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A Symposium

To commemorate Commentary's fiftieth anniversary, the editors addressed the following statement and questions to a group of American intellectuals:

In the eyes of many observers, the United States, which in 1945 entered upon the postwar era confident in its democratic purposes and serene in the possession of a common culture, is now, fifty years later, moving toward balkanization or even breakdown. Pointing to different sorts of evidence—multiculturalism and/or racial polarization; the effects of unchecked immigration; increased economic and social stratification; distrust of authority; the dissolution of shared moral and religious values—such observers conclude in their various ways that our national project is unraveling.

Do you agree with this conclusion, in whole or in part? Has your own thinking changed in recent years on the question of the basic stability of American institutions?

We are now in the midst of a conservative resurgence, social and cultural as much as political, which arguably arose in response to the trends described above. In your view, is it making any headway toward arresting or reversing them? How would you assess its promise, in both the near and the longer term?

The responses—seventy-two in all—appear below in alphabetical order.

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Elliott Abrams

The test America faces in the coming decades is whether our democratic institutions are powerful enough to resist and reverse the destructive policies still being championed by a strange brew of elites.

Those elites are principally a mixture of liberal/Left politicians, members of the media and the academy, with reinforcements from the liberal churches, black leaders, the American Jewish establishment, and (intermittently) the judiciary. In their long march toward victory in remaking American culture, their successes have been great. The amazing proliferation of quota systems in employment and education, the advent of multiculturalism, and the terrible coarsening of social life in only 30 years all give testimony to what they have wrought. Even now, when it is clear to almost everyone that our welfare system and much of our public-education system are spectacular failures, when soaring illegitimacy and urban crime rates are a widely acknowledged scourge, no serious changes in the policies that contribute to these results have yet been achieved.

Pessimism about American society is therefore understandable. And yet, the other side of the coin is brighter: even after being told repeatedly since the mid-1960's that their traditional views of American society are ridiculous, repressive, and outmoded, most Americans still are not persuaded. While religion has for two decades been pushed increasingly to the margins of public and academic life and ridiculed in most of the media, America remains a country where the great majority of citizens attend church and believe in God. While the judiciary has, for the most part, lent itself to the assault on traditional values, Americans still believe that prayer is a good thing and that employment quotas and, for that matter, abortion on demand are bad ones. There is a genuine counterrevolution under way, fueled by the manifest failings of 50 years of liberal rule and by the generalized sense that public policy is weakening rather than strengthening the society.

Two cultures are now struggling for supremacy, but the rival pairs are neither C. P. Snow's scientific culture vs. literary culture nor the “Anglo” cultural tradition vs. a new multicultural and primarily Hispanic wave. The battle is between those who believe the government must tutor and discipline—must, indeed, reform and civilize—a society that is instinctively nativist, racist, and unenlightened, and those who believe current policies are corrupting the virtues that reside in the American people and the system of limited government under which the nation lived until the New Deal. What is most striking about those who belong to the first group is not their view of the national government as a tool or even their willingness to use government power as an instrument of coercion in their desire to remake American society. More significant is their belief that the underlying society is so terribly flawed as to require this radical reconstruction.

Since the Great Depression and with the enormous prestige of victory in World War II, the party of government has been more or less in charge, controlling Congress and the organs of our culture. It was not seriously tested until 1980, and even so it then survived the Reagan years almost intact. President Reagan refused to challenge it in critical areas—federal spending grew rapidly—and liberal control of Congress continued. The Bush and Clinton administrations saw a return to liberal normalcy, and it was argued that the Reagan elections had been anomalies or merely personal victories for the old actor. It turns out, of course, that the Reagan victories reflected a broad popular revulsion at the liberal critique of America and the attitudes and program associated with it. This is why George Bush won when he appeared to be Reagan III but lost when he seemed to desert the cause, and why every incumbent defeated in 1994 was a Democrat.

The reason for optimism is that 50 years of lecturing by their supposed betters have not persuaded the American people that the eternal verities of yesteryear—family, work, and faith, and the greatness of America—are instruments of repression. There is a new consensus forming that recognizes how much is lost when the government subsidizes illegitimacy, restricts religious activity, promotes radical views of male-female relationships, divides citizens according to race, or vigorously attempts to undermine the sense of a common history and culture. Both the size and power of government, and the ends it so often seeks, now meet resistance and criticism unthinkable 25 years ago.

What we are seeing is an end to the disjunction between the citizen acting as voter and the citizen acting in private life. As parents or children, neighbors or colleagues, employers or employees, Americans never lost respect for the “old” virtues. If the citizen as voter cast his ballot for liberal candidates, it was to deploy a safety net, expand opportunity, or fight injustice. But liberal government grew beyond these limited goals decades ago, and the gap between the virtues the citizen celebrated in private life and the goals he supported with his vote began to grow. Now it is too large, and the voter is using his ballot to insist that government reinforce rather than subvert the virtues he cherishes in private life.

