LIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY
Bell, Daniel & Burnham, Walter Dean & Sandel, Michael
We take pleasure in reprinting from New Perspectives Quarterly, published in Los Angeles, the following discussion with Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Harvard, Walter Dean Burnham, MIT...
...The strategy of FDR and the New Deal was to rival the concentration of power in the national economy with a similar concentration of power in the federal government...
...The first was the Wall Street financial and legal group—people like Stimson, McCloy, Dillon, and Lovett, with Nelson Rockefeller on the political side...
...The wars of religion were, in effect, wars of truth...
...I must also agree, however, that the problem is an enduring one...
...They are part of a public good...
...I suspect it had much to do with the cultural contradictions of tradition and modernity being woven into the economic contradictions of accumulation versus consumption...
...What also happens is that issues with an important economic reach can be transubstantiated into symbolic or religious issues...
...However, if we're talking about bedroom issues where legislation may be contemplated to get us back to God's truth, it's a different arena...
...Without stability, people don't know what to expect...
...This really changes things from the good old Leave It to Beaver days...
...Bell I'm not sure I like the phrase "the common good...
...If they don't want abortion, they should also be opposed to the death penalty...
...Michael Sandel Our predicament goes back to the New Deal...
...Sandel There was for a time, and there is now, an attempt to legitimate national institutions without national citizenship...
...Bell The status of women, then, is the one culturally fundamental, structural change that marks a departure from the past...
...I can't see them being comfortable with the banning of Catcher in the Rye from the high school library...
...Much of the Reagan revolution was, in fact, to do away with the Great Society, not the New Deal...
...I see it this way not only as a liberal, but as a Jew...
...Insofar as people drew their collective identity from public life, it was important that they conceive the community as located not simply in neighborhoods, small towns and even cities, but primarily in the nation...
...in the world economy by patriotically invoking imagery from 1952, are examples...
...Although the NOW movement may have gone too far in the other direction, they are pulling back...
...Reagan's talk of a Christian nation, and the cultural conservatives' response to the relative decline of the U.S...
...Individuals and groups are simply left to pursue their own interests and values as long as they are consistent with similar liberties for others...
...While the conservative critique has been alive to the concentration of power in the federal government, it has been blind to the effects of concentrations of power in the corporate economy...
...Gardels But conservatives would say private acts have public consequences...
...Gradually this realization set in, yet the structures of economic and political life were already inescapably located at the level of the nation—and even beyond it...
...The Republicans have not even begun to come to terms with the social and economic advances of women...
...The link, conservatives argue, is that character and self-restraint have traditionally ruled social behavior...
...211...
...Services like child care depend upon government expenditures or nonprofit institutions...
...Only Japan approximates that kind of community today...
...Civil rights, for example, are a matter of public access...
...When the economy is bad, that's the issue...
...Gardels Our definitions of the common good tend to be pretty vague once we leave the domain of public issues like plant closings and look at questions of right or wrong, or of character and virtue...
...a belief in New Deal social policies and Keynesian economics...
...Today, the American Dream requires two wage earners in the family...
...For example, personally, I'm against abortion, but that should be purely a private matter...
...The political institutions that come to the fore in the neutral state are institutions like the judiciary and the bureaucracy...
...Republicans will not be able to come to terms with the women's issue...
...It is a return of the repressed...
...Now the Republicans will have their turn...
...The ideal of the neutral state seemed the only alternative...
...Burnham Well, it will depend on what balance of political forces develops on any particular issue...
...A democratic conception of the public good would address itself precisely to this vulnerability that is the legacy of the neutral state...
...Sandel The liberal reply to the Moral Majority should not be to flee moral argument but to engage in it...
...What they disagree over is which rights are necessary to realize the ideal of the neutral state...
...The idea of tolerance doesn't seem to do the trick...
...Burnham That is why citizenship education is of such concrete importance to the preservation of a democratic civil order...
