by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Badly shaken by Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the countercultural excesses of the late 1960s, many Americans have come to yearn for a return to “traditional values,” even if that return was being sponsored politically by a nouveau-riche class which aspired most of all to conspicuous consumption. In any case, we are paying now for the crude anti-Americanism, the feckless nose-thumbing and flag-burning that marked a good part of the counterculture in the late 1960s. We are paying for its insensitivity to native speech and sentiment, an insensitivity that, strangely, is itself part of American tradition. Much of the Reaganite reaction, though eventuating in concrete socioeconomic policies, drew upon feelings of hurt that were held by people not necessarily reactionaries or even conservatives. These feelings were exploited skillfully; many of us on the left quite underestimated the power of vague, incantatory appeals to “tradition”—just as we also warned, to little avail, that the hijinks of “the young” in the late 1960s would be paid for later by the workers, the poor, women, and minorities.
We live in a curiously mixed situation. On the one hand, a managed passivity, submission to television captions, apparent indifference to social suffering, political chicanery, and a blundering president—the expected elements of a “mass society.” On the other hand, strong new popular movements that mobilize previously silent segments of the population to struggle over issues like abortion, prayer in the schools, the death penalty, and so on. Such movements are hardly symptoms of a “mass society”; they represent a shrewd appropriation by the right of methods and energies through which labor and liberals helped create a (sort of) welfare state.
Fundamentalism is familiar enough in American history, but the political energies and moral virulence characterizing it today may be rather new. When lined with religious passion and cast as agent of traditional values, right-wing politics takes on a formidable strength.
Pastoral nostalgia, individualist appeals, traditional values, religious fervor—it is the mixture of all these into one stream of collective sentiment that the Reaganites have managed. And up to a point it has worked: many Americans do “feel better about their country,” if only because they have a president who says what they wish to hear. One reason this intellectual scam has worked is that so far, with perhaps the exception of Mario Cuomo, no political leader in the opposition has grasped emotionally the power of native speech and symbol. If, as I believe, we are paying for the irresponsibility of the countercultural left, we are also paying for the desiccation of liberalism, which in the figure of Jimmy Carter was reduced to a technological cipher.
It would be foolhardy in a few pages to try to sort out the many strands of American individualism, still one of the strongest components of national myth and belief. The Reaganites do have some claim upon this tradition: there is a clear line of descent from a corrupted late Emersonianism to the “rugged individualism” of Herbert Hoover to the “possessive individualism” of today (to possess: to grab). But the right has no historical ground for the exclusiveness of its claim within the American individualist tradition. There is, in reality, no single tradition; there is only an interweaving of many elements in complex, confused, and often contradictory ways. If individualism has often been used to justify economic depredation, it has also provided support to social critics standing alone, and independently, against government and mob, from the Mexican to the Vietnam wars. What is sad is that, through a default of will and imagination, the speech and symbols of individualism have been allowed to fall into the hands of the right.
The power of ideology (or: In America a little goes a long way). Reagan’s most effective slogan has been “Get the government off our backs.” It appeals to Americans who transfer their frustrations to “the bureaucrats.” It appeals to Americans whose small businesses have been squeezed or destroyed by giant competitors. It appeals to Americans bewildered by the merger mania, known in earlier days as the concentration of capital. But above all, it appeals to the executives and managers of Big Business whose institutions were rescued from probable collapse by the welfare state but who never reconciled themselves to the agents of their rescue, and who now feel free to release their yearning for the good old days of “rugged individualism” and union busting.
Sensible people know that the talk about getting the government out of economic life has not led to a significant decline of government intervention in the economy. Indeed, it could not. It has only changed, in a reactionary direction, the social character and goals of government intervention. The policies of the Federal Reserve Board constitute a major intervention into economic life. The readiness of the federal government to bail out Lockheed, Chrysler, and Penn Central is quite as decisive an intervention as a program, if there were one, to help bankrupt farmers and create jobs for the unemployed. As John Kenneth Galbraith tartly observes, “Senator Jesse Helms stands staunchly and rhetorically for the free market and for a uniquely rigorous quota and licensing system for the tobacco producers (or landowners) who help to assure his election” (New York Review of Books, June 26, 1986).
About one thing we can be quite certain: the interpenetration of state and society, government and economy is an inescapable fact of modern life. Serious conservatives know this. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Richard Darman says in a moment of candor: “We’ve been in the business of economic planning as long as we’ve been in the business of practical politics” (New Republic, May 5, 1986). The only question, but a big one, is whether the government’s economic role will be progressive or regressive.
Exposing the cant about “getting the government off our backs,” while necessary, is not likely to suffice. For the ideology behind such talk does speak to certain realities: the visible bureaucratization of large institutions, whether private corporations or segments of the state. But this ideology does not speak honestly or realistically to these facts of modern life. Nevertheless, especially when fused with nostalgia for American individualism, this ideological gambit is going to be effective, at least until put to the test of crisis—what can it say to the increasing poverty of even these boom years?—as well as to the test of deceitful practice—what credence does the “free market” rhetoric of a Jesse Helms merit when set against his insistence on government privileges for his tobacco constituency?
