YUPPIES, TECHNOCRATS & NEOLIBERALS: CHILLY THOUGHTS ON THE NATIONAL FUTURE
Lekachman, Robert
Walk north on a balmy evening from Lincoln Center in Manhattan along Columbus Avenue for fifteen or twenty blocks and treat yourself to a vision of youth a la mode. No costume is outré when...
...Business Week advised its addicts that as of the New Year, yuppies were "out" Excerpted and adapted from Visions and Nightmares: America After Reagan, 1987 by Robert Lekachman...
...That they are also licenses to print money is beside the legal point...
...Yuppies and Neoliberals How ENTRANCING, ONLY A FEW DECADES AGO, was the Consciousness III challenge to ersatz cowboys and prisoners of three-piece suits...
...With much encouragement from politicians eager to score local points, citizens in Iowa are led to wonder why they should underwrite New York City's buses and subways...
...Crusades against abortion and for public school prayer no doubt will continue but without White House encouragement...
...If IBM favored white shirts, sober ties, and gray flannel suits, executive trainees dressed to suit and dutifully ate no-martini lunches...
...If the users of for-profit hospitals judge that they are better treated as customers of profit maximizing enterprises than as patients of nonprofit institutions, then the former deserve to expand their market share and the latter to shrink in importance...
...Loud along the boulevard resonates the psychobabble of relationships, getting in touch with one's feelings, personal growth, transference and countertransference, how to get through the summer while the analyst is away, and other oral evidences of the vulgarization of austere Freudian doctrine...
...At the least, they possess college degrees...
...Enter the young as vessels of new revelations and heightened consciousness...
...Blacks and Hispanics will not be totally ignored because no Democrat can become president without substantial minority support...
...But the spirit of consumption and the ethos of conformity endure...
...Reich's subtitle to The Greening of America was "How the Youth Revolution is trying to make America livable...
...The fashion at elite schools of business administration is entrepreneurship...
...He vigorously supported Westway, a favorite of New York City's bankers and real estate developers...
...No doubt connections exist between their daily labors and the quantity and quality of food, clothing, living space, cars, and consumer appliances that ordinary folks aspire to, but these are singularly elusive...
...Hart's triumph was made possible by the lowered expectations of traditional Democrats, inveterate Republicans, and a drifting mass of weakly affiliated or nonaffiliated voters...
...Chastened by the Reagan administration's mixture of hostility and indifference to their aspirations, blacks were moved to support almost any Democrat capable of recapturing the White House...
...Not at all a palatable message for the optimistic young...
...Cuomo for president on the spot...
...On several grounds, neoliberalism is preferable to the nightmare of four, eight, or more years of Reaganism...
...The stacks of documents they sedulously check generate revenues priced at $80 to $100 per hour...
...Payroll taxes are regressive...
...To rival Japan requires devotion to educational achievement and sharing of collective aspirations and rewards in ways alien to the individualism legitimated as much by neoliberalism as by its conservative rivals...
...Success defines itself as upward movement in its bureaucracy...
...Confusion is the fate of the young...
...Although Ronald Reagan spoke as eloquently as ever against abortion and in celebration of prayer, Moral Majoritarians could not help noticing that Nicaragua, the Pentagon budget, the threat of higher taxes, all seemed higher priorities for Reagan than the piety of school children and the lives of the unborn...
...Saints excepted, we are all creatures of self-interest...
...No costume is outré when clothes are expected to make statements comprehensible to peers, if not to touring cultural anthropologists and marveling senior citizens...
...It was a traditional liberal appeal for justice complemented by an equally traditional assault upon the Republicans as the party of the rich and privileged...
...Like conservatives and Democrats of the hardline Henry Jackson school, they are anti-Soviet and prodefense...
...A pensioner who gratefully retires after four decades of steady but ill-rewarded work will receive monthly checks that are a much larger proportion of his recent earnings than will better-paid retirees...
...Large commercial farmers collect the bulk of agricultural subsidies...
...Younger workers have made intergenerational transfers to senior citizens, some of whom are far more prosperous than they are...
...It is David Riesman's other-directed glad-handers, not inner-directed souls still responsive to the Protestant ethic, who rise...
...Neoliberalism fits comfortably into the tradition of pragmatism...
...The moral...
...It took a universal program in the wake of World War II, the British Health Service, to raise standards for the poor...
...along with economists, consultants, Theory Z, synergy, and junk bonds...
...Humbler, blue-collar types work with machines and their own hands to fill the tangible needs of, among others, yuppies themselves...
...Saturn's imitation of Japanese practice and its organizational expression in mainland America impose fascinating pressures upon corporate behavior, and agonizing choices for yuppies...
...It tears at the frayed fabric of group harmony...
...Yuppies of course deal in many other varieties of symbols and abstractions—as stock analysts, management consultants, editors, computer programmers, loan officers, forecasters, designers of advertising and marketing campaigns, and shapers of images for politicians and other performers...
...If a single value unites them, yuppies are prochoice— in their careers, lifestyles, and political representatives...
...poverty, distorted priorities, and lawmaking by private power...
...The second half of Reagan's final term had dampened conservative euphoria...
