Liberal Politics, Conservative Sentiment

...it has gone on for no less than a century but "flared up with a vengeance in the 1960s" and raised issues that "were never resolved or assimilated...

...The contradictions are obvious...

...My observation is simply this, that the conservative-liberal opposition lines up rather well with the traditional division of the human personality into will and intellect...

...A delicate moment...

...Steve Allen made an appearance...

...It's a tough world out there...

...They're not talking about compassion for spouse or siblings but fellow feeling for the stranger, the excluded, the neglected...

...Education, intelligence, a critical view toward traditional pieties have not produced the socially committed activists that liberals might have anticipated...

...They would much prefer a settlement, and they will lend support to whichever camp does the least damage and whichever camp really seems to understand their recalcitrant civilian existence...

...The censorious right has had to beat at least a tactical retreat, the saga of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker having fulfilled the fondest hopes of everyone who believes that Sinclair Lewis, H.L...

...The elderly parents had brought first one son, then the other, home to be nursed in their dying days...

...But the story didn't end there either...

...It is nothing so neat as a right that accuses the left of trying to change society too rapidly and a left that accuses the right of preventing rapid change...

...Entrepreneurial energy and independence, eager acceptance of the economic system have not produced the solid, or even patriotic, Americans the conservatives desired...

...But it is also sound advice in terms of both the electorate's current anxieties and the political system's capacities...

...The liberal notion of compassion stands squarely in this tradition...

...Warfare between the two camps is also eased by the availability of a group that everyone can dump on, all the more so in the wake of the stock market's turmoil...

...They could be seen in the jousting over President Reagan's nominations to the Supreme Court...

...Seven out of ten said that government should "take care of people who can't take care of themselves," but almost as many agreed that WINTER • 1988 • 81 "when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful...

...They would have admired the couple's actions, which they now would see as a welcome example of ideological inconsistency: parental acceptance and human decency triumphing over a narrow worldview...

...It shouldn't be overlooked that punishments are usually taken to be more effective for lower-income people and foreign enemies, while rewards are reserved for the rich and respectable...

...A politics totally dominated by these somewhat bleak facts might do little more than replicate them...

...It is the antidote of prejudice or of class or racial WINTER • 1988 • 83 narrowness...

...My own effort, moreover, is not a program but (at best) an insight...

...That advice is sound...

...At one point do we ask ourselves whether it was not despite the traditional faith of this couple but because of it that they could do what they did...

...The underlying truth, which many Americans suspect will not be altered by even the most rational of social arrangements, was expressed by St...

...For the moment, moral righteousness has been dampened a bit all around...

...In part, yes...

...Gary Hart proved that neoliberalism could be reduced to petulance and people running up and down the back stairs, The Ginsburg sequel to the Bork nomination demonstrated Marx's dictum on historical repetition as farce...

...The mother was at the conference to reassure other church people...

...There is, however, one asymmetrical symmetry in the national Kulturkampf that I find full of political implications...

...From his formal evening wear to his genial and tame sallies, he didn't belong...

...All involve rather simple, immediate, and direct schemes of incentives...

...The concentration of poverty among single femaleheaded families has given new urgency to certain feminist demands, but questions about family breakdown are also being reopened, especially by minority leaders, in a way that was not thinkable twenty years ago...

...Nonetheless, not all the moral-cultural issues can, or should, remain parked on the sidelines...

...Yuh don't git AIDS by huggin' em...

...Though they may chafe enough to remain not quite convinced of the conservative psychological model, relatively crude incentives are in fact the acknowledged determinants of their workaday lives...

...All assume a human psychology, whether of pupils, criminals, economic actors, or foreign adversaries, that responds quite straightforwardly to rewards and punishments...

...They do, alas, find an echo of it in such otherwise anodyne messages as "stand tall," "stay the course," or "just say no...

...Consider what the two camps have written on the reverse of their banners, the accusations they most readily fling against one another...

...The conservative curse word is unmistakable: permissiveness...

...The liberal-left affinity for the intellect flows naturally from the Enlightenment headwaters...

...They could be seen in contrasting reactions to Oliver North's testimony during the Iran-contra hearings...

...The Baby M case reminded everyone of how ill-prepared we are for a whole clutch of problems posed by the impingement of technology and commerce on human reproduction...

