Peace Corpse

Supporters of federal power privatization have learned a lot from failures in the last Congress.

Nick Gillespie from the May 1997 issue

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As in the civil rights movement, liberals found themselves outflanked to their left: "From the New Left came an attack on the liberal welfare state that made conservative objections sound like quibbles,"writes Burner, reconstructing the argument. "Especially in the angriest days of Viet-nam, many radicals were unwilling to believe any good of the government....The welfare state, as its enemies on the left saw it, was a form of pacification, imperialism at home at a time of imperialist venture in Southeast Asia. A welfare check, in effect, equates to economic aid for a Vietnamese village; a housing project, to a fortified hamlet; city police, to the marines."Compounding this point of view was what Burner calls the New Left's "special perception"of the poor as ennobled by their poverty. "To say that poverty was being romanticized here by Americans who could afford to romanticize it is to say the obvious,"writes Burner.

While there is no doubt that elements of the counterculture romanticized the poor (one reason for the popularity of blue jeans), Burner is not particularly convincing that left-wing opposition to welfare played a major role in subverting the Great Society or the War on Poverty. Thirty years and billions of dollars later, many of the entitlements born of that era are still with us in one form or another; and, as Burner himself documents, most of the programs had flaws inherent in their design and implementation.

Burner suggests similar inherent problems with America's Vietnam policy. "Basic to an understanding of how and why a liberal administration moved the country to full engagement in Vietnam,"he writes, "is the ingrained liberal habit of combining action and restraint that allowed neither retreat nor decisive engagement. To retreat would have meant abandoning the logic of the Cold War that had been at the very core of liberal internationalism, while to advance too quickly would have signified abandoning liberal prudence."

Burner provocatively links "liberal internationalism"to "liberalism at home."Both, he suggests, were applications of a technocratic approach to governing, which fell prey to the lack of local knowledge inherent in a top-down structure. "Liberals,"he writes, "were...trapped within their own belief in expertise. In [Vietnam] the technical and military experts would surely find a way to reshape South Vietnam and defeat the communists."

That of course did not happen, in part because the government was never able to generate the sort of mass support necessary to prosecute the war. Even as the Johnson administration tried to cast the conflict in Cold War terms that stressed a monolithic, international communist menace that must be met at every turn, "relatively open access"to combat zones and hospitals for journalists, granted in part due to liberal convictions about freedom of the press, denied the government any monopoly on interpretation.

By 1968, Burner notes, about 700 correspondents were reporting on the war, "and many were finding plenty of stories unfavorable to the United States."Faced on the home front with a continually surging anti-war movement, the Johnson administration found itself on the horns of a similar dilemma: "Liberals had customarily defended the right of principled dissent, even when they did not approve the cause. Now that dissent had turned against the liberals' war."

For the most part, Burner is willing and able to recognize the ironies--many of them bitter for him--of such turnabouts. At times, however, he fails to recognize the larger implications of his analysis. For instance, in a discussion of German emigre scholar Herbert Marcuse, then "the country's most visible left academician,"Burner explores the reason for the extreme cast of much '60s thought and the growing distance between young radicals and the rest of America. Radicals, under the sway of Marcuse's "revolutionary dialectic of history,"were not just disrupting the status quo as a means to an end (as the early civil rights movement had been). Rather, the radicals were interested in "revolution" as an ongoing process through which consciousness constantly rethought and remade the world.

"Marcuse,"summarizes Burner, "contended that capitalism had succeeded in destroying among the people in general the very ability to think and act dialectically. It had done so, the argument suggests, by buying off the working class with a superficial prosperity that masked the meaninglessness of life...and rendered the population incapable of serious thought. It was therefore necessary for intellectually advanced revolutionary movements to take over the job of thinking."

In outlining such an argument, Burner indicates why dissent within and among groups could increasingly no longer be tolerated: Within such a framework, there is ultimately only one truth, only one righteous path. Those who disagree are at a lower level of understanding and must be educated upward.

Although Burner implies this is a radical rupture from mainstream liberalism, it actually replicates many of the worst elements of the modern, technocratic state--relying heavily on elite leadership and top-down control. The distance between the radicals and a rapidly expanding federal government that dictated policy in more and more areas of daily life may not have been as great as appeared at the time.

Burner's own left-liberalism allows for--perhaps creates--such blind spots. Throughout Making Peace with the 60s, he draws no distinction between public and private spheres and consistently conflates government action with society as a whole. In an epilogue, he romanticizes the New Deal as a time of national purpose, "a sense of a wider community," and laments the lack of such national coherence now. While such tics are bothersome, they make the book all the more convincing. Even as Burner laments the demise of big government liberalism, Making Peace with the 60s painstakingly details where and why things went wrong.