ON POLITICAL BOOKS

...The Hubert Humphreys, despite their shameless pandering to voting blocs like the elderly, also tried to appeal to an overarching concept of the public interest— to forge, not a coalition, but a party whose members felt they were above all citizens building a better society, even if that temporarily hurt them as individual senior citizens or homeowners, bankers, or whatever...

...See "The Cult of Consulting," Gregg Easterbrook, The Washington Monthly, May 1980...

...The voters, no fools, are most inspired by politicians who (like Reagan) treat them not as "workers" or "community members" or "consumers" or "permanent renters" but simply as considerate, productive Americans...

...To do this he must expose himself to a broader range of judgment than that offered by the New York reviewers or the browsers at Brentano's...

...to keep up in the race to develop "competitive new technologies," or lamenting that "while the U.S...

...The organizer who (according to Irving Howe's forthcoming autobiography) once bragged to children that "I live in Newark among the rats," is now building himself a new house in one of the more prosperous sections of Santa Monica, among the palms...

...Arguing in favor of gas rationing as an alternative to high prices during the "energy crisis," Hayden opts for a "white rationing" system (where coupons would be freely bought and sold, and their prices consequently inflated) because he cannot conceive of a direct rationing system that functions without additional "costly"government bureaucracy...

...They seemed to counsel the citizen being stabbed to remain patient until the Humphrey-Hawkins bill passed...

...The left," he says, "cannot attack [the] sources of family breakdown if it is ambiguous about the value of the family to begin with, or if it is indifferent to divorce or the lack of authority and direction in children's lives...

...When he discusses crime, for example, one does not find Hayden trying to sell his readers any fancy left-wing nonsense about lawbreaking as a form of protest, or a "product of-the system" (or, for that matter, an excusable act of war...

...But these moments of incisive common sense are lost amid Hayden's groaning attempt to establish his position as a theoretician of the solar lifestyle...

...Here again, the temptation to cultivate an interest group seems to have obscured a more general truth...

...Born leader or not it was difficult to imagine his running for conventional elective office after saying some of those things...

...A Hubert Humphrey, who remembered how, in World War II, boards of unpaid volunteers successfully rationed gas, might draw a different conclusion, and make a better case for rationing...

...Senate in California in 1976, and a few months ago he kicked off his campaign for a seat in California state assembly with a $200-aplate dinner at the ritzy Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles...

...In Hayden's rhetorical world workers never use their economic leverage to the detriment of the economy (although when layoff fears recede they sometimes "take a little more time to socialize with other workers...

...So Hayden sticks with controls—not even bothering to mention their long-run drawbacks...

...Even more than Ronald Reagan (who occasionally praises NASA or the Pentagon), his view of government is unremittingly sour...

...And if there's anything Hayden seems to want these days, it is to get elected...

...Hayden received the loudest ovation of the day...

...He heads his own powerful organization, the Campaign for Economic Democracy (financed in part by the household income he shares as Mr...

...Hayden's critics, both left and right, deride his celebrity and evident ambition...

...Where Hayden might articulate a clear vision of what (now that he's not a socialist) he wants American society to look like, he seems to have opted for an "interest group" model...

...Yet reading Hayden's recently revised book, The American Future (Washington Square Press, $3.95), it is this ambition you begin to treasure...

...Wearing a green army jacket and a look of disgust, he cut through all this soft-headed liberalism, proclaiming dramatically that it didn't matter whether Seale was innocent or guilty...

...Driving home, I wondered about his argument (murder, I hoped, would still be a crime after the Revolution...

...Then Hayden stepped onto the stage...

...Hayden's idea that successful political movements are composed of coalitions of aggrieved "interests" is nothing new, of course...

...Hayden's ideal of "economic democracy" turns out to be Ralph Nader's suggestion that representatives of workers, consumers, and local communities ("stakeholders," as Hayden calls them) be given permanent seats on the boards of corporations...

...He rails against "cheap substitutes" for metals, wood, and glass, as well as against inexcusably decadent consumer items like television sets and "electric typewriters...

...But such a solution has less appeal to voting blocs like the renters or the well-to-do Santa Monica homeowners who don't want big apartment houses built in their neighborhoods...

...Talk about self-perpetuating bureaucracy...

...Like any no-nonsense conservative, Hayden attacks permanent budget deficits ("an 18-year pattern of federal spending") as well as the system of indexed government benefits that "perpetuates inflation...

