Picking Up the Political Pieces
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing PICKING UP THE POLITICAL PIECES BY BARRY GEWEN u jl jl e ran for President advocating maj or tax cuts together with a military buildup. An outspoken critic of centralized...
...Books with titles like Allen J. Matusow's The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Harper & Row, 542 pp., $22.95) give the wrong impression: If the sleeves are a bit frayed, the sweater is basically sound...
...Matusow expertly traces each thread of the late '60s' disintegration...
...Balanced budgets were a sort of religion with him...
...Selma, Alabama, in 1965 was the last time that Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership and ideals went unchallenged...
...In reality, the American consensus held throughout...
...Honesty would bring it only disaster...
...How could the American political landscape have changed so profoundly in a mere 16 years...
...The answer is that it hasn't...
...The winners did not win, the losers lost...
...Millions of others who rejected Gold-water in 1964, and except for the fears raised by the decade's lunatic fringe would have rejected Nixon in 1968, barely rate a mention...
...imperialism and eventually democracy itself...
...For those who are unwilling to adopt this kind of passivity or the dead end of Reaganomics, A Time of Passion suggests a rather different course: What we must do is learn from our mistakes and get on with the job of creating, if not the Great, at least a good society...
...If he plans to tackle the huge deficits of Reaganomics in 1985 without raising taxes, he will have to cut deeply into such middle-class entitlements as Social Security and Medicare...
...has stood still since approximately 1966...
...Despite his overwhelming electoral triumph in 1980 (he won 489 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter's 49), his percentage of the popular vote was an unspectacular 50.75...
...Since then, he has clearly lost some of his support, most notably among blue-collar workers and women...
...So were his doubts about Social Security, although these he toned down during the campaign because Hell hath no fury like an elderly voter scorned...
...Finally, there was the unfortunate change that came over the civil rights movement...
...We should not, however, expect to hear any knives being sharpened until after the election...
...Millions who were attracted to the positive side of the '60s—whether racial equality or the Beatles—drop out of his narrative as soon as they turned away from the extremists...
...But his name is also Ronald Reagan, and he won the Presidency in 1980inawalk...
...We know more than we did in 1966, but the more that we know is the extent of our ignorance...
...In rapid succession, as increasing numbers of Americans and Vietnamese died in the jungles, it attacked corporate liberalism, U.S...
...After damning government interventions of various kinds in just about every chapter, Morris is left contemplating his navel—or doing the intellectual equivalent, which is accepting the inevitability of long-wave economic trends and demographic shifts...
...Let San Francisco stand for the rest...
...The lesson he draws from his dour analyses of the New Frontier's technocracy, Lyndon Johnson's two wars (in Vietnam and on poverty), the collapse of economic theory, and the doleful exhausted' 70s, is the importance of enduring values and a sense of limits...
...In 10 years, there would still be welfare mothers and welfare children, there would still be slums, there would still be isolated old people, there would still be alcoholics, and drug addicts, and criminals and hustlers, there would still be dilapidated housing and neglected children...
...Looming up behind them is the immense task of fitting the United States into the new global economy now in the process of being born...
...Richard Nixon ran against rioters in the streets, Jimmy Carter defeated Watergate and Ronald Reagan (assisted by the Aya-tollah) triumphed over wimpishness...
...The mau-mauing was successful even if the project wasn't: The funds were restored...
...Philosophically, theU.S...
...Meanwhile, his hard-core opposition—including unions, blacks, environmentalists, and antinuclear types —could scarcely be harder...
...Other onetime liberals who have reached similar conclusions are finding comfort in the free-market homilies of the incumbent President...
...We may have trouble figuring out how to get from here to there, but it is worth remembering that Franklin D. Roosevelt entered office with little more than a willingness to experiment...
...An outspoken critic of centralized government, he sought to trim back many social programs that benefited the poor, and to consolidate others into block grants as a way of enhancing states rights...
...As a national model, Sweden still has much more to offer than Japan...
...apart from a few normally Republican John Anderson voters, it is uncertain that he has gained any...
...He had a Westerner's unsophisticated charm, an ingenuousness that the unkind were prone to label dullness...
...More than ever before, it is evident that Reagan's victory over Carter had less to do with ideology than with the particular circumstances of the election, and that the Reagan Presidency represents only one more reaction in a series of reactions, commencing with the excesses of the late '60s...
