Asks what's going on

...Please continue to read Dissent...

...One such potential center would be liberal on economic issues while seeking to accommodate backlash politics...

...they make up much of its own rank-and-file: the always dependable, dues-paying, ready-for-action militants of its movements, unions, and political parties...

...Let the Republicans do their worst, since only then will we get a chance to do better...

...But this was largely an illusion, because so many Americans experienced this "left" culture (and law and administration) as something alien, frightening, or deeply disturbing...

...Still, it would be a mistake to try to understand the contemporary right solely in terms of resentment, traditionalist revolt, backlash politics...

...The second would be run from within the Republican party, perhaps by someone like Colin Powell...

...At Dissent we did not accept the easy optimism of this analysis...

...That these same people also long for an American tradition isn't all that hard to understand...

...The response of California educators to the abolition of affirmative action in state colleges and universities suggests one future version of left politics: a kind of innergovernmental resistance...

...In any case, savage criticism, though an understandable response to the self-satisfaction of this hero or, rather, of his admirers and imitators, is probably misplaced...

...12) The constraint of police powers and the enlargement of the rights of criminal suspects and prisoners...

...White backlash was not a major political force in 1964, I argued, "chiefly because the civil rights movement has not yet made sufficient progress to threaten anyone...

...But it would never have taken on its current dimensions if it didn't tap into genuine, widespread popular anger and fear...

...We should also add, I think, bureaucratic opposition and obstruction: the welfare civil service is not a Republican stronghold...

...But these leftist successes can't by themselves explain the widespread sense of social collapse...

...When 8 • DISSENT American Questions, it is focused on the rich and the well-born, it produces a bad egalitarianism, a politics of envy and leveling...

...5) The acceptance of cultural pluralism, if not of a full-scale ideological multi-culturalism, in government agencies, schools, universities, and the media...

...Even relatives may be resented, but strangers and foreigners are resented more easily, with greater peace of mind...

...In fact, however, since the New Deal (more accurately, perhaps, as right-wing publicists claim, since the income tax), the state has been the absolutely crucial agency of liberal and left social policy...

...7) The progress of secularization: the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere—classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on...

...Right-wing anger is more specifically directed against the supposed, and to some extent real, beneficiaries of those supposed, and to some extent real, leftist victories: blacks, women in the professions and the civil service, gays, immigrants, people on welfare—and then against the politicians and bureaucrats who administer the benefits, who work "for them" and not "for us...

...It is a response to the "extreme strain, mobility, competition, anxiety, and disorder...of modernity itself," I wrote in 1964, "or at any rate to one of the several alternative modernities currently being shaped in the United States: a particularly raw, because very advanced, form of capitalism, unmitigated by the solidary structures of an older urbanism...

...Maybe the resistance of all these groups to the right-wing agenda will be nothing more than a rearguard action, easing the general retreat of the left, and encouraging people to think that a major regrouping and counter-offensive isn't really necessary...

...Reaction against modern culture and adaptation to the global economy go together here, in opposition to a state perceived to be strongly engaged in helping blacks, immigrants, gays, and so on, and also against a state perceived to be strongly engaged in constraining free enterprise and entrepreneurial zeal...

...If this turns out to be a typical response, the Republicans are going to learn that there is a considerable gap between ideological triumph and actual victory on the ground...

...Some WINTER • 1996 • 9 American Questions twenty million people live in such communities today, behind walls policed by armed guards...

...Typically, he has partners but not comrades...

...It didn't build stable or lasting movements or create coherent constituencies, let alone control Congress or the presidency...

...Does the left have a lifeboat...

...Republican legislators face a 10 • DISSENT American Questions long battle with social workers, school teachers and administrators, much of the civil service that deals with product and work safety and environmental standards, scientists and technicians in and out of government, doctors and nurses...

...outside his family, he is, mostly, a loner...

...It looks more, right now, like a politics of ideological confidence and militant ambition...