Regaining lost ground will be most difficult, for it is much easier to damage society than to repair it. Even the strongest consensus in society and the largest majority in Washington cannot quickly fix broken families or schools, reduce urban crime, or lower the abortion rate, when it took decades to break down the restraints and undermine the social and moral standards that once prevented the spread of those pathologies. There will be many more Bill Clintons: candidates who prove that La Rochefoucauld was right in calling hypocrisy the tribute vice pays to virtue. But now that American society has begun to reassert its belief in the existence of vice and virtue alike, and in the worth of its own values, traditions, and achievements, there is reason to believe that the prospect for the country is a good one.

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Joseph Adelson

Let me warn the reader not to expect much in the way of prescience. I have a miserable record in foreseeing the future even in areas where I would seem to have the necessary knowledge and experience. One example is my myopia about the emergence of the drug culture, though I was in a sense present at the creation.

I had been friends with Timothy Leary in graduate school and had kept in touch with him in the years that followed. We met at a psychological convention in the early 1960's and in the course of a long conversation I learned that he was planning to go to Mexico to find and sample mushrooms which could induce hallucinations. He had experimented with them and felt they might be the path to spiritual salvation. Even then he imagined recruiting others to their use, filling their unmet religious needs through the communion with higher powers that these substances could provide. I nodded indulgently, smiled intently—another of Tim's enthusiasms, I thought, here today and gone tomorrow. I did not for a moment imagine that we were on the threshold of a leap into the widespread use of hallucinogens and other drugs.

Nor did I anticipate any of the other changes which were to come later in that decade. My academic specialty was adolescence, yet I did not foresee the arrival of the youth culture. I had taught at Bennington College, which attracted just those well-to-do, socially conscious, politically sophisticated young women who would a few years later help launch modern feminism, yet I could not at the time construe that they would ever venture from roles as wives and mothers, very narrowly defined.

Throughout this period I did intensive psychotherapy with clients who were to be the seedbed of the counterculture, yet I had not a clue that it would soon develop. Despite a lifelong association with higher education, I did not sense the imminent capture of the American university by the Left, even as it took place before my eyes; I preferred to believe that the faculties of science and engineering and medicine and business would resist the seizure and despoliation of the campus. And despite the fact that I wrote on and around the topic, I did not foresee the continuing decline of the nuclear family, or the growth of fatherlessness that David Blankenhorn has recently discussed, or the deficiencies in impulse control and superego function which would ensue.

You will note in these examples a perhaps incurable optimism; more precisely, an inability to imagine poor outcomes. The error that troubles me most was my misreading of the racial division in our country. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act led me to believe the country would soon settle into an acceptable degree of racial harmony. The racial turbulence that followed, as in Watts, was, I thought, a temporary matter: we would move ahead to the assimilation of blacks in a typically American way. I had in mind the pattern followed by earlier immigrant groups, above all, the Italians and Jews of my own childhood. The path would not necessarily be smooth—it had not been for us—but it would be steady. I simply could not imagine otherwise.

The first extra funds I had earned in my life were invested in a project for interracial housing. For reasons never quite made clear, it did not prosper, and was absorbed, at a considerable loss, into a more conventional real-estate investment trust. That incident now strikes me as emblematic in its belief that given money, opportunity, and good will, most social problems could be corrected. It is emblematic, too, uncomfortably so, in the picture it provides of the consummate liberal gesture, of benevolence de haut en bas.

Both the belief and the gesture address themselves to traditional racism—hating or despising or fearing blacks and other disadvantaged groups. Our current dilemma involves instead a tangle of deceptions and self-deceptions which corrupt public discourse.

Picture the scene: a group of university professors so committed to rigid intellectual honesty that they would not hesitate to destroy anyone mis-reporting or even substantially shading research data. They are gathered to choose the very best among the applicants to their highly selective graduate program. The files before them are a treasure trove of potential academic stars—GRE scores in the 98th percentile and above, grade-point averages near perfection, ga-ga letters of recommendation. Disputes arise about the niceties—yes, that 3.9 is a good GPA, but what about the B+ in organic chemistry?

Somewhat late in the day, the committee finds itself examining a group of applicants with passing but mediocre test scores and grades somewhat better than mediocre but far from outstanding, though with equally euphoric letters. They choose the best among these, though in only one or two cases is the best even close to those chosen initially. There is nevertheless a certain jauntiness in this discussion, a Panglossian happiness, shall we say, and reassurances are given that all those chosen will do quite well. But all will not do well. A few will, some will founder and disappear, and others will merely get by.

Most American institutions now have in place a system which violates the legitimate interests of the majority. Because it is immoral, we proclaim on all possible occasions that it is moral indeed. That was the theme of the latest public address given by my university's president, a man who was once an able professor of engineering and who has now become a speaker of just such platitudes. My president does not take the next step, though others do: if racial preferences are quintessentially moral, any effort against them is eo ipso evil, hence allowing any and all forms of retribution.

If you think this far-fetched, consider the following, reported in an article by Harold Johnson in National Review. A Democratic political leader says he is looking into the private lives of the two academics who wrote California's proposed amendment against racial and other preferences. He will find out if they have cheated on taxes, touched students inappropriately, and the like. “These two professors may have white shirts on now, but by the time we're done with them, they'll be pretty dirtied up.” An utterly shameful statement, uttered shamelessly, but when racial virtues must be protected, so it goes.

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Robert L. Bartley

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