DEAD CENTER
Karp, Walter
Dead Center LIBERTY UNDER SIEGE: American Politics 1976-1988 by Walter Karp Henry Holt. 255 pp. $19.95. One quotation in Walter Karp's new book best summarizes its theme. The time is November...
...The time is November 1986, shortly after the mass media have disclosed the full extent of the Reagan Administration's war on Nicaragua...
...Wasn't this the man, after all, who drew his Cabinet from the Trilateral Commission, an organization knocked by Karp...
...Karp recounts in painful and painstaking detail how the Democratic Congress sabotaged his Presidency, retaliating against the first Democrat elected President without the approval of party leaders, squashing the fruit of party reform...
...His engaging style, merciless and humorous, is reminiscent of a turn-of-the-century crusader's...
...Karp, a contributing editor of Harper's, makes his case persuasively...
...But in the end, Liberty Under Siege is sobering and illuminating...
...Along the way, Oligarchy had to check tyranny—Ronald Reagan—but without reviving democracy...
...The reader finds only hints of motivation—the desire to please big business for the sake of campaign contributions, plain old ego, the strengthening of the party hierarchy...
...But in November 1986, the electorate does nothing more than return control of the Senate to Democratic "centrists," and with the lowest voter turnout since 1942...
...The siege, it turns out, continues...
...Karp's typewriter sometimes slips...
...Reagan, by contrast, comes across as a genuine partisan of capital and the police...
...Carter is an evident disaster...
...But although he shows how the loyal opposition is so craven, he never really explains why...
...A decade earlier, such news would have ignited a popular rebellion, or at least an outcry...
...In 1976, Karp posits, the American people were making their political presence felt in Washington, among other ways by electing an "outsider" idealist to the White House...
...ergo, says Oligarchy, rigorously logical, party democracy is disastrous as well...
...Indeed, as I write this review, my local newspaper features two pertinent headlines: Bush Sends Signals of Cooperation and Dukakis, Bentsen Urge Kirk to Stay in Job...
...Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan provides the sound bite: "We have exorcised the [Vietnam] war, the riots, the rhetoric, and thank God that time is over...
...Keenen Peck (Keenen Peck is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...Carter dominates the first half of Liberty Under Siege...
...Walter Karp would rewrite these headlines bluntly: Bush and Democrats to Maintain Reaction and Democratic Party Chairman Paul Kirk Selected to Silence Jesse Jackson...
...Oddly, the Democrats welcomed even huge deficits...
...Karp's critique of the bogus Iran-contra hearings is devastating and should shame the participants...
...Over, indeed, thanks mostly to the efforts of Moynihan and his fellow Cold War liberals, who prefer an unaccountable government of either party to one that may be questioned by the people...
...The cast of characters provides many openings for witty truth-telling: Moynihan ("mackerel-bright"), Ward Heeler Lane Kirkland, Mighty Scoop Jackson, the Dixie-Daley Congress of Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski, the Uriah Heepish Robert Byrd, Zbigniew Brzezinski ("Reactions' secret agent"), a "superbly pliant" Washington press corps, Tip O'Neill (who can "strangle without leaving fingerprints"), "willfully ignorant" Ronald Reagan, such "quacks and blatherers" as the Committee on the Present Danger and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, and Jimmy Carter, "an earnest, intelligent man carried by excessive ambition into a political nightmare...
...The Democrats seek power, apparently, for its own sake...
...In the second half of his book, Karp describes how the Democratic leadership colluded with Reagan to enact his agenda and then rescued him when the Teflon began wearing thin...
...Thus, the party of the people bailed out the President during three crucial crises: Debategate, Lebanon, and Irangate...
...Instead of exposing the President's economic buffoonery, the Democrats "pursued him over the same cliff," in the words of The New York Times...
...By 1988, however, Oligarchy and Power (Karp's words) were firmly in control...
...The first, which seems so long ago, involved the Reagan campaign's filching of Carter's debate briefing book...
...And Karp ignores the campaign and defeat of "mere Mondale...
...Karp does a wonderful job of unmasking bipartisanship...
...I have quibbles as well: Karp overstates Carter's outsiderness...
...When Reagan ran into trouble, the Democrats were quick to "avert the menace of a popular republican revival"—fearing the small "r...
...The analysis in Liberty Under Siege would support these conclusions, bleak as they are...
...yet its roots remain obscure...
...Instead of stopping him from subverting the Bill of Rights, the Democrats allowed him to put government on the people's backs...
...Its growth and institutionalization become manifest...
...At the start of Liberty Under Siege, the antidemocratic impulse just exists...
...This is the book's greatest weakness...
...Baited by the Right in his own party and by the guerrillas of the New Right, Carter paved the way for Reagan and Thermidor...
...Duquesne," for example, instead of "Dubuque...
...They give the popular party a perpetual excuse for doing nothing at all," Karp writes, "being nothing at all, promising nothing at all save the living deadness of centrism...
...As Karp demonstrates, Carter's attempts to appease his critics—especially by launching a massive military buildup—only weakened him further...
...It places historical events in the context of an ongoing process...
...Liberty Under Siege chronicles the strangulation of the democratic spirit at the hands of the largely Democratic establishment...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