...If the only way of reintroducing substantive conceptions of the common good implies the imposition of unitary truths, then I'm against that too, but I don't think it is enough simply to invoke the distinction between the private and the public...
...or the Old Left view that we were dominated by the Eastern Republicans of Wall Street...
...What does the wisdom of classical political theory have to say about that...
...Rather than reform the structure of the economy on the basis of some vision of the common good, the state would seek prosperity by managing aggregate demand...
...With the rise of secularism and science, the age-old conflict between science and religion acted itself out over evolution...
...This country never had a truly political class until we began to develop one after World War II...
...The New Deal public philosophy provided some of this, but only a limited amount, and not for long...
...It is probably most useful in the context of this discussion to talk about a political class...
...The 1960s helped bring an end to patriarchy...
...The other is a cultural axis divided by traditionalist and modernist...
...It is the one irreversible element...
...Burnham Public interest was viewed as a metaphysical term that couldn't really be applied in practical politics...
...One of our great problems today is that the game continues...
...It was in this context that we had, for a relatively brief moment—the Camelot moment— an equipoise with consensus about the evils of the dirty Russians just after the dirty Nazis, a consensus about social-harmony liberalism, and a situation where folks hadn't yet come out of the closet and cultural issues weren't nationalized...
...So, many political entrepreneurs at the beginning of the populist revolt, like George Wallace, encouraged the feeling that "we weren't being included" at the national citizenship level...
...But it is important to appreciate how politically ambitious an undertaking such a project was...
...This country was founded on the rejection of the idea that there is a unitary truth that can be imposed on the entire society...
...When civil rights moved beyond voting rights to affirmative action and busing, it entered very controversial areas in terms of the common good...
...There can be quite sharp disagreements on political issues, often discrediting one side or the other, but the class maintains the continuity of society...
...That's what divides them...
...If they believe in the privatization of business, they should believe in the privatization of morals...
...Who today defends the notion of an Establishment...
...Yet the disorienting fluidity of values is precisely what calls for a response...
...From the mid-1940s through the mid1960s, a consensus held in American society presided over by the Liberal Establishment...
...This is why the crisis of the political class becomes so important...
...But the welfare state has not only been sustained by interest-group bargaining at the legislative level...
...In the 1920s, modernity came in wholesale with the shift to a largely urban society...
...The difficulty in maintaining some sort of comity in a pluralistic society should not be underestimated...
...Except in extraordinary times, such as World War II, or the Great Depression, or in such fleeting moments of collective crisis as the Iranian hostage situation, it is difficult to see ourselves as participants in a shared national identity...
...In a sense, the general questioning of authority spreads from this changing role of women...
...Such a politics was entirely process-oriented and uninterested in substantive results that might benefit some sectors of the society over others...
...If we ask ourselves what is likely to occur today, we can look to previous conservative revitalization movements that appeared at times of stress and readjustment...
...Burnham That is the predicament of liberalism...
...When that class failed, stumbled, and simply fell apart over Vietnam, then there was no one to defend the notion of an Establishment...
...Burnham Just recently, after the death of Len Bias from cocaine, the president of the University of Michigan said, "We just don't really believe it is our job to try to dictate our students' private lives...
...We forget now that the central political question in the 1920s and 1930s was how to reform the political economy so that democratic ideals could be preserved...
...Many women are increasingly dependent upon caring functions outside of the home in order to be able to go to work...
...Generally speaking, that consensus comprised an internationalist orientation...
...The Great Society was one of the few great policy revolutions in modern times that had no concrete referent in what public opinion wanted...
...The cultural conformist image of 1952 is dead as a dodo...
...The question is whether it is an adequate philosophy...
...It's easier to wheel and deal or to trot out archaic symbols when things start getting out of hand...
...For example, when Richard Nixon used to attack the Liberal Establishment, he was voicing resentment of this liberal political class, although, ironically, he drew from it in the person of Henry Kissinger...
...Gardels Cultural conservatives are trying to give a substantive conception to what the state ought to do...
