In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan drew on the same parables, but they were substantially reconfigured. Repudiating Roosevelt’s national community, Reagan redefined the Benevolent Community as small, traditional neighborhoods in which people voluntarily helped one another, free from government interference. The Rot at the Top referred to Washington insiders, arrogant government bureaucrats, and liberal intellectuals who wanted to grab power and stifle creativity. The Triumphant Individual was the business entrepreneur who started work in an attic or garage and ended up spawning an entire industry. And the Mob at the Gates comprised a wide assortment—illegal immigrants, drug traffickers, Third World debtors and revolutionaries, terrorists, greedy trading partners, and, above all, Communist aggressors—who threatened our way of life. But America would prevail. “America is back and standing tall,” Reagan said in 1984. “We’ve begun to restore the great American values—the dignity of work, the warmth of family, the strength of neighborhood, and the nourishment of human freedom.”15
6
All four of our morality tales refer to a collective identity. They affirm a common destiny. Thus a fundamental theme in the American mythology is membership—inclusion and, necessarily, exclusion. In American political life, as in our sporting events and lawsuits, the pronouns “us” and “them” contain the essential information. They signal the boundaries beyond which loyalties and commitments do not extend. We trust that others like “us” will fulfill mutual obligations that yield joint benefits. But for “them” we have only pity or disdain.
In the story of the Mob at the Gates, “they” are dangerous outsiders. Their specific identity, and the quality of their menace, has varied throughout our history. “They” have been, at one time or another, American Indians, French, English, Mexicans, Southerners, European immigrants, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, and Russians, to name a few. That members of these groups have on occasion done us injury is true but not essential; that the pigment of their skin is different from that of most Americans is often, but not necessarily, the case. What unites them is that, at some point, “we” have defined ourselves as definitively not like them, and our thorough repudiation of what they represent has buttressed our sense of what we stand for.
Similarly, as Triumphant Individuals we are characterized partly by contrast with who we are not. In this story, “they” are featherbedders, menial workers, and time servers. They are the men in gray flannel suits who dither and grovel in the offices of large organizations, workers who mindlessly follow routine, petty bureaucrats, and all the other slackers who fail to pull their own weight. That even entrepreneurial garages go dark unless the bureaucrats at the local utility keep the electricity coming may seem to suggest a more complicated story of how we get things accomplished in America, but the stirring distinction between the change master and the time server endures.
A comparable dividing line runs through our conception of the Benevolent Community. On one side of the line the governing principle is solidarity; on the other side it is altruism, even paternalism. “We” are solid citizens who ask no more than our due, who offer or accept help only in cases of unanticipated and uncontrollable calamity. “They” are the poor, dependent by nature and perhaps by choice. We assume, mistakenly, that they are mostly black or brown. Our sense of mercy requires that we limit their suffering; our sense of justice requires that we accompany our charity with proper discipline.
Finally, in the tale of Rot at the Top, “they” are business tycoons, wealthy aristocrats, Washington insiders, or any others who seem to exercise unaccountable power or enjoy unearned privilege. “We” are the common people, too often robbed of true authority, unfairly dispossessed of our proper rewards, innocent victims of the venality and incompetence of self-serving elites.
Dividing the world into “us” and “them,” of course, is a universal and perhaps inevitable human trait. But when the dividing line is accepted without question by all sides of the political debate, it renders our convictions about credit and blame, about the sources and solutions to our problems, sturdily resistant to evidence. This is dangerous when it undercuts the possibility of mutual responsibility and reciprocal gain. As we attribute to “them”—dangerous outsiders, lazy workers, the poor and the deviant, the scheming elites—the problems that bedevil us, we simultaneously limit our repertoire of responses to two broad categories: First, we can discipline them. By being tough and assertive, we can compel them to repent, lay down the law on acceptable behavior, and punish them when they transgress. Alternatively, we can conciliate them. Through generosity, understanding, and toleration we can socialize them, bring out the best in them, and seduce them into changing their ways, into becoming more like us.
It is in large part this pervasive mythic division between the “us” and the “them” that explains the American propensity to squeeze the most collectively diverse and individually complex public choices into a linear array of options anchored, on the one end, by toughness and on the other, by conciliation. These are our contested principles, in issues ranging from foreign policy to welfare. Our public discourse, thus constrained, is often comfortably straightforward but perilously incomplete.
Our morality tales are increasingly at odds with the new challenges we confront. The prevailing versions have little relevance to the relationships that frame our lives—with other peoples of the earth, within our firms, toward our poor, toward our leaders. The prevailing versions do not speak of mutual obligation. They neither celebrate joint gain nor forebode reciprocal loss. Our morality tales, too long unexamined, are losing their power to inform our present. Once again we must revise and reaffirm our declaration of identity.
