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 disciplinarians.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 not 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.
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.
These two intellectual currents—Keynesianism and pluralism—were easily combined. Just as Keynesianism legitimized the idea of activist government as a way to stabilize the economy, pluralism legitimized it as a way to stabilize politics. Both currents were ultimately propelled by the comforting notion that some people could be helped without imposing undue costs on others. Full employment in the economic sphere, coupled with the ongoing accommodation of interest groups in the political sphere, would ensure that everybody got his, by and by. Public issues were subtly transformed into group claims, all of which could eventually be satisfied. The logic of public action could be left vague. There was no finely honed and rigorous liberal public philosophy—no story about where we were going or who we were—because there seemed to be no need for one.
Postwar liberalism was doomed to excess. Its fullest flowering, in the 1960s and early 1970s, occurred in an anomalous moment of history during which the United States was particularly unconstrained, its economy buoyant, its power unequaled. This was a sheltered and rich environment, a cultural hothouse unlike anything America had experienced before or is likely ever to experience again. Any public philosophy so germinated would be enfeebled once it left the hothouse. Liberalism was no exception. As the economy began to slow in the 1970s and American preeminence came under challenge, it was no longer possible for some groups to benefit without the burden manifestly falling on others. But because liberal pluralism lacked any definition of the public good apart from the sum of group claims and any coherent principles for screening and balancing such demands, conflicts grew harsher, and claims more insistent.
By the late 1970s liberalism and, inevitably, the Democratic party appeared less the embodiment of a vision of solidarity and more a tangle of narrow appeals from labor unions, teachers, farmers, gays, Hispanics, blacks, Jews, the handicapped, the elderly, women—proudly separate, vocally self-aware and self-interested subgroups. Of course these demands were no more parochial than those from traditional Republican claimants—bankers, oil companies, insurance firms, doctors, and corporate bureaucrats, among others. But that is precisely the point. The traditional Democratic constituencies had previously represented “us,” the common people. The voices of unionized workers and farmers, of mechanics and common laborers, had been our voices. In the liberal parable, the bankers, industrialists, and special interests had been cast as “them,” admittedly useful but corruption-prone elites requiring constant surveillance lest they enrich themselves and exploit the common man.
Decades before, the Progressive historian Vernon L. Parrington had drawn the distinction:
From the first we have been divided into two main parties. Names and battle cries and strategies have changed repeatedly, but the broad party division has remained. On one side has been the party of the current aristocracy—of church, of gentry, of merchant, of slave holder, of manufacturer—and on the other the party of the commonality—of farmer, villager, small tradesman, mechanic, proletariat. The one has persistently sought to check and limit the popular power, to keep control of the government in the hands of the few in order to serve special interests, whereas the other has sought to augment the popular power, to make government more responsive to the will of the majority, to further the democratic rather than the republican ideal—let one discover this and new light is shed on our cultural tendencies.22
The decay of the community of the common man, the splintering of the Democratic party, made this distinction untenable. Each of the modern Democratic constituents appeared to be just another one of “them,” with no more legitimate claim on the nation than any other. Although they might garnish their demands with references to the common good, these obeisances were understood as mere formalities—appropriate attire for public occasions. None spoke of the social obligations attendant upon the receipt of public benefits. All seemed simply and cynically intent upon getting as much as they could.
By the late 1970s, accordingly, the liberal public philosophy conveyed no central principle to organize and rank political claims. There was no story to explain the new reality in which we found ourselves. Liberalism offered nothing but a feeble and unconvincing call to charity and conciliation, routinely discounted as window dressing. The central function of politics was to accommodate claims, rather than to forge ties of reciprocal responsibility. The best government was the one that gratified the greatest number of groups and enraged the fewest. “Responsiveness” became a cardinal public virtue.
Claims were routinely asserted as rights. Welfare recipients, criminal defendants, students, recent immigrants, blacks, and the elderly, among others, declared themselves entitled to specified benefits. Such demands—made in both formal legal proceedings and informal public argument—served to further dramatize that the claimants were different from everyone else. They were members of unique groups with special needs, which the majority must acknowledge and accommodate. Quite apart from whether the majority acceded to these claims (and this depended largely on which group demanded what), the mere act of claiming was itself divisive, further separating “them” from the rest of us, and thereby undermining the ideal of social solidarity. The language of entitlement suggested that the claimants owed nothing to the majority in return; because claimants had a presumptive right to what they were demanding, obligations all flowed in one direction, to “them” from the rest of us.
Liberal politicians, as a result, had no compass for determining what they stood for. There were no governing principles on which they could draw. They typically fell back on the only available sources of guidance: the claims put forward by leaders of the various groups that comprised the liberal constituency, and the results of polls which revealed in greater detail what the members of these groups wanted for themselves. The speeches and position papers of liberal politicians dutifully appealed to group sentiments; party platforms predictably promised something for every group in attendance.
This is not to suggest that conservative politics was any less influenced by the concerns of its constituents or that conservative groups were more restrained in asserting claims on the public. But at the least, by the end of the 1970s, there was coming to be a coherent conservative viewpoint that allowed such claims to be sifted and ranked. Even more importantly, conservative politicians were able to provide the public with a plausible story about why the nation would be better off—why “we” would benefit—from a policy of accommodating the claims of conservative constituencies. There was no such integrating philosophy on the other side. Fractious subgroups, each promoting its own agenda, were all that liberalism had to show to the citizenry.
The philosophical watershed, where conciliating “them” gave way to disciplining “them,” came with the administration of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic president who carried into policy many of the central precepts of the new conservative public philosophy. Carter understood the public’s growing disdain for government. He had campaigned as an outsider, against Washington, and what he termed “the complicated, confusing, overlapping, and wasteful government bureaucracy.” For Carter, the Rot at the Top was located along the Potomac.23 Similarly, the proliferation of asserted rights was perverting the Benevolent Community: Carter decried “fraud, waste, and abuse” in the burgeoning welfare system and sought its overhaul. (Carter’s abortive reform effort adopted the model of the negative income tax, first proposed by conservative economists in the Nixon administration.) Carter’s conservative tendencies became particularly open in the latter years of his administration. He appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and supported the Fed’s decision, in October 1979, to limit the nation’s money supply in order to combat inflation, even though interest rates and unemployment would quite predictably rise as a result. And it was Carter, and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who ended détente with the Soviets. The Mob at the Gates had become a more palpable threat. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Carter embargoed grain sales to the USSR. When the Soviets deployed SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, Carter moved to install comparable American weapons in Western Europe.
This renunciation of liberal conciliation was not a random shift in political fashion, nor was it inspired by delusion. The Soviets were acting more aggressive. Inflation was soaring, and unionized workers indeed were collecting pay gains outpacing productivity. Something was seriously amiss in the welfare system. Government regulations were growing costly and cumbersome. Jimmy Carter was a man of generally liberal instincts; so were the majority of his countrymen. But they adopted the conservative public philosophy because it seemed to offer insight into what was happening and what to do about it. The world was already divided into “us” and “them”—the Soviets and other foreigners, greedy workers, meddling bureaucrats, and the clamorous poor. The choice was to be either charitable and conciliatory toward them or assertive and tough. The first alternative was demonstrably not working. It was time to try the second. America’s metaphors shifted: We had to stop soft-pedaling and play hardball, better to be hard-nosed and hardheaded than soft-hearted and wishy-washy, time to take a hard line rather than be a soft touch. Absent any respectable alternative—without any new vision of social solidarity to replace that which liberalism had abandoned—the public’s perception began to be shaped by the conservative parable.