...For the moment, however, large numbers of Americans identify with those solitary swimmers, angry in the water, but not yet ready for the left's lifeboat...

...And it is sad but true that men and women on welfare, who don't fit this image and therefore are despised by the right, don't make good leftists either: for readily understandable reasons, they are hard to organize and, since the decline of urban political machines, they don't vote...

...on the social selfishness of large segments of the upper middle class, which consciously disdain the sentiments of welfarism' and are prepared to let the poor and the ethnic minorities stew in silence...

...3) The effects of affirmative action, probably somewhat exaggerated in the claim made by some supporters: that eleven million women and blacks and other minorities now hold jobs that they would otherwise not hold...

...2) The visible impact of feminism: the growing number of women in the professions and the political class, their increased mobility and growing presence in middle-, and occasionally upperlevel, management positions, and media attention to all this...

...And this isn't just WASP anger and fear...

...It is hard to imagine these two in alliance for long, and yet they march side by side on many issues and cooperate easily in the dismantling of the welfare and regulatory state...

...Institutionally, the left today is weaker than it has been in a long time...

...It's not always easy to say, and the dominant materialist ideologies of the old left capture only part of the story, which is cultural as well as material...

...Even more clearly today, it has to be analyzed as an effort to seize upon real opportunities and avoid real dangers—not merely to strike out irrationally at scapegoats and victims or to reject a radically misunderstood "liberalism...

...The decline of the unions and the incoherence and spiritlessness of the Democratic party are the visible signs of this weakness, but it is also important that the "new social movements" have not replaced those two...

...Irving Howe wrote a critique in the Fall 1964 issue of the magazine, and I wrote a similar piece in the British journal Views (I was living in London that year, where the Encounter articles were much discussed...

...For any plausible explanation, we would have to add to the list economic decline, decaying cities, broken families, homelessness, drug use, and (real and "virtual") violence...

...And about all that the left has its own story to tell, in which the free market and the profit motive figure in a large way—for there are no more revolutionary and disruptive forces in the modem world...

...Still, right-wing politics is in part at least reactive, and what it reacts to is left-wing success or what is thought of as left-wing success...

...But something is missing in the standard contemporary portrait of thisAmerican hero, and this absence helps to account for his readier presence on the right than on the left: he has no sense of, or he is ideologically barred from acknowledging, his own and other people's vulnerability...

...The left too includes people of roughly this description (and once included many more of them...

...Backlash politics now has a much larger social base than Hofstadter and Lipset perceived in 1964, for it appeals also to Catholics and to white ethnic groups, especially to men in those groups, but to many women as well: the so-called Reagan Democrats, who show little sign of coming "home...

...The right then offers a strange but not entirely incoherent mix of individualist alternatives: selfreliance, local control, privatization, the free market, charismatic Christianity, New Age quackery...

...So the right delights in opposing this power, striking postures of militancy and defiance, while leftists and liberals struggle to explain to their fellow citizens why government officials enforcing gun control, say, aren't fascist beasts...

...The material conditions of everyday life—declining living standards, the threat of unemployment (or, more likely, underemployment: work that doesn't use one's skill or fill one's time, that provides poor wages and no benefits), the disorders of our cities, and the steady deterioration of the public sphere—do not at this moment provide fertile ground for leftist commitment...

...The right, right now, has seized the ideological initiative and sets the political agenda...

...The left didn't "seize power" in the years after 1964...

...The Communist Manifesto: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones...

...These two critical arguments are of differWINTER • 1996 • 5 American questions ent sorts...

...He works hard, seizes opportunities, accepts responsibilities, takes the lead (and expects to be followed by his wife and children...

...The ferocity of the fights over abortion, gun control, capital punishment, "political correctness," and even affirmative action (where, admittedly, jobs are at stake) can't be accounted for in narrowly economic terms...

...Would it be stable...

