POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Interferon Crusade. Sandra Panem. Brookings, $25.95. Touted as a possible wonder weapon against cancer as recently as three years ago, interferon has lost its luster...
...It didn't take the students long to learn the lesson...
...meanwhile, the number of families fell by half...
...Richard Medley...
...Panem's account is an object lesson in how politics can take precedence over scientific merit in setting the course of research...
...Basic Books, $23.95...
...Farm groups invariably argue that the current patchwork of agricultural subsidies is necessary to preserve the family farm...
...Intellectuals take comfort in their smug belief that politicians are dumb...
...As Carter left town, Democratic and...
...Timothy Appenzeller The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America...
...The fascination of a possible cancer cure," Panem writes, "drove researchers, investors and the business community to target interferon...
...Diggins shows that such attitudes have prevailed since our nation's beginning...
...Ergo, Democrats are failures...
...Regrettably, this disparaging view of civic life seems to typify how Americans have thought about politics...
...Relying .on evidence from their own work and from earlier studies, Maddox and Lilie write, "The question to ask regarding a person's politics is not how old the person is, but when the person was young...
...Traditional American virtues—independence, hard work, piety—have always been apolitical...
...Panem slips by such questions with irritating judiciousness...
...And most suspect that politicians are corrupt egomaniacs...
...Thoreau called politics "the gizzard of society...
...Navarro, an economic researcher at Harvard, has a tendency to indulge in political philosophizing and to construct elaborate models that do little more than quantify the intuitive and glorify the obvious...
...Ask that question about our current crop of college age students and you find millions of people who gained political consciousness just in time to watch Democrats help Ronald Reagan beat up on Jimmy Carter...
...Richard Meyer 'Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum...
...The latest polls suggest that this perception is sticking...
...Businessmen pride themselves in thinking that politicians haven't really "made it...
...The Founders thought talk of community, of a polls to which we should subjugate parochial interests, was foolish and subversive, just as too many Americans do today...
...Navarro shows how these policies often weaken this institution by artificially inflating land prices, stimulating over-production and making it all but impossible for young people to enter farming...
...Her treatment of such issues is brief but balanced...
...If Maddox and Lilie are right, the Democrats may have plenty of time to hone excuses like that as they hunker down to watch the Republican generation grow graciously older...
...But the question of interferon's efficacy is not Panem's subject...
...Politically, the Founders were too pragmatic to rely on things as vague as benevolence and civic virtue when it came time to design a government...
...Diggins' book indicates that those now calling for more politics—not less—or for a renewal...
...public service never made the short list...
...But instead of wondering if the party's lack of courage and loyalty may be a problem, Democrats are comforting themselves with the notion that young people are just plain selfish...
...But artificially cheap apartments give landlords more discretion in choosing tenants...
...over time, they tend to select renters from their own social class...
...Instead, she uses the tale of its promotion and development as a vehicle for discussion of the policy issues that have arisen with the emergence of biotechnology and its rich commercial possibilities...
...Republican leaders joined hands to agree that the only Democratic president in the previous 12 years had done a terrible job...
...Phillip Keisling The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism...
...It also encouraged many of the small biotechnology companies spawned by the development of recombinant DNA technology to choose interferon as their first product...
...William S. Maddox, Stuart A. Lilie...
...Much of this book can be quickly skimmed...
...More surprising, Diggins finds that the most famous critics of American politics and culture—the Transcendentalists, Tocqueville, the Populists and Henry Adams, for example—rarely borrowed from either communitarian or classical traditions...
...The "interferon consciousness-raising" that Krim initiated led directly to a surge in spending for interferon research by the National Institutes of Health and private foundations...
...Peter Navarro...
...From the Founding Fathers on, American political attitudes have been dominated by a brew of Lockean liberalism and Puritanism that doubted whether human nature allowed much room for unselfish political involvement at any level...
...Epitomized in Madison's pessimistic view of social man and his fears of factionalism and class war, American political attitudes from the beginning were suspicious of direct democracy and politicians...
...Of course, they had also noticed that Carter was a Democrat...
...Johrr Patrick Diggins...
...Touted as a possible wonder weapon against cancer as recently as three years ago, interferon has lost its luster amidst inconclusive clinical results and reports of harmful side-effects...
...of a sense of civic community through educational reform or a draft have a shallow well of American tradition to drink from...
...In Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, the proportion of students and professionals living in rent-controlled units doubled between 1970 and 1980...
...Instead she concentrates on more familiar issues such as the restrictions on information exchange that can accompany industrial sponsorship of research, the possible conflicts of interest among professors, universities, government, and industry over patent rights, and the siphoning of talent from academe into industry...
...Rent controls are often urged on behalf of low-income families, the old, and the preservation of neighborhoods...
...What distinguishes this book are several perceptive and highly useful "case studies" that detail how policies promoted by both liberal and conservative interest groups often fail miserably in producing their ostensible goals...
...The young like Reagan, and they like Republicans...
...But the emotions that surrounded the development of interferon made it a unique case, and its peculiar issues demand more trenchant analysis than Panem gives them...
...Since then, vast sums have been spent and false hopes raised in patients and families...
...Panem describes how, in the mid-1970s, Mathilde Krim, a geneticist at the Memorial SloanKettering Institute, managed by sheer public relations skill to focus the interest of government, philanthropists, and investors on interferon, a group of naturally occurring proteins whose promise as a cancer cure was supported only by ambiguous results from a single clinical trial...
...Who is to blame for it...
...And liberalism taught that government shouldn't meddle with things like "private" morality...
...Socially, the Puritans saw politics as presumptuous before the Creator, and our most indigenous moralists like Ben Franklin taught that real virtue was found in a penny saved, not in public service...
...Maddox and Lilie argue that the most important influence on ideology is.not class, income or education, but age...
...John Wiley, $18.95...
...Cabo Press, $18.00...
...Were worthier projects neglected because of the hype...
Vol. 16 • January 1985 • No. 12
