Political Booknotes

...His despair is clearly related to his concern, vividly articulated, that we are “defining deviancy down...

...Branching your life out into such places, at least for a little while, is the key to becoming what Fussell did: a socially useful skeptic, not a socially useless cynic...

...But he does capture the essence of his political credo in a Harvard lecture quoted in the book’s introduction: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society...

...He’s done this for laughs in such books as Class and BAD, and in far darker terms with his deconstruction of World War II boosterism, Wartime...

...Its most fervent proponents include banker Pete Peterson, former Senator Paul Tsongas of the Concord Coalition, and twotime presidential candidate Ross Perot, but it also underlies the competing positions of the Republican Congress and the Clinton administration.Both sides agree, in effect, that America must tighten its belt and curb its budgetary excesses...

...We are dealing with a profound social change...

...They have remained stagnant only for the lowest quintile...

...What changed was distributions of savings...

...He describes his own trajectory as ‘‘from college to professional killer, and then to benign professor...

...If you listen, it's everywhere-Steve Forbes promising to "drive a stake into the heart of the Internal Revenue Service," Arizona Senator Jon Kyl comparing current budget policy to "bleeding a patient with leeches in order to make the patient healthy...

...It just has high standards...

...The zig always informed the zag, which made for a keener sense of the dilemmas and values of the wider world than we’ve seen in any generation since...

...Block disputes the aptness of this vampire metaphor in two respects...

...It began with his 1964 report on the disintegration of the black family, for which he was generally vilified...

...And his recent prophecy that turning welfare over to the states without adequate resources or federal safeguards will leave thousands of children sleeping on grates has apparently gone unheeded, to our possible future discomfiture...

...ADAM YARMOLINSKY is a Regents Professor of Public Policy in the University of Maryland system...

...In criticizing the elites of academe, politics, journalism, the class structure, and business, Fussell’s goal has been to resuscitate the once-valued great American trait of thinking for yourseIf...

...While most Americans went into debt, the top one percent of earners drastically increased their savings...

...The lesson here, “Mistrust school solutions,” is useful far beyond the battlefieldeven in, or perhaps especially in, school...

...In his war service, Fussell was just a dogface with gold bars, so right away he developed a properly jaundiced view of generals and staff officers...

...Computers themselves are the obvious example...

...It holds that over the last four decades, America has become soft and flabby and that in order to regain our economic health we have to undergo a diet of strict austerity, beginning with the federal budget, whose extravagance is draining vital fluids and leaving us listless and torpid...

...Block contends that once you strip away these metaphors, economic reality is far different from what both politicians and economists describe...

...He thanks God...

...On the old questions, he points out, we could at least look to European models...

...And who does he thank for their salvation...

...The economy has not failed to create income, but to distribute it equitably...

...Unlike them, Fussell was on his way to the invasion of Japan when the atom bomb was dropped...

...According to Block‘s revised calculations, real wages have increased rather than declined for most workers...

...It didn’t take much actual warfare for Fussell to divine the technique’s “signal defect, which quite effectively prevented its being applied...

...He shows how the figures about a decline in savings, which are gleaned from Commerce Department reports, ignore the increase in pension funds...

...Today, one can acquire for $1500 a computer that can perform tasks that two decades ago could not have been performed adequately by a multimilliondollar mainframe...

...The Kzmpire State contains equally arresting analyses of the impact of the new global economy...

...The narrative is the story of "Amazing Grace"of a sinful wretch who through effort and self-denial is finally saved...

...Mencken...

...In one of his most famous essays, Fussell offers his own bloodstained knowledge of ground combat in opposition to the view held by many armchair commentators that the US...

...Even though the concept of posttraumatic stress syndrome hadn’t been formulated yet, Fussell undoubtedly came back to America with a raging case of it...

...For instance, Fussell tells us that in his officer training, much time was spent on the maneuver of having one half of the platoon provide covering fire while the lieutenant in charge led the other half around to the enemy’s flank for a surprise assault...

...They make this compact volume, a pastiche of previously published articles and speeches stitched together with new commentary, a valuable and lively reexamination of issues that are both fundamental and very much alive today...

...Not everybody who survives combat learns what Paul Fussell did (Why didn’t George Bush or Bob Dole...

...But leave he did-ending up in the mud of France as a 20-year-old infantry officer...

...one might be summed up as “Mistrust exotic military contraption~~( in’ Fussell’s experience they don’t work) and another as “Mistrust night operations” (ditto...