...The visible successes of the liberal left, as I have already argued, give a false impression of its strength, for they were won without the support of large-scale, mobilized social movements...

...A friendly critic of an earlier version of this article suggests another possibility: a new centrism that combines left/right politics in two different, perhaps alternating, ways...

...Modern, secular, liberal, and pluralist America was only half real, half fantasy...

...For obvious reasons, these are likely to be most successful among the middle and uppermiddle classes, where they are manifest, for example, in the extraordinary proliferation of privately owned residential communities...

...Pat Buchanan's demagogic opposition to NAFTA reflects a nationalism directed as much against American minorities (and new immigrants) as against foreign workers: this is the politics of resentment...

...Consider the ideology: its protagonists claim to be defending traditional American values, and to some extent they are doing just that, though in a very one-sided way, suppressing the fraternal impulses of the tradition and its more openended, imaginative, and utopian features...

...It isn't a program for survival...

...They suggest different causal explanations of right-wing politics...

...They have not created armies of activists or disciplined voting blocs...

...For the Goldwater movement represented, he thought, an American version of the traditionalist revolt, a politics of nostalgia, a WASP backlash (like Prohibition and anti-immigrant protest), that had no future in an increasingly modern, secular, liberal, and pluralist America...

...It's best to be clear about the character of this success, since most leftists refuse any acknowledgment of it and then have no sense of how their political opponents see the world...

...The focus of left and liberal politics these last thirty years has been overwhelmingly on "liberation" from various restrictive institutions and practices—not on the creation of new institutions and piactices...

...Obviously, this defense of liberty sits uneasily with the growing investment in prisons, with anti-abortion politics, with arguments for capital punishment, school prayer, the censorship of pornography, and much else on the Christian evangelical agenda...

...Now it is important to stress the other side of the dichotomy that I set up earlier: the reasons for this are material as well as cultural...

...When I call these alternatives "adaptations," I don't mean to say that they are going to work...

...They believe that the world they partly lived in and partly imagine they lived in—of stable families, secure jobs, safe neighborhoods, familiar religious truths, established gender and racial hierarchies—is collapsing around them, and that the victories of the left have caused the collapse...

...But there is a sense in which the left or some vulgarized version of the left dominated the culture (and parts of the legal system and the civil service) and even seemed at times to be winning the Gramscian war of position...

...But private self-defense has a broader social appeal...

...the first focuses on social and cultural factors, the second largely, though not entirely, on economic factors...

...1) The visible impact of the civil rights movement: the new black middle class, the growing number of black elected officials and civil servants, the attention given to black protest in the media, local as well as national...

...But the backlash can't be explained, as Lipset tried to explain it, by saying that its partisans are growing less influential and less numerous, that modernization is an inexorable process and traditionalist revolt a lost cause, a politics of desperation and certain defeat...

...Those liberal "elites" no doubt had support in the population at large...

...Richard Hofstadter offered this analysis in the British journal Encounter: The Goldwater movement is a revolt against the whole modern condition as the old-fashioned American sees it—against the world of organisation and bureaucracy, the welfare state, our urban disorders, secularism, the decline of American entrepreneurial bravura, the apparent disappearance of individualism and individuality, and the emergence of unwelcome international burdens...

...The Goldwater right, Howe wrote, "rests...

...Still, the identification of the state and the left, of top-down reform with "liberal" political, professional, and intellectual elites, isn't crazy...

...So here is a rough list of successes, in no particular order— as of the 1980s, say, though the rollback in some areas had already begun by then and is considerably advanced by now...

...But the left faces a dilemma here: it can't defend the egotism...

...6) The transformation of family life: the first successful challenges to male authority and the traditional division of labor, first steps toward protecting battered wives and rescuing abused children, rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangments--and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media...

...Today, neither the American aristocracy nor the bourgeoisie is in any danger...

...For the moment, it is the union of cultural and economic commitments that holds the high ground, with exuberance on the right, dispiritedly on the left...

