They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1996 by James Fallows

E.J. Dionne Jr. Simon & Schuster, $24 By James Fallows One year ago the most prominent Republican spokesmen were Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, each of whom carried the message that government was inherently bad. Now the party's nominee is Bob Dole, its most vigorous stump orator is Pat Buchanan, and its dreamed-of savior is Colin Powell. In different ways, each of these men conveys the message that government has a necessary and even beneficial role. Dole has devoted his whole working life to legislative deal-making; Buchanan urges that the federal government protect Americans from foreign products and immigrants; Colin Powell worked in and ultimately led the nation's largest public bureaucracy. As part of the military's recovery from Vietnam to Desert Storm, Powell illustrates the difference between a branch of government run poorly and one run well, and how a government-imposed change in rules--desegregation and then affirmative-action in the military--can create new opportunities for genuinely talented individuals.

This shift in Republican symbolism may be an early confirmation of the trend that E.J. Dionne predicts in They Only Look Dead, which was completed last year while Gingrich, Limbaugh, Dick Armey, and Phil Gramm were still riding high. (Disclosure: I have known Dionne for years.) The book's argument, in essence, is that today's Republicans have fundamentally misread Americans' real attitudes toward government. Americans say they fear, mistrust, and resent government, especially the federal government. But this is nothing new. With the rare exception of the mid-1930s through the mid-1960s, when the federal government seemed the bulwark against world depression, the Nazis, and the Soviet Union, Americans have almost always said they felt this way. Yet even as they complain about federal power, they have relied on it heavily, for functions ranging from building canals and highways to providing medical care for retirees.

Today's Republicans, Dionne says, have made the mistake of pushing an abstraction--America's theoretical hatred of government--much further than people, in reality, want it to go. "The new conservatism will fail," Dionne concludes, " ... because it seeks to define away almost all the problems that Americans want politicians to grapple with." The first sign that the Republicans had overreached came with their sweeping proposals, now muted, to scale back environmental regulations. Dionne argues that the faith in unregulated markets and "devolved" government symbolized by the Contract With America, is out of sync with the problems on the minds of American voters.

In the first part of his book Dionne outlines those problems, calling them the "four crises" of modem political life. They are: an economic crisis, marked by global capitalism and a widening wealth gap; a political crisis, with both parties failing repeatedly to deal with obvious public problems from welfare to schools; a moral crisis, mainly involving pressures on family structure; and a foreign-policy crisis, because America has not yet figured out its international role.

Having laid out these problems in a competent if not ground-breaking way, Dionne then spends 200 pages explaining in detail why the Republicans--torn by conflicts well illustrated in this year's primaries--and the Democrats--who have struggled to seem more than a convention of interest groups--have had trouble dealing with them.

I see these chapters as mainly a warm-up to the most original and valuable part of his book, a closing essay on how liberalism should reconceive itself to match its message with the times. Dionne uses the term "progressivism" to describe the political movement of the future, but he is not just trying to squirm away from the unpopular word "liberal." Instead he argues that today's political landscape greatly resembles the circumstances that brought the original Progressives to power a century ago. The strongest similarity is the widespread sense that the unregulated market is placing stress on individuals, families, and even the natural environment in ways that only a central rule-maker--that is, the federal government--can offset.

Dionne makes a negative case for the inevitable rise of new-progressive solutions, which is that the conservative strategy "has been tried before and found wanting" (his italics). "The new laissez-faire," he explains, "is simply Gilded Age conservatism dressed up in the finery of a high-tech age." But he also makes a positive argument, which comes across as original and even inspiring. He rebuts the contention of many Republicans that there is a difference only of degree, not of basic nature or purpose, between democratic self-government and a totalitarian regime. "Between our New Deals and New Frontiers and Great Societies," Dick Armey has written, " ... you will find, with a difference only in power and nerve, the same sort of person who gave the world its Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward--the Soviet and Chinese counterparts." Dionne replies that, at its best in American history, government has been a tool not of more oppression but of more liberty. This has meant, he says, "the use of government to give men and women the tools needed for positive liberty, beginning with free elementary and secondary education and moving in the Depression and postwar era to Social Security, unemployment compensation, and access to college and to health insurance."