Abandoning the Good Fight

...On the other hand, egalitarian measures do increase the opportunities of the disadvantaged to exercise liberty...

...As an object for our concern and our efforts, the poor, victimized by ghetto landlords and brutal police, have been replaced by the corporate executive, victimized by the EPA and osha...

...poor—welfare or a job paying the minimum wage—is not much more meaningful than the Soviet citizen's choice between Pravda and Izvestia...

...although the author has individual chapters on Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moyni-han and Daniel Bell, he provides scant personal background and strenuously avoids anecdote and chit-chat...

...Perhaps most depressing of all, as Peter Steinfels notes in his new book, at least some of those who labored so stalwartly to salvage humane values in the previous decade have become part of the crew wrecking them in this one...

...Thus, while alleviating inequality will not usher in a millenium of bliss, neither will it aggravate unhappiness...

...It is interesting that neoconservatives are obsessed with the question of whether reducing inequality "really" makes the poor happier, yet scoff at antigrowth intellectuals who wonder whether economic growth makes us happier...

...One such magazine was The New Leader...

...To argue the contrary, as the neoconservatives do, is to build a straw man...

...The dreariness of the late '60s has been replaced by a new dreariness of the late '70s...

...Probably the strongest chapter in the book is entitled "Equality and Social Policy...

...Abbie Hoffman has made way for Jack Kemp...

...in addition, they may discourage social diversity (although this is by no means certain...

...Never mind that government redistribution is more piddling in the U. S. than in any of the Western democracies, except for Switzerland...

...Another neoconservative tenet is that demands to better the lot of the poverty stricken "have no end"—thanks to the so-called Tocqueville effect, which holds that resentment of remaining inequalities increases as inequality decreases...

...He makes his own position clear in the book's very first paragraph: Neo-conservatism has "devoted its attention to fundamental questions its rivals have frequently overlooked" and "deserves, accordingly, a thoughtful, extensive, and careful evaluation...

...As for the first, Steinfels correctly contends that few individuals seek absolute equalization of rewards, regardless of effort or contribution...

...I know of no empirical evidence supporting this proposition, except in the limited sense Tocqueville himself used it: Oppressed people are more likely to revolt when their situation has begun to improve than when it is at its worst?not because they increasingly resent the residual inequalities (usually still huge), but because they sense for the first time that change is possible...

...The new dawn once promised if only we could make a revolution is now promised if only we could make a counterrevolution...

...The Neoconservatives deserves to be taken seriously...

...And I remember being told —I think it was sometime in 1968, when I was a junior at Harvard—that Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, had decided to join his publication to the list and "take on" the New Left...

...This is neoconservative thought at its least appealing...

...Any kind of action has unanticipated consequences...

...Without them, the choice of the U.S...

...But planned action is not unique in this regard...

...The second dichotomy is no less facile...

...However, as Steinfels comments in a different context, neoconservatives have an annoying tendency to choose precisely "the most insubstantial targets" for their polemics...

...Nevertheless, its outlook, "preoccupied with certain aspects of American life and blind or complacent toward others, justifies a politics which, should it prevail, threatens to attenuate and diminish the promise of American democracy...

...As John Gross, quoted by Steinfels, said about the 19th-century British Saturday Review: "Many of the attitudes which they derided as mawkish might better be described as humane...

...Do companies foresee causing cancer when they put a particular chemical on the market...

...It is not, despite appearance of an excerpt in Esquire, a book of New York gossip...

...Steinfels rightly responds, though, that "politicians, generals, diplomats, bankers, and policemen have been known to exhibit these weaknesses as well...

...One can mock mau-mauing or be skeptical of compassion untempered by serious thought, but neoconservative writing comes dangerously close to rejecting social concern tout court—a concern that is a resource to be nurtured and not a disease to be vaccinated against...

...another was the Socialist quarterly Dissent, guided by Irving Howe...

...Neoconservative assessments of equality issues are further marred by two simplistic dichotomies: between "equality of opportunity" and "equality of result," and between equality and liberty...

...It is therefore far more in sorrow than in anger that I have watched the subsequent course of events...

...The honorable service rendered by those of my elders who were intellectual critics of the New Left is one that I, caught in the midst of the maelstrom, will always celebrate...

...Assorted malaises, from status insecurity to sexual anxiety, are attributed to liberal intellectuals...

...author, "Behind the Berlin Wall," "Push Comes to Shove" In the depths of the '60s, it was difficult to find liberal intellectual voices willing to dissent from the ideological and tactical excesses of the New Left —excesses that, as the decade moved on, increasingly came to define the core of student radicalism rather than the fringes...

...It is sad that many who defended humane values in the '60s will not take up this new fight...

...Finally, neoconservatives delight in impugning the motives of intellectuals or others among the better-off who are concerned about the disadvantaged...

...The "law" of unanticipated consequences should be an invitation to cautious thinking, not an excuse for doing nothing...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Assistant professor of public policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard...

...Did those pioneering television anticipate its effects on tastes and lifestyles...

...Yet a few publications did keep their pages open to defenders of democratic and humane values seeking to answer critics whose perception of American reality was dominated (and hence distorted) by the blights of Vietnam and race...

...Hence, trying to achieve equality is socially destabilizing...

...What he focuses on instead are ideas—neo-conservative notions such as the "overload" on democratic institutions, the "law" of unanticipated consequences, the perfidiousness of demands for "equality of result" as opposed to "equality of opportunity," the call for a reassertion of elite self-confidence to replace American self-flagellation...

...Genuine discourse necessarily involves a desire to alleviate the suffering of the disadvantaged, especially in a world where differences in "effort" or "contribution" represent in significant measure accidents of heredity or early environment having little to do with individual merit...

...Egalitarian legislation does restrict the liberty of the well-off both to dispose of incomes the market has rewarded them and to behave in ways that injure the worse-off...

...An interest in the disadvantaged has always characterized the Left in Western democracies (and, of course, I include American liberals...

...The urban rioting in the '60s generally occurred before, not after, the Great Society programs came on line...

...that was good news indeed, for Commentary was one of the country's most distinguished journals...

...Do consumers anticipate putting a local restaurant out of business (ruining the dreams of its owners) when they eat at McDonald's...

...It begins by observing that "one of the more perplexing aspects of neoconservatism is its apparent belief that America is in the grip of implacable egalitarianism...

...This is a dubious view of American reality, of course, even if there are people who feel college admissions should be determined by lottery, or who portray equal rights for homosexuals as the most pressing issue on the national agenda...

...Neoconservatives argue, too, that planned social action has unanticipated negative consequences...

...This sense of social responsibility is now under attack by forces more powerful and more sinister than neoconservative intellectuals...

...Occasionally, Steinfels gets fixed on debater's points or stylistic textual analysis of the prose of someone he is criticizing, but at his best he offers sustained and telling intellectual argument...

...A great to-do is made about feelings of "liberal guilt," aiming, as Steinfels notes perceptively, to make people feel guilty about feeling guilty...