...I am not entirely unsympathetic to that sort of thing, but it doesn't speak to the needs of people living in the ruins, as it were, of communal life, facing the dangers of the modern economy...

...And, second, the strength of the right was radically underestimated if one focused too closely and exclusively upon the traditional WASP world of local businessmen, small-town doctors, lawyers, realtors, and insurance salesmen, retired army officers, Methodist and Baptist churchgoers, and so on...

...Of course, this anger would be less intense and politically less effective, though by no means nonexistent, in better economic conditions...

...No doubt, the different factors interact, in ways I can't precisely describe...

...The politics of the new right is also bred in the newer cities and burgeoning suburbs of modern America...

...10) The extension and increasingly effective enforcement of environmental, safety, and public health regulations—most dramatically exemplified in the campaign against smoking...

...We are watching today a massive, if uncoordinated, effort by large numbers of ordinary Americans to free themselves from the costs of social solidarity, to cut loose from people in trouble, with whom they are afraid to identify, to make it on their own...

...Like everyone else, I am in principle in favor of diet and exercise, but it is important to acknowledge that men and women obsessed with health food and body building are not the stuff of left politics...

...The first reason for our skepticism about the "traditionalist revolt" was the sense that the social transformations against which the Goldwater movement was directed were only just beginning...

...He is the head of his family, a good neighbor (though his conception of the neighborhood is narrow), a churchgoer, a fervent patriot, a citizen wary of the tyranny of public officials, a soldier defending his country...

...What would everyday life be like within it...

...9) The legalization of abortion...

...They are focused more on ways of life than on standards of living...

...If rational explanations can only be made in the language of material interests, WINTER • 1996 • 7 American Questions then these conflicts will largely defy explanation...

...Think, for example, of the French terror, when aristocrats (or people called aristocrats or associated with them) were ceremoniously beheaded while the Parisian crowds cheered...

...but they were not driven to act by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritarian party...

...Even the craziness of American life, always with us, I suppose, but suddenly so much more salient, is probably also a way of coping: from militia training in remote places to spiritual fulfillment through diet and exercise...

...The attack on the welfare state will certainly make life harder for many people, but I suspect that this impact will be less massive and more delayed than many leftists suppose—in part because of private coping, which will be effective for a while, for some people, in part because of slack in the system and bureaucratic inertia...

...Nonetheless, as anyone who was politically conscious in the 1950s or early 1960s will recognize, the policies they put into effect changed the "feel" ofAmerican life...

...And so there is no basis in his character for compassion and solidarity...

...And it produces instead a bad libertarianism, a politics of selfishness and neglect...

...The growing inequalities of American economic life are a direct reflection of this newfound freedom, which is in fact the privilege of the few...

...Resentment is focused, instead, on the poor, on racial minorities, on new immigrants—and on the state officials who (usually inadequately) serve and protect these people...

...they also point to possible lines of strain in the contemporary right...

...And, again, politicians and bureaucrats who represent the interests of these importunate others are resented along with them...

...That's why the right is able to present itself as idealistic these days, and why it is in fact so militantly ideological...

...We have been misled into thinking that we were the real anti-statists by our opposition to the Vietnam War, the imperial presidency, governmental deception, witch-hunting, censorship, police brutality, and so on, and by our arguments for decentralization, politics on a human scale, popular participation at the local level...

...At the same time, however, they are not likely to fail in any immediate and obvious way...

...The globalizing economy, disappearing factories, downsizing companies, and capital mobility all work to produce a sense, which is not at all unrealistic, that it's not only a way of life that is at risk but also a way of earning a living...

...This is, again, a version of an old American ideal...

...Economic redistribution, welfare provision, racial integration, environmental control, safety regulation: all these are unimaginable without state power...

...What does it look like...

...We thought that Goldwater was a harbinger of worse to come—for two reasons...

...Why is this so...

