What Happened to Liberalism?

The Unraveling of America. A History of Liberalism in the 1960s By Allen Matusow $42 pages, $22.95, Harper & Row

EVINEROMTHI vantage point of 1984, the 1960s hardly seem a part of history. The troubled decade that marked the rise of liberalism is far more vivid in today's political and cultural imagination than is, say, the decade that marked Eisenhower's ascendancy.

In general, politicians in 1984 define themselves by their support or opposition to the government policies of the '60s. And the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a man who had been too conservative even for the Republican Party in 1968, was heralded as the emergence of a modern conservatism in response to the liberalism of the '60s. Republican presidential candidates since 1932 had, in effect, all been running against Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 Reagan revitalized the party by running against John I. Kennedy '40, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the programs that constituted the Great Society.

So in 1984, policies nearly a generation old are fiercely contested political issues, and, as a result, one might expect any account of the Great Society to be resolutely partisan. But that is exactly the obstacle which Allen Matusow overcomes so impressively in his history of liberalism in the '60s.

This gracefully written and thoroughly researched book reads very much like a tragedy. It is the tale of well-intentioned progressives whose attempts at real reform foundered because of their own ignorance of economic realities, the limits of conventional political action, and the challenge from radical movements strengthened, ironically, by the hesistant reform.

Matusow is a liberal, perhaps a disillusioned one. He believes that economic inequality in the face of tremendous prosperity results in a less than great society an assumption that will, no doubt, irritate many conservatives. But he goes far beyond the widespread and simple view that the Great Society faltered and eventually disintegrated because of the increasing economic drain of the Vietnam war. The war's effects, both economic and social, cannot be discounted, but Matusow emerges from the partisan fog to reveal the contradictions and tensions within the Great Society programs.

John Kennedy's portrayal here is far different from the general tone of last year's tributes. In the move towards liberalism in the Democratic party, Kennedy was actually more of a cautious follower than the courageous leader his media image implied. With the liberal intellectuals who dominated the party in 1959, in fact, Kennedy was on shaky ground. The young senator had, as a congressman in 1949, claimed that pro-Communists were directing America's Far Eastern policy. He was referring to liberal scholars at a number of universities, including Harvard Liberal intellectuals were further reputed by the affection the entire Kennedy family had shown for Senator Joe McCarthy.

But Kennedy was of course, a brilliant politician and media manipulator. And he knew that he needed the support of liberal intellectuals, the core of the party, if he were to become president. So Kennedy curried the favor of academies like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38 and John Kenneth Galbraith; their activist, anti-Communist stance began to weave its way into his campaing speeches. Kennedy gambled by casting himself as the civil rights candidate. With Lyndon Johnson as his running mate--to reassure Southern white voters--Kennedy slipped by in November with a plurality of 118.550 votes.

Kennedy's 1000 days in office would be a halting struggle to implement liberal ideas. Kennedy would not take the lead he had promised on Civil Rights, for he feared his Black-white coalition in the South would descend into turmoil. But finally, when turmoil did erupt, he would be forced to take action, it had become politically acceptable to advocate slow social change in the South.

Under the influence of economists like Galbraith and Paul Samuelson '38, Kennedy, who was an "economic illiterate," came to accept and advocate Keynesian ideas of deficit spending and increased government control of the economy. In a contentious dispute with the steel industry in 1962, Kennedy come to the conclusion that businessmen were "sons of Bitches" and that he was going to implement Keynesian tax policies, which he figured would stimulate growth, "whether or not business thought it was good."

It was ironic, Matusow writes, "that the administration begun by John F. Kennedy should have become the sponsor of liberal reform...for he was transparently a conventional politician of conservative inclination. But Kennedy was also a politician keenly sensitive to shifts in the political climate, and that climate altered perceptibly during his years in the White House. Diminishing obsession with the Cold War permitted intellectuals to look critically, at their own country once again. The era's affluence spawned both social optimism and the revenues to pay for modest new welfare measures. The civil rights movement touched the nation's conscience and illuminated the squalid underside of American life.

ALTHOUGH MATUSOW does not specifically address the point, Kennedy's experience reflected both the limitations and the strengths of liberalism in the period. The attempt at reform was genuine, but the execution was conventional and doomed to failure Kennedy's most idealistic programs, shepherded through Congress by Lyndon Johnson in the mid-'60s, couldn't overcome the status quo.

Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, only placed public funds in the pockets of health care professionals and did not appreciably raise the quality of medicine for the poor and the elderly. Urban renewal, as it turned out, did not eliminate slums. "It only relocated them."

The problems were caused not only be entrenched interests which stood to lose in the new programs, but also by the lack of political clout wielded by the poor whom the programs intended to aid. Matusow describes one program, designed by a maverick friend of Robert F. Kennedy '48, David Hackett, which emphasized community control of development and political action. It was the one program in the Great Society that could be deemed radical: "Other Great Society programs sought reform by appeasing institutions; community action would seek to reform institutions by empowering the poor."

Matusow's description of this program's ultimate failure provides a telling critique of the idealistic and perhaps unrealistic hope some had placed in the federal government.

Matusow recounts the decline of the Great Society through poor management and escalation of the Vietnam ment and the escalation of the Vietnam count of the counterculture which grew in the late '60s. He sees fundamental flaws there as well. Students for a Democratic Socity, the Yippies, the Black Panthers--all went through periods of romance with Third World revolutionism, and then turned to guerilla tactics, reinforcing their isolation from the American mainstream.

Nothing seemed to symbolize the disarray and divisiveness more than the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Bloody battles erupted in the streets between brutal police and young radicals, and the party nominated Hubert Humphrey, who privately was a critic of the war but who remained the public heir to Johnson's policies.

Liberalism had entered the '60s with soaring hopes and unbridled confidence; but its policies had only led to the "unraveling" of America. What went wrong? This question is still open to debate. In Matusow's view, economists who misjudged the effect of higher taxes are partially to blame:

By inducing less work and less investment, more drastic income redistribution would result in less economic growth. Less growth would mean fewer jobs and a slower rise in living standards, important to poor people above all. It was indeed a hard world when redistribution, which alone could reduce the extent of poverty, might in the long run hurt the poor.

And this dilemma was compounded by the establishment's successful attempt to thwart the empowerment of the poor.

THESE PROBLEMS are still with us. The income gap between Blacks and whites is the same as it was 20 years ago. Integration, especially in the North, is still a troublesome issue. This illuminating book has much to say about why liberalism failed and America turned to Ronald Reagan. But the old problematic questions remain, and unhappily, answers and solutions still seem distant.