POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Hidden Spending: The Politics of Federal Credit Programs. Dennis S. Ippolito. Chapel Hill, $19.95. Does the federal budget deficit give you nightmares? Then maybe you'd...
...Others, like Art Buchwald or Mark Russell, offer only lukewarm commentaries on politicians' foibles, and they're safe enough to allow these satirists to be treated as court jesters...
...Press, $27.50...
...Much of this is familiar—the militarism, repression, adventurism, disinformation, and encouragement of terrorism...
...Simon and Schuster, $15.95...
...Poor, uneducated voters tend not to vote on referenda and initiatives at all and are confused when they do...
...In fact, he seems to have no sense whatever of this distinction...
...Even the poorest peasants must pay bank officials to get credit for seeds and fertilizer, and top agency heads and presidents would be ridiculed if they did not salt away money for cars and multimillion-dollar villas...
...A good number of Western diplomats are undoubtedly misled by their optimism and openness and the store they put in good personal relations with their opposite numbers...
...Nor can such overstated and polemical arguments possibly help us come to terms with the real differences between our diplomatic code of conduct and the very different one that tends to prevail in the Kremlin...
...While he is well aware of the ruthlessness of the Soviets (who, he reports, have been airdropping small, doll-shaped booby-traps around Afghanistan, designed to blow up children), Reeves, an American reporter, is particularly critical of his own country's involvement in the region...
...He is convincing too on the typical intransigence and ruthlessness of Soviet negotiators, who rarely share their Western counterparts' willingness to make concessions—both minor and major ones—to show their good will or give momentum to a difficult negotiation...
...popular opinion limits our use of force and undermines our espionage...
...With credit, there need be no losers...
...military aid dollars...
...police in the city of Peshawar letting the air out of the tires of parked cars to combat auto theft...
...What Revel fears most is that the West is "predisposed to succumb"-a complicity that he believes to be both witting and unwitting...
...The New Right takes pride in being part of a grass roots rebellion, but Peele argues that its leadership in the last few years has been an academic and political elite (Irving Kristol, George Gilder, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie...
...Here as elsewhere, his defense of democratic values seems perfunctory in the extreme...
...In his view, after all, the stakes are so high: what's at issue is nothing less than survival...
...His sweeping claims about Moscow's grand imperial designs, his unproved assertions about the way the Kremlin is using its "military superiority" to obtain in Western Europe "without going to war precisely the same results that a war would bring," the strangely awed and overwritten descriptions of a "monopolization of power more effective than any mankind has ever known before"--in the end, it all adds up to a shrill and fairly predictable caricature that can hardly help to alert Americans to the real difficulties of dealing with the Soviet Union...
...Credit costs, notes Ippolito, are "sufficiently diffuse, uncertain and indirect (as well as often being longterm) to shelter political benefits against political costs...
...Why, for instance, when literacy is one of the few genuine benefits Marxist regimes can offer Third World countries, has the U.S...
...More important, contrary to Revel's own frightening claims about the kinds of tactics that are required to fight the Soviets, it would not involve any serious betrayal of our democratic principles...
...David Bell Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans...
...Revel may himself believe that his own clever slogans can erase the differences between Henry Kissinger and Petra Kelly, but he is unlikely to convince any but the most committed and hawkish antiSoviets...
...Credit is diverted from less risky ventures to more risky ones, with the taxpayers bearing the risk instead of private lenders...
...the Atlantic alliance is unable to maintain even the semblance of unity...
...The pervasiveness of corruption suggests that land reform or welfare would fail, as benefits would go only to those rich enough to pay for them...
...Reeves resists the easy answer of blaming the repressiveness of Islamic fundamentalism for Pakistan's authoritarian politics: it was elites in the country's swollen civil bureaucracy, for instance, who, resentful of Bhutto's challenge to their corrupt power, encouraged the army to overthrow the government...
...Jokes and cartoons on cripples, sanitary napkins, and gay sexual injuries may in Krassner's view have advanced First Amendment rights, but they hardly offered satire with a radical point of view...
...The costs are not simple to measure...
...Last November, voters considered more than 300 measures on everything from banning pornography on cable television (Utah's Initiative A) to removing special fishing rights for Indians (Washington's Initiative 456), as well as radical tax-cutting proposals in nine states...
...The book's failure, in its own way, shows just how much both the culture and former idealists have changed since the 1960s...
...But calculating what he could get elsewhere involves some guesswork...
...On questions of human rights and domestic repression, he notes, "I am all in favor of world opinion judging the democratic countries' compromises more sternly than it does the socialist countries...