...It would be nice to think that such visible evidence corresponded to some inner conviction, some genuine sense of what a good part of the electorate has felt missing from liberalism...

...And had the story ended there, I am sure my friends would have been moved by it...

...Of course, there's some doubt whether they find enough of it in George Bush, but if Bush were a liberal, he'd be out of the question...

...None of these proposals can claim much success...

...Everyone favors preserving fundamental values...

...On the one hand an exaltation of "freedom...

...It was a marathon comedy show organized to raise funds for the homeless —"Comic Relief," it was called...

...How do we get a little respect for will into the candidate's performance...

...Bill votes for Reagan...

...Many of those shelters are operated by religious institutions...

...Whether liberal candidates manage to overcome popular doubts on this score may depend less on their own words and actions than on those of dozens of organizations, journals, personalities, even professions that together establish the public image of the liberal "movement...

...On the one hand paeans to the free market and individual enterprise...

...Of course, the attitudes of political candidates must ultimately be communicated in speech and gesture, program and personal qualities...

...I doubt that the president and his budget-cutting are held harmless among that constituency...

...The connecting thread is emphasis on will, whether one sees it as barely capable of containing our natural savagery or as actually propelling us far beyond our undisciplined and unmotivated condition into some Coueistic orbit...

...In all its different forms it posits any number of intervening factors that can deform or even reverse what would otherwise be a clear cut relationship between incentives and behavior...

...This brings us back to a classic description of conservatism as envisioning human nature as weak and corrupt, a description always hard to reconcile with the relentless and absolutely obligatory optimism of the American right...

...The human psychology assumed by liberals and the left is considerably more complicated...

...But in fact a presidential candidate can do relatively little to change this kind of perception, at least in the short run...

...Virtue, indeed, is some habitual excellence...

...The first performer had a half dozen condom jokes, and a couple of cracks about the pope, the Vatican, and Jesus...

...They are civilians trying not to be caught in the crossfire...

...and even the economic issues, let alone the foreign policy ones, pose the problems of motivation, determination, discipline, exercise of will that so many Americans see as the conservative strong suit, as well as the problems of foresight, negotiation, institutional reform, intelligent planning, and (above all) inclusion of outsiders that have been the strength of liberalism...

...Liberal activists have debated the merits of stressing their own version of "family" politics...

...But precisely for that reason, the anti-yuppie reproaches, which range from genial derision to outright condemnation, disclose much about the moral stances of left and right—and their limits...

...The right, too, dates the outbreak of present hostilities from the 1960s...

...Why then are so many such citizens easily enlisted behind catchphrases like "Spare the rod . . ." and "There's only one thing these people" (minority teenagers, welfare recipients, labor unions, Iranians, the Sandinistas, Moscow) "understand, and that's force" (a spell in jail, a good boot in the pants, a cut in pay, bombing the hell out of 'em...

...The line of division runs as sharply through the ranks of Democratic voters as anywhere...

...They're talking about a capacity to reach beyond the "us" to the "them...

...The story, of course, did not end there...

...And when sheer will is found wanting, one appreciates the social practices that provide reinforcement...

...it is a feeling that springs up naturally once understanding breaks through the false barriers of ignorance and error—and reveals a common humanity...

...It is premised on the necessity of understanding the conservative impulses of a great many Americans who are not necessarily enlisted in the conservative camp...

...A good many of my friends would have seen this as a kind of cautionary fable...

...Americans have always been far more 86 • DISSENT complicated, far more unpredictable, far more ornery than the various "majorities" that conservative and neoconservative polemicists have celebrated...

...Break humanity free from the fetters of superstition, cultivate true science instead, and liberation will follow...

...The Democratic party has been advised to concentrate on economic issues in 1988 and deal lightly with the moral-cultural questions that have divided the nation since the 1960s...

...Key values in both the liberal and conservative constellations can evidently be joined to produce a hybrid no one is eager to claim...

...To go further: a politics that is nothing but will is ultimately a fascism, as the phrase "triumph of the will" reminds us...

...Yuppies are something of an embarrassment to both sides in the national Kulturkampf...

...There was not only a distinct cast to the comedians...

...Yuh don't git AIDS by washin' em...

...They know that their own children, their spouses and relatives, their neighbors and fellow workers, respond to external pressures in far more convoluted and apparently contradictory ways than the neat reward-punishment schemes would allow...