...Nor does it tie the obligations of the welfare state to a sense of national community or civic engagement...
...Issues such as sexual preference or abortion intersect with the deeply held religious commitments of others who are in the same economic situation...
...There was no attempt to deal with the larger question of citizenship education and a great failure to explain what the federal government was trying to do...
...Thou shalt not kill therefore thou shalt not have an abortion...
...it presupposes one...
...So there has been an aspiration to neutrality both in the principles that define the individual rights and in the policies that result from interest-group liberalism...
...This is one thing the Republicans will have to consider in their wholehearted attempt to demolish the social-support role of the state...
...They legislated morality—a morality of inclusion that insisted on the full membership of a group wrongly excluded from the common life of the nation...
...Furthermore, those who are left or right on the economic issues are not always left-modern and right-traditionalist on the cultural issues...
...Now, looking at the question of leadership and the elites that may emerge on the basis of social and political attitudes, this becomes difficult to translate into specific political terms because there are two axes...
...And this, it seems to me, is the source of much of the frustration with the prevailing political agenda...
...To show how far we've gone in the exact opposite direction, we are unable to find a national politics of any kind in the 1986 elections...
...The Democrats are leading again, in terms of general preference statements...
...The Democrats did take the initiative in nominating Geraldine Ferraro for Vice-President...
...or "Government should support moral truths...
...The paradox paralyzes us...
...The rise of populist frustrations has to do with the erosion of a sense of community and, with it, a perceived erosion of democratic possibilities...
...The question is what are the relevant communities, and for which purposes...
...Gardels All right, but then what happens when we attempt to define what the common morality should be on a range of questions: abortion, homosexuality, sodomy, parental authority, pornography, the role of women...
...So the agenda should be larger than the one the religious right puts forward...
...To decide what is public and what is private requires some conception of the common good...
...In good old populist American fashion, William Jennings Bryan united the victims of the 1893-94 economic collapse, and then in 1925 was the fundamentalist defender of creationism at the Scopes Monkey Trial...
...The political class is the overt spearpoint of the Establishment...
...Sandel I completely agree that the insight of cultural conservatism has been to grasp the inadequacy of the public philosophy of the neutral state and to address questions of tradition and community in politics...
...And, if the price of that recognition is that communities will exercise their democratic prerogatives in ways we disagree with, then we need to organize better politically...
...It was only after World War II that the liberalization of the culture occurred and cultural issues were politicized...
...Abortion and pornography are not the only issues that invite moral reflection...
...No society can exist if we take nonnegotiable political and moral issues and politicize them...
...The notion of authority in the social sense is pretty much gone in this country...
...A neutral state does not try to cultivate civic virtue...
...The context in which people listen is simply not there...
...What both sides in this debate fail to address is the growing sense in the electorate that, notwithstanding the expansion of individual rights and entitlements in recent decades, we're less in control of the forces that govern our lives rather than more...
...Because of space limitations, we have omitted the second section...
...The absolutes for cultural conservatives are clear because they are given by God...
...In abstract political philosophy, the Aristotelian or Rousseauian view that a community requires a conception of a common good is quite right, but such a conception is premised on the principle of a homogeneous cultural community...
...The crucial political problem is how to maintain a functioning polity without the conformity of an imposed common good on the one hand, or a fragmentation of interests on the other...
...The change in women's roles also has economic consequences tied to the decay of American economic hegemony over time...
...Since these preferences arc nonnegotiable, they distort classic expectations of left and right, or of party allegiance...
...Bell The conservatives are incosistent...
...By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the populist tax revolt, the New Right, and cultural conservatism finished it off by attacking from the other side...
...Nobody...
...We can no longer afford to take for granted that the answer to that question is, for all purposes, the nation state...
...Gardels I can see community-oriented liberals being comfortable with Ft...
...They will have to deal with the kinds of problems that are far more than a mirror of male-female relationships...
...This failure of elites to exercise authority is the most troubling residue of the great social changes in the postwar period...
