Upbeat Visions of the U.S.
SILK, LEONARD
Upbeat Visions of the U.S. America's Economic Resurgence: A Bold New Strategy By Richard Rosecrance Harper and Row. 230 pp. $22.50. Peril and Promise: A Commentary on America By John...
...The mass media, breeding and responding to widespread mental laziness, torpor and the pursuit of entertainment and cheap pleasure, are the roots of the evil...
...These books are, nonetheless, earnest responses to the cardinal American anxiety of the day...
...Permit closer government-business cooperation...
...trench warfare between Democrats and Republicans will not do...
...After the long years of living with nuclear terror, the fear that Communism may burst forth again continues to inhibit a drastic change in military and foreign policy that would make it possible to devote more of our resources and attention to economic and social needs...
...As he says, "I see things through the lens of journalism, which often creates a picture of the world that is made up of equal parts of despair and hope...
...The American decline will be dramatized sooner or later by the crackup of the debt-burdened financial structure...
...He concludes that America, having created its own problems, "can solve them...
...This remains anathema to business conservatives even as they ask for government subsidies, continuing huge weapons programs, and tax breaks or tariffs that serve particular industrial interests...
...The two authors offer many of the same suggestions for bringing about an American resurgence: Reduce the United States budget deficit, which is a serious aggravant of the trade deficit...
...Similarly, Rosecrance, after observing that "typically, history writes 'finis' on the headstones of great nations," goes on to declare: "The basic contention of this book, however, is that, unlike past powers, the United States can come back from decline...
...3. There has been a collapse of American communal institutions—the family, the schools, the churches, the neighborhoods...
...it has only been experiencing a cyclical lapse that will soon end, with better public policies...
...In the early 1980s, the U.S...
...Past cyclical declines, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, have led to reforms and a strengthened economic performance, and the United States will do it again...
...No surprises there...
...2. Neither ordinary citizens nor the experts know how to solve these social problems or diseases, and the society is unwilling to waste billions trying to find out what works...
...The questions that urgently need answering are why the United States, in the presence of the opportunities presented by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, has been so slow to move resources from military to social and economic uses, and why it has not reordered its national and global priorities...
...Reviewed by Leonard Silk Economics columnist, the New York "Times" In these two tracts, John Chancellor, the NBC news commentator, and Richard Rosecrance, professor of political science at the University of California in Los Angeles, confront the question that has been plaguing the United States, off and on, since the end of the Vietnam War: If America is in decline, what can be done to turn it around...
...Alas, we know our problems, and their solutions, quite well...
...And he has a lot to say about a subject that Rosecrance largely overlooks: the importance of American domestic political reform, if foreign and economic policies are to be overhauled...
...Both reflect the visceral hopes of their authors that they Uve in a land that has not had its day...
...Chancellor calls upon President George Bush to bring some Democrats into the White House to signal that these are extraordinary times, just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought Republicans into his Cabinet during World War II to demonstrate that winning the War was more important than politics...
...The issues Chancellor cites as "not partisan" but "national"—public aid for schoolchildren, safety in the workplace, day care for children, getting people out of poverty, ending the wastage of that fifth of the workforce who are "impoverished, undernourished and ill-educated," rescuing the inner cities now abandoned to rot, crime, despair —all these are highly partisan issues that cannot be blown away by rhetoric about national unity...
...The United States is not in a secular decline at all...
...The age of American hegemony, he contends, is ending, and this nation would weaken itself further by misallocating resources in a futile effort to maintain global dominance...
...4. The people are okay but the politicians are no good...
...Chancellor's book is less systematically organized than Rosecrance's...
...Provide greater support for education and research and development...
...We must put aside liberalism and conservatism in favor of cooperation and action...
...Neither journalists nor social scientists anticipated the tumultuous events in Eastern Europe during the past year, even a few months before they happened...
...Rosecrance's Japan-centered strategy for the United States may be running behind events...
...economy has demonstrated a remarkable resilience, a formidable ability to create new jobs through sustained noninflationary growth, and a capacity to reward innovative entrepreneurs...
...Impassioned, angry journalism, like Chancellor's, offers no reliable prophecy of future events...
...Hormats goes on to observe that "on the positive side, the U.S...
...Both books are basically upbeat...
...economy went through a tough time—and it still suffers from big budget and trade deficits...
...I remember Auden's line for Britain between the Wars: "You live in a land that has had its day...
...For the most part, however, these are the result of distortive policies rather than an underlying deterioration...
...5. Just as totalitarian dictators learned that the "big lie" could serve their interests, in late-stage capitalism it was found that television and the monetization of politics—with the demonstrated power of spot advertising to manipulate public opinion—could turn all the big and little lies of special or kook interests into the common coin of American political discourse...
...Hope may be a better guide to public policy than fear, but not necessarily...
...There is reason to ask, though, whether either Japan or the United States really wants that...
...Chancellor avoids being tagged with either the L-word or the C-word himself when he asserts that "there is a compelling need for a new vocabulary of American politics, more pragmatic and less partisan, free of the ideological divisions of the past...