The ideology of a reclaimed laissez-faire is having a “run” in some parts of the industrialized world, especially because of social democratic and liberal inadequacies, though only in the United States and Great Britain has it had a modest economic success. The battle between advocates and opponents of the welfare state—which, like it or not, today has greater political urgency than an abstract counterposition between capitalism and socialism—will continue to the end of this century. But meanwhile there are some new ideological wrinkles.
The corporations have discovered the importance of ideas, or at least the manipulation of ideas. Some nine or ten years ago I noticed, in one of those institutional ads that corporations print on the New York Times op ed page, a quotation from the literary critic Lionel Trilling. This struck me as a turning point in intellectual life, or at least in our public relations, coming as it did only a few years after some writers had proclaimed “the end of ideology.” In the last decade, under the shrewd guardianship of the neoconservative intellectuals—who offer their thoughts to the corporations, though not for free—corporate America has discovered the pragmatic uses of ideology, the importance of entering intellectual debate, and consequently has poured millions into foundations, magazines, conferences. Mobil and Exxon, borrowing apparently from the pages of Public Interest, offer solemn essays on political economy; the investment house of Shearson Lehman flashes snappy statements on television about the virtues of capitalism. Credit for enticing the corporations into ideological battle must go in part to Irving Kristol, who has made himself into a sort of back-room broker between the corporations and the Republican Party on one hand and available intellectuals on the other. He has taught American businessmen, at least
some of them, the elementary lesson that social struggle takes place, perhaps most of all, in people’s heads and that just as dropping some change into the cultural programs of public broadcasting helps create an “aura,” so the interests of the business community may be served by subsidizing magazines like New Criterion and Public Interest, as well as the network of institutes, committees, foundations, and journals in which the neocons flourish.
There are times, however, when our corporate leaders forget all the babble about social responsibility and lapse into mere truth. Here is John Akers, chief executive of IBM, on divesting in South Africa: “If we elect to leave, it will be a business decision. . . . We are not in business to conduct moral activity. We are not in business to conduct socially responsible action. We are in business to conduct business” (New York Times, April 23, 1986). One can almost hear Kristol gently remonstrating: Yes, yes, John, but do you have to say it?
The war whoop of chauvinism. Shrewdly seizing upon a popular reaction against the often vulgar and mindless anti-Americanism of the late 1960s, the Reagan administration has succeeded partly in blotting out memories of the disastrous and destructive American intervention in Vietnam. A new national mood has been programmed. It’s symbolized, half in myth, half in parody, by Rambo. It is released in the unsportsmanlike displays at the Los Angeles Olympics. It is embodied, more fiercely, in the indefensible Reaganite policy of intervening in Nicaragua. And it is raised to a pitch of madness in the Star Wars program (which E. P. Thompson has shrewdly described as an instance of American “individualism” gone berserk . . . the lone cowboy now ascending the heavens to clean up the rustlers). This new national mood draws upon two contradictory emotions held with about equal intensity: first, everybody has been kicking poor little America around; and second, we’re the strongest country in the world (as was proved once and for all in Grenada) and we’re going to straighten things out, even if we have to call in John Wayne to help out Ron.
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A consequence of these transformations in public discourse has been a debasement in the social tone of American life, the texture of shared feelings, the unspoken impulses and biases. About such things one can only speak impressionistically, but we all recognize them. They strike upon our nerves. We are living in a moment of moral smallness, a curdling of generosity, a collapse of idealism. I don’t mean to suggest that most ordinary Americans have become morally bad—of course not; only that the moral styles, the tones of speech and qualities of symbol which the Reagan administration and its journalistic and intellectual allies encourage are pinched and narrow-spirited, sometimes downright mean.
How else do you explain the readiness of a thirty-five-year-old arbitrager publicly to say that adding “a library and a room for the au pair girl” would come to four or five million dollars—and this at a time when thousands of New Yorkers had no homes last winter? This chap might have felt the same way at an earlier moment, but he would have been too cautious or ashamed to say it. Now, in the Reagan era, it’s acceptable. Or, for that matter, how else do you explain that someone like Ed Koch can gain favor through a smirking double-talk that shows the folks in front of the tube how to put down blacks without quite saying so.
To live under an administration that featured such notables as James Watt and Rita Lavelle; in which the attorney general declares poverty in America to be merely “anecdotal,” and the president himself (ignoring massive evidence, some of it accumulated by his own administration) announces that people go hungry in America only if they lack information on how to get help; in which the head of the Civil Rights Commission is part Uncle Tom and part, it seems, huckster; in which the president dares to compare the Somocista contras, some of them proven killers, with Washington and Jefferson—is to recall again the force of Brecht’s sentence about another (still more) evil time: “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible tidings.”
