POLITICAL PAST

...This is historically dubious...

...He shows how urban renewal meant that "poor people lost their homes...

...Growth would provide the necessary budget for a posture of imperial strength, while expansion abroad would encourage (and eventually become necessary to the maintenance of) growth...

...So what now...

...The growth coalition was "a political monstrosity," because it spent the money, in billions, and "achieved no reforms...

...By the time Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter had tried, and failed, to carry out the long overdue realignment of the political system, Ronald Reagan had a mandate and an opportunity to succeed where they did not...

...they have come to "stand for notions wildly antagonistic to their roots...

...not only why a liberal consensus emerged, and turned liberalism into a conservative force, but why the forces for change lacked the power to prevent this from happening...

...He relies too heavily, perhaps, on deploying pairs of opposed concepts— "politics" and "economics," "growth" versus "no growth," "conservatives" and "liberals"—and sometimes misses the ironies and paradoxes of the interaction of real interests and personalities...

...The thesis is relatively simple, and Wolfe expounds it lucidly—more lucidly, I fear, than I may be able to do, given the limitations of a short review...

...middle income and wealthy people gained them...

...Growth in itself, Wolfe is at pains to insist, is good...

...But what, I found myself wanting to ask by the end of America's Impasse, about the cost of no-growth...

...What was bad was the political price paid to achieve it...

...More than two generations have passed since the German sociologist Werner Som-bart, contemplating the collapse of the Progressive movement, asked: "Why is there no socialism in the United States...

...Godfrey Hodgson (Godfrey Hodgson, the author of "America in Our Time" and "All Things to All Men," a study of the modern Presidency, is a British correspondent who has covered Washington and the United States for many years...

...The Republicans, like the Democrats, have abandoned their fundamental principles, Wolfe argues...

...American liberalism became dependent on the two forces it needed to control: business and the national security establishment...

...What notions...

...But Reagan too, Wolfe predicts, is destined to fail because he has repeated the fundamental mistake of his predecessors: he has chosen an economic, rather than a political, philosophy as the guiding light of policy...

...But America's Impasse is a fine book arid, since to change the future it is necessary to understand the past, a timely and valuable one...

...In this intelligent, indeed at times brilliant, book, sociologist Alan Wolfe offers a conceptual and analytical guide to the political history of the United States since the New Deal...

...More serious doubts arise, tributes themselves to the force and aim of Wolfe's analysis...

...The evidence Wolfe adduces in support of his thesis—and this is always a great test of a book of this kind—is made more comprehensive and more coherent by that thesis, not pulled and tugged to fit it...

...As early as 1938, Wolfe argues, politics in the United States had reached stalemate...

...Or they could have been liberal, and carried out reforms...

...Keynesian economics, Wolfe argues, could have worked only if some social democratic party, with the support of labor, could have forced reforms upon the state...

...At that point American political society faced the same choice which European and other developed societies have generally reflected in the structure of their parties and their politics: beBOOKS tween conservatism and some form of democratic socialism or social democracy...

...This was true in economic theory, in social policy, in defense, and in foreign policy...

...Keynesianism did not...

...Instead, the United States evaded these two choices and pursued an economic, not a political, salvation: the pursuit of growth...

...And so Leon Keyserling, the disciple of Keynes, and Paul Nitze, the apostle of anti-communism, stood as godfathers to Cold War liberalism...

...The roots of the Republican ideology lie in the marriage of mid-Victorian capitalist expansionism and mid-Victorian religious idealism: "doing well by doing good...

...The cost of growth, no doubt, has been heavy...

...Wolfe disentangles the links between domestic liberalism and quasi-imperial expansion abroad...

...I suspect that the instinct to choose an "economist" consensus (using the word "economist" as the old Marxists used to use it) goes deeper back into American political history than Wolfe seems to appreciate...

...In domestic policy—Wolfe is especially persuasive in his analysis of the Housing Act of 1949—"liberalism was a complacent vision...

...I think America's Impasse works...

...A "growth coalition" was put together which "presupposed the suppression of fundamental choice...

...Any resemblance between bombed-out villages in Vietnam and devastated areas in the Bronx," Wolfe writes, "was more than coincidental: both were the products of action taken by liberals that were tailored to win conservative support...

...Wolfe, in short, has succeeded better in describing and interpreting what happened than at uncovering the deep causes of the process he analyzes so clearly...

...Also, I would have liked to see Wolfe work out his historical analysis further back into the past...

...The question is not only why the growth coalition behaved as it did, but why it was allowed to...

...social justice without pain...

...In America that was an impossibility, and so "there is only one thing wrong with the view that Keynesian-ism failed: it was never really tried...

...Massive retaliation— Wolfe quotes Samuel Huntington—"was a domestic strategy," and National Security Council paper number sixty-nine begat "a centrist non-ideological approach to foreign policy" and to domestic policy as well...

...Well, the Republican tradition, Wolfe says, did not inherently value growth...

...The politicians could have been conservative, and saved money...

...By 1948 the impulse of New Deal idealism was largely spent...

...Keynesians might come to power...