...Policies that further reward them dangerously miss the point...
...Target welfare, Medicaid, food stamp, and public-housing recipients for frequent investigation...
...The heavy indictment is every bit as justified today when few care as in 1970 when the country listened...
...Tempt conservative politicians and media allies to stigmatize them as cheats...
...They will enjoy wider choice of physicians and superior hospital care...
...Deficits, unless Gramm-Rudman is permitted to wreak its mindless destruction of federal activity, will have compelled the White House to accept new taxes...
...The celebration of self in our culture differs from time to time and place to place in expression, but not in essential psychic quality...
...Prophets of the information age—Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, the late Princeton economist Fritz Machlup—accurately forecast the occupational restructuring of a labor force that continues to reduce the minority of men and women whose efforts eventuate in products and services for ultimate consumers, and to increase the proportion of information or misinformation workers...
...Lacking any oldfashioned passion for social justice and possessing far too rational attitudes toward public policy, neoliberals are quite capable of reshaping policy in much the same direction as supply siders and neoconservatives, not out of ideological fervor but out of solicitude for efficiency, international competitiveness, faster economic growth, and intellectual tidiness...
...Quite probably, recession in 1987 and 1988 will succeed the sluggishness of 1985 and 1986...
...Not only is Ronald Reagan constitutionally unavailable as a thirdterm candidate, by now his popularity, come 1988, could well sink to Carter levels and Democrats rather regret his departure to the golden West...
...UNLIKE THEIR OPPONENTS ON THE POLITICAL right, neoliberals do not by preference stigmatize the poor...
...Health care, however, highlights a major neoliberal defect...
...Segregate any group as the objects of public charity...
...As governor, New York's Mario Cuomo has reduced business taxes and levies on high-income families...
...As Reich barely refrained from saying in the quaint patois of the time, like oh wow...
...At this point there is a shrewd and ironic 'fantasy" about American politics in which Gary Hart is elected as president in 1988...
...Nevertheless, implicit in their diagnosis of poverty as largely the consequence of slow growth and inadequate labor market skills is quiet endorsement of the Thomas Sowell position in the endless argument over the relative importance of race and class as explanation of the perpetuation of a large black underclass...
...The apparent contradiction between enthusiasm for a great many government services and income maintenance efforts, and generalized distrust of government can be resolved by breaking the link between financing and delivery of traditional public services...
...However, wages will average just four-fifths the pay of other UAW workers...
...All the same, their distrust of large-scale, universal programs and attraction to market mechanisms lead ineluctably to segmented service delivery...
...Federalism entails complex patterns of state contribution to Washington and equally complicated flows of subsidies and other expenditures from Washington to states and local jurisdictions...
...If the individual is to survive in a collective society, he must have protection against its ruthless pressures...
...Workers will be paid salaries...
...Numerous successful politicians, playing neoliberal games, are almost as skeptical about the efficacy of large-scale government action as Ronald Reagan himself...
...Boutiques, sidewalk cafes, and sanctuaries of gelati, tofutti, and premium ice cream jostle each other...
...On inspection, their origins were either neoconservative or derivative from industrial policy, itself a tendency of ambiguous intellectual sponsorship...
...Affirmative answers to these queries all but guaranteed a second Hart term, continued Democratic control of Congress, and reaffirmation of the neoliberal vision of America—its gingerly compassion, preference for free markets in life-styles as well as consumer goods and public services, and caution in foreign affairs...
...In general, private property originates in the economic activities of private markets...
...He lost in 1980 to a virtuoso prestidigitator of traditional symbols— patriotism, individualism, opportunity, freedom from meddling government, not terribly different from Carter's 1980 themes...
...At the bottom of the factory's hierarchy will be work units, teams of six to fifteen men and women who elect a UAW "counselor" to lead them...
...Will the psychobabble of the imminent future be translations from the Japanese...
...It may be that in the wake of the most ideological president in our history, the public would welcome neoliberal emphasis upon technique and process and the suspension of crusades at home and abroad, particularly if the economy's readjustment is brief and not too painful...
...In the case of public welfare, one Supreme Court decision required welfare administrators to accord beneficiaries fair hearings before termination or reduction of benefits...
...To be obsessed with self is commonplace among the young and far from unique among the middle-aged and elderly...
...Rapid growth encourages employers to accept and train less qualified and less literate workers, after the precedent of World War II...
...Both tend to ignore an interesting fact: the federal government's share of Gross National Product has actually risen during the Reagan years, partly 39 because Social Security pensions have been paid to more recipients as the population has aged, but mostly because defense expenditures and the interest costs of servicing the enormous deficits, caused by them as well as by reckless supposedly self-financing supply-side tax cuts, have ballooned...
...I have lingered upon Social Security because here as elsewhere neoliberal like neoconservative logic draws upon the wrong social science—economics instead of sociology...
...Obviously not very many of them qualify for this label redolent of mingled envy and derision...
...Whoever speaks most convincingly to the largest percentage of this generation may well be Ronald Reagan's successor...
...The unions' role in Hart's victory was inevitably subdued...