...Is it true, then, that proponents of liberal remedies are inevitably saddled with a complexity that puts them at a rhetorical disadvantage when competing with conservative simplicities...

...We're reaching forty million people, was the repeated claim, though I strongly doubted it...

...It has not gone undetected but neither has it been underlined...

...Critics of popular conservatism have an easy time demonstrating the inconsistencies in its various elements...

...It is the decade, after all, that gave us such notions as "counterculture," "Middle America," "silent majority...

...Sheer frustration with recalcitrant reality is certainly a good part of the explanation...

...Most of America is not enlisted in the Kulturkampf...

...A recent Gallup poll conducted for the Times Mirror Company, for example, finds eighty-seven percent of those surveyed declaring they have "old-fashioned values about family and marriage," but more than two-thirds rejected the idea that "women should return to their traditional role...

...This listing of contending forces is incomplete, but it is impressive enough...

...It is not the ambition, the material success, the rejection of public responsibility that are lamented but the fact that yuppie energies are not contained within the framework of stability and accumulation thought to be necessary for family life: sexual fidelity, delayed gratification, deference toward the generation in place, respect for religious beliefs, and other traditional standards...

...When some of the reports from the school on these developments seemed to carry an upbeat, approving tone, a friend in the administration commented sourly, "So what...

...What Can Liberals Do...

...Believers in a traditional straitlaced moral code had been forced to confront the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in certain philosophies...

...But there is more involved here than a difference in the direction of concern...

...Not that there haven't been any number of efforts to think across the battle lines of the cultural war...

...Rewards may relax the industriousness of a producer...

...By contrast, it seems increasingly apparent that what "family values" means—and also "basics," as in "back to basics" —has less to do with any particular content than with a general concern for discipline...

...They have some good words and some bad words to say for the combatants...

...Sheer will is indeed essential to making it through one's obligatory tasks...

...It used to be called selfishness...

...The prospect is not exactly inspiring...

...but this does not refute the underlying point...

...But a politics that does not accord a sufficient regard for this dimension of human experience is sure to be distrusted...

...But in fact they point in different directions...

...A lot of Americans catching their breath at the end of the day distrust liberalism because they do not think liberalism appreciates whatever it was that got them through that day's work...

...Not that there weren't limits of propriety...

...Poll takers have been noting this fact all along...

...The liberal counterpart is a little less clear: narrow-mindedness, mean-spiritedness, bias, greed, chauvinism, prejudice—pick one or two...

...on the liberal-left banner, "compassion...

...Such statistics only echo and distill the "contradictions" that can be heard in luncheonettes, bars, PTA meetings, anywhere Americans have not been schooled in the principles of ideological consistency...

...It is not uncommon to hear a parent, far removed socio-economically from the classes where liberal psychology is known to flourish, speak about her child in terms that reveal a full awareness of the complex workings of achievement, discouragement, satisfaction, fear, and so on that are part of schooling...

...One of the afflicted sons had been using his considerable resources to house and care for other AIDS patients...

...Indeed, an order of battle could be drawn up by listing the groups officially for and against the High Court nomination of Robert Bork...

...Admittedly, the censure is not very severe, for the subordinate status of the group under fire is indicated by the diminutive, pet-like ring of its popular name — yuppies...

...On the other hand the expansion of government necessary for a hawkish foreign policy or the reinforcement of police powers for assuring "law and order...

...Family values" point inward...

...There is in fact a populist version of the conservative psychology that does not reflect this class bias but still posits a rather uncomplicated link between behavior and "interests...

...On the other hand an insistence on social conformity and an intolerance of intellectual heresy or personal eccentricity...

...The Midwestern family home had become a hospice of sorts...

...Some of the show's humor was outstanding, a lot was at least novel...

...The public overwhelmingly thinks big business makes too much money and has too much power—but also thinks government regulation does more harm than good...

...After he died, the parents began to take in and care for them as well...

...Again it is difficult at first glance to find any symmetry in these mutual recriminations...

...The skirmishes in this civil war continue...

...The desperate sex of the unmarried was the leading theme, and penis jokes abounded...

...compassion, outward...

...There were no sexual innuendoes: there were simply no innuendoes...

...What most of the varieties of conservatism hold against yuppies, on the other hand, is their lack of the famous "family values...

...Meanwhile the Iran-contra affair exposed the administration's dark underbelly...

