The only solution, in the minds of many of these conservative thinkers, is to reverse course. Although not every one of them would agree with all aspects of the prescription, the general lesson is the same: We should eliminate welfare except to victims of sudden and unexpected hardships. We should allow our teachers to punish and expel. We should empower our police officers and judges to mete out swift and certain punishment. And we should teach our children self-control. In short, we should restore social discipline.
5
The conservative tale about the Rot at the Top is too well known to require detailed elaboration. Ronald Reagan himself became the most vocal exponent of the tale. “Government is not the solution to our problems,” he proclaimed on more than one occasion. “Government is the problem.” The story tells of excessive red tape, intermeddling bureaucrats and policy professionals, and ballooning government expenditures—unrestrained, out of control. And the moral of this tale is essentially the same as the others: We must exert discipline over the taxers and spenders, the bureaucrats and meddlers, who otherwise would go on consuming ever more of our resources and compromising our precious freedoms.
What is so compelling about all these arguments—drawn from foreign policy, economics, sociology, and politics—is that they are mutually reinforcing. They tell one interwoven story. No conservative thinker, and certainly no politician, subscribes to the full complement of these views. (Ronald Reagan gave voice to many of these themes without putting them into effect. His budgets were not marked by excessive discipline.) But the details of these arguments are less important than the central set of parables that informs them. Liberal permissiveness has rendered us vulnerable to exploitation. Without discipline, there has been no accountability. Without accountability, decadence has crept in, irresponsibility has become endemic, the system has lost its moral fiber, and we have let ourselves become victims.
This coherence gives the story enormous appeal. It rings true with elements of almost anyone’s personal experience. It offers a comprehensible and comprehensive explanation for what has happened to postwar America. Bundling such disparate issues together into a single tale of decadence, slackness, and assertiveness gives comfort. The comprehensive explanation suggests a way of coming to terms with the source of the decay and eventually reversing it. It is only a matter of recognizing the prevailing pattern and applying the moral. In its simplicity, consistency, and plausibility, the new conservative public philosophy provides a near-perfect mythology.
There is a final feature that helps to explain the emotional appeal of modern conservatism, and to distinguish it starkly from its philosophical forbears. Traditional conservatism was dour. It spoke of austerity and self-discipline. It emanated the gray gloom of Herbert Hoover and William Howard Taft. It dwelled on the shameful side of the morality tales. As such, people regarded traditional conservatism the way they regard a bitter medicine or a strict diet—good for you, perhaps, especially after you have gone on a binge, but fundamentally unpleasant nonetheless.
This new brand is markedly different. It preaches austerity and discipline, to be sure, but with the crucial revision that the discipline is not for “us” but for “them.” The conservatism of the late 1970s and 1980s was astonishingly successful at convincing many Americans that vast changes in national priorities could be achieved to the benefit of nearly all and the detriment of only a small number of demonstrably undeserving claimants. For the rest of us, the message was cheerfully optimistic—the proud side of the morality tales. We could achieve whatever we want to achieve, be whatever we want to be, or in the vernacular of the day, “go for it.” There were no limits on our strivings, no constraints on our impulses.
The two parts of the message are not inconsistent. To discipline “them,” it is necessary that we be strong. We must be ready to exercise our will and impose our vision with self-confidence, pride, and enthusiasm. It is always easier to be righteous when you know that you are right. As Teddy Roosevelt (Ronald Reagan’s favorite president) represented in word and deed, ebullience and aggression are nicely complementary. The 1984 Republican platform proclaimed the imperative to discipline the Soviets, crack down on welfare cheats, and stringently control public spending, while the convention hall echoed to the strains of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
The new conservatism, in sum, has brilliantly blended two rather distinct messages: On the one side, authority, control, and discipline for “them”; on the other, liberation, optimism, and exuberance for “us.” It thus endeared itself to millions of Americans uncomfortable with the disturbing suspicion—a suspicion that Jimmy Carter’s more traditionally dour conservatism had unforgivably failed to dispel—that the world had changed, and that coming to terms with it might end up requiring us to fundamentally revise the stories we told one another about it. “No need,” said Reagan, and we cheered.
6
The liberal response to this new conservative version of our national morality tales has been notoriously unconvincing. This has not been because liberal thinkers have suddenly lost their capacity for analysis, imagination, or insight. Even in recent years they have shown no end of cleverness in devising new programmatic solutions to specific public problems. Those who bemoan the liberals’ dearth of new ideas have not been paying attention. Policy prescriptions are not the problem. The failure has lain deeper, with a liberal public philosophy that no longer embodies a coherent story that rings true for most Americans.