...His policies, in other words, have not significantly differed from those of his Massachusetts colleague, Michael Dukakis, a stylish neolib, or his opposite number in New Jersey, Thomas Kean, a temperate moderate Republican...
...The neoliberal approach is tacitly hostile to national health, comprehensive welfare reform, large-scale public job and housing ventures, and similar national solutions, on grounds of principle and political practicality alike...
...NEOLIBERALISM PERPETUATES REAGANOMICS BY other devices...
...The lawyers and aspiring executives have received marketable credentials from law factories and schools of business administration...
...Four-fifths of them will be covered by lifetime employment guarantees, save in the occurrence of "catastrophic events...
...Another threw out a New York statute that imposed a twelvemonth state residency requirement for benefit eligibility...
...As ever, social reality is messier than the abstract categories of scribblers...
...There is, accordingly, nothing unprecedented in yuppie displays of ego, any more than in their passion for the latest fads in food, house plants, furniture, physical fitness recipes, watering holes, summer weekend locales, audio and video equipment, movies and music, and the multitudinous artifacts of personal adornment...
...The old-fashioned rhetoric of social justice, equality, redistribution, empowerment of the weak, and full employment does not trip easily from the tongues of the Bradleys, Aspins, and Gephardts...
...Sony and Hitachi confer lifetime jobs on faithful employees, unlike Fortune's 500 largest industrial operators, 100 major banks, or 200 giant retailers...
...There must be sanctuaries or enclaves where no majority can reach...
...If their marriages endure, husbands and wives do not cast monthly accounts of the extent to which the larger of two incomes subsidizes the recipient of the smaller one, nor do they set monetary values upon cooking, cleaning, and other household duties...
...All but Kemp tried unsuccessfully to get the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, and in so doing encountered nearly universal popular apathy...
...Its Mondale fiasco taught the AFL-CIO to avoid early endorsement of any Democrat and although many unionists preferred Cuomo to Hart, they had no trouble choosing Hart over Bush or any of the other Republican lightweights...
...From that law flows an ineluctable corollary: the powerful, never the needy, collar a disproportionate percentage of the cash...
...Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company...
...Americans glorify decisive executives and clear hierarchical definitions of authority...
...Retirement rewards will be strictly associated with income performance...
...the artificiality of work and culture...
...Pat Robertson, a thriving television evangelist who heals the sick and speaks in tongues, had offered himself in Republican primaries as the Christian savior...
...In Japan, but certainly not here at home, it is bad form to change employers...
...In the United States, public housing from its inception in the 1930s has been closed to all but lowincome families...
...In 1984, Gary Hart was their favorite candidate...
...As in Japan, Saturn employees will be encouraged to supplement wage guarantees with productivity bonuses...
...They do favor a decent welfare state, but their position entails no commitment to a national health program, an official Democratic position as recently as 1980...
...absence of community...
...Insofar as the scholarly imperialism of economists is allowed or actually encouraged by politicians to reshape social policy, it is almost certain to reinforce existing distributions of income and wealth...
...When Saturns or otherwise named vehicles begin to roll off the assembly lines in 1989, there will be a different set of social relationships...
...Nothing new here of course...
...Electoral calculation will inevitably modify economistic impulses...
...Conceal the news that numerous clients have received less than they are entitled to...
...A work unit module— three to six work units—will be headed by a company-selected "work-unit adviser...
...An overvalued dollar, antiunion crusades by numerous industries, creative deployment of bankruptcy to discredit unions by unilateral reduction of wages and benefits, lack of success in organizing service workers, pervasive two-tier wage schemes well calculated to pit veterans against new workers, and blatant sabotage of collective bargaining by an employer-controlled National Labor Relations Board, had combined to drive down the union share of the labor force to its lowest figure since the 1920s...
...Yuppies crave success and money as any old Consciousness II young fogey might but according to one of their admirers, "They are imaginative and original," display "little tolerance for boredom," expect "interesting work and satisfying emotional relationships," and anticipate "psychic and social stimulation on the job...
...Licenses are mere privileges, initially granted for three-year terms and, subsequently, renewed or revoked by FCC decision...
...They are the adepts of the age of information...
...The payoffs for education and marketable skills in an expanding economy similarly encourage teenagers to stay in school and out of jail...
...Should they bet their career prospects on calculated shifts from one employer to another or is corporate loyalty the new ticket to promotion, stock options, titles of escalating significance, and perquisites, however suitably disguised, of transcendent spiritual fulfillment...
...Economists proficiently calculate costs and benefits for individuals operating in efficient markets...
...And their general prochoice posture on abortion is flexible enough to accommodate Representative Gephardt who, representing a conservative constituency, opposes abortion under almost any set of contingencies...
...It is not impossible...
...Most religions and ethical codes do their best to mitigate the primacy of ego...
...We must create a new property...
...Recognizing the mood of his troops, Jesse Jackson, after making loud, threatening noises, decided not to repeat his 1984 candidacy, and to endorse Hart...
...What do they do, think, portend for the national future...
...The yuppie code is distinctive, for it appears to be the first article of yuppie faith that nothing is more natural and even commendable than narcissism...