The favored tone of worldly, or sometimes macho, indifference to the plight of the jobless and the homeless cuts through the whole range of the people in power and their intellectual allies. The sensibilities of the country’s elites, all those who make policy and shape opinion, harden. We see it in the systematic refusal of the Reagan administration even to consider programs that would provide jobs for the unemployed; in the steady deterioration of OSHA-determined work safety regulations in factories; in the disdain lining even the surface of official policy toward blacks; in the steady efforts of the civil rights division of the Justice Department to sabotage affirmative action; in the surrender of the Koch administration in New York City to luxury developers; in the admiration shown a gun-toter like Bernhard Goetz; in the mere fact that a rag like the New York Post can survive.
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How deep and durable is this shift in public sentiment? Will the rightward turn continue after Reagan? For that matter, is there a turn to the right? A not-very-profound article in the Atlantic (May 1986) argues that there has not been one. Its authors, Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, produce an array of poll results showing that majorities of respondents still favor many of the programs associated with liberalism. How then, you may wonder, did Reagan manage to get reelected? Simple, conclude our authors: the economic situation got better and most people vote their pocketbooks.
This would be comforting if true, but at the very least it requires complication. If a majority of Americans favor liberal measures yet a majority of voters chose Reagan, doesn’t this suggest that the appeal of the president and his slogans was deeper, more telling than any (perhaps fading or residual or formal) attachment to liberal programs? The polls do not measure intensity of commitment, or which of two conflicting sets of opinions held simultaneously may be the stronger. Evidently, for many Americans the appeal of Reagan and at least some of what he represents was stronger than the attachment to welfare-state measures. And that would seem to signify a shift to the right, would it not?
I don’t claim to know how strong or lasting this shift will prove to be. One need only look at the dominant style of opinion within the Democratic Party to see that the rightward shift has all but overcome those who are supposed to resist it. (The code word is “pragmatic.”) The very tone of the opposition, such as it is, which the leading Democrats adopt seems clear evidence that the Reaganites have come to set the terms of the debate. Liberal proposals are virtually invisible at the Democratic top. When was the last time that even Senator Ted Kennedy spoke out in favor of his once-featured project of a national health bill? Or that any of the leading Democrats remembered the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act? Except in their response to Reagan’s outrageous feeler about canceling SALT II, the posture of the leading Democrats is defensive—or, worse still, acquiescent, as when Senator Bill Bradley votes for aid to the Nicaraguan contras.
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Few things about the national condition are more depressing than the collapse of American liberalism. To recall Lionel Trilling’s once-famous remark of the 1950s—that in America liberalism is the only viable political tradition—is to thrust oneself back into another world. In the face of the Reaganite victory, the organizational and ideological collapse of American liberalism has been astonishing. Hardly a politician dares acknowledge himself to be a liberal, the very word itself having come to seem a political handicap.
Of the older intellectual spokesmen for liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith are still heard from on occasion, but they are understandably intent upon writing their own books and perhaps, again understandably, are weary of polemic. Schlesinger advances a consoling theory—consoling if true—about the periodicity of American politics, according to which the next swing of the pendulum will bring us happily back to liberalism (but why must the pendulum keep swinging?). Galbraith aims his neatly ironic shafts against Reaganomics, but with a world-weariness that seems to despair of ever again striking a blow that will tell. As for other social analysts who defend liberal measures and values—writers like Robert Kuttner, Barbara Ehrenreich, Michael Harrington,
Robert Reich, Jeff Faux, among others—they are mostly spokesmen for the democratic left who have been forced, in these trying times, to pick up the slack of liberalism. What might be called mainstream liberalism seems quite unable to attract talented new advocates who can speak to audiences beyond the confines of the academy.
Why, one wonders, has American liberalism suffered so severe a decline? That there should have been losses; that the usual crew of opportunists should desert; that veterans would grow tired and step aside—all were to be expected. But so utter a rout? Is it possible, as some writers of the sectarian left have said, that liberalism in America has “exhausted itself”? A full answer to this question will have to wait for others, but here let me note a few possible causes for the unhappy state of American liberalism.
Fundamentally, I’d suggest, we have been witnessing the all-but-inevitable disintegration which affects every party or movement that has held power for a length of time. Success breeds complacency, obtuseness, and corruption, and these in turn make for an incapacity to see, let alone confront, the problems created by success. As long as the American economy was expanding and Keynesian prescriptions were more or less working, New Deal liberalism and its offshoots could retain vitality. But once they had to confront problems no longer soluble through the by now conventional New Deal measures—problems like the Vietnam War, third-world eruptions (Iran), the radical transformation of the world economy, new productive techniques, inflation, and so on—liberalism fell apart. The time had come for policies of a social-democratic slant but these an increasingly insecure liberalism would not approach. The comforts of office, the fears of yesterday’s innovators before the risks of tomorrow’s innovations—all disabled American liberalism.