...Arguing in a similar vein, also in Encounter, Seymour Martin Lipset wrote the right's epitaph: It cannot be stressed too strongly that the politics of backlash, whether religious-cultural, economic, or racially motivated, is a consequence of the fact that the U.S...

...Men and women in such a setting are driven to become entrepreneurs of the self, egotists with a mission (and certain aspects of left culture have played into this intensely personal politics, sometimes identified with "liberation...

...And in the last decade and a half we have clearly, finally, seen backlash politics on a large scale...

...its everyday exemplars can be made fun of, gently, in the popular culture, but left-wing intellectuals and writers who attempt anything more savage are likely to find that the public, like Queen Victoria, is not amused...

...Its ideology has the contradictory doubleness that I have been describing: nostalgia for a Norman Rockwell America, on the one hand, and a hard, angry, radically individualist survivalism, on the other...

...This sounds very much like a description of the contemporary right, but Hofstadter was firmly convinced in 1964 that there would be no contemporary right, at least of this kind, thirty years later...

...They will find other ways, the educators said, to reproduce the current diversity of racial and ethnic groups in the student population...

...It opens opportunities to the rich and powerful that were mostly not available in the sixties: hence the readiness of corporate executives to support a far right politics that they disdained only thirty years ago...

...But there has been real progress since, in many different areas of American life, much of it experienced as threatening by many Americans...

...And he resents people who encroach on his space, ask for his help, make some claim on his resources, inhibit his private pursuit of happiness...

...the other would reject the backlash while maintaining an anti-statist economic conservatism...

...4) The emergence of gay rights politics and, again, the attention paid to it in the media...

...They now have a chance to free themselves from governmental restraints, tax burdens, safety and environmental regulations, legal liabilities, and union contracts, and so to increase their share of the GNP—and all this in the name of liberty...

...The left is often accused of sponsoring a politics of this sort, and sometimes does...

...Think of that as a dress rehearsal— though we thought it real enough at the time—for disciplined, ideological, right-wing politics...

...Although its enthusiasts like to think of themselves as conservatives, their basic feeling is a hatred of what America has become...

...Or think of the denial of educational and employment opportunities to "bourgeois" children in many communist countries...

...Backlash politics lay somewhere ahead of us, because the social and cultural realities against which it was directed were still emergent...

...For the many, on the other hand, the left's weakness makes any collective resistance to these inequalities enormously difficult...

...The groups now reacting with such desperation are desperate precisely because they are growing less influential and less numerous...

...They reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers—not the population at large...

...Political and economic weakness on the left has a twofold effect...

...And when this state, under attack, deprived of funds, fails to run decent public schools, or stop factories from moving to Brazil, or hold down health care costs, or control urban violence, more and more people are forced to fend for themselves...

...Most of these victories were won in the courts, the media, the schools, the civil service— and not in the central arenas of democratic poli6 • DISSENT American Questions tics...

...The two explanations are still relevant and still useful, and I want to restate each of them—without, however, attempting a systematic comparison or any measurement of their relative importance...

...But the market has invisible hands, whereas "liberal bureaucrats" and "leftist lawyers" leave fingerprints...

...What most surprises my friends on the left, I think, is the radical anti-authoritarianism and antistatism of the new right...

...It wasn't a campaign, many of us said, but a movement...

...The first of these would be run from within the Democratic party: Governor Casey of Pennsylvania suggests what it might look like...

...Resentment makes for an ugly politics...

...But I think that we should wish the inner-governmental resistance well, and join it whenever we can...

...or the traditionalism...

...On the other hand, the economy-as-it-is might well generate something closer to a left politics were it not for the cultural backlash...

...An old, bad, and dangerous idea is in the air: the worse, the better...

...I stress the word "uncoordinated"— for this effort takes different and even contradictory forms...

...13) The steady expansion of Medicare and Medicaid and, more generally, the rising expenditure of public funds for welfare provision— and also the growing accessibility of this provision to such people as amnestied and even illegal immigrants...

