Reactionary Running Mates

Susan Faludi sounds like Pat Buchanan.

Virginia Postrel from the December 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

These ideas make for impassioned prose, but they’re lame as historical analysis. The very reason that cultural, economic, and social changes are so hard to control in a free society is that they emerge through the uncoordinated choices of millions of people. The world we live in is the product not of elite conspiracies but of dispersed, often highly personal, decisions.

The fatal flaw in the Faludi-Buchanan message becomes apparent when you consider the issue on which the two writers would seem most to disagree: the role of women in American life, and most particularly in the economy. Buchanan attributes the rise of working women to–what else?–lower tariffs. Once John Kennedy started reducing trade barriers, the ’50s family was doomed.

"The social costs?" writes Buchanan, "As workers’ wages stagnated and fell, wives and mothers entered the job market in record numbers to maintain the family standard of living. In 1960 fewer than one-fifth of women with children under the age of six were in the labor force; today almost two-thirds are.…The price is paid in falling birthrates and rising delinquency, in teenage drug abuse, alcohol abuse, promiscuity, illegitimacy, and abortions–and in the high divorce rate among working parents. The American family is paying a hellish price for the good things down at the mall." (Emphasis in the original.)

For Faludi, meanwhile, feminism has nothing to do with work. It is a form of rebellion against consumer culture. Feminists threw out their Clairol and ignored the siren’s song of snazzy appliances. Stiffed barely mentions women in the workplace, except to pooh-pooh the concerns of men in traditionally masculine occupations.

This emphasis is just plain weird–but telling. The feminism that most American women, and most American men, have embraced over the past three decades is the feminism that says women can and should fully participate in economic, social, cultural, and political life. It is not an ideal that rejects participation in the marketplace, either as consumers or as producers, but rather one that gives women an equal shot. It doesn’t declare women victims of their hair coloring. It simply encourages them to find the identity, hair and all, that suits them.

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."

So much for every human being having a valuable story. In fact, Faludi avoids testosterone-drenched Silicon Valley, a place of great purpose and little "ornament," for the same reason Buchanan never mentions steel minimills. Their vision of the good life as static and shaped by collective, political decisions depends on excluding any hint that there might be winners in a world that has changed, that those winners might be sympathetic, or that those changes might have come simply from people trying to do things better.

The "elite" Buchanan hates so much is not primarily a privileged hereditary class but rather Middle Americans, male and female, who want the freedom to be themselves and the opportunity to find a better life. The good old days were bad for many people: for free spirits who didn’t want to live through "service to an organization made up of equally anonymous men"; for people who valued creativity over playing by the rules; for people of the wrong background, color, or region; for people who wanted not "the world we grew up in" but a better world. The Buchanan-Faludi ticket is a ticket not to a happier, or even safer, future, but only to a future where somebody else is in control.

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