...Pblic largesse enriches the wealthy and tightens the grip of the powerful...
...Contrasting Stereotypes To BE A REAL YUPPIE ONE MUST THINK and act like one...
...At best, 41 Hart was half a loaf...
...and "loss of self...
...For unknowing disciples of William James, the important question to ask of any human effort is, will it work...
...Families, voluntary associations, professional societies, and political entities quarrel and disintegrate when they focus narrowly upon who pays and who benefits...
...If vouchers improve the quality of education, increase the quantity of low-income housing, and widen access to medical care for the poor, let millions of vouchers bloom...
...Yuppies find themselves in industries like data processing, computer services, banking, law, advertising, and public relations that are especially vulnerable to recession...
...By definition, largesse can be capriciously granted and removed at the pleasure or displeasure of administrators endowed with alarming discretionary power either by congressional design, congressional inattention, or the natural disposition of bureaucrats to interpret statutes in ways that widen their own sphere of action...
...The second was the prospect of quick returns on a new economic policy in the shape of a cheaper dollar and a better balance between imports and exports...
...Reich extended the themes of his law review essays and celebrated his own rebirth as a child of the new consciousness...
...At Yale he was esteemed as an extraordinarily gifted teacher of law, and beyond the boundaries of New Haven as the author of exceptionally provocative law-review articles, occasionally cited with approval by members of a Supreme Court spectacularly different from that of the 1980s...
...One of the reasons why income is distributed still more unequally in 1986 than in 1980 is the enormous transfer of resources from ordinary taxpayers to the collectors of interest on the federal debt, most of them far better off than those whose taxes flow in their direction...
...The principle of progressive taxation requires affluent citizens to contribute more substantially than the less prosperous...
...Yet American and British experience makes it abundantly clear that services for low-income and otherwise vulnerable groups will be second-rate or unavailable whenever and wherever access to them is means-tested...
...Means-tested benefits inflict stigma...
...Council homes, the British equivalent, have been open to middle-income as well as poorer families...
...If the Japanese work ethos sweeps over America, the organization man may stage a strong comeback...
...Defense policy should be less expensive and foreign policy less chauvinistic...
...Harmony requires peaceful acceptance of cross-subsidization and the humility to realize that in most lifetimes most individuals at some times are subsidized and on other occasions contribute to subsidies for others...
...Elected representatives and public functionaries perceive largesse as so many acts of grace, to be as legitimately recalled as compassionately extended...
...In the 1950s and 1960s, Federal Housing Administration loan guarantees financed middle-class flight to the suburbs...
...Congress originally may have intended license limitation as pressure upon broadcasters to meet minimum criteria of public service...
...A business unit to coordinate plant-wide operations will include company representatives, specialists, and an elected union adviser...
...In their reliance upon markets, distrust of "big government," and emphasis upon growth instead of equity, neoliberals and neoconservatives converge if not coincide...
...They recognize the legitimacy of decent social provision...
...Yuppie distrust of government interference in personal life-styles and aspiration to property and wealth echo at considerable distance Reich's insistence on individual autonomy...
...A third prohibited midnight raids on the apartments of welfare recipients in search of adult males cohabiting in violation of eligibility rules...
...Nor has Consciousness I ceased to influence the conduct of the young...
...What remains of the welfare state after eight years of Reagan reaction will be threatened by the social accounting of neoliberals...
...His home base incorporates consumer items unknown to Whyte's organization man: jacuzzis, VCRs, exercycles, and compact disc players...
...Legitimization of for-profit hospitals, nursing homes, dialysis centers, and health maintenance organizations also sanctions a hierarchy of accommodation and, inevitably, nursing care that trails downward from luxury suites to ordinary private rooms, semi-private accommodations, and wards of varying size, according to the financial resources of individual patients...
...There is less logic than there is political wisdom in these arrangements...
...With some exceptions, mostly related to new computer-related specialties, yuppies in their offices occupy themselves more modishly in ways similar to those of their predecessors...
...As conservatives indignantly charge, Social Security does embody an element of income redistribution...
...As a percentage of salary, his tax is one-tenth that of his hierarchical subordinate...
...But the yuppie horde—true yuppies, fellow travelers, aspirants, and mere followers—constitutes a political prize of enormous value...
...New Yorkers reflect that food prices would be lower if a portion of their taxes were not devoted to propping up markets for Iowa's corn and wheat...
...The yuppie version of Consciousness II combines the vocationalism of Whyte's organization men with claims to individual autonomy that remind one of the 1960s...
...In depopulated cities, urban renewal (in black circles bitterly translated into charges of black removal) diminished inventories of low-cost rental housing in exchange for convention halls, new hotels, and luxury flats...
...Moreover, the larger the individual income, the more substantial the proportion of it derived from dividends, interest, and capi44 tal gains, not a dollar of which is subject to Social Security levy...
...As with families and university faculties, so with the communal enterprise of popular government...
...The social costs of rational investment are heavy...
...Sensible members of fashionable departments moderate their grumbling partly out of fellow feeling for colleagues and partly out of the sense that a university bereft of concern for culture, history, and the roots of human conduct is indistinguishable from a trade school...