...Public policy dictated that a certain person was favored because of race, and the little guy affected was expected to suffer while the wealthy elites were out doing their own thing...
...Sandel But the legitimacy of the outcome will depend on the persuasiveness of the arguments— the moral arguments—that support it...
...The politics of the future will have to come to terms with this permanent change in the status of women, which is also reflected in the labor market...
...A lot can be reversed: even black gains which may be split, with a substantial black middle class in contrast to a disoriented and much larger underclass...
...Secretary of Education Bennett replied, "Why not...
...The political influence of the religious right is symptomatic of a public life so drained of common meanings that it is vulnerable to those who would interject their own narrow, intolerant moral conceptions to fill it...
...Betty Friedan represents this "second-stage" pullback...
...It seeks instead a framework of rights that is neutral among competing conceptions of the good life...
...Most of today's issues were inconceivable as national issues...
...The first and third parts appear below.—EDs...
...One is an economic 202 axis divided by the left and the right...
...Thus, no claims should be made on public monies...
...Conservatives may be quick to say that the local community should decide about pornography but less ready to let the same community restrict plant closings...
...Eighty percent of all new jobs since 1980 have been occupied by women...
...In England when Chamberlain was discredited, Churchill stepped forward...
...Burnham But civil rights was directly the state's business—who gets to vote and doesn't get to vote...
...Similar issues undermined the integrity of the Democratic coalition...
...The second part of the project failed because the nation proved too vast a scale across which to cultivate the shared understandings and common involvements necessary to political community in the traditional sense...
...Walter Dean Burnham The new deal era was ideal for maintaining both permissive and traditional values...
...Traditionalism has its roots in the small-town life of America and its fundamentalist Protestantism...
...203 Life was simpler in the 1930s...
...For example, in the next 15-20 years, half of the university professoriate on the permanent tenure level may be women...
...Survey data in the 1980s show that, after having narrowed in 1984, the gender gap has widened again to about 10 points...
...They cite AIDS...
...This failure of the directing political class helped to blur the salience of economic and cultural issues in politics...
...It is very worrisome when a particular conception from one tradition, as Weyrich sug209 gests, is imposed on the whole society...
...These decisions often enforce the idea that government may not favor one conception of the good over others...
...The politicization of cultural issues has been one of the greatest dangers in recent years...
...In basic numbers, the new professional-technical class is a women's class...
...Sandel There is a sense in which the ideal of the neutral state is the public philosophy...
...The post-World War II generation that was weaned on unrivaled American power in the world, and unprecedented opportunities for consumption at home, now finds that, individually and collectively, we are less in control of the forces that govern our lives than we had imagined...
...We traded that in for toleration, a notion far more important for a society than that of a single moral truth...
...If this antiestablishment, populist revolt of the last two decades has destroyed the authority of the Establishment, where will a new consensus and enduring elites emerge to provide cohesive leadership for the future...
...I would substitute the phrase "the public good...
...That is a great weakness...
...After all, do we have a state that stands for nothing...
...The Democratic party has been more responsive to the issue of concentrated economic power, but far less responsive to the 208 consequences for democracy of the federal bureaucracy...
...Sande...
...In order for democratic control to be effectively located at the level of the nation, it was not enough to develop new structures and institutions, but also, through political education, to recast the meaning of democratic citizenship on a new scale...
...The breakup of WASP dominance came after World War II for a number of reasons...
...Burnham I would also strive for maximum tolerance in these matters because they are not negotiable...
...It turned out that neither of these structural reforms prevailed...
...The revolution begat the counterrevolution at the level of activist politics...
...The debate about rights has not been rooted in any meaningful sense of commonality or belonging, which accounts for the proliferation of rights and entitlements without a corresponding sense of social obligation or civic engagement...
...Burnham This is an exceedingly important point...
...But things got worse...
...It may mean the New Class proposition of Irving Kristol that we are dominated by the liberal professionals...
...When the economy is good, something else is the issue...
...That alternative seems to be foreclosed today...