The prevailing liberal story draws upon the same morality tales as does conservatism but interprets them in the radically different terms of altruism and conciliation. The liberal gloss on the American mythology is perfectly familiar: First, the Mob at the Gates must be treated with understanding and tolerance. Poorer nations deserve our aid. We should work in concert with our allies, while appreciating that their needs and priorities may be different from our own. And we should patiently pursue a structure of peaceful coexistence with the Soviets, through trade, cultural exchanges, and arms control. Second, individuals rarely triumph when they can’t get work; economic policy should ensure full employment, so that every citizen can find a market for his labor. Inflation can be restrained by an income and price policy that, unlike the conservative remedy, does not depend on unemployment to keep down prices. Third, the nation, as Benevolent Community, must come to the aid of the needy. Similarly, the more fortunate among us should contribute more to common purposes; taxes should be progressive. Finally, it is scheming economic elites who comprise the Rot at the Top; they must be restrained by a strong and compassionate government empowered by and dedicated to the common people.
The liberal public philosophy has its own coherence. Only through generosity and conciliation can we maintain domestic tranquility and global peace. Only through peace can we ensure prosperity. Only through prosperity can we afford to be charitable and conciliatory. The logic is internally consistent. And this philosophy surely conveys a moral vision no less valid than that of modern conservatism.
But the central parable of generosity and tolerance has seemed to many Americans disconcertingly naïve in a world they perceive as colder and crueler. Popular wisdom now teaches that détente promotes Soviet aggression, and Third World aid generates corruption and profligacy. “Full-employment” budgets invite workers to demand higher wages, thus fueling inflation. The welfare system does not reduce poverty, it perpetuates it. Government is too big, too meddlesome, too wasteful. The new conservatives did not invent these connections; they had only to point them out. Charity and conciliation are doubtless worthy goals for our personal lives, but such sentiments cannot sustain a nation in the world as it is. Altruism seems a feeble foundation for a public philosophy.
7
Yet in fact altruism per se never figured prominently in the liberal public philosophy that dominated American political discourse from the start of the New Deal to the end of World War II. It was the precept of solidarity, a sentiment crucially distinct from altruism, born n
ot of specific legislation or programs but of concrete, common experiences—the Depression and World War II—that profoundly affected almost all Americans. The goals of reviving the economy and winning the war, and the sacrifices implied in achieving them, were well understood and widely endorsed. The public was motivated less by altruism than by its direct and palpable stake in the outcome of what were ineluctably social challenges.
The New Deal was concerned primarily with social insurance rather than with the redistribution of wealth. The Social Security Act of 1935, for example, was based on the principle of private insurance; one’s benefits were to depend, for the most part, on one’s contributions. Roosevelt was quite explicit about his distaste for welfare: “Continued dependence upon relief,” he warned in his 1935 State of the Union address, “induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief … is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”12 The problem, and the responsibility, were broadly felt. More than a third of the nation was “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.” This was not some separate and distinct group in need; it was “us.” The solution, quite obviously, could not be a redistribution of income from us to them, nor even from a more wealthy them to us. The problem demanded a national effort to improve the way the system worked. FDR called upon “this great army of our people, dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.”13
Responding to the Mob at the Gates required a similar collaboration, not just among Americans but also between America and its allies. We were all in it together, fighting the fascists and then, immediately after the war, forging a system to rebuild the world economy and maintain the peace. Conservatives had sought to isolate America from an irredeemably wicked world. The liberals who came of age during the Depression and the war sought to remake the world. They created new institutions to bind nations together: a system of fixed exchange rates; an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank to improve international liquidity and spur development; a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to promote world commerce; the United Nations and the World Court to mediate disputes among nations, and regional pacts like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to isolate incorrigible outlaw states who defied the American-led campaign for global harmony.
By the middle point of the century, American liberalism was triumphant. It had triumphed over economic disaster, it had won the war, it was magnificently winning the peace. Conservatism was seen to have pushed us into the Depression, balked at joining the good fight against fascism, and then recoiled from subsequent global responsibilities. It was relegated to the status of a fringe philosophy, a largely ignored alternative version of the American story.14 The liberal interpretation of our basic myths was clear and compelling: We needed to work together to forge a new world. It celebrated the common man. It was optimistic about the future and commonsensical about the present. It spoke to “us,” and we heard it.
8
The liberalism of the 1960s was different. In the stunning economic boom engineered by postwar liberal policies, many Americans experienced for the first time the exhilaration of rapidly rising incomes. Cars, highways, and suburban homes brought unprecedented mobility, privacy, and independence. “Solidarity” became a more abstract sentiment, with no obvious relevance to most Americans’ everyday lives. In a richer America, the guiding principle of social solidarity was slowly and subtly transmuted into altruism. The stories Americans told one another had less to do with reciprocal obligation and mutual benefit than with the painful necessity of helping “them.”
