Allocating Loss

...To the wage-earner or "majoritarian" interest, the source of evil has been excessive corporate power, with deliverance depending not on nationalization of business but on a strong Federal commitment to such regulatory agencies as the National Labor Relations Board...

...She may even help to put a new generation of American socialists more closely in touch with some of their own mythology about the failure of American workers to achieve class consciousness...

...Characterizing peace, justice, and harmony as the social norm, the myth also holds that social turmoil is a transitory abnormality...

...Harrington traces the origin of the American belief in deliverance back to the Enlightenment and its faith in God-given principles of order for human communities...

...Their scheme of deliverance called for active American efforts to construct strong American-style democracies throughout the Third World...

...As long as the United States expanded economically, most Americans stood assured of a better future and had little need to scrutinize their inconsistent political beliefs...

...The Vietnam era vividly demonstrates how all three interest groups were blinded by the myth of deliverance and its promise of a quick fix for social peace and harmony...

...If losses must be inflicted, the wealthy and powerful are the most deserving targets...

...The majoritarian mission was even broader...

...They, too, aimed to defeat communism, but for them foreign policy also had a positive role to play in strengthening such functionalist institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...

...Some have found the answer in the nation's overall standard of living, others in the absence of a feudal past and attendant de jure social hierarchy...

...The overriding task of government is to locate and remove the abnormality, thus delivering the nation from evil and restoring the natural harmony...

...Bill Blum (Bill Blum is an attorney in Los Angeles and a free-lance writer...

...Harrington's historical narrative is broad and sweeping, stretching from the majoritarianism of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom to the uneasy alliance of localism and majoritarianism in support of the New Deal to the triumph of functionalism under Jimmy Carter and the blend of localism and functionalism under Ronald Reagan...

...What is needed, Harrington argues, is a new "politics of loss allocation" marked by a clear recognition of the points of fundamental conflict among economic groups and based on an ongoing process of real debate, bargaining, and compromise of deep differences...

...However, as Harrington explains, each group has traditionally identified the source of evil and the proper mode of deliverance quite differently...

...Or to put it another way," in Harrington's words, "differences in interest among different groups in the nation...

...By contrast, the managers or "functionalists" fear excesses of "untutored popular democracy" and would concentrate authority in the hands of professional experts in both the public and private sectors...

...While Harrington may be justly criticized for oversimplifying the views and programs of certain Presidents, there can be little doubt that her study will shake up complacent minds across the entire political spectrum...

...In it, she argues that Americans and their leaders have denied the existence of class conflict because of a deeply entrenched national myth, the "myth of deliverance...

...Functionalists saw the war as part of an American mission to keep international business transactions free and open...

...Such confusion, in Harrington's estimation, applies to foreign policy as well as to the domestic scene...

...But in the contemporary world of economic limits, the American system of beliefs threatens to produce rising uncertainty, disillusionment, and recrimination...

...At the same time, class and racial conflicts were undermining the Great Society programs that promised deliverance from poverty and inequality at home without the necessity of basic social change...

...The alternative—a lingering politics of illusion after the fashion of Reaganomics—is far worse...

...Political mythology is, of course, not peculiar to the United States...

...Although our political life has, in fact, been shaped by deep-seated economic and social conflict, each major group has clung to the myth that social crises are caused by some readily cured social malady blocking the natural and just exchanges among all interests...

...The tragedy of all this, according to Harrington, is that Americans still do not realize how the myth continues to cast a spell on them...

...Generations of progressive historians and social activists have grappled with this important question without reaching consensus...

...Still others have blamed defects in socialist ideology and the penchant of the American Left for aping the theory and practice of foreign revolutionary models...

...But neither they nor the other two groups realized the complexities and contradictions—conflicts between the industrial nations and the Third World, age-old conflicts of race, region, and class within the Third World— that stood in the way of American success...

...Localists, on the other hand, see evil in big government and salvation in the preservation of grass-roots autonomy...

...The bulk of Harrington's book is devoted to explaining how these three broad social groups have vied for power, formed temporary coalitions, pursued common policies, and then shifted alliances after joint goals had been achieved or abandoned...

...Why, in a nation so laden with inequality and concentrations of power as the United States, is there no class-based, left-wing movement of significance...

...In Vietnam, for example, all three groups united behind the American crusade, but for varying reasons and with varying goals in mind...

...Harrington makes it no secret that she considers majoritarianism, shorn of its attachment to deliverance, as the outlook most appropriate for a democracy capable of allocating loss...

...The localists, who by that time had come to see world communism as the Great Satan, approached the conflict in purely military terms as a struggle against a monolithic force which, once vanquished, would permit America to turn inward again...

...At the core of this all-embracing paradigm is the conviction that human relations are by their nature harmonious and that serious social conflict is unnatural and unnecessary...

...Behind the facade of social tension lies a beneficent natural order within which all interests are complementary and in which all needs can be satisfied...

...while inevitable, are essentially superficial...

...The Founding Fathers subscribed to it, and the Declaration of Independence, with its emphasis on natural rights, implied that social harmony would flow freely after deliverance from the evils of monarchy...

...Though often arduous, the task is always possible and requires no basic alteration of the underlying social structure...

...But what makes the American variety unique is that the three major groups have achieved so little consciousness of the gulf between their varying beliefs in deliverance and the intractable social problems that have confronted them...

...Contrary to the fecund promises of deliverance, some interests will lose in that process, and Americans would do well to acknowledge that painful fact of political struggle...

...But the myth has been most evident and its effects most pernicious in the Twentieth Century...

...According to Harrington, the course of modern America has been directed by three major interest groups: capital managers, industrial wage earners, and "localists"—those engaged in small or locally based enterprise, including farming...

...To this body of accumulated wisdom, political scientist Mona Harrington has contributed a fresh and thought-provoking book, The Dream of Deliverance in American Politics...