CHAPTER 2
THE PREVAILING VERSIONS
1
The terms “liberal” and “conservative” (along with their more recent “neo” variants) denote two fundamental orientations toward public issues. They anchor American political discourse. Each orientation harbors internal contradictions and inconsistencies; neither comprises a logical structure of opinions founded on first principles. And many who think of themselves as one or the other often find that on certain specific issues their sympathies lie in the other camp. Nevertheless, Americans tend to define their stances across a remarkable range of issues by reference to conservatism or liberalism.1
These two orientations are not comparable to the conflicting ideologies that animate politics in other cultures. They are best understood, rather, as different interpretations of the same four morality roles—the Mob at the Gates, the Triumphant Individual, the Benevolent Community, the Rot at the Top. Both are inspired by roughly the same values; both project similar ideals of the perfect society. Both feature a division of the world into “us” and “them.” The conservative version sees “them” as unruly and exploitative, yielding only to discipline. The liberal version sees “them” as misguided and needy, deserving of and open to accommodation and charity. In recent years the conservative version has been more compelling to a majority of Americans.2 It is important to understand why.
Many liberals have refused to credit the currently reigning conservatism with a philosophy at all. They prefer to see it as a thinly veiled scheme to further enrich the wealthy. Some conservatives doubtless embrace their positions out of pure self-interest. But such cynicism is rare. The majority of conservatives, I venture, are attracted by the ideas themselves; the stories make sense.
Other liberals have conceded conservatism’s new claim on the public’s sentiments but see it as a sign of the temporary reversion toward private interest and away from public activism that periodically overcomes a reform-weary citizenry.3 This view, however, fails to account for the reformist zeal of the new movement and its aggressive use of public power to transform the American system. The new conservatism is no simple rejection of “big government,” for it is content to subordinate a significant part of the economy to the military, and aims at expanding the powers of the police, teachers, and other designated public disc
iplinarians.
Still other liberals have sought to attribute the change in public attitudes to the congenial personality of Ronald Reagan, rather than to any philosophical shift. History will note that the president was an artful orator and a master of parable. He brilliantly acted the part of America’s cowboy hero—the tall and rugged town marshal, who kept the peace with integrity, optimism, and self-deprecating humor.4 But this explanation overlooks the groundswell of support for conservatism that arose before Reagan arrived in Washington. The new conservatism was a wider phenomenon than Reaganism. The ideological chest-thumping of the Reagan administration, for example, obscured Jimmy Carter’s quieter but profound conservatism. Reagan’s success lay not in changing the nation’s view of how the world works—he had been saying the same things for years, after all, without sparking much of a response—but in giving clear voice to themes the public had finally shown itself ready to embrace.
The new conservativism is attractive because it manages to make sense out of a great deal of our troubling collective experience since, roughly, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It refashions resonant new versions of America’s core myths. It extracts from these reinterpretations a set of plausible lessons. The first such lesson describes a world “out there” grown more ruthless and sternly warns that as individuals and as a nation we must struggle for survival against the Mob at the Gates. Another speaks of Triumphant Individual entrepreneurs who must be liberated and spoiled workers whose wage demands could ruin our economy. A third talks of dependency and excess in our Benevolent Community and charges us to require responsibility of the objects of our benevolence. The last warns of slackness and corruption in our political system that inflict on us an unaccountable flood of wasteful public spending.
All four lessons convey much the same moral: We are in danger of losing our way. We must impose discipline and responsibility on “them”—malign outsiders, free-riding workers, welfare cheats, bureaucrats and politicians—in order that we may fulfill our grand destiny. The parable presents an intricate blend of dissenting Protestant theology and social Darwinism—of salvation, redemption, and triumphant survival. The overarching lesson is dramatically clear, and it applies to a range of public issues. Its power lies in its simplicity and scope, and its evocation of unarticulated fears and hopes.
2
Consider, first, the new conservative position on foreign policy. For years liberals had sought to appease the Soviets, placate the less-developed nations of the Third World, and coddle our allies. As a result, the story goes, we became an easy mark. The Mob at the Gates took advantage of us. Our defenses were down; the Soviets surged ahead of us in armaments. Emboldened by our passivity, they viciously subjugated Afghanistan, cracked down in Poland, and expanded their influence in southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America. Simultaneously, the United States was being taken for a ride by Third World nations that demanded our aid but persistently sided with our adversaries and voted against us at the United Nations. Other Third World nations have threatened default on loans from our banks. We have been overrun by illegal immigrants who defy our borders, take away our jobs, and live off our social services. Drug traffickers in Asia and Latin America, undeterred by cynical governments, pump poisons into our cities. Iranian thugs humiliated us; terrorists kill and maim at will. Even our allies have refused to cooperate with us in limiting East-West trade.