...Riding, a former Mexico City bureau chief for The New York Times, has written a fascinating description of Mexico's economic and population problems, its authoritarian, corrupt "democracy," government-interest group symbiosis, national culture, and admiration and resentment of the United States...
...More importantly, however, and more ominous, the problem, he argues, is rooted in the very nature of democratic society...
...Riding shows how government workers, journalists, judges, and policemen all are expected to supplement their low salaries with bribes...
...But the magazine, along with Lenny Bruce's monologues, also provided fiercely moral satire that contributed to the 1960s culture of protest and undermined the authority of respectable institutions...
...This is not a completely banal suggestion—such tactics are the subject of some argument in both the United States and Europe—but it is hardly a dramatic departure from the kinds of policies pursued to one degree or another during both detente and the cold war...
...The chapter on corruption is particularly useful...
...Stephen Chapman Best of the Realist...
...In the end, then, once you discount the implausible suggestions, the democracies aren't left with much—only a surprisingly bland prescription for what seemed like an alarming disease...
...And many of the loans wouldn't even be made in the private sector...
...The democracies do not, however, always show such virtuous restraint—Revel declines to pass judgment on American support for the Nicaraguan contras or the Chilean regime of General Augusto Pinochet—and in the end his overdrawn caricature of the naive and well-meaning Westerner does little to help us grapple with the very real but unavoidable ways in which our democratic principles may handicap our practice of realpolitik...
...It's only too bad that he hasn't corrected more...
...He scorns those who worry about the spiritual emptiness of capitalism and suggests that "untrammeled information is the nightmare of all governments...
...Among the most persuasive is his sense of the patience and perseverence with which Moscow has often pursued its expansionist goals, trying again and again in Finland, for example, over a period of more than 25 years, before Finlandization was finally achieved in the aftermath of World War II...
...Finally, despite what sponsors of a national referendum process (who range from Jack Kemp to James Abourezk) have claimed, direct legislation does not attract voters otherwise disenchanted with the political system...
...Even for Realist fans who relished Krassner's uninhibited satire, this gratuitous shocker proved too much and the thousands of cancelled subscriptions eventually led to the magazine's collapse...
...Art Levine Why Democracies Perish...
...The answers were similar for each question: Yes-0 percent...
...Islamic holy men "excommunicating" any members of their congregations who persist in believing Americans walked on the moon...
...It makes little attempt to examine its subject within the contexts of American history and American political thought...
...All that money may not help curb Soviet aggression— Pakistan's army has started three wars and lost them all, badly...
...If a state is going to rely on its citizens to decide the law, it must make an effort to adequately inform them about the issues...
...Questions included, "Do you have any complaints about the way American planes bombed your village...
...The Yalta agreement, flawed as it was, was not a "psychotic denial of reality...
...Reeves's writing, though a little unorganized, is full of good reporting and memorable anecdotes that reveal the history and culture behind Pakistan's political troubles: peasants strapping transistor radios to the horns of their water buffalos...
...It also demonstrates how tame most of today's satire really is...
...Oxford University Press, $24.95...
...Since 1898, more than 17,000 statewide referenda and citizen initiatives have come before American voters, and about one-third of them have made it into law...
...But with the growth of apathy and cynical indifference, such satire has lost its appeal...
...True, here and there, he stops to nod with seeming deference toward the values that sustain democracy...
...The problem here too is that he undermines his case with ludicrous exaggeration...
...There is in fact something shrewd and disconcerting about many of Revel's criticisms...
...Johns Hopkins Univ...
...It deserves attention because Washington's credit obligations have grown rapidly in the last decade and because their costs are little understood...
...He never stops to ask what such survival would mean if it can only be secured by abandoning our democratic values and going tooth for tooth with a ruthless and unprincipaled rival...
...This isn't really surprising: it would have been hard indeed to come up with a suitable ending for his overdrawn, apocalyptic tale...
...He might have written a very troubling book about the difficulties of dealing with our most important rival...
...He seems, for example, quite uninterested in the crucial, corrective role played by what he calls "self-criticism" and "selfcondemnation...
...In truth, the prescription may be the most honest part of the book, Revel's way of inadvertently correcting his own exaggerated claims about the imminent demise of democracy...
...It does, however, seem helpful in propping up the regime of Pakistani General Zia ul-Haq, the Islamic fundamentalist dictator who, in a 1977 coup, murdered Zulfigar Ali Bhutto, the only freely elected leader Pakistan ever had...
...Salt Lake City campaign theme that ran, "Confused...
...Here, too, some of Revel's arguments are more familiar than others...
...Through extremely effective organization and an emphasis on "moral issues" like school prayer and abortion, this elite managed to enlist supporters for its real agenda—conservative economic policies...