...Seale faced charges in connection with the killing of an alleged government informant...

...But I also respected Hayden more, in a way...

...Hayden's very credibility—and his potential competence as a leader—seems compromised by his fealty to the elements of his own "coalition...

...You can sense, even in the revised Hayden of 1980, a politician trying to express them anew—as when he appeals to common "family values," calls on his readers to remember the "traditional self-sacrifice of production," or advocates building new industries (instead of simply protecting old ones, and their voting blocs), or undercuts his own end-of-empire aesthetic by finishing a chapter with a corny call to "believe that our greatness lies always before us, that our potential is still infinite...

...said, and the main point was that Seale was on the right side...

...Wherever possible, he blames America's ills on the usual suspects...

...Today, of course, he is very much the Democratic politician...

...Left-liberal politicians, Hayden argues, "acted like social psychologists as people were victimized...

...More generally, Hayden chastises the left for "having . . . lost God, the flag, national defense, personal safety, and the traditional family to the conservatives...

...In this muddled scheme, the average citizen would find his interest fragmented into its "consumer," "community," and "worker" parts, with the professional advocates of these incomplete perspectives set to warring against each other...

...Eager Yale law students :.ad helped turn the gathering into a civil liberties symposium, discussing the technicalities of the grand jury system, the unreliability of the government's key witness, and the possible bias in jury selection that might convict an innocent Seale...

...So politics precludes Hayden from being a cliched sixties holdover...

...But, ironically, the Johnson/ Humphrey brand of coalition-building, for all its disastrous consequences, had redeeming elements that Hayden's version lacks...

...Inflation is caused by the Vietnam war and "corporate power"— never the power of labor unions...

...Does Hayden know that the rosy estimates for solar energy on which he relies were cranked out by solar boosters in a Democratic White House desperate to get some optimistic figures in time for Jimmy Carter's Sun Day announcement in 1978—and that they were based on a computer program whose chief virtue was the ability to generate just such headline-grabbing numbers...

...And socialism, he argues, has failed to solve "the problem of the state as self-perpetuating bureaucracy...

...The book offers little reassurance that Hayden, if elected, would not be even more vulnerable than most liberal politicians to being duped by the wishful thinking of his own allies and staff...

...Hayden gives no indication that, short of such a Toffleresque technical miracle, there is any hope that our government will ever do anything particularly well...

...It is the traditional political model of the New Deal Democrats, the"Old Politics" of men like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey that Hayden and his followers went to Chicago to protest in 1968...

...One was the belief, at the heart of the best New Deal politics, that the government could work for the common good in a manner that was inspiring as well as simply efficient...

...has provided costly military protection to West Germany and Japan since World War II, their scientists have been free to concentrate a far greater effort on developing the technology for consumer goods that are superior to American products...

...No wonder Hayden must abandon the notion of economic growth...

...His prose is heavily weighted with the constant, oppressive litany of these interest groups—"working people, consumers, minorities, and small business," not to mention senior citizens, gays, lesbians, and the handicapped...

...But when it comes to necessary collective self-help through government, Hayden is left (after grumbling about "bureaucratic giantism") yearning for a futuristic quick-fix, "the introduction of new communications and computer technology" that will promote "efficiency...

...When Hayden ventures so far as to praise the American Revolution, he must quickly add the obvious qualification "limited as it was by slavery and male superiority...

...At the time, Hayden's radical stance also seemed to have a bridgeburning aspect...

...N]ationalization seems an unattractive alternative both in theory and the everyday experience of Americans...

...Controls create a dual market that protects existing occupants (usually members of the middle-and upper-middle classes) at the expense of those unfortunates looking for a new place to live...

...At times Hayden to recognize that this no-growth line has little appeal beyond the already converted—and particularly little appeal to the poor and jobless...

...A key group under Hayden's umbrella, of course, is the anti-nuclear power/ pro-solar lobby...

...This is no small contradiction for a left-wing politician who sees a need for...

...Indeed, Hayden spends much of his book arguing for a "steady state economy," where Americans abandon the pursuit of GNP and "an urban, materialistic, consumer culture" in order to cultivate an "inward-looking consciousness" better suited to "the end of the frontier" and the "collapsing" American empire...

...criticizing "permissive lifestyles...

...Imagine the various "stakeholder" constituencies, each championed by "full-time board members, with staff," posturing, negotiating (and forming "coalitions") around every significant corporate decision...