...As always, a successful revolution requires revolutionaries...
...On the expenditure side, Social Security benefits replace higher percentages of earnings as those earnings move downward...
...Yet this high-pitched screed turned its author into an instant celebrity...
...Cultural and political phenomena invariably define themselves in the polemics and behavior of vanguards...
...So examined, Social Security is unfair on both the revenue and expenditure side...
...Then discover that some overpayments have been made...
...Strategic planners generate strategic plans...
...Black "pathology" cures itself in the benign atmosphere of high employment...
...Under the cloak of rationality the functional equivalent of old-time charity medicine completes a comeback begun by Reagan...
...No wonder psychobabble is the popular yuppie dialect...
...Would the public be equally patient with a president less endowed with Reagan's grip on public affection...
...Departments of accounting, management, and computer science subsidize colleagues who teach unpopular courses in philosophy, foreign languages, and art history...
...Yuppies, as New Hampshire license plates boast, aspire to live free, but alas for Reich, not in communes furnished mostly by warm emotion, altruism, and a relentless sense of community...
...In the next century, free medical care for miners, a reform jointly sponsored by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, was generally inferior to that available to the middle class and affluent...
...The cohort includes high-school dropouts, drug addicts, street criminals, welfare mothers, clerks, craftspeople, farmers, white-, pink-, gold- and blue-collar workers, and career members of the armed services, not to mention small businessmen and women, civil servants, and housewives...
...These essays on property, government regulation, and twentieth-century feudalism contain the roots of the assault upon the corruptions of organizational power that endures as the most satisfactory portion of his book...
...The religious right threatened to sit out the 1988 election or, worse, nominate their own candidates...
...Was this the model for the industrial policy recommendations of the Iacocca commission...
...Hart proclaimed himself the prophet of new ideas...
...Medicare and Medicaid pay a high percentage of the for-profit medical sector's bills...
...The author describes the kind of appointments Hart is likely to make and the kind of policies he is likely to adopt—more or less along neoliberal lines...
...Seventy-five million Americans were born between 1946 and 1966, making the yuppie generation slightly less than a third of the nation's population in the middle of the 1980s...
...Indeed, this is one of its major contributions to decency...
...For a time, the Supreme Court seemed to be nerving itself to proclaim something akin to a right to life translatable into a governmentally guaranteed income large enough to impart reality to that right...
...Were rearranged exchange rates, managerial renewal, and a new spirit of cooperation between labor and corporations enough to restore the bloom of health to the sallow countenance of American capitalism...
...Its small-car factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee, a last-ditch multibillion dollar attempt to compete with Japan's Hondas, Nissans, and Toyotas, substitutes cooperation for confrontation on the factory floor and a managementunion committee substitutes for the traditional top-down, hierarchical style of the auto industry...
...For them, politics seems less conflict between groups than search for tax, regulatory, and mild planning initiatives that promote enough growth to soften the harsh edges of ancient struggles between rich and poor, black and white, males and females, the Sunbelt and the Rust Belt...
...The awesome constitutional protection of due process envelops "rights...
...Practically everyone gets more than the actuarial value of lifetime contributions and low-income families benefit most...
...There is an intergenerational transfer and probably another between affluent and less affluent beneficiaries...
...Naturally, the rich will fare better than the poor...
...They substituted new and inalienable entitlements to joy, love, friendship, infinite openness to experience and sensation, immediate communication, and warm, oh so warm, community...
...Reich's publisher anticipated so little public interest in Reich's volume that its first printing was a mere 5,000 copies...
...Conferences between Japanese and Americans baffle at least the latter because at meeting's end it is still mysterious who on the Japanese side is in command and what has 35 been decided...
...No living soul can sensibly forecast the condition of the economy in 1988 but it is unlikely to be buoyant...
...Social Security as Social Contract THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION'S ALARMIST cries over impending "bankruptcy" of Social Security have shaken the confidence of younger workers that they will collect full benefits twenty, thirty, or more years hence...
...Odd and sad that Ronald Reagan won two elections as a celebrant of Consciousness I and hordes of young men and women crowd classrooms in which the mysteries of accounting, financial management, computer science, and corporate law presumably are explained the better to prepare for updated versions of 38 Consciousness II...
...Reich's own transformation is almost as startling as the salvation of America that is the stuff of his book-length sermon...
...Under this rubric, Reich listed numerous benefits conferred by government upon groups of citizens, from welfare and veterans' benefits to agricultural subsidies and taxicab franchises...
...and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness...
...universal benefits are popular entitlements...
...IN THEIR RATIONAL, AFFECTLESS FASHION, neolibs share numerous goals with old-style libs...
...Yet again, health care is paradigmatic...
...WHO ARE THESE YOUNG URBAN PROFESSIONALS...
...Then whenever Congress or a state legislature needs to cut spending, start with means-tested programs...
...Subject them to complex and humiliating qualification requirements, frequently baffling even to those who administer them...
...Social Security survived eight years of a president with an earlier record of strong opposition to it, because pension benefits flow to nearly everybody and above all to the vast, amorphous middle class...
