter, how else do you explain that someone like Ed Koch can gain favor through a smirking doubletalk that shows the folks in front of the tube how to put down blacks without quite saying so...
...A full answer to this question will have to wait for others, but here let me note a few possible causes for the unhappy state of American liberalism...
...It has only changed, in a reactionary direction, the social character and goals of government intervention...
...Granted that the leadership of the AFL–CIO doesn't always quicken hearts...
...II A consequence of these transformations in public discourse has been a debasement in the social tone of American life, the texture of shared feelings, the unspoken impulses and biases...
...Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1986...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
