Doomsday for Democracy

TECHNICALLY, Daniel Patrick Moynihan still is a Harvard Professor. But he has spent about half of his ten years here on sabbatical, leaving his tenured seat in limbo for well-publicized stints in the Nixon White House and ambassadorial posts in India and the United Nations. Although the University is hardly averse to globe-trotting faculty (Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger '50 did not lose his Government Department seat until spring 1973, four years after he had joined the Nixon administration), Moynihan's insatiable penchant for applied government exhausted even Harvard's patience.

While Moynihan held onto his professorship by abandoning the U.N. in mid-winter, he's risking it again with his race for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat now held by James L. Buckley (R.-N.Y.). In fact, Moynihan will very likely be out one tenured chair in mid-September when the Empire State's liberal Democrats will split their primary votes among Rep. Bella S. Abzug, former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark and New York City Council president Paul O'Dwyer.

So when 15,000-plus people gathered in the Tercentenary Theater on the muggy afternoon of Commencement Day 1976, June 17, to hear Moynihan address the annual meeting of the Associated Harvard Alumni, they probably heard Pat Moynihan's parting shot to Harvard. Offering the domestic version of the doomsday-for-democracy spiel he perfected as U.N. ambassador, Moynihan theorized that America's "educated class" must take on the "challenge of reformation and reconstitution" to head off a "calamitous" fate at the hands of a young elite full of contempt for the liberal tradition of the West. The crowd--dominated by Harvard alumni, hardly the victims of the "liberal" system Moynihan was eulogizing--ate it up, especially when a handful of protesters perched on the steps of Widener briefly chanted "Racist Moynihan," confirming everyone's suspicion that, yes, Western democracy like the Roman empire is in its decline and fall.

I WOULD AGREE the speech was remarkable--not for its insightful vision into the problems of Western democracies like the United States, but for its condescension, alarmism and hack psychologizing conspicuously cloaked in a Kissingerian veil of scholarly objectivism. These may seem like unnecessarily--and for those who know me, uncharacteristically--bitter words. But I believe Moynihan was being either intellectually dishonest or arrogantly blind, two popular Cambridge mindsets that, once revealed, should be pilloried with all the venom of a congregation of offended Puritans. My anger is sharpened by the frightening prospect of Moynihan's taking a seat in the Senate, where he would have at least six years access to a national audience and higher governmental office. Imagine how the press will embrace this Harvard-professor-turned-politician, a Renaissance man for the people who follow People.

Examine how Moynihan argued his apocalyptic hypothesis. For one, he carefully ignored the substance of the counter-culture's ideal, in part by focussing snidely on the left's most visible and fickle wing, the "children of the rich." The academic-turned-politician also evasively classified the critique of the discontent within a broad framework of Western development, comparing the present to the late 1930s and 40s, periods in which, he claimed, intellectuals in the West were disaffected with "'bourgeois' values such as liberty and democracy." Thus the left's critique of the United States can remain merely a negative phenomenon, without any alternative vision for the future, and--because the protesters were supposedly a Western, not American, creation--without any real validity for this nation.

So Moynihan made no exploration of the future that the left envisions, a world in which men and women are not channeled to perform certain narrow, stereotypical roles, a world in which the natural environment is treated with respect, a world in which resources are allocated according to the principles of equality and justice. These may be naive dreams, but many people are quietly shaping their lives around them, disdaining standard goals to concentrate on changing their own values and those of individuals around them. But Moynihan can see only the scion of an upper-class family screaming through a bullhorn at a University Hall administrator, labeling that official a "running dog of imperialism."

Moynihan's pseudo-scholarly attack on the left on Commencement day grew radically more offensive as he offered contemporary society the couch and set into some armchair analysis. A few excerpts illustrate the profound insight of Moynihan's thinking: "I would suggest that a liberal culture does indeed succeed in breeding aggression out of its privileged class...I do not believe that the young elites of this moment who will explain away any act, howsoever monstrous, of Arab terrorists or New World dictatorships do so out of admiration. I believe they do so out of fear. And with this fear has come a profound new phenomenon, the ultimate in role reversal, the final betrayal of self. It is called identification with the aggressor. It arises from an overwhelming sense of helplessness when confronted with overwhelming power."

It's a challenge to dissect such a theory rationally; I can hardly find grounds for discourse. Moynihan's words strike me as the thoughts of a man unable to understand a radically different philosophy who is scurrying about, cooking up an outwardly sophisticated theory that resolves any self-doubts the criticism generated. Think back to the causes of the critical "young elite" (itself a phrase intended to put the left into the heirarchical world Moynihan feels comfortable in): Did they fear the "overwhelming power" of the Vietcong (who, Moynihan incorrectly says, were a "totalitarian regime...not many years back."). Or did they simply respect the right of the Vietnamese to choose their leaders and form of government and society without the interference of the United States? Did the left fear the MPLA in Angola or did they recognize the right of the Angolans to choose their own leaders? It is the Moynihans of this world who are afraid, who either bluntly or cunningly protect a stable status quo rather than recognizing that the covered principles of liberal democracy oblige support of the outsiders.

Indeed, Moynihan's cure for American society confirms this suspicion. He longingly quoted Harvard's 1876 class day orator, who spoke with "self assurance and resolve." Moynihan quoted the orator calling on the members of the educated class "to set themselves against the prevailing vulgarity that has become characteristic of American life: It is for them to endeavor to elevate the standard of public taste...to promote and foster...that true inward refinement which alone makes possible the higher social enjoyments that distinguish civilization from barbarism dressed up."

So, it can now be revealed that the solution to the West's problems is a more confident ruling class that can remake a world whose students have resolved "to do less for King and Country," words that reveal the extent of Moynihan's devotion to democracy. There is no point to looking for leadership from anyone besides the educated class, "for it would not work and it will not happen." Imagine what would have happened if the United States had not "failed in South East Asia, disgraced at its very center, shriveling at every perimeter."

I ENTERED HARVARD with the Class of 1976, but took a year off and won't graduate until June 1977. When graduation rolled around I expected a brief bout with nostalgia, especially on Commencement Day when my senior roommates marched through the Yard in their caps and gowns. But oddly enough the mood of the Commencement Week was alienating; it seemed like freshman week all over again, the best-forgotten days when we were all impressed with Harvard and took it seriously, when we felt like human beings of a higher order because here we were, mere freshmen, listening to Pat Moynihan in Sanders Theater speaking about Joseph Schumpeter and Lionel Trilling.

All the cynicism we had learned in the intervening years had evaporated, leaving no perspective on Harvard. My classmates were instant alumni, believing that Harvard does indeed stand for good manners and truth and the threatened freedoms of liberal democracy. Those with a higher vision had become the freaks; the inside belonged to Pat Moynihan and defenders of liberal democracy like the elderly woman who angrily mounted the steps of Widener after the AHA ceremony to try to knock down the protesters' bedsheet banner that read, "Moynihan Preaches Democracy But Supports Dictatorships."