...Nevertheless, Rosecrance's perception that a reorientation of America's foreign policy is crucial to its economic revival is an important contribution to national thinking about the problems of the United States in the emerging multipolar world...
...The Reagan-Bush assault on liberalism has hurt the moderate wing of their party, too...
...How are we to choose among these diagnoses and visions of the future...
...Chancellor, noting the growing body of negative literature on the subject, especially Paul Kennedy's best-seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, states at the outset: "Mine is not a declinisi argument, although I may be accused of being soft on declinism...
...fear and alarm may lead to sounder action, whether the issue is America's social and economic troubles, one's fate in a totalitarian country, or the threat to the global environment...
...This plea for a conservative-liberal coalition ignores the powerful obstacles to change within the Republican Party and the widened gap between the parties...
...He favors public financing of campaigns and the elimination of Political Action Committees, arguing that if Congress were less burdened with fund-raising in huge amounts, it would be less of a bastion for kept incumbents and more concerned with broad public interests...
...But he believes the United States, being a global and not merely a regional power, still has a vital role to play in working with others for a stable, peaceful world...
...fighting the old LeftRight battles will not help...
...But our troubles are not semantic...
...Our greatest failure has been not assuring an adequate corps of American students for our graduate schools in science, mathematics and technology, and this is due in large measure to the weakness of primary and secondary education in the country...
...The best prophets are those who scare the hell out of you...
...It may take a national crisis to close the breach separating far-Right conservatives from liberals and moderate conservatives—that diminished band in the Disraeli or Nelson Rockefeller tradition who favor a more humane capitalism...
...Increasingly, Japan is focusing its foreign investment and trade toward Europe and its own backyard in the Pacific...
...176 pp...
...Hope, when it underrates the depth of problems and dangers, can lead to negligence and inanition...
...6. The Cold War, despite all claims to the contrary, is not perceived by the public or by political leaders as over...
...Lookto the long run...
...1. The haves of American society, overcome by selfishness and greed, couldn't care less about helping the havenots—the homeless, the mentally and physically sick, the drug-addicted, the AIDS victims, and other sufferers of the ills of a society that have not been cured by the magic ofthemarketand actually are getting worse...
...Not a great deal, I'm afraid, though both authors have tried their damnedest to arouse America to its perils and promises...
...Save more and invest more in productivity-raising enterprises...
...and the drive of East and West Germany toward unification...
...Chancellor is bolder in calling for such politically painful measures as increasing taxes, cutting the rate of increase in entitlement benefits, and greater government support for high technology— although in the case of the last he carefully avoids the IP-word (Industrial Policy...
...Indeed, he maintains that, to promote America's economic resurgence, "traditional liberal or conservative nostrums will not suffice...
...Specifically, Chancellor proposes abolishing the primary elections and party caucuses that have made the electoral process so tiresome and expensive, and putting the choice of Presidential candidates in the hands of party professionals and elected officials...
...7. We have been too slow to appreciate the importance of the economic and technological competition with Japan and Europe, and are now resorting to an aggressive, protectionist policy that will only deepen America's problems...
...9. America really is in decline, for the sort of deep cultural reasons found in other spent civilizations by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee...
...8. The shift to the Right of American ideology during the Reagan years, and the widening gap bet ween management and workers, are ill-suited to economic growth in the modern world and to meeting public and social needs that are neglected or poorly met by the market, as compared with the mixture of capitalism and social democracy practiced in Japan and Western Europe...
...many even believe that big public efforts would be counterproductive...
...Do this partly byraising taxes, partly bytaking advantage of the end of the Cold War to cut military outlays, and be prepared to cut entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare...
...Tensions between the countries have been rising...
...Those profound causes cannot be eradicated by a superficial reallocation of resources or the impassioned oratory of patriotism...
...What the Japanese most fear is that Europe and the U.S...
...will form a coalition of their own and gang up on Japan...
...Peril and Promise: A Commentary on America By John Chancellor Harper and Row...
...Best of all, his book has a clarity and fervor that should make it appealing to a great many readers...
...But the authors' stresses differ...
...the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the surge toward democracy...
...Rosecrance, building on his earlier work, The Rise of the Trading State, would have the United States compete harder for foreign markets and work harder to create a closer partnership with Japan...
...Can the books under review help us...
...Here are some possible answers to those questions, which readers are invited to score...
...17.95...
...The highly expensive quest for votes has sucked principle and intelligence out of the political process and deprived the nation of genuine leaders...
...As Robert D. Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, put it in his contribution to After Reagan: Confronting the Changed World Economy: "Myth One: America is in decline...
...Three striking developments have shifted the international spotlight from Asia to Europe: the rapid movement of the Western European democracies to a single market and the impetus that is giving to economic growth...
...nor does heavily footnoted, data-laden political science, like Rosecrance's carefully reasoned volume...
Vol. 73 • May 1990 • No. 8