...Wayne deciding not to close a plant...
...The idea that the state shouldn't legislate morality is something that many liberals reflexively invoke...
...The discourse is so impoverished that when we debate "ethics in government" we're reduced to talking only about the private peccadillos of public officials...
...and in culture, a Father Knows Best, WASP, patriarchal dominance...
...The notion of a "common good" implies a public debate on moral issues...
...Until it bogged down and became exhausted, the old interest-group liberalism could claim its own process legitimacy—explosive issues were kept out of the public arena...
...There was the civil rights movement which actively brought blacks into society...
...The process of groups coming back again and again for another slice of bread has been institutionalized in the "iron triangle" of lobbyists, insiders, and legislators—the interestgroup Liberal Establishment against which populism has revolted...
...If the issue is a clear-cut economic one, we may be certain which way things will break...
...Also, at a time when the American economy was hegemonic throughout the world, positivetremendous growth rates of the postwar period, business elites were satisfied with their terrific profits while the well-being of the average Middle American was rising as well...
...Even in the 1920s and 1930s, when there was a great deal of economic liberalism and even radicalism, the culture was profoundly conservative...
...The very phrase "proper role of women" is a phrase unlikely to be used today...
...The New Dealers drew the insight from Progressives that, to build a modern democracy, it was not enough to centralize government, it was also necessary to nationalize politics...
...If we want to do something in the general interest—like an industrial policy in which some zero-sum decisions must be 207 made—we don't have the mechanism to develop a national consensus...
...Bell Although the rise of women is independent of the fall of the Liberal Establishment per se, the two come together to the extent that the elite group's general authority came under question at the deepest social level, which also created a focus for other kinds of resentment...
...We can see the difficulty of trying to come up with values that aren't relative in the modernist, secular culture of this pluralistic society...
...Sandel . . . where the public interest is no more than a disconnected collection of individual interests...
...Burnham There are several practical examples, especially in the context of the race issues of the 1960s...
...Burnham This was basically the notion of "interest-group liberalism" in political science...
...There is also a judicial expression in Supreme Court decisions and in administrative agency rulings concerning rights and entitlements...
...Without continuity there is no stability...
...But what about the civil rights laws...
...The neutral state idea breaks down because the pressure of built-up change vectors requires policies that are very hard to justify in terms of neutrality...
...I would prefer to expand the private space as a way of building a liberal and tolerant society...
...Since moral issues are nonnegotiable, they can only tear apart a society...
...The massive movement of women into the work force also means that women are more heavily concentrated in the health and publicsector professions than are men...
...What social forces will bring them to the fore...
...If the oldest forms of social authority are questioned, then all forms of authority are open to question...
...If restraints were off on the economic side, why not in one's personal life...
...the problem is that tolerance is not self-interpreting or self-implementing as an ideal...
...To quote Paul Weyrich: "God's truth ought to be manifest politically...
...Since nurturing professions like health and teaching are heavily dependent on public funding, women have a greater need for government...
...First of all, the Liberal Establishment is an amorphous term that mixes in different things...
...Now, cultural issues and economic issues are mixed together in politics with alternating importance and even substitutability...
...These are the central political questions as we head beyond the Reagan era...
...According to current labor force data from the Census, the whole new middle class is basically a women's movement...
...Sandel This is symptomatic of the inability to cultivate a national citizenship capable of sustaining a shared notion of the common good...
...Moral issues should be detached from the public realm...
...We will continue to insist on certain rights, but we can't avoid addressing the question of how to revitalize a sense of commitment and civic engagement in the various communities to which we belong and on which a vital democratic life depends...
...Burnham And, of course, without a national citizenship, the structures were bound to become illegitimate, as they have become...
...If it is a matter of choice, there can be no proper role and, therefore, no valid moral sanction in trying to apply standards of that kind...
...Sandel It is unavoidable in a democracy that moral and political arguments be addressed to some particular community...
...And, as already mentioned, proportionally, large numbers of women are going into public or nonprofit sectors, such as the health and teaching professions...
