Crisis of the Old Order - The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 - Review

National Review, Nov 5, 2001 by Michael Knox Beran

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, by Steven F. Hayward (Prima, 811 pp., $35)

The theme of this splendid work of history, the first of two volumes, is the corruption and at length the catastrophe of modern liberalism. It is also the story of the wilderness years of the man who eventually sacked the liberals' citadels, and composed their epitaph. The Age of Reagan opens in 1964, when Ronald Reagan was a faded actor who had recently been dumped by General Electric as its corporate spokesman. Hayward's book is less a chronicle of Reagan's rise over the next 16 years than a study of the conditions that made it possible.

Reagan's rhetoric and his charm were of course essential to his extraordinary ascent; but Hayward shows that they were less important than his insight into the wrong turn modern liberalism had taken. Classical liberalism-the liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln-was rooted in the promise of the individual citizen. It was rooted in his capacity for self-government, and his ability to realize his destiny by threading his own way through the emporia of a free society. During the course of the 20th century, however, classical liberalism gave way to a form of mandarin liberalism, to the belief that problems had grown too complicated to be mastered by private individuals; only experts in the service of the state were competent to solve them.

"For many years now," Reagan declared when he became California's governor in 1967, "you and I have been shushed like children and told that there are no simple answers to complex problems which are beyond our comprehension." The growing faith in the powers of what Reagan called an "intellectual elite more gifted than the rest of us" not only undermined an older form of American liberalism; just as insidious was the moral languor concealed beneath the elaborate theoretical solutions of the new liberalism. "The fetish of complexity," Reagan said, "the trick of making hard decisions harder to make-the art, finally, of rationalizing the non-decision, have made a ruin of foreign policy," and of domestic policy as well. To perplex a problem with endless studies, to stir up a cloud of statistical dust and dubious data, to confound the judgment of the ordinary citizen with unintelligible jargon and opaque acronyms-all of this tended to obscure the moral heart of the matter. "It's the complicated answer that's easy," Reagan used to say, "because it avoids facing the hard moral issues." Rejecting the baroque compromises of liberal mandarinism, Reagan argued that "there are simple answers-but there are no easy ones."

Hayward contrasts Reagan's challenge to the morbid intricacies of modern liberalism with the passivity of Lyndon Johnson. LBJ possessed, with all his imperfections and delinquencies, many sound instincts; but Hayward shows that those instincts rarely survived contact with the experts-the "kooks and sociologists," as LBJ called some of them-who surrounded him. Consider, for example, the Great Society's welfare programs, which Johnson hoped to prevent from degenerating into a system of handouts. "No doles," he emphatically declared. Nor would he subsidize the breakdown of the family: "They [the poor] want to just stay up there and breed and won't work and we have to feed them," Johnson groused to his deputy budget director, Elmer Staats. "I told you we don't want to take care of all these illegitimate kids and we want to make 'em get out there and go to work." But Johnson was unable to translate instinct into policy: In waging their war on poverty, the technicians of the Great Society drew not on the homely wisdom of their chief but on convoluted social theories that insisted that human behavior could be modified or "engineered" by mandarins. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it "the scholarship of Che Guevara," and complained of the effect of the "direct transmission" of untested "social science theory into governmental policy."

"The government," Moynihan said, "did not know what it was doing." The results bore him out: In the war on poverty, as Reagan later said, poverty won. The war in Vietnam was waged in much the same fashion. Johnson persuaded himself that the U.S. could prevail without incurring the expense of a conventional war, the kind of war that would jeopardize his ability to build the Great Society. A coterie of mandarins in the Pentagon, led by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, assisted Johnson in the perpetuation of this fantasy; they assured the president that he could dispense with orthodox tactics in the struggle to preserve the freedom of South Vietnam.

By applying the novel techniques of "graduated pressure," "strategic persuasion," and "flexible response," America could break Hanoi's will with a minimum of pain. "This is a different kind of war," a McNamara protege lectured the Joint Chiefs; in the Pentagon and the White House, discussions of military security began to sound, according to one observer, "more and more like seminars in game theory." McNamara himself disdained to refer to the North Vietnamese as "the enemy." The word no doubt seemed old-fashioned.