...Namely, the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy’s flank is...

...It is still much too early in his career for a summation...

...And although that was, to put it mildly, wrenching for those lucky enough to survive, there was a moral payoff: The professional killer forever after counseled the college professor...

...was precipitous and even hateful in the way it ended the Second World War...

...In these many roles he has been sometimes contentious but never dull, more often a source of innovative ideas than of political compromise...

...In measuring growth and inflation, econometricians tend to ignore qualitative changes that have occurred...

...in the face of our ignorance he presses for the Hippocratic principle: “First, do no harm.’’ He is particularly persuasive on the folly of turning over to the states the problem of long-term welfare dependency, arguing that it is “so large a problem that the state governments where it is most concentrated simply will not be able to handle it.’’ In a long introduction, he quotes himself responding to a reporter who accused him of giving up on welfare reform: “People who say nothing can be worse than the present welfare system, just you wait and see...

...For a major political figure, Moynihan is refreshingly aware of how much he-and we-don’t know...

...so a compilation of his scholia is useful...

...You could live a lifetime in Pasadena without learning what Fussell did his first morning on the front line when he discovered that the position he’d come into the night before was surrounded by dozens of dead teenaged German soldiers: “My boy ish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away all at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or iust...

...Younger people seem to have forgotten that you don’t need a war for that benefit...

...He forcefully advocates an ethic of maximum questioning, not because notlung really matters, but precisely because some things do-the first-hand experience of a subject, jargon-free language, and the dissemination of facts no matter how unpleasant or inconvenient, for instance...

...JOHN B. JUDIS is a senior editor of The New Republic...

...SCOTT SHUGER is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...That is what Pat Moynihan has been about: calling on politics to save our changing culture from itself...

...although in the form of a memoir, that’s what this book essentially is...

...He describes his after-combat self as possessing an “intense skepticism about official utterances of any sort, military, political, ecclesiastical, or academic,” and says that he was “angry at the whole postwar atmosphere of public misrepresentation and fatuous optimism...

...But the consistent principal theme tying all these issues together is the impact of postindustrial society...

...The explanation begins and ends with this: World War 11...

...The availability of cheap credit can spur investment, but not in the face of sufficient uncertainty about the future...

...Political Booknotes The Birth of a Skeptic By Scott Shuger PAUL FUSSELL HAS EMERGED over the years as a skillful exposer of the fake elements in America’s public culture...

...Budget Chicken Li ttles By John Judis HE CURRENT DEBATE OVER ECOTn omic policy is dominated by what might be called grim realism...

...World War I1 gave Fussell’s generation zig-zag lives...

...He favors reforms, but they are extremely specific, such as a transactions tax on security purchases to reduce financial volatility...

...Here Moynihan raises new, troublesome and imperfectly understood questions...

...The dominant metaphor casts capital as blood and the government, or state, as a vampire sucking this precious fluid out the economy...

...In the past two decades, for instance, computerization has dramatically increased the quahty of consumer goods such as automobiles and of capital goods such as machine tools, while the price of these goods has not increased proportionately...

...Moyn~han has lived in interesting times, poised at the intersection between politics and social science...

...His experience is a bit breath-: the US...

...Block charges that government and private economemcians have consistently overstated inflation and understated productivity, savings, and economic growth...

...But new problems of family structure and ethnic and race relations are arising first in American society, so that now we are exposed to the risks and challenges of being pioneers...

...Block argues that it is possible to enjoy the benefits of an international trading system without subjecting the United States to the whims of currency traders and to competition from foreign firms that do not adhere to minimal labor and environmental standards...

...He favors free trade as a spur to domestic productivity and increases in the standard of living, but he rejects free trade as a Platonic ideal...

...But many are, despite their military origin, widely applicable...

...Block’s fundamental view of the economy is much more positive and optimistic than that of the right or the left...

...If cynicism is our leading social disease (one in which the elites promiscuously traffic, because they can buy insulation from its consequences), skepticism is a main ingredient of any social vaccine...

...Anyone who wants to understand the current debate over balanced budgets and entidements should read Block’s book...

...This was the beginning of four months of ground combat during which Fussell lived in near-constant fear, saw friends killed right next to him, and, finally, was badly wounded...

...Fussell’s detour of the military is still available, and there are countless additional complex, other-regarding arenas that can likewise stimulate practical wisdom and moral judgment: the schools, the various levels of government, youth and community service organizations, hospitals, hospices, old-age homes, and so on...