...Sandel I think that traditional positions between liberals and conservatives break down over questions of community and morality...
...They do tear away at the consensus in society to the extent they are propelled into the public arena in any way other than a neutral way...
...Women are the only rising middle-class group in America because of their previous status and because of the opportunities open to them...
...In a consumption-oriented society, neutral morality sanctioned by the state encourages lack of self-discipline, permissiveness, and the pursuit of immediate gratification...
...For men, it is almost a dead heat...
...Both are seen as part of the Liberal Establishment...
...Bell I dissent vigorously from the statement that tolerance is a vacuum...
...What prevailed was Keynesian economics, which was neutral on the question of the good because it simply accepted preferences as revealed by consumers...
...so many, looking around at the mess the society is in, turn to some sort of God—seeking to solve the problems in their lives...
...Burnham The woman's role is now regarded as a matter of choice...
...The system maintained its legitimacy 206 as groups were satisfied through marginal and incremental adjustments...
...Efforts to propose alternatives fall apart because there is either prosperity or no apparent threat to prosperity...
...Economic issues and interests are negotiable...
...This theory of countervailing power, however, did not stand alone...
...The exhaustion of the New Deal liberal agenda has come with the success of the first part of the project, but the failure of the second part...
...It is hard to imagine how public political education can go on in a country as large as this without the institutions and motivation to do so...
...Rather than a national political community of shared purposes, the other legitimating aspiration has been the ideal of the "neutral state...
...Tolerance is a vacuum, not an integrating principle...
...On the other hand, rights-oriented libertarians say that property rights and the efficient functioning of the market economy will best allow individuals to choose their own conception of the good...
...Sandel The way to address the cultural conservatives is not, as many liberals do, to deny that politics has anything to do with morality, or to refuse to defend a substantive conception of the common good...
...The group has not yet crystallized, but they are a potent element of any future equation of power...
...Despite their great importance in such areas as civil rights, these are not democratic institutions...
...At the same time, there are Eastern Republicans and California entrepreneurs who are very "right" on economic issues, yet culturally modern or libertarian...
...Rights-oriented egalitarian liberals defend the welfare state on the grounds that we need to provide people with social and economic rights in order to respect their dignity as autonomous agents capable of choosing their own preferred lives...
...We can't escape making arguments about what properly counts as private and what counts as public, and the resolution of those arguments will ultimately depend on some moral conception of the common good...
...This unrealized fact has many implications about what kind of society we will have and what kind of stake women have in it...
...In political terms, the question is which axis overrides the other at any particular time...
...This is why the Kantian conception of toleration and due process, a procedural republic, so to speak, becomes the sociological condition of civil order...
...205 Paradoxically, the reaction to modernity can only be contained by the restoration not of social authority, but by both the earned authority of the political class and the moral authority of the Establishment...
...Gardels The point of cultural conservatives is precisely that the idea of the neutral state is insufficient...
...For example, the political debate between the Democrats and the Republicans in the decades since the New Deal has increasingly become a debate between rights-oriented egalitarians, commonly known as liberals, and rights-oriented libertarians, or conservatives...
...Bluecollar workers may be "left" on economic issues, but pro-Reagan and for traditional cultural values...
...The nation would become the first source of collective identity and allegiance— the primary political community...
...Others argued that only centralized planning with a larger role for the state could preserve democratic government...
...The Vietnam War was undertaken by that nascent political class...
...It was once argued that sweatshops and child labor were "private" arrangements, not public concerns...
...I am convinced this vacuum is the source of the traditionalist sentiments of Reagan voters as well as the more raucous reaction of the Moral Majority, New Right, and Christian Right, the return-to-basics movement in education, and the effort to set forth a moral rhetoric as the scaffolding of political legislation...
...Secondly, the debate over rights fails to attend to conditions necessary to a vital democratic life...
...It implies a unitary concept and, being a good liberal, I want to "reserve" a number of areas from such a conception...