...They are caught between the lines, and they are torn by loyalties to both sides...

...Virtue and achievement do not spring so much from understanding as from exercise, testing, repetition...

...One popular "family" columnist has warned parents to be careful, "the yuppie you scorn may be your own...

...Among the pro-Bork forces: American Conservative Union, Black Americans for Life, Christian Action Council, Eagle Forum, Knights of Columbus, International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Association of Evangelicals, National Right to Life Committee, National Right to Work Committee, and the Southern Baptist Convention's Public Affairs Committee...

...If our emotions tend to be naturally positive and harmonious, intellect can more successfully steer them...

...Suppose the story ended there...

...Perhaps everyone is feeling a bit chastened...

...Penalties may crack the self-esteem of a novice...

...Bill feels that Reagan, like himself, can make the realistic, even when unpalatable, choices in a tough world...

...What haunts the conservative camp about liberal "permissiveness," or at least makes the conservative message carry beyond the ranks of ideological or religious true believers, is not simply the rejection of this or that traditional social norm but the suspicion that liberals discount the struggle of will or the need for reinforcing institutions involved in the maintenance of any social norm...

...Cass differences do become a factor at this point...

...Think what you will of it, it is not an identity with which a lot of Americans, including many who do care about homelessness, are comfortable...

...That idea, which would have been a surprise to Tocqueville or Bryce, has haunted our political activity and analysis since the 1960s...

...first, most Americans are "civilians" in the great cultural civil war...

...During one of the pleas for funds, a performer began, "Once you realize that there but for the grace of . . ." he faltered, ". . . whatever god you might believe in...

...A friend of mine recently attended a conference where she listened to an older Midwestern couple pointedly introduced as "church people...

...If, on the other hand, we experience our emotions as unruly and potentially destructive, at least one plausible response is to emphasize the importance of will in keeping them in check or even directing them to constructive ends...

...The risk that AIDS and teenage pregnancies could be manipulated to reinforce right-wing fearmongering has still not kept these threats from inducing a new sobriety among people who once welcomed the rejection of "Victorian" mores...

...One could argue that the Democratic party was getting free campaign advertising, but at what cost of a different sort...

...A good part of the public admits the cogency of liberal ifs, buts, and maybes, even while talking tough and distrusting liberal "permissiveness...

...Everyone between the Atlantic and the Pacific favors change, it seems, and rapid change, too...

...I suppose we should enjoy the truce while we can...

...It may be, however, that the momentary state of relative calm (or confusion) gives us a chance to take a fresh look at the values in conflict and rethink our political approaches to them...

...but in regard to different things...

...Emblazoned on the conservative banner is the aforementioned "family values...

...Discipline, in turn, implies the strengthening of the will and the existence of practices that reinforce the will when it is weak...

...It won't, of course, be permanent...

...it did not seek volunteers to actually work with the homeless...

...Military threats may only stiffen the resolve of an adversary...

...Sometimes she will speak in the language of pop psychology— but often in nothing but the language of untutored observation and common sense...

...The only corporate sponsor was Home Box Office, which had "opened its signal" to make the show available to all cable viewers...

...But again and again we see that the citizenry is not willing to 84 • DISSENT support the hard right's across-the-board "get tough" measures, whether against the poor at home or communists abroad...

...Finally, the gyrations of the stock market have wonderfully concentrated everyone's mind...

...They are scarcely opposites...

...Yet it may also disguise several realities that badly need emphasis at the beginning of a presidential election year...

...Family values," shorthand for a conglomeration of issues relating to sex, socialization of children, and religion, points toward the world of existing group relationships, of people already tied to one another by kinship, religious fellowship, or neighborhood proximity...

...Change his hairstyle, the cadence of his speech, the leading phrases of his stump oration...

...In contrast to the generation of the 1960s, yuppies opted for fine-tuning their private worlds—which sometimes seem to extend scarcely further than their skin—rather than attempting to alter the public world...

...It's also a tough world in there...

...Pick an issue on which he can WINTER • 1988 • 85 demonstrate "toughness...

...Writers on the left as well as an occasional conservative like Kevin Phillips have outlined "populist" programs meant either to bridge or to skirt the gap between left and right...

...The contrast between intellect and will is often part not of a dualist but a tripartite division of personality that adds emotions or some corresponding concept...

