Money means Nothing in Kaus' Post-Liberal America

At the Democratic National Convention a few weeks ago, keynote speakers Bill Bradley, Zell Miller and Barbara Jordan painted vivid pictures of an America gone awry. The socioeconomic gap between white and Black and rich and poor has always been vast, but since 1981 it seems to have widened even more. Politicians who play on Americans'' increasing fears of race and class strife may very well win the election.

True, George Bush has done nothing to soothe tensions, and the exceptional public-opinion poll boost the convention gave to Bill Clinton suggests that Americans might once again embrace "affirmative government."

But what does that mean? According to Mickey Kaus '73, a senior editor of The New Republic and author of The End of Equality,New Deal-Great Society Democrats think that government, if it wants to erase inequality, must pursue large-scale income-redistribution policies. Apparently, these appeals keep a small, hard core of voters from breaking ranks.

As November draws near and Clinton's huge lead inevitably shrinks, the Arkansas governor may promise redistribution in order to hold on to his party's most faithful. And maybe that's not so bad. If you're a Democrat tired of losing all the time, you can conclude that whatever pulls in another million votes it fair game, right?

Well, not really. First of all, class warfare doesn't win elections. The Republican coalition of the wealthy and the suburban middle class outnumbers and out-participates the Democrats' volatile supporters of money equality.

More significantly, if you want to improve the sorry state of fin-de-siecle America, you can't just play around with the income bell curve. Even if tax-and-transfer policies actually effected a substantial reallocation of income (they don't) Kaus doubts that any social benefits would result.

Kaus divides egalitarian sentiment into two major threads. Money egalitarianism seeks primarily to level differences in income. The "Civic Liberal" partisans of social egalitarianism, by contrast, don't care who makes how much , as long as people treat each other with respect.

Social and money equality don't travel together. Kaus's data suggest that money equality increased greatly between around 1950 and 1973, and then slipped back slightly after 1973. Yet between 1950 and 1984 social equality nosedived.

Here Kaus invokes the stereotypical picture of a nation united by "Ozzie and Harriet" and World War II. By 1984 some amalgam of investment bankers and $1000 watches dominated the American culture scene. In spite of the money inequality of the 1950s, Kaus says (maybe a bit implausibly), Americans were happier then.

The main difference between the 1950s and the 1980s, Kaus concludes, lies in the size of the public sphere. The ever-decreasing frequency of interactions between individuals from different backgrounds has nearly destroyed social equality. More and more, Americans equate salary earned with intrinsic worth, and so a shrinking public sphere allows snobbery and status envy to geed upon income differences.

The End of Equality

by Mickey Kaus '73

Basic Books

$25.00

Kaus wants to convince Americans that money doesn't mean anything. As long as everyone has enough to eat, it doesn't matter that some people are rich and others aren't. Indeed, the free market and the work ethic that goes with it require this inventive. He concludes that we can resolve social inequality by reinventing the institutions that used to keep our culture from falling to pieces.

The blurbs on the back cover of The End of Equality ttry to paint Kaus' message as a radical departure from American political practice. Author Lawrence Mead goes so far as to name Kaus "the inventor of Civic Liberalism. "But despite the book-jacket bluster, Kaus' solution is as old as America itself. Alexis de Tocqueville considered strong civic ties to be the cornerstone of democracy, and the activists of the French Revolution even reorganized the calendar in order to squeeze class rivalry out of late-eighteenth-century society. Kaus' philosophy is nothing new.

But the real innovation of The End of Equality is that it follows time-honored civic liberalism to its logical ends. Kaus maintains that the first problem civic liberals must eliminate is the persistence of underclass. If the United States can somehow raise its poorest citizens' standard of living, other Americans won't be able to justify their flight from the public sphere. The perceived threat that the poorly-educated, crime-ridden underclass poses to the children of the wealthy and the middle class will disappear, and Americans will find their way back into public parks, public schools, public transportation and the like.

How do you rehabilitate the underclass? According to The End of Equality, you give up on welfare and instead guarantee subsistence-level jobs. Sidestepping economic issues entirely, the author mentions only the benefits of increased social equality. Everyone who wants to live will have to work. Without middle-class derision of "welfare mothers" and "welfare cheats," the ubiquity of work will bind Americans together.

The End of Equality suggests that other institutional changes will shore up the new public sphere. A healthcare system that puts the rich and poor together in the same doctors' offices and hospital rooms demonstrates an unequivocal refusal to value the lives of the rich more than those of the poor. Likewise a military draft. Although it provides and easy out for college-aged males who hesitate to face the risks and rigors of military service, the current All-Volunteer Force is the epitome of institutionalized social inequality; the poor boys get paid to get killed, and everyone else stays home. Earnest institutional changes Kaus implies, can and must rebuild society.

There's no guarantee the Kaus' forced Civic Liberalism will be any more successful than the class-blind Pruit-lgoe apartment complex. Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe built this vast concrete block, devoid of the tenements' decaying wood and the bourgeois curves, angles and bay windows. But people resented the ugly, socially-engineered building, and the housing authority that paid for the place ended up dynamiting it.

We might cynically suggest that a desire for social superiority--not just material well-being--motivates people, and Civic Liberalism is therefore doomed to failure. Maybe you just can't convince people that money doesn't matter.

Kaus' plan is no blueprint for the rebuilding of American society. The evidence he accepts is reasonable but not rigorous. too anecdotal, too thin. And like utopians of the past, he pessimistically critiques the old politics while messianically exalting the new.

But his proposals about how society ought to work are no less credible than anyone else's ideas. Clinton's still uneasy mix of money and civic liberalism remains untested, and certainly neither the old-style Democrats nor the Republicans offer better solutions. With no end to American's current malaise in sight, revitalizing common culture can't hurt.