...It was like Judge Garrity saying that Boston must integrate...
...If the 1970s saw a revolt against authority, the 1980s are seeing a revolt against modernity— a strong cultural current that has been gathering force worldwide...
...Daniel Bell There are many different dimensions to the so-called Liberal Establishment, and also to the question of what succeeds it...
...There was general economic disaster and a sense that government was part of the answer, not the problem...
...Bell To tie these shifts back into the question of the fallen authority of the Establishment, we must start from the widest social context—the breakup of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony...
...210 It is also not clear that the state can succeed in depoliticizing cultural issues...
...I find the approach of Education Secretary Bennett horrifying...
...So, both political community and the democratic prospect are neglected insofar as the public philosophy of the neutral state defines our political agenda...
...But it is only a partial response because it fails to take account of the economic developments that led to the concentration of power in the bureaucratic state in the first place...
...My parallel point concerns making the state both strong enough to do its job and democratically legitimate enough to develop nationalized citizenship...
...Sandel It's not so much that tolerance is a vacuum...
...In fact the present decade reminds me a lot of the 1920s...
...That project is now exhausted, and we are struggling to find out why, and what might take its place...
...That was the last time there seemed to be a public philosophy able to animate public life...
...What is striking, then, is that the welfare state has two legitimating ideals—an original one and a new one that increasingly predominates...
...they don't want to give up the American Dream...
...In principle it was a good idea, although the particular choice may not have been right...
...The prevailing agenda neglects two important political concerns...
...This happens when people have lost their reference points and society feels adrift from its moorings...
...What about broader questions of social and economic structures such as the Catholic bishops addressed...
...In fact, a politics that worries about the common good and addresses moral questions will also have to worry about defining citizenship and giving meaning to democracy in the face of large-scale social and economic structures...
...But Garrity lives in Wellesley where he doesn't have to worry about the consequences...
...They argue that the traditional values and morals that made this country great ought to be promoted by government if we are going to stem the social decay unleashed by the permissive, tolerant or, in your words, "rightsoriented" philosophy...
...And of course, without an Establishment, who carries forward the continuity of the society...
...I also think the most important thing is to avoid the politicization of cultural issues...
...every other society is a plural society...
...This was a really poisonous mixture that ultimately resulted in delegitimation of liberal efforts...
...We take pleasure in reprinting from New Perspectives Quarterly, published in Los Angeles, the following discussion with Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Harvard, Walter Dean Burnham, MIT political science professor, and Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard...
...To the extent they have tried, with Phyllis Schlafly for example, it's in the wrong direction...
...Finally, women are more economically independent because they are bringing in their own incomes...
...At the level of legislative politics, the neutral state takes the form of interest-group pluralism— the idea that there is no public good apart from the preferences of individuals and the interests of such groups as may organize to press their claims...
...Nathan Gardels, editor of NPQ, opens the discussion...
...The "neutral state" is the idea that the vast social, political, and economic arrangements of the welfare state should draw their justification not from the idea that the nation embraces a shared conception of the good, but instead from the idea that a just society is one that does not try to impose on its citizens any particular conception of the good...
...What counts as private and what counts as public has long been the subject of political debate...
...Perhaps the old New Deal was neutral in the sense that everyone got the same specific thing while Great Society programs targeted specific groups to get specific things...
...FDR appreciated the need to cultivate a new kind of citizenship...
...Abortion had not been nationalized...
...Abortion, school prayer, sodomy, and so on are fixed along the cultural axis...
...It is easy, in retrospect, to define the civil rights movement as a question of public morality, but at the time the segregationists claimed, "If I own a private lunch counter, it is my business who can sit there...
...One is the question of political community...
...They were cut out of the action...
...Beginning in this period, the number of women going to work contributed substantially to the breakup of male domination...
...Nothing links the variety of campaigns together at the gubernatorial or local levels...
...It tested them and they failed...
...public sector activity was kept to tangential, negotiable relations among people, preferably those that could be monetized...