...An experienced polemical columnist and celebrated point man for conservative anti-communists, Revel should know the danger of overstating his case...
...He seems quite unworried about the potential dangers involved in this kind of bluster: that, after all, would be to give in to just the sort of weak-willed "passivity" that he is warning against...
...Play It Safe...
...17.95...
...Magleby's valuable new book is the first comprehensive study of direct legislation as practiced today, and it comes to some disturbing conclusions...
...Our divisive politics work against consistency in foreign policy...
...This does not mean, as Magleby seems to hint at times, that we should do away with direct legislation...
...The book is a brisk, thorough dissection of the federal government's role as a lender—what the programs are, how they work, how their costs are concealed, and why they've come about...
...Still, buried in the book are such luscious tidbits as the typographical error that inadvertently made a recent Dade County, Florida referendum call for a 99.95 percent reduction in property taxes, instead of the 50 percent the sponsors wanted, and the...
...Many of his criticisms are indisputable...
...Paul Glastris Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States...
...In part at least it is a matter of choice and political will: "The way in which a civilization faces difficulty is at least half-determined by its mental and moral state and only half by its objective situation...
...Ippolito, a government professor at Southern Methodist University, says that things are even worse than they seem...
...Paul Krassner, ed...
...Sixty-two percent of voters surveyed can think of no issues they would like to vote on, and direct legislation campaigns are often skewed because of the lack of spending limits (overwhelming spending by opponents, for instance, blocks measures 87 percent of the time...
...The Realist can still shock and offend, even as it fails to amuse...
...The result: not one piece of the New Right's social legislation has been passed under Reagan, while several of its economic goals—especially cuts in taxes and in social programs—have...
...our lack of historical memory numbs our sense of outrage, leaving us unprepared for each next round of Soviet repression and adventurism...
...No-24 percent...
...Democrat, centrists and socialists, Republicans and Democrats"—have in effect pursued the same cowardly appeasement of the Soviet Union...
...He continues that "the people who rule the initiative and referendum process are first and foremost the people who set the agenda," and shows that these are not individual citizens, as state constitutions intended, but single-issue lobbies...
...Even the magazine's "clean" items carried a sting...
...As Revel's title indicates, his principal argument deals with the democracies' response to totalitarianism...
...Like many others in the book it is a very good question...
...In a period of growing budget pressures, loan programs offer a cheap way to channel help to a favored constituency, whether it's middle-income college students or international banks...
...Largely uncounted in the growing public debt are hundreds of federal credit programs, which have accumulated nearly $600 billion in outstanding loans and loan guarantees.In recent years, he figures, credit programs have added some $100 billion to the federal debt...
...Kitry Krause Passage to Peshawar...
...The Realist quoted "Ngo Diem Gallup" as saying the high noopinion vote was due to "physical inability to answer because of death...
...More often, however, Revel's picture of the Soviets is simply not credible—overstated, generalized and off-puttingly tendentious...
...At other times, his perceptions seem more telling...
...specifically cut literacy programs from its $3.2 billion in aid to Pakistan...
...For a few years in the 1970s, the political passion of The Realist did find its way into some of the work of Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor and the pioneering writers for National Lampoon and "Saturday Night Live," but they've all lost their fire...
...Many Are...
...Tamar Jacoby Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America...
...Revel doesn't in fact offer much of a solution...
...Some of Revel's suggestions are more provocative: during the 1950s, for example, he would have liked the West to use the threat of nuclear war to prevent the construction of the Berlin wall...
...On occasion, Revel offers a new or littleknown anecdote—about Soviet infiltration of the Western European peace movement, for example—to support what are by now otherwise routine charges among anticommunist conservatives...
...There's real anger in that joke, a perspective missing in today's comedians, like Eddie Murphy, who have borrowed the obscenities of Bruce and Krassner without the moral passion...
...For instance, in reacting to a 1965 Evans-Novak column that said a government task force found few South Vietnamese complaints about village bombings, The Realist reported the results of a mock government poll...
...The West does not generally like confrontations and we tend to want to get along—and as a result sometimes we may not bargain hard enough...
...The controversial, tasteless parody of "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book" (William Manchester's Death of a President) is reprinted here, complete with its extremely unfunny necrophilia scene...
...It was fueled, at heart, by a hopeful belief that moral outrage could make a difference...
...Magleby concludes that direct legislation as it currently exists is unrepresentative, heightening rather than diminishing the power of special interests...
...Alan Riding...
...Loan guarantees are even trickier, since they require no outlays unless the borrower defaults...