...George Bush averted a thirdparty run by Robertson only by painting himself into a still tighter corner on pornography, drugs, school prayer, pure textbooks, and righttolife...
...The hardened politicians in the huge auditorium actually listened, cheered, and seemed prepared to nominate Mr...
...Whyte detested the spiritual sterility of those who worked, married, and lived according to the organizational code...
...Young workers whose Social Security deductions have alleviated the poverty of their elders will in time collect retirement benefits financed by workers who are young when they are old...
...Lines form in front of particularly popular "in" establishments like Ruelles, where the sounds of soft rock entice customers into a Gay Nineties interior whose walls feature buxom female nudes...
...Then and only then did London purify its water and install sewer systems...
...Managers will acquire complete flexibility to switch people from one task to another...
...When Reich wrote his book and the articles that preceded it, he noted that California's tax and fee structures combined to generate subsidies for middleclass college students financed mostly by regressive taxes levied upon their financial inferiors, for it is a law of public largesse that acute social need accompanies small political power...
...We wish we had the space to include it all here, but lacking that, we urge our readers to turn to the book...
...The uncertain fraction of the seventy-five million who possess convincing claims to genuinely elite membership share educational credentials...
...Meanwhile, the story continues.— Eds.] BY THEMSELVES, YUPPIES ARE NOT NUMEROUS enough to elect a president...
...The Japanese value group consensus and mutual respect...
...If all of the above sketches a set of dull fellows, all too likely to glaze the eyes and turn off the hearing aids of their auditors, it is unfortunately closer to truth than to caricature...
...Communications policy exemplifies the general condition...
...Space buyers distribute advertising budgets among competing print and television media...
...In their wisdom, courts have ruled that the Communications Act that created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) awarded no property right to radio or TV station operators...
...Since a single rate applies to wage and salary income and does not apply to earnings above $40,000, the corporate vice president paid $400,000 is assessed the same amount as a colleague collecting a mere $40,000...
...Consciousness III lingers from the 1960s as hedonism shorn of Reich's apocalyptic aspirations...
...it also gives society the power to change, to grow, and to regenerate, and hence to endure...
...Their parents and grandparents, alas, are mired either in Consciousness I, the atavistic remnants of frontier individualism, or Consciousness II, the charcoal-gray spirit of the organizational mentality, bureaucracy incarnate...
...GENERAL MOTORS' SATURN PROJECT breaks still more abruptly with standard American corporate tradition...
...Whyte's title entered the language of common discourse and he is not fairly to be charged with admiring the behavior he analyzes...
...Frustratingly for Falwellites and Robertsonians, Congress managed to smother antiabortion and proprayer constitutional amendments...
...His version of industrial policy was unlikely to be as protectionist as the AFL-CIO's major industrial unions wanted and his high-tech image made them uneasy about the intensity of his commitment to the rescue of the industrial midwest...
...From Gray Flannel to Green Pastures BEFORE WE EXPLORE THE MANY MANSIONS Of yuppie heaven, let us resurrect another, wildly contrasting vision, that of a nearly forgotten prophet of the 1960s, Charles Reich...
...But in the Nixon-Agnew era, the source of most of Reich's "horribles," as in the age of Reagan, such precariousness of tenure impressed timid network executives as sufficient reason to tone down news comment, deemphasize documentaries critical of establishment institutions, and confine the guest list on discussion programs to responsible souls slightly to the left or slightly to the right of the amorphous, dearly beloved center...
...Low-paid workers will require supplements to the amounts they have earned from either the Social Security trust fund or their own small IRAs...
...Viable social arrangements, public or private, flourish in an ideological atmosphere of solidarity...
...Yuppie politicians consult David Garth for image implants, for that famous nonyuppie sees deeply into yuppie psyches...
...Union representatives will sit on the manufacturing advisory committee overseeing the entire operation and also on the strategic advisory committee charged with long-range planning...
...a belief in `belongingness' as the ultimate need of the individual...
...The economic approach to health care assimilates it to any other commodity or service in the market43 place...
...Their distinct preference is to "manage themselves," since "taking orders . . . insults their intelligence...
...The national mood was sour, but not hopeless...
...Losers will continue to have a hard time...
...The plain fact is that corporate managers have been excessively compensated for nearly two decades of demonstrated incompetence...
...The payment and benefit pattern has endured both because, at least until recently, the young expected to gain from it in due time and because few were inclined to examine in close detail exactly who was subsidizing whom...
...Hart's political chips were bet on three risky propositions...
...Thus far, a bit more than half a century since that August 14, 1935 when Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act, all retirees have been collecting far more in benefits than the actuarial value of their own and their employers' payments to Social Security trust funds...
...There is no official definition of the group...
...If a classical Freudian survives and keeps the faith, he or she will in moments of carefully rationed utterance tell a patient yearning for happiness that the best psychoanalysis offers is enhanced capacity to cope with ordinary, human misery...
...As in the Middle Ages, property amounts to a grant conditioned upon loyalty to the sovereign...
...Neoliberalism is less a nightmare than a recipe for uneasy sleep, an interlude between right-wing activism, Reagan style, and, just possibly, revival on the political left...