...Reading his book, one realizes that many politicians and policy-makers who claim to be pragmatists and realists are in fact practitioners of outworn ideologies...

...In terms of the economy, it is the story of an American economy that was once buoyant and healthy, but has become sick, and flaccid, and can only be saved through painful exertion...

...His welfare reform pmposal of the 1970s, the Family Assistance Plan, which could have made a modest beginning on a now almost impossible task, was rejected by an unholy alliance of right and left, which also rejected his proposed Family Support Act of 1995...

...In effect, Fussell’s life’s work of critically studying people and the language they’re enmeshed in is that of an angry young man growing old, but not soft...

...Navy in World War 11, the London School of Economics, Averell Harriman’s Albany, John Kennedy’s New Frontier, a Harvard professorship, the Nixon White House, ambassadorships to India and the United Nations, the senatorship from New York, leadership of the Senate Finance Committee, and reelection to a fourth term by a landslide even during the Republican revolution of 1994...

...Using Federal Reserve rather than Commerce Department data, Block shows that virtually no change occurred during the ‘80s in the overall savings rate...

...Another wide-ranging Fussellism would be “Mistrust the elites...

...As often as not, these critiques were implicit autobiographythe reader sensed that Fussell could spot the phony because he’d lived the real...

...Investment and growth, he argues, depend on a host of factors, including new technology, industrial organization, and, perhaps most important, the presence of unutilized human and technological resources...

...And over time he became convinced that the fraud, hypocrisy, ignorance, and greed that have increasingly marked America since V-J Day have been enabled by the withering away of the average citizen’s resistance to pronouncements and paradigms from on high...

...That is, Fussell’s variety of mistrust isn’t the cheap, talk-show-pundit kind...

...First, he argues that the metaphor of capital as blood vastly overstates the importance of money capital and savings to new investment and growth...

...In this discussion, the opinion-making elites are discounting the American and Japanese lives at stake and it’s Fussell who’s holding them dear...

...This is not Dole’s nostalgia for a lost golden age, but rather a sense that important social changes are taking place and that we need to find ways to reconcile them with the demands of civilization...

...The book explores a range of current public policy issues, from full employment budgets and the foolishness of the proposed balanced budget amendment to the newly discovered worldwide increase in illegitimacy rates and the forgotten history of the drug wars...

...Now, with this book, the life story becomes explicit and we get to see just how an academican English professor, for God’s sake-became such a reliable cultural bullshit detector in the best tradition of Mark Twain, Thorstein Veblen (also a professor), and H.L...

...It's merely a question of which programs to cut and when...

...It’s important to plumb the significance of “mistrust” here...

...Secondly, Block argues that the state, far from being a vampire, can spur investment and growth by employing or inducing private employers to use unutilized resources...

...Some of the insights are narrowly military...

...In a new book, Fred Block, an economic sociologist at the University of California at Davis, argues that this grim realism is based on highly misleading metaphors that have affected popular and academic theories about the economy...

...Moynihan’s pronouncements are but he is also willing to revise them in the light of experience-and of his remarkably persistent study of social science literature...

...All this is fairly obvious, and has been demonstrated repeatedly over the last sixty years, but it runs counter to the prevailing metaphors-and to the dire prescriptions on which they are based...

...thus this book is really a kind of interim report...

...Block makes a similar argument about savings...

...When these qualitative factors are included in measures of GDP or inflation, then the picture changes radically...

...The government can convert potentially unutilized savings“pools of blood”-into investment...

...If Hitler had been smothered in his crib, Fussell might never have left Pasadena, Calif., his square hometown...

...Block, drawing upon Donald McCloskey’s analysis of the role of metaphor in economic thought, argues that current thmlong has been shaped by a narrative, or allegory, that is sustained by metaphors...

...It recalls the reputed ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times...

...He does not believe either balanced budgets or deficits are cure-alls, although in the current debate his thinking would incline him most against those who urge a balanced budget amendment...

...The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself...

...The Prophet Daniel By Adam Yarmolinsky 0ver more than three decades in public life, Pat Moynihan has had a disturbing habit of calling attention to problems we have lived to regret ignoring, and of offering sound advice that we have lived to regret not talung...

...In other words, skepticism, unlike cynicism, wants to believe...

...And those of us who first spotted it are entitled to be heard a generation later when we are saying we still don’t understand it...

...Back again at Pomona College and then on to Harvard for graduate school, Fussell was “now convinced that my duty was criticism, meaning not carping, but the perpetual obligation of evaluation...