Reactionary Running Mates - Susan Faludi and Pat Buchanan

Reason, Dec, 1999 by Virginia Postrel

The feminism that most Americans embrace (while often rejecting that label) is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for women as well as men. Women went into the workforce in part to make money for their families, particularly in the inflation-ravaged 1970s, but also to address their own desires for stimulation, independence, dignity, and, yes, personal consumption.

The social and economic changes that followed were a product of those myriad, dispersed, undirected personal choices. "Nobody knows who is in charge" because no one is, in fact, in charge. The dynamism that Faludi and Buchanan oppose comes from the unplanned pursuit of happiness - the personal search, by trial and error, for better ways of living.

If everything was wonderful in the good old days, the feminist story makes no sense. Women should have been happy with the world as it was. They might have rebelled against advertising, Faludi-style, simply by buying less stuff. They didn't have to go to work and buy even more.

Similarly, if everything was wonderful in the good old days of anonymous corporate cogs, nobody would have bought The Organization Man, let alone In Search of Excellence. There would have been no late-'70s enthusiasm for "entrepreneurship," extending to the present day. There would have been no stories about the rage of the depersonalized, alienated factory worker, the bored and angry man on the assembly line. Faludi and Buchanan are both old enough to remember a time when factory work was portrayed as hellish subjugation or mind-numbing routine, not the stuff of nostalgia.

The static world of postwar ideals changed partly because of"outside" pressures - from foreign competition, from upstart companies, from social critics who hit a nerve - and partly because it was in many ways to many people unsatisfactory. Today, Buchanan acts as though only grueling physical labor, preferably in a noisy factory, is valuable and real. Anything else - selling photocopiers, managing health insurance claims, delivering packages, answering phone banks, providing emergency medicine, remodeling houses, repairing computers - anything with a modicum of independence, a clean office environment, ongoing public contact, or technical requirements is no damned good. The Middle Americans who hold those jobs are not his people.

Buchanan's anti-elitism excludes most Americans. So does Faludi's. She tries to justify her focus on the dysfunctional fringe of American life by declaring these outliers indicative of the future mainstream. "Every human being who has lived a life has something important to say," she told the Chicago Sun-Times. Every human being, that is, who fits the story Susan Faludi wants to tell.

In an interview with The Gazette in Montreal, she encountered the inevitable question about why Silicon Valley has no place in her book. Isn't it full of men? "I suppose I could have done a chapter on the perils of basing manhood on being an Internet whiz kid," she said. "It's hardly the same experience as learning something that's been handed down, a feeling that you're contributing to a purpose."