...Interest rates accordingly will rise, push new homes out of the reach of middle-income families, and complete the destruction of independent farmers...
...Just as the Homestead Act was a deliberate effort to foster individual values at an earlier time, so we must try to build an economic basis for liberty today—a Homestead Act for rootless twentiethcentury man...
...In Marxist terms, yuppies inhabit the superstructure atop an ever narrowing base...
...By now, the process should be drained of mystery...
...By contrast, largesse both reflects and reinforces existing distributions of political power and influence...
...Japan has prospered without lavishing million dollar salaries and multimillion dollar compensation packages upon its executives...
...No surprise that council housing has a generally good reputation and public housing does not...
...Overheard conversations conduct themselves in the educated tones of the college credentialed...
...Or, second best, join the large organization that pretends to be entrepreneurial by setting up quasi-independent small units under its umbrella...
...The hospital chains will gladly contract with the federal or local governments to treat the medically indigent on terms that simultaneously economize on public expenditures and pay suitable dividends to stockholders...
...In other words, the system is progressive in its outlays: the more lucrative was your working career, the less significant as part of your Golden Years resources will Social Security be...
...They are associates in the Wall Street and midtown major law firms...
...Yet there is something distinctive about this decade's yuppie phenomenon, suggested by a pair of contrasting stereotypes, the first of them William H. Whyte, Jr.'s The Organization Man, a bestseller of the Eisenhower era, and the second Charles Reich's coronation of youth, The Greening of America, an evocation of the flower-power side of the 1960s...
...As Whyte put it, middle-class careerists shared "a belief in the group as the source of creativity...
...Reread three decades later, Whyte's polemic seems to describe Japanese corporate culture better than it does our own...
...Anything But Socialism IN AMERICAN POLITICS, almost anything, aside from outright socialism, is possible...
...In still another sharp break with union tradition, job classifications are practically abolished...
...In effect, welfare will supplant current, dignified income-maintenance provision, much as Medicaid to the dismay of many middle-class patients finances long-term nursing home care only after assets have been all but dissipated in order to establish eligibility...
...In a typical 1985 GM plant, supervisors/foremen (ninety per shift) report to general supervisors (fifteen per shift) who answer to production superintendents (five per shift) who salute a single general superintendent who owes allegiance to a production manager who communicates with the man at the top, the plant manager...
...The distinction is crucial...
...Start your enterprise in emulation of the heroes of Route 128 and Silicon Valley and become rich and independent...
...Human solidarity enlists familial affection, solicitude for neighbors, and concern for still larger and more distant groups...
...Their attachment to civil rights seems to be consistent with skepticism over the more aggressive varieties of affirmative action...
...34 Unlike old-fashioned intellectuals, who are similarly removed from the mundane sphere of physical production, yuppies specialize only in those varieties of the intangible that promise financial profit, and by habit and preference comfort themselves with the application of technique to data...
...Can Neoliberalism Succeed...
...In truth, the more prosperous of Social Security beneficiaries have during their working careers contributed enough to pay the least affluent retirees most generously of all...
...The contrast is dramatic...
...Still more problematic was the restructuring of the American economy initiated in the automobile industry in Fremont, California, where General Motors' joint venture with Toyota was under way, in Detroit where Mazda had made a deal with the UAW, and in Tennessee where General Motors seemed to be betting its future on the success of a $3.5 billion gamble on Saturn...
...In Congress neoliberals share nearly flawless civil rights records with traditional liberals of the Ted Kennedy stripe...
...REICH WROTE AT THE END OF A PERIOD when a Supreme Court led by strong liberals, among them Earl Warren, William Douglas, Arthur Goldberg, Thurgood Marshall, and William Brennan, moved cautiously away from definition of welfare grants to indigent families as largesse or gratuity and toward enunciation of a right to public assistance...
...Unlike him, they also identify in their constituents a yearning for the sort of public intervention that protects peace-loving citizens from criminals, environmental damage, unemployment, nuclear accidents, catastrophic medical bills, indigency in later life, and so on, with as little intrusion by fussy officials as possible...
...One of them, coauthor of a bestselling expos6 of the Kennedys, revealed in print that in 1984 he had voted for Reagan out of repentance for his contribution to the wild 1960s...
...As foreigners sour on American prospects, the flow of funds that in the first half of the decade financed rearmament, huge budgetary deficits, and equally unprecedented deficits in international trade is fated to slow...
...Reich's own distinction between largesse, the new property, and more traditional property entitlements focuses upon a danger to new property claimants...
...The converts to the new ethos contemptuously dismissed both the asserted inevitabilities and the purported rewards of hierarchical organization...
...Nor do they share a single allegiance either to neoliberal ideology or neoliberal contenders...
...decline of democracy and liberty, powerlessness...
...They fret over unemployment, but successfully control latent nostalgia for public jobs programs to alleviate it and never, never refer to that legislative embarrassment, the Humphrey-Hawkins Balanced Growth and Full Employment Act of 1978...
...Still, Hart's early appointments, his initial judicial selections to vacancies on the federal district and appeals benches, and the replacements he seemed poised to choose for retiring or dying Supreme Court veterans, reassured unions that at the least the new boys and girls, unlike their predecessors, listened to Lane Kirkland and shared many union aspirations...
