Policy Elites

...In his conclusion, Blumenthal advances the provocative thesis that what we are witnessing in Reagan's America is not the party realignment political scientists talk about but a realignment of elites...

...Policy elites are as uninterested in ideas, at least as scholars have traditionally understood them, as the rest of Americans...

...When Blumenthal tries to show that Milton Friedman's treatment of the origins of the Federal Reserve System is historically inaccurate, he is, though convincing, off the point...

...A political ideology once considered so extreme and archaic that it was dismissed as a remnant soon to disappear has become the officially governing ideology of the world's greatest superpower...

...Friedman is not considered a great economist by his followers because his ideas are accurate...

...He wrote "America's Impasse...

...Alan Wolfe (Alan Wolfe is a sociologist at Queens College in New York...

...But even here, his thesis about the primacy of ideology is, in my opinion, weak...

...I only wish that ideas came first and power after, but nothing I have seen in the rise of the Right convinces me that such is the case...

...It tries to be all these things, but it brings off none of them successfully...

...If there is one central thesis to The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, it is that "ideas themselves have become a salient aspect of contemporary politics...

...To be fair, Blumenthal does state that "the rise of an ideological politics does not mean that a majority of the voters agree with conservatism, or even that many express themselves in its special language...

...No amount of counter-evidence, no matter how well collected by Blumenthal in his review of efforts at monetarism, will change the mind of a Friedmanite...

...What should be a strength, however, turns into a defect...

...We are, in short, not talking about ideas but about faith...

...Blumenthal views his book as a continuation of an earlier one, The Permanent Campaign, in which he told the story of how political party organizations were being replaced by media consultants and public relations experts...

...I, for one, do not see the continuity...

...The difference is that they, unlike ordinary people, back up their faith with footnotes, graphs, and, from time to time, a,fluency of invective...

...Somewhat disorganized as this book is, Blumenthal does at times contradict his main thesis, and these points tend to be the best parts of the book...

...For when he shows that conservatives will always be in opposition no matter how firm their hold on power, and when he talks about myth, the meaning of the Protestant ethic, and "the will to believe," he moves on to psychological territory, which turns out to be much firmer...

...It does mean that an elite devoted to this brand of politics is flourishing...

...Blumenthal takes us on a guided tour of these elites: the University of Chicago economics department, the policy organizations in Washington, and the New York-based neoconservatives...

...Reagan's success is not based on the popularity of ideas, but on his command over the nation's subconscious...

...It is not the extremist who is in power but the actor...

...Blumenthal's book, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, is neither a history of American conservatism, nor a description of its rise to power, nor an analysis of its ideas...

...No one, not even conservatives themselves, would have guessed, a quarter of a century ago, that kooks close to the John Birch Society would be making policy for all the rest of us...

...in fact, they save the book and make it worth reading...

...Instead, mouthing certain ideas now, as it was twenty years ago, is the way to foundation grants, let alone power...

...I say "even" because Sidney Blumenthal is not only a good reporter but, unusual among Washington journalists, he is also someone who has heard of Max Weber and knows a thing or two about why modern societies are the way they are...

...We have not thought through the failure of "liberalism" and replaced it by a new "conservative" consensus...

...I know of no book that is able to explain how such a transformation took place, not even this one...

...Then we get a sense of how deep the angst is in America...

...I have a far less sophisticated but, I think, more realistic interpretation: Conservative ideas are popular today because intellectuals, like the rest of us, are faddish...