...Hayden clearly envisions himself as the leader of a "new majority governing coalition" composed of the various "constituencies" that might endorse his radical program...

...Another typical "constituency" Hayden identifies as ripe for picking is "permanent renters...

...Hayden has been a champion of the well-publicized movement that succeeded in imposing rent controls in Santa Monica...

...It is this need to make sense to the average voter that seems to have forced Hayden, in 1982, to question some of the unspoken assumptions of the left with the same sort of acid honesty he displayed at New Haven in 1970...

...If Hayden is struggling to break the mold of cliched leftism, many of his followers aren't—and Hayden at times seems to consciously play to the prejudices of this audience ("protecting his base," another politician might call it...

...American Future repeatedly accepts on faith questionable assertions from sympathetic sources (although, in the peculiar tradition of Marxist scholarship, the stuffiest establishment organs are occasionally also given total credence, as if every Business Week editorial on a "crisis for the corporation" was a damaging admission leaked directly from the Executive Committee of the Ruling Class...

...among other things: regulation of oil and gas prices, credit, export, and investment controls, "national health insurance with cost controls," affirmative action plans ("elaborated sill more broadly") "strict" regulatory controls on toxic effluents, "stringent" controls on capital flow, mandatory conservation, and anti-redlining laws...

...He calls for "returning major responsibility for certain programs and services from the government to society...

...He defends private property ("The ability to own and create seems to be necessary to both freedom and dignity...

...But if politics is the cause of much of what is good about this book, politics—at least Hayden's particular conception of it—is also the source of most of what is bad...

...Hayden's sixties radicalism had appeal (to me, at least) because it, too, tried to stir such universal, communal sentiments...

...Kingman Brewster, president of Yale, had made national headlines and won over many protestors by expressing doubts that Seale could receive a fair trial...

...Unlike so many best-selling left-wing gurus, Hayden has eagerly taken the most democratic of risks: he wants to win elections...

...For the left "to be credible on this issue," he concedes, it "will have to accept the need for greater deterrence, more police on the streets, and stiffer criminal penalties...

...Amazingly, Hayden seems bereft of this faith...

...So we occasionally find him worrying sensibly about the ability of the U.S...

...Predicting that "Americans will be subject to skyrocketing energy inflation," (much of American Future, alas, was drafted at the height of the Iran oil crisis), Hayden asserts that "the possibility of a materialistic middle-class life-style—by 1975 standards —for all Americans will become more and more remote because of objective limits...

...In a democracy, where there's ambition, there's hope...

...The long-term solution to a housing crisis is increased housing supply...

...Jane Fonda...

...Have you ever heard Jerry Rubin, in any of his serial guise...

...But it's hard to believe Hayden doesn't know that in the long run controls inevitably cause trouble, as both owners and their customers scramble to evade them by making needless alterations, secretly bidding up prices, converting to condominiums, or allowing the housing stock to run down...

...But there is reason to expect that he will choose to build on them in the future...

...In The American Future these appeals—and the concrete policies that might be formed around them— are trapped in the framework of Hayden's complex strategy for a "new coalition" and his quasi-feudal version of "economic democracy...

...Only he had had the guts—the radical honesty, if you will—to point out the obvious: that Seale was quite possibly guilty as charged...

...And Hayden often gives the impression of having bought an extreme version of the dreary, no-growth argument some solar advocates favor...

...Rent controls may be useful in times of acute housing shortages, a point on which Hayden's sense of the shortcomings of the free market is refreshing...

...Earlier, of course, Seale had been Hayden's codefendant on conspiracy charges following the violent protest attending the presidential nomination of Hubert Humphrey in Chicago in 1968...

...The occasion was the big demonstration in New Haven to protest the trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale...

...it is also, I think, essential to getting elected...

...A politics based on appeals to patriotism and selflessness is essential not only to governing a society that could be ripped apart by warring economic interests...

...Secure non-politicians like Norman Lear may make a splash by vilifying Jerry Falwell—but as a politician, Hayden knows he must appeal to the moral values those on the religious right hold...

...The New Haven demonstration wasn't entirely peaceful, either, but by its second day it had lost much of its radical tinge...

...He almost won the Democratic nomination for the U.S...

...Attacking "the bloated bureaucracy of the welfare state," he talks (rightly) of the need for "voluntarism" and "self-help...

...There was a war on, he Robert M. Kaus is politics editor of Harper's and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...