...Reich's point remains sharp: the networks retain enormous opportunities for profit on condition that they barter away at least part of their First Amendment right to free speech...
...The New Property," the most celebrated of these articles, focused upon governmental "largesse" as the dynamic of alteration in property relations...
...An Individual Retirement Account option would at a stroke destroy the universal character of the present system...
...In famous litigations, the particularly privileged among them may get to carry the briefcases of their seniors...
...He warmed up with a catalogue of New Left charges: American society was very nearly terminally corrupted by "disorder, corruption, hypocrisy, war...
...The National Organization for Women, not yet recovered from the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment campaign, was comfortable with Hart, whose record on freedom of choice, ERA, funding of food stamps, and child nutrition was flawless...
...Organization mentM corporate culture of the 1950s furnished no powerful role for women—conformed...
...40 PASSION ELECTS PRESIDENTS Jimmy Carter, an apparent exception to the rule, won narrowly in 1976 because his opponent Gerald Ford displayed even less emotion and aptitude for public speaking than did Carter...
...Reich's analysis was prophetic, for increasingly, property and benefits get linked to status and status is conferred either by the state, or still more insidiously, by a small number of very large private organizations which act as 37 loosely regulated agents of the state, among them corporations, foundations, and universities...
...Calculation is fatal to comity...
...If one strains, even Consciousness I reappears in the entrepreneurial aspirations of many yuppies...
...Self-expression, perspicaciously deployed, translates into money in the bank...
...Can a neolib make it to the White House next time around...
...The promarket bias of the neolibs inevitably tells against cultural and political interpretations of brutally high rates of unemployment in the black community and inordinately high percentages of female-headed black families subsisting in poverty...
...In 1982, at the depth of a minidepression, Ronald Reagan had appealed to the voters to stay the course...
...Little in the realm of sensation offends trend setters: drugs, X-rated movies, abortion, pornography, and of course sex, straight or kinky, with or without benefit of matrimony...
...One of this decade's unfolding dramas features the Japanese ethic in Fremont, California where General Motors and Toyota embrace in a joint venture...
...Neoliberal Dissension ON SOME ISSUES, THE NEOS SPLIT...
...To shelter the solitary human spirit does not merely make possible the fulfillment of individuals...
...The first was the hope that the shift to fiscal restraint, even though mitigated by an easy credit policy by the Federal Reserve, would not plunge a weakening economy into deep and prolonged recession...
...He has been notably prudent in social program funding...
...That they have endured so long testifies to public acceptance of the system...
...Public relations wizards put spins on media perceptions of their clients...
...Indeed, for three national campaigns in a row, Democrats and Republicans, whether incumbents or challengers, have run against big government, just as though they did not yearn to head it...
...Many of them, by now in their early forties, are parents and homeowners, burdened by debt and kept barely financially afloat when both spouses are employed...
...For a space, the public seemed prepared to wait for the benefits of experiments in industrial policy, substantial shifts in tax and spending priorities, and modest voucher, enterprise zone, and training accounts experiments...
...It should be glaringly clear that tampering with either side of the ledger risks an open season of interest group conflict...
...SUCH A SOCIETY INVITES RADICAL CHANGE...
...His youth, energy, craggy good looks, indeed his very boots proclaimed affiliation with the baby boomers' passion for jogging, pumping iron, grazing, and fashionably consuming...
...Charismatic is neither the first nor tenth adjective that even their admirers attach to George Bush, Howard Baker, Robert Dole, or Jack Kemp...
...But millions of people in the summer of 1984 watched and heard him deliver a passionate keynote address to the assembled Democrats in San Francisco...
...As with vouchers, so with pollution metering instead`of legalistic regulation, contracting out of public services to low42 bidding profitmakers, individual training accounts in place of government-sponsored programs, and, even possibly, for-profit medical care in preference to public or voluntary alternatives...
...Beneficiaries, understandably, come quickly to esteem each boon like older 36 varieties of property, as inalienable as acres of land and the structures erected upon them...
...Well-paid professional and managerial workers will judge that they could earn much higher rates of return from their and their employers' contributions if they were allowed to invest these sums in common stocks or real estate...
...Sadder still that so many of the 1960s celebrants of Consciousness III now earn comfortable livings as management consultants, lawyers, and investment bankers...
...In Whyte's drab universe, the corporation substitutes for religion and politics...
...What turns the troops on is emotion...
...Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty in short order became a jobs program for middle-class professionals...
...But, worse still, neoliberal intervention is unlikely to succeed in good part because rewards are directed to groups that constitute a good part of the problem...
...All production workers will be enrolled in a single category...
...In laissez-faire Victorian England, public health legislation was enacted only after it became clear that the plagues of the poor spread on an equal opportunity basis to the affluent...
...In today's yuppies Consciousness III survives, albeit less as a sense of community than as a stage of consumer culture...
...The heritage of racism and its continuing manifestations tend to be discounted as explanations of the black plight...
...Universal entitlements create enormous constituencies in favor of their continuance...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
