1. News is a story of crisis and emergency response.
The aftermath of a grisly multiple murder on a Long Island commuter train overshadows major national events. In keeping with the crisis theme, the story focuses not on the pro forma arraignment that was the day's main institutional event but on the threatening racial anger that apparently motivated the killer. The killer's note, in effect a press release describing his motives and seeking vindication, was disclosed by law-enforcement officials evidently persuaded that the note would vilify the killer, boost the odds of his conviction, and make them look good in the bargain. The story's focus on actions taken by newsmakers to turn public attention to private advantage is typical of the genre, in which fabricated events usually displace real ones.
2. News represents even routine institutional events as crises.
A technical financial study of the Clinton health plan is assimilated to the news genre's crisis format. This is done primarily by giving the story a high-ranking, front-page location, thereby endowing it with urgency and magnitude, and by focusing on a single aspect of the event that has strongly positive or negative implications for the community. In this instance, a study that appears to have been equally critical of and favorable to the Clinton plan is presented as mainly favorable. This emphasis, however, didn't persuade the editing staff, which wrote a headline expressing the opposite view of the report's central significance.
3. The news story is occasioned by an official proposal, action, or statement, which is reported largely on the newsmaker's terms.
"Xerox announced" is the operative action here. The news story's ironically objective narrative voice prevents the reporter from describing the event on his own authority, and, as in this story, often leads him to adopt the specific words as well as general point of the announcement. Thus, the Time's headline and lead paragraph adopt the company's self-serving, euphemistic way of describing layoffs as "sharply cutting back their payrolls in an effort to become more efficient and improve profits."
4. The news story validates the newsmaker propaganda built into the fabrication it's about.
The video game manufacturers' announcement of an undefined and voluntary product-rating system, to be implemented sometime in the future, was meant to give the impression that government regulation of video-game content isn't necessary and that the industry is handling concerns about violent and sexual content by itself. This news report is replete with contrasting views and written with an astringent neutrality (as most of the stories on this front page are not), yet merely by virtue of focusing on the industry's fabrication, it reinforces the anti-regulation cause.
5. Some news stories don't fit the crisis-and-emergency-response mold.
Here, reporter Steven Erlanger got free of the usual formats and themes, spent some time observing and interviewing in Tomsk, and wrote a story that simply reported what he learned in his own voice and on his own authority. The result is a fascinating picture of change and continuity in Russian politics that is utterly free of the distortions engendered by the preconceptions of the news genre and its related dependency on newsmakers.
The post Reading Between the Lines appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>News isn't just any account of what happened yesterday. It's a story, with characters, action, plot, points of view, and dramatic closure. In particular, it's a story about crisis and emergency response—about the waxing and waning of urgent danger to the community and about the actions of responsible officials to cope. Thus, newsmakers in search of publicity and journalists in search of news don't converge on just any sort of news event. They enact, select, and narrate events in the image of the genre's overarching drama of urgent public danger. In other words, they translate themselves and their projects into the language and theater of crisis.
In some circumstances, this translation involves little or no change. When a real crisis is at hand and people are taking real steps to cope with it, the focus on crisis and emergency response simply means that the media faithfully reflect what is actually happening.
But the news genre insists that crises and emergency responses are taking place every day and everywhere. As newsmakers and journalists adapt the news story's preconception of ordinary events as crises and the front page's preconception of ordinary days as times of great excitement and historical consequence, the actions they undertake and the stories they tell become fabrications. The news stops representing the real world and begins to falsify the real world. The transaction between newsmaker and journalist degenerates into a joint exercise in manipulation and exploitation.
The newsmakers and journalists involved are more or less aware of the falseness of what they're up to. However, disclosing that falseness would undermine the benefits they're seeking from the news process. Newsmakers are looking for public approval and support. Telling the audience that they're playacting for the press wouldn't exactly serve their purpose. Journalists present themselves to the public as objective observers and reporters of the real world. Disclosing the fact that they're covering fabrications as news events would destroy their authority with readers.
The word lying is harsh, but it's the correct term for the behaviors we are talking about here. A lie is defined as a misrepresentation of one's state of mind or belief as to what is authentic and true. When people script and enact events and simulate sentiments for the media's consumption, they