...Once friendly with the Soviet Union, Pakistan is now a "frontline" state in America's defensive strategy...
...and No Opinion-76 percent...
...Estimating costs is made harder still by the failure of lending agencies to provide complete information about defaults and interest costs...
...It's too bad, because Revel has been watching the Kremlin for some time, and he has interesting ideas about what makes the Soviet state so particularly ruthless and potentially threatening to the rest of the world...
...The cold war is hardly, as Revel argues, indistinguishable from detente, and there is little to be learned by suggesting that virtually all Western leaders--Pconservative and Christian...
...Gillian Peele...
...Magleby claims that fully 35 percent of voters with an eighth-grade education or less cast votes inconsistent with their expressed views on the subject...
...From 1958 until it faded away in 1974, Paul Krassner's underground magazine, The Realist, dished out an irreverent and often obscene mix of satire, interviews, and offbeat news items attacking mainstream institutions and morality...
...Mainly, it seems, he would have us drive a harder bargain— although how exactly is not quite clear...
...The book is sprinkled with vague exhortations to "exploit" the weaknesses of the Soviet system, generally through economic means...
...Tina Rosenberg...
...It is, in any case, rather difficult to see how he would press such ultimatums today...
...Yet, he continues, somewhat disingenuously, "I merely note that this double standard gives the Soviet empire an automatic advantage...
...JeanFrancois Revel...
...But that doesn't mean they're free...
...But it does mean that the process is in real need of reform...
...Unfortunately, Direct Legislation is dry social science at its driest, full of formulae, regressions, "readability" and "alienation" scales, and phrases like "the dependent variable is dichotomous...
...These elusive costs are exactly what makes credit a politically attractive tool for presidents and members of Congress...
...Since the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, thousands of rifle-toting refugees have poured into Pakistan, and with them, billions of U.S...
...The problem is that Revel himself seems unsure which he believes is more important, democracy or power politics...
...While voting on statewide propositions is touted as the undiluted expression of the people's will, Magleby writes, it tends to be uninformed, and unrepresentative of the voting public...
...even in the democracies!' Certainly, by the end, it is hard not to feel that he puts the superpower rivalry first—far above the niceties of democratic principle...
...When the federal government lends, it generally offers a lower interest rate than the borrower could get elsewhere...
...In particular, you would expect he would know the difference between exaggeration and threat-mongering and a sober, persuasively realistic exposition of the nature of the Soviet Union...
...A modern, truly funny Realist would certainly be welcome now, and this dated anthology is no substitute...
...Originally conceived by Progressive-era reformers as a way to bypass corrupt state legislatures, these forms of "direct legislation" have recently achieved new prominence as a vehicle for conservative populists, like Howard Jarvis and Michigan's Richard Headlee, angry at "the liberal establishment...
...Running Press, $8.95...
...But in fact much of the book is given over to a simple indictment of the Soviet Union—a long, detailed and often repetitive catalogue of the qualities that he believes make it so dangerous...
...Judging from this account of the months Reeves spent in Pakistan, this fractious, impoverished Islamic nation may be the next one Americans learn about on the evening news...
...Then maybe you'd better avoid Hidden Spending...
...It is not a very promising backdrop for Revel's thesis about the plight of Western democracy— his notion that it is a kind of "willing victim," losing its struggle with totalitarianism and, what's more, losing deliberately...
...The constituencies get their help, but without making an embarrassing addition to the deficit...
...Most of The Realist's targets have faded away or lost their power, and so has that sort of satiric intensity...
...Richard Reeves...
...Now we're left with Joan Rivers's "slut" jokes and the ascendancy of a smug, heartless conservative ethic that remains essentially unchallenged by today's toothless satirists...
...When In Doubt, Vote No...
...And the lobbies work hand in hand with "an initiative industry" of lawyers and signature-gatherers who charge hefty fees for drafting proposed legislation and getting it on the ballot...
...Religious piety, sexual repression, racial discrimination, and the Vietnam war were all pilloried in a manner that adolescents of all ages found hilarious and titillating, but now very little of it holds up as amusing...
...Knopf, $18.95...
...David B. Magleby...
...The democracies' political scruples may at times put us at a disadvantage in the face of an uncompromising adversary, but not even Revel himself seems to quite believe his melodramatic claim that we are somehow on the verge of "perishing...
...The author concedes that the Reagan administration has held the growth of credit in check and directed attention to the problem, but notes that "all of the major credit programs have survived . . . reasonably intact" What is needed is to honestly calculate the costs of loan programs and to include them in the budget—thus forcing them to compete on equal terms with those programs requiring direct expenditures...
Vol. 17 • March 1985 • No. 2