The 1960 report of the President’s Commission on National Goals15 had made no mention of poverty among blacks nor, for that matter, of poverty itself. This was not because material want was extinct in America or somehow wholly invisible. It was rather that a greater or lesser degree of deprivation still seemed quite unremarkable, a fundamental aspect of the human condition that America had to an unprecedented and rather astonishing extent managed to limit. When poverty had so recently been the rule, it only gradually came to be seen as a troubling exception. But before that decade was halfway through, commentators were talking about the “other” America,16 and Lyndon Johnson was calling for a crusade against “the one huge wrong of the American nation.” The war on poverty was to be “a moral challenge that goes to the very root of our civilization.”17
That challenge was rooted in the sense that John F. Kennedy’s death left America with an unfinished moral agenda. No well-organized interests had pressed for a national campaign against poverty; no grass-roots movement had mandated it. The war on poverty emerged largely from liberal opinion leaders—from academics, journalists, and editors—who saw it as a national responsibility, and from Johnson, who saw it as a personal mission. It also had a second, highly significant set of origins: For reasons that were entirely plausible, but also in part a matter of historical accident, the war on poverty was intimately linked to the civil rights movement. Even though the majority of the poor were white, as they always had been and would continue to be, America’s discovery of the poor as a group coincided with and became merged with its belated effort to extend political rights to black Americans. Johnson laid out the logic for this connection: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”18
This commingling of the two national failings, racial discrimination and poverty, made eminent sense at the time. But it accentuated the distinction between “us” and “them,” and cemented the perception that social programs were mandated not by a sense of solidarity, but by altruism tinged with guilt. Most Americans did not feel poor. But here was a distinct group with different colored skin and a different culture, who lived in poverty largely because we had discriminated against them for generations. It was not a matter of reciprocal responsibility and mutual benefit, but of removing an injustice. “Their cause must be our cause too,” Johnson declared. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”19 His words were stirring but incompletely convincing. Many Americans felt that in fact it was, to a great extent, “just Negroes” who required the assistance of the rest of us. Thus the Great Society rested from the start on the shaky foundation of ethical duty rather than mutual responsibility and reciprocal benefit.
Yet at the time this foundation seemed sufficiently firm. The special conditions of what would prove an odd and passing moment of American history allowed “us” to be generous to “them” with little identifiable sacrifice. The extraordinary growth of the American economy during the 1960s made it possible for the nation to wage a war on poverty, and then another on North Vietnam, while enjoying a broad rise in living standards. Keynesianism, the then-dominant economic doctrine, held that such public spending, far from impoverishing the middle class, would serve to keep the vast economic machine going at full throttle. Lyndon Johnson talked reassuringly of the “fiscal dividend” awarded by economic growth. “Today, for the first time in our history, we have the power to strike away the barriers to full participation in our society. Having the power, we have the duty.”20
Other aspects of Great Society liberalism appeared to be similarly painless. Extending civil rights to blacks cost the majority of Americans relatively little. Segregation in southern schools, luncheonettes, and hotels could be banished at small cost to those of us who lived elsewhere. At the same time, we could afford to be benevolent in our dealings abroad. The United States was preeminent in the world economy by default, with no serious trade competition from overseas. So the nation could afford to indulge its allies and the Third World; boosting foreign purchasing power could only result in more American export sales—where else would they spend the money?—and would help prevent communism to boot. Our political leadership of
the Western world was unquestioned, so we could magnanimously yield to our allies on smaller matters. And the government had learned how to “fine-tune” its fiscal and monetary policies sufficiently well, it was thought, that workers could get generous wages and pension benefits, and managers could promise automatic cost-of-living increases. In all these respects, the liberal public philosophy of the 1960s and early 1970s entailed a peculiarly cut-rate form of charity. We could give “them” whatever they needed or wanted, and it didn’t seem to hurt “us” a bit.
This easy altruism was reinforced by prevailing pluralist ideas about American democracy. By the 1960s pluralism had come to serve both as a description of the American political system and as a prescription for its continued health. American politics was powered by the maneuvers of shifting and overlapping interest groups, whose leaders bargained with one another over the nature and purpose of public action. The result was assumed to be a reasonably stable, responsively democratic political system. To many Americans, these features helped explain why democracy had continued to survive so well in the United States, in contrast to its easy susceptibility to mass movements in other nations.21
In this pluralist view, the “public interest” was nothing more (or less) than an accommodation among group leaders, with no substantive content apart from the benefits those leaders lined up for their constituents. Groups asserted their claims, and the jostling and horse trading got underway; what emerged was enshrined as the national will. Policies that could placate a greater number of interest groups were by definition the most conducive to the public good. Pluralism contained no principled limits on what compromises should be reached or how far government should go to accommodate the various groups that made up the public.
Tales of a New America Page 4