...That's almost exclusively because women are more sympathetic toward Democrats than Republicans...
...People like Justice Brandeis believed it was necessary to decentralize the power that had gathered in the corporate economy...
...The new one is the idea of public provision of rights and entitlements for the sake of freeing people to pursue their own interests and ends...
...The history of American politics and culture is the recurrent tension between traditionalism and modernity...
...Tolerance is no substitute for a vision of the common good...
...Modernity is the expression of liberal and cosmopolitan attitudes in the cities...
...So, the New Deal public philosophy had two parts—to centralize government, and also to enlarge the meaning of citizenship, to nationalize politics...
...The problem is a serious one...
...That's why we have the rule of celebrity, of notoriety and personality...
...Americans don't want to go backward...
...The original one was that the welfare state expresses the mutual obligations we owe as fellow citizens who share a common life...
...A political class is a group of individuals from a similar social stratum, with like-minded views and a sense of responsibility for governance...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, the anti-Vietnam War New Left, the counterculture and the women's movement began fraying the authority of that Establishment from the left...
...There have now been two generations of this class...
...On the contrary, it underlies the political argument between the two parties and sets the terms of debate...
...The upheaval caused by affluence on tradition and community, as well as the Keynesian emphasis on credit and consumptionled growth, spilled over into the culture...
...These institutions are designed, in principle at least, to be insulated from democratic pressures, and so better able to define and defend individual rights...
...In the 1920s, the early 1950s, the late 1970s, and now in the 1980s, the economic issues are not front and center...
...A sense of national citizenship had to be cultivated to underwrite and legitimate the extended involvements of centralized government and national economic institutions...
...Discrimination against Jews broke down and Jews then performed one of the most remarkable feats of social mobility in history...
...It was coupled with a political theory that had been part of progressive politics from the early part of the twentieth century...
...This is the problem with Reagan's attempt to revitalize federalism...
...For example, working-class authoritarianism complicates a possible alignment today...
...That the neutral state is the reigning public philosophy can be seen in the fact that it is not the sole philosophy of one party or the other...
...In periods like this, when society is constantly undergoing stress linked to economic and technological progress under affluence, and because of the amorphous quality of our politics, religious and conservative revitalization movements come to the fore...
...Sandel The cultural conservative have too narrow a notion of the place of moral argument in politics...
...Bell The changing status of women is fasci204 nating from a sociological angle...
...The federal government did not make any demands on private morality, pornography, or other cultural themes...
...Burnham Here again we see the political transubstatiation that crosscuts constituencies...
...If there is a common thread to this revolt against modernity, it is the emphasis on continuity and tradition, and a reaction against secularism and the universalism that was the utopia of the Enlightenment...
...The second generation was professional elites who joined the public service—McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow...
...That is the one that has receded and lost much of its force, although it is not completely dead...
...I have a strong sense that new institutions and mechanisms need to be built, but, in the absence of concrete developments that shape opportunities for moral engagement, it is hard to see how the building process is going to develop...
...They will have to deal with tensions between people who are economically orthodox but culturally laid-back on the one hand, and the religious-cultural right on the other...
...This is just too big a country to be run by a single standard, even something as broad as the Judeo-Christian ethic...
...This now applies across the board on a whole range of questions having to do with authority, respect, duty, and what is "proper...
...This is why Secretary Bennett asks if schools shouldn't be engaged in character building...
...That is the empirical result of having no public philosophy...
...Then, there is the more specific reference to the development of a political class that was blown apart by the Reagan wing of the Republican party, which came to power opposing that political class's fading authority...
...There will be, for example, a lot of cutting and thrusting on the part of Republican elites to try and manage the tensions created by the potential candidacy of Pat Robertson...
...But in a period when the economic issues are blurred and cultural questions come to the fore, as has been the case for the past few years, leadership on these issues passes into the hands of the aggressive characters of a Jerry Falwell, a Pat Robertson, or a Jesse Helms...
...Even a libertarian would agree...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
