King Mob

FOR 200 YEARS and more the United States has been generally free of what Europeans would call "Men of the Right." An amalgam of radical individualism and nativist Main Street values--anti-black, anti-foreign, fundamentalist--has historically passed as a unique American conservatism. Barry Goldwater and the Ku Klux Klan stand as separate archetypes, both backward-looking but emphasizing different elements of a preferred American past; the first upholding rugged and unfettered entrepeneurial skill in an age of strangulating bureaucracies, and the second a world of small-town community unperturbed by urban industrialization and its symbols.

By this standard, Bell and the Public Interest crowd--at least half of them past or present Harvard professors--seem mild. None of them so much as implies that Social Security should be made voluntary, labor unions broken up or every conceivable public project turned over to private ownership; nor are they hysterically anti-Communist. But taken together, these two volumes reveal the emergence of an American intellectual Right on the European model, basing its conservatism on a collective--rather than an individualist--understanding of society.

Many of these men were once Socialists, and their previous method, if not their conclusions, persists. Moreover, the Public Interest conservatives refuse to identify their cause with the status-anxious "little man," which Rightists from the late Tom Watson to George Wallace have attempted to do. Befitting high-level academics--Daniel Patrick Moynihan is among the contributors to "The American Commonwealth, 1976"--theirs is an elitist rightism. Like John Adams, the traditionalist of colonial days, they seem to have no greater fear than that of King Mob.

THEIR PHILOSOPHICAL goal, as Bell makes clear in his book, is the separation of the capitalist system of production, which the group thoroughly endorses, from the liberal theory of politics and economics--a theory which postulates absolute freedom and the pursuit of each individual "unit's" self-interest. In America no legitimate conservative theory has historically been able to accept one without the other. But Bell, particularly, locates the nation's present malaise--lack of faith in government, a sense of social purposelessness and even economic crisis--in a contradiction between the self-suppression of the individual in efficient work and the "hedonism" which characterizes leisure time and the consumption realm.

As long as America experienced massive and uninterrupted economic growth, Bell's argument implies, hedonistic self-interest could be bought off. There was enough surplus wealth created by the economic system that capitalists could enjoy dividends and workers pay raises; similarly, "special interests," like farmers and government workers, could have subsidies and increasing absolute shares of national income. In this way, hedonism, the villain of Bell's analysis, was defused as a political danger and displaced into the harmless arena of culture, which it has dominated since the late 19th century. The anti-capitalism of American avant-garde artists, writers, intellectuals and even Greenwich Village is a result of the individual's refusal to subordinate the myth of liberalism--the individual's total freedom--to the Protestant ethic of the unfree work-place.

For reasons having to do with foreign competition, the limits of growth, and the practical impossibility of raising the productivity of the growing white-collar sector of the economy, the days of massive economic growth are over, according to Bell. Bell and his colleagues fear that at this historical stage the public will run wild: Hateful of sacrifice for the public good, every interest group will demand its accustomed larger share of a non-expanding pie, causing disillusion, further inflation and possible class conflict (which translates into "chaos" for most of the Public Interest theorists). In an economy which can no longer afford to sate hedonism, the individualistic legacy of John Stuart Mill must be traded in for the approach of the principled conservatives, Burke and Tocqueville. Enlightened economic self-interest is no longer a sufficient rationale for the continuation of capitalism: the masses must now be provided with a new "liberal" philosophy justifying restraint in the national interest, lest a more extreme ideology of the Right or Left takes advantage of popular anger and destroys liberal freedoms and society altogether.

The rest of the Public Interest group is, on the whole, more frightened and frightening in their analyses than Bell. R. Nisbet decries the excess of democracy which has hamstrung government and, citing Tocqueville, identifies the current political threat as the "tyranny of the majority." He draws a distinction between public opinion and popular opinion, praising the former as something more than the mere "whole of a majority of actual, living voters." Valid democracy is "historic, tradition-anchored and 'corporate'." Sounding like a Prussian Junker, Nisbet, a genteel tenured member of the Columbia faculty, identifies perhaps his greatest fear for the future of his nation: ". . . the aggregate we call the mass or crowd, always oscillating between anarchic and military forms of despotism."

Samuel P. Huntington, in his essay--which is unbelievably titled "The Democratic Distemper"--fundamentally agrees with Nisbet, while putting forth a more historical analysis of the problem: In the 1960s Americans simply participated too much in the political process--this naturally gave rise to polarization (since we became concerned with single issues), which gave rise to popular disaffection (since our polarized opinions could not be accommodated by the government). The public has thus developed expectations which are impossible for the governing elites to satisfy. The solution, according to the author of the U.S. forced-draft urbanization program in Vietnam, entails a cutback on democratic decision-making in areas like universities where the "claims of expertise, seniority, experience and special talents" cancel out the "claims of democracy." Huntington also hopes that some measure of "apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups" will replace the activism of the '60s, making it possible for political leaders to force economic sacritices on workers at home while implementing a "strong" foreign policy free from the "indulgence" of popular prejudice.

Huntington's essay was rejected last year by the trilateral Commission--a group on America's future founded by David Rockefeller--for being too anti-democratic. The commission might have found Irving Kristol's article more to its liking. Kristol defends the existence of large corporations on the basis of Montesquieu's philosophic concerns: It is necessary to defend the citizenry from concentrating all power in the State, and the super corporation is only another institution providing for the decentralization of authority. The future of liberal democracy, says Kristol, is "intimately involved" with the present capitalist corporations' "prospects for survival."

Kristol also states an overriding theme among the Public Interest group: the dangers of populist paranoia and moralism, which suspects that powerful interests are constantly thwarting democratic will. This populism gives rise to "a rather infantile political utopianism," is often found on the pages of The New Yorker and is responsible (according to Robert Nisbet) for crimes as varied as the damaging disclosures about the CIA and the HEW's ban on single-sex classes.

The logical conclusion of all this is S.M. Lipset's piece, the most bizarre in the collection, which finds a peculiar American streak of moralism at fault in most political conflicts of this century--Joe McCarthy's witch-hunts, Vietnam demonstrators, Daniel Ellsberg and Nixon are examples of the perception of politics as "a struggle between good and evil forces rather than as a series of collective bargaining issues." Hopefully, Lipset writes, the two-party system will absorb and then compromise the moralistic passions of the present-day Left and Right--the worst since the early 20s--as the parties have done in the past. Lipset's position is that any type of organized political outrage--even if issuing from the horror of mass murder by one's government in Southeast Asia--makes public administration impossible. One cornerstone of the new "liberal" outlook, as Bell says, is that all issues must be negotiated: "Dissident pragmatism," even opportunism, must replace coherent and "ideological" opposition.

IT IS THE experience of the last ten years, largely, which seems to inform the Public Interest conservatives' viewpoint. As members of the government and influential social scientists, many of them constructed and supported the anti-poverty and welfare programs and the Vietnam policy which led to popular revulsion. More importantly, the government of the '60s was headed, for the first time, by conscious elitists--Bundy, the Rostows, McNamara, and Ball, many of whom the essayists in the Public Interest cite in their papers and served with on faculties. Rather than admit the failure of elitist political leadership cut off from vulgar opinion, the Public Interest scholars apparently wish to justify their original errors and retroactively combat the alienation they wrought. Not only was democracy wrong in the '60s, they tell us, it is also wrong now.