...Should these groups join forces this year, we may be able to get back to the unfinished business of the Great Society— or at least to struggling with the right problems instead of engaging in nonsensical debates about supply-side economics...
...troops not been fighting in Southeast Asia...
...Surveys consistently show the public continues to support the fundamental institutions of the welfare state by wide margins, and any national politician who calls for their dismantling dees so at his peril...
...Just at the moment it stirred the conscience of the nation, it shifted from integration and nonviolence to black power and the clenched fist...
...A hoodlum named Charles Sizemore was placed in charge of a summer jobs program in the city, and after hearing about prospective cutbacks, sent some of his boys to tell the Mayor to come up with the money, about$45,000, or "this goddam town's gonna blow...
...Morris' personalized and highly idiosyncratic chronicle is an instructive study in disillusion...
...Calls from antipoverty agencies around the country poured in...
...The most chastening sections of The Unraveling of America are the chapters devoted to the War on Poverty...
...history...
...Admittedly, the solutions are not obvious...
...The law making his birthday a national holiday is a sad reminder of both the moral consensus he forged and the tumult that followed...
...Because none of the victors possessed a genuine mandate, it was easy during these years to conclude the nation was wildly out of control, lurching from one side to another...
...The White House is being forced into running a deceitful campaign this coming fall...
...Besides, the true pessimists tell us that these are the easy problems...
...If, as seems probable, a period of activism ensues sometime in the next 10 years, it will do well to complete the unfulfilled promises of the '60s—full employment, national health insurance, tax reform, income redistribution, worker participation...
...Inflation had its beginnings in the 1966 budget, when Lyndon Johnson irresponsibly attempted to deliver guns along with butter...
...By 1968, youthful activists were quoting Mao to each other and listening reverently to the cretinous Mark Rudd...
...Linked to the war and further inflaming passions was the growth of the student movement...
...One of the few things we can be certain of is that our search for answers in this vast uncharted territory is sure to provoke excesses of its own...
...Morris, more subtle or perhaps more confused (he provides evidence for both judgments), has no greater respect for the conservative Reagan than for the liberal Kennedy...
...Having failed to persuade the American people to love Calvin Coolidge, Reagan is vulnerable, and he knows it...
...Berkeley, to be sure, had already erupted, yet Columbia and Kent State could probably have been avoided, and with them the inevitable backlash, had U.S...
...Several things stopped the country in its tracks .The Vietnam War was needlessly escalated, creating divisions that should never have developed...
...It is long on condemnation, short on prescription...
...His hostility toward the progressive income tax was well known...
...Matusow's mistake is to take these minuscule, albeit attention-getting, parts for the whole...
...After ritualistically grinding out funding applications, they were horrified to learn the government was giving them everything they had asked for, tens of millions of dollars worth of grants, more money per capita than any other city in the country...
...From another angle, Charles R. Morris tells a similar story in his provocative new book, A Time of Passion: A mer-ica 1960-1980 (Harper & Row, 270 pp., $17.50...
...Urban guerrillas and bomb factories were the inevitable next stage...
...With no idea what they were doing, they began setting up programs, and soon were regarded as experts...
...A less honest man would have parlayed this experience into a career as a "consultant...
...In 1966 he was one of five staff members, all young, all inexperienced, responsible for getting the Trenton, New Jersey, antipoverty program on its feet...
...Instead, Morris writes: "Viewed with bleak detachment, there was no reason to suppose that our programs, even if they got better and better, would eliminate poverty in Trenton...
...The Republican Party's efforts to woo the Hispanic vote and its talk about registration drives among fundamentalist Protestants are two signs of the White House's uneasiness...
...His name is Barry Goldwater, and in 1964 he was buried under one of the greatest election landslides in U.S...
...As with the New Left, so too with the counterculture's evolution from flower child to Charles Manson, and civil rights' descent into honky baiting and criminality...
...one cannot imagine the election of Nixon otherwise...
...Reagan has gone about as far as he can in slashing the subsidies of the poor and the powerless, those whose claim on Washington's attentions is solely a moral one...
...But as a result, his book has a lopsided quality...
...In 1962, for example, the New Left's self-proclaimed " newness" was its rejection of the dogmatic Marxism of the Old Left...
Vol. 67 • April 1984 • No. 6