...Yet my own guess is that most people know, from their own experience, that the liberal "complex" psychology comes closer to reality...

...Nonetheless, it is true that the liberal affinity for social remedies that look to intellect rather than will naturally suit those for whom intellect is bread-and-butter and for whom personal satisfaction and intellectual challenge constitute a greater source of motivation...

...Consider the problem from another angle...

...My friend imitated the no-nonsense tones in which this reassurance was conveyed: "Yuh don't git AIDS by feedin' em...

...But differing views of the emotions correspond to different attitudes toward intellect and will...

...Isn't it more than one philosophy, really, that needs to be expanded...

...The Catholic bishops, in particular Chicago's Cardinal Bernardin, have argued for a "consistent ethic of life," melding their concerns about nuclear weapons and abortion with opposition to capital punishment and support for the poor and unemployed...

...In other words, liberalism was being given an identity...

...In principle, "compassion" is no less relevant to this world than to any other, but that's not what liberal editorialists mean when they invoke the term...

...It just shows that the alumni don't want the church proposing limits on what they do with their sex lives or the government proposing limits on what they do with their money...

...If liberal political strategists were to find something that rang true in these reflections, what would they likely do about it...

...Those who have tried to make "knowledge class" a term of derision, respectable social-scientese for "pointy-headed intellectuals," have conveniently ignored the economic interests that in reality fracture this "class" defined by education and function in a high-tech society...

...The couple had two sons, both enterprising and successful—and both victims of AIDS...

...Robin Williams kept breaking into his running parody of a fundamentalist faith-healer...

...Many of the people who keep them going would have appreciated the anti-Reagan jibes, which were scathing...

...It is the world of "us...

...It is interesting, by the way, that "Comic Relief" asked for pledges of money...

...Mencken, and Clarence Darrow said the last word on American fundamentalism...

...Paul: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do...

...In the anti-Bork ranks: AFL-CIO, American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Abortion Rights Action League, National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, National Council of Churches, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club...

...But I kept wondering what a show like this meant to the volunteers who actually work in the shelters the funds were going to support...

...The comedy routines reflected the paying milieu out of which they have emerged, essentially the yuppie audiences of comedy clubs...

...Second, despite the predictable clashes, there is something of a lull in the struggle...

...Nonetheless, there is a connection between back-to-basics in the schools, "getting tough" with crime on the streets, letting the market take its course in the economy, and a ready resort to military power overseas...

...It's a step Bill doesn't feel enthusiastic about, but it's the realistic selfinterested choice in a dog-eat-dog economy...

...WINTER • 1988 • 87...

...Yuppies, after all, are the children who made good...

...There was a distinct assumption of what the audience, people who "cared about homelessness," must be like...

...Peter Berger is representative of the neoconservative right when he writes of nothing less than a Kulturkampf in which a whole range of social, moral, and religious issues pit the traditional middle class, now spearheaded by "business," against the new "knowledge class...

...but disagrees as to what they are...

...Nothing remarkable there...

...Most moralcultural questions, after all, can be only marginally affected by the White House and Congress...

...Unlike "Hands Across America," with all its corporate sponsorship—and Main Street patina— this seemed to be the work of the younger comedians who have trooped across "Saturday Night Live," "David Letterman," and the other late-night showcases...

...I thought of this the other night when I broke away from these closing paragraphs to watch a television special...

...Strange devices...

...The left, for example, reproaches yuppies for their lack of social consciousness, their readiness to translate their individual, family, or educational advantages into strictly personal success, their unembarrassed rush to the good life conceived as a low-risk, tasteful hedonism...

...The Kulturkampf will undoubtedly boil up again and again during the presidential election year, and maybe there is nothing to be done except slog it out, knee-deep in exaggerations and caricature...

...Why not...

...Much of the population finds itself in a quite different daily reality...

...Todd Gitlin, speaking from the left, has recently described this "cultural civil war" as one "between the traditionalists and modernizers...

...That's the refrain of Bill Gapolinsky, the young collegeeducated voter of working-class background whose reaction to the Reagan-Mondale presidential contest is profiled, along with the reactions of his family and friends, in Jonathan Schell's History in Sherman Park...

...A recent survey of Notre Dame alumni—a Middle American bellwether, to be sure—reveals that over the last ten years, Notre Dame graduates have become politically more 82 • DISSENT conservative and religiously more liberal...