...They pay for the services they get and do their best to avoid paying for public services that other people get...

...But neither of these versions of centrist politics has yet been tested nationally, and it seems likely that each would be rejected by party activists...

...With regard to the list I have just given, they are not entirely wrong on either count...

...Is it seaworthy...

...A leftist counter-offensive is a long way off, and meanwhile people in trouble and at risk need to be protected...

...This was the second reason for our skepticism in 1964: we thought that right-wing politics was not only reactive but also adaptive to the emerging conditions of American political, social, and above all economic life...

...The two don't always go together, but they do somehow match the mood, and perhaps also fit the experience, of many Americans—and not, I think, primarily ofAmericans who live in small towns...

...q WINTER • 1996 • 11...

...The increased interest in school vouchers, the disenchantment with the welfare system, the tax revolts and anti-immigrant protests, the growth of private security firms, and the arming of the American household—all these express the same sense of having to cope by oneself, for oneself...

...they responded to demands from organized groups of various sorts...

...A long, dreary, and dispiriting decline in all these areas is more likely than a dramatic crash...

...First, the right-wing reaction that Hofstadter and Lipset described had barely begun...

...is becoming more liberal...

...He cooperates with others only for some limited and specific purpose...

...People are pushed toward private, rather than collective, versions of self-defense...

...8) The virtual abolition of capital punishment...

...There are, as yet, no public spectacles like those of 1793, but when people are thrown off the welfare rolls, one can almost hear the cheering crowds...

...11) The first successes in the effort to regulate and limit the private ownership of guns...

...The electoral "gender gap" is too small to offset the drastic shift of white men to the right...

...Don't tread on me...

...Of course, the developing reaction was (and is) well financed and, at least to some degree, carefully orchestrated in the very media that the left was (and is) said to control...

...Arguments of this sort give too much credence to its populist rhetoric and its gestures of defiance...

...The Goldwater right did not yet have the support of corporate America, but new wealth and entrepreneurial energy, especially Southern and Southwestern wealth and energy, were already engaged: this was a modern as well as a traditionalist politics, a politics of interest as well as (and for the moment, even more than) of resentment...

...Their hero is a man (though it is one of the signs of the right's modernity that its politically active women, while officially encouraged to be the helpmates of this man, also aspire to be his equals) who is strong, self-sufficient, armed if necessary, like "the pioneers who made this country what it is...

...I sense among some leftists today a certain eagerness for catastrophe, so that there won't be any doubt about the urgency of turning back the political tide...

...Evangelical Protestantism might well be similarly explained: a search for salvation that avoids the old communal structures and the old patterns of mediation and mutuality...

...Of course, the right's "sink or swim in the market" is a survivalist program only for some, and this message of (self-)selection is reinforced by the ideological insistence that they swim best who swim alone, leaving their wounded behind...

...What are these people so angry about, so afraid of...

...That also means, however, that the various social catastrophes looming in the mind of the left—millions of men and women begging in the streets, the destruction of the black middle class and the disappearance of black students from elite universities, massive environmental pollution, a surge in industrial accidents, and so on— are probably not going to happen, at least not on the expected scale...

...This makes for a different sort of desperation than that described by Hofstadter and Lipset in 1964, which leaves much less room for optimism—and much less room for left politics in either its standard or alternative versions...

...Corporate support for NAFTA, for example, reflects an abandonment of American workers and a repudiation of the hard-won, always precarious, industrial agreeements worked out in the years after World War II (and still effective in 1964): this is the politics of interest...

...Environmentalist politics draws strong support in opinion polls but hasn't yet proven effective in either congressional or presidential elections...

...Even on the left, there is little sense of these successes as parts of a coherent program and very little speculation about what sort of society their completion would bring: how would it be held together...

...Certain versions of communitarian politics represent an effort to exploit the nostalgia for tradition, to give a left twist to the longing for family, neighborhood, and church...