The problem, thus posed, admits of only one approach. We must impose discipline. We must regain our credibility, and the way to do that is to get tough with this Mob at the Gates. We should dramatically increase our military defenses, get the Soviets (and their Cuban allies) out of Central America and Africa, give aid to Third World nations only when they play on our side, and crack down on international terrorists without undue squeamishness about who gets in the way. We should get tough on illegal immigration and drug smuggling. We should tighten up on East-West trade, so that the Soviets cannot easily take advantage of our technology. We should “play hardball” with our allies on trade and defense. We should threaten to retaliate against Japan if its markets are not fully open to our products. And we should impose austerity on Third World debtors, ensuring that they repay their debts and end their profligate ways.
Liberal indulgence toward the Soviet Union is thought to have threatened our very survival. According to foreign-policy hardliners, we cannot conciliate the Soviets, nor should we try to. The danger of nuclear war will recede only when the Soviet Union transforms itself from a totalitarian state into a freer and more democratic one. Liberal accommodation has only fortified Soviet totalitarianism. By this view, pressures for change are growing within a Soviet Union collapsing from economic and moral decay. We should promote this internal disintegration by “a combination of active resistance to Soviet expansion and political-military blackmail and the denial of economic and other forms of aid.”5 To hasten that process we will have to be tougher than they are.
3
The conservative story covers economic policy as well. For years, the tale goes, America’s Triumphant Individuals—its entrepreneurs—have been held back by slack and sloth elsewhere in the economy.
The liberal solution to the tendency of the economy to succumb cyclically to recession and underemployment was for the government to spend freely enough to restore demand. But this approach, inspired by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, ultimately proved its own undoing, according to the conservative story. Government went on spending beyond its means, even during times of buoyant growth. Undue government solicitousness also bred expectations that Washington would always step in to snap the economy out of slumps and slowdowns. The result was a breakdown of social discipline. Conservative economists condemned the laxity: “The standard brand of liberalism … was still undisciplined, still devoid of guidelines or limits.”6 The government went on a spending binge through the late 1960s and the 1970s, while workers went on a corresponding wage binge. Succeeding presidents tried to keep the rate of unemployment too low, relative to what the economy could manage without fueling inflation. By the late 1970s prices were out of control. Such irresponsibility undermined the integrity of the entire economic system.
The lesson of this story, too, is clear. We must restore discipline to the economy. We had to “break the back” of inflation in the early 1980s through tactical unemployment, to remind workers of their vulnerability to joblessness should wage demands get too high, and we must stand ever ready to do so again. Future economic policy must “take the control of inflation as its first priority” and relegate unemployment to a lower concern.7 To control inflation is to impose discipline on the system, particularly on the inflationary wage demands of workers.
Another strand of this conservative parable emphasizes the imperative to discipline the insatiable public sector. If we fail to constrain the federal budget, by constitutional amendment if necessary, productive entrepreneurs will be starved of resources. Businessmen are motivated by money; paring their financial rewards through taxation saps their will. Conservative thinking holds: “The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power.”8 Public spending, of course, simply reflects the set of common endeavors that cannot be coordinated by the market. In the conservative view, however, this set is small, and claims for government action are presumptively illegitimate. While conservatives frequently oppose public spending in the abstract with more vigor than program by program, the mythic theme is clear: We must discipline “them,” those illegitimate claimants on resources, so our nation’s inventors and investors can be freed to create new wealth.
4
The modern conservative’s position on social welfare and other underpinnings of the Benevolent Community is consistent with the rest. First, according to this tale, the welfare system is riddled with waste and fraud. Second, when welfare has gone to those it was intended for, its effects have often been perverse. It has
encouraged poor teenage girls to have babies and deterred them from marriage and work, trapping children in a lifelong culture of dependency and irresponsibility. At the same time, criminal suspects have come to enjoy so many rights that our police are incapable of keeping order, so drugs and crime infest our cities. We have forbidden teachers to control their classrooms and have been more concerned about equality and self-expression than about competence in basic skills, with the result that our schools are failing to educate—a failure particularly damaging to the poor in inner cities. The three forms of laxness have reinforced one another: The easiest path for inner-city youths has been to drop out of school, and then for the girls to have babies and live off welfare, and for the boys to live off girlfriends on welfare and the proceeds of crime.
This overall tale is backed by a plethora of studies purporting to show the inefficacy or the downright malignancy of welfare—and of the related permissive approach to education, law enforcement, and child rearing. One conservative sociologist examined the data on poverty and welfare, particularly those covering the period since the Great Society, and discovered that despite the striking growth in welfare spending during this interval the plight of poor blacks did not improve. His conclusion: We failed to deal with poverty because we created all the wrong incentives—to get into poverty rather than to get out. We undercut discipline and responsibility.9 Some educators have come to much the same conclusion about American education. “Permissive progressivism,” with its emphasis on self-expression rather than self-control, perverted our schools.10 The same story echoes in the work of criminologists, who attribute the dramatic increase in crime between 1960 and 1980 to a permissive approach to child rearing that stressed self-expression instead of self-control.11
Tales of a New America Page 3