Trail's End
White, Theodore H.
Trail's End AMERICA IN SEARCH OF ITSELF by Theodore H. White Harper & Row. 465 pp. $15.95. This is a book liberals will not like, but they should read it anyway. It tells a basic and unpleasant...
...Kevin McAuliffe (Kevin McAuliffe, a free-lance writer, teaches journalism at Fairleigh Dickinson University...
...the overbearing Federalization of authority against which Reagan ran...
...In one, White details what the nation has doomed itself to in the form of entitlement programs, Congressional mandates, and automatic cost-of-living adjustments— programs which do not require new votes authorizing new sources of funding with each increment and for which even most liberals admit in private there will be no funding left within a few years...
...In the other non-political chapter, White examines the 1980 census and treads over much of the same ground the Moynihan Report covered eighteen years earlier...
...One can agree with White's criticisms or be impressed by the vigor of his case without sharing all his judgments—most notably his apparent blame on the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic Conyention for the party's current quota mess...
...He is so pessimistic about the future that in his musings on the slain Kennedy brothers he now compares them to the ancient tribunes, Caius and Tiberius Grae-chus, who died while the Roman republic was self-destructing, as White now believes America is...
...Barry Commoner rates not a word...
...White pursues a theme of liberalism me-' tastasized into the political process itself, including campaign financing "reform" that has given birth to the political action committees, primary "reform" that abolished the winner-take-all rule, and delegate selection "reform" to the end that conventions became "farces, forums where 'cause' groups and special-interest groups engaged in spirited battles over issues and emotions...
...If, somewhere along the way, there is one point where the Democrats lost touch with the country, White believes it was Lyndon Johnson's 1965 remark that, above all, "equality of result" in American life was the goal of the Great Society...
...Two chapters of America in Search of Itself do not deal with politics intrinsically...
...White's coverage of John Anderson's 1980 campaign is skimpy and superficial...
...And for the same reasons: We have debased our currency, dissipated our authority, trivialized our politics, become cynical about our own values, and extended our global reach beyond the capacity of any democracy to sustain...
...In America in Search of Itself, the last (and second best) of his "Making of the President" series, White says farewell to a generation of reporting on our Presidential politics and farewell to an America he knew...
...New words like 'quotas,' 'entitlements,' and the officialese 'protected classes...
...Liberals, as I said, may not agree, and I know liberals who don't...
...White does not end his book with the 1980 election but goes on to describe how Reagan's economic program may well have lost him his chance to dismantle the New Deal and may have given the Democrats a second life...
...Recalling Fannie Lou Hamer's bloodcurdling testimony about Mississippi brutality that year, White notes how "a ban on exclusion of American citizens from political participation" became "an insistent inclusion of each group . . . whether elected at the polls or not...
...It tells a basic and unpleasant truth that many in the liberal community have not yet faced, but ought to soon: Conservatives did not elect Ronald Reagan President of the United States in 1980...
...Yet this is not a neoconservative book...
...Liberals "had set out to free everyone and had created a nation of dependents instead...
...Surely one of the greatest handicaps Democrats faced in 1980 was not only that the legacy was under attack but that its defense was in the hands of an incumbent who acted as if he did not believe in it himself...
...White does a good job of detailing how Jimmy Carter's Presidency self-destructed almost at once but is short on specifics of what Carter could have done differently...
...The madness of a good idea run wild," White goes on, created "a monster whose shadow hangs over all American politics today" with "equality . . . based not on excellence or merit, but on bloodlines...
...America in Search of Itself offers some of the most pungent analysis of Ronald Reagan to appear yet...
...He wrote "The Great American Newspaper...
...As he sums it up, "Somewhere, in the decades of upheaval, came a wrong turning...
...As he projects the effects of black illegitimacy rates (now well more than half the rate in city after city), the separatism of "bilingual" education, and uncontrolled illegal immigration, he openly doubts that "this multiracial society, split and cross-hatched by so many groups of special demands and special pleadings, should survive into the Twenty-first Century as one nation...
...One does not see the hand of Norman Podhoretz here, and White makes none of the blunders of his 1968 and 1972 books, which were so full of rhapsodized "new Nixon" hype that he had to write another book explaining how he got taken in...
...Liberals did...
...But if Reagan has no real mandate from the American people for supply-side economics, a new arms race, and enforced prayer in public schools, he nevertheless was the inevitable beneficiary of the wrath of those millions of Americans who thought it was time to reject, and reject emphatically, the Democratic Party and what its liberalism had wrought...
...Throughout, he overstates Carter's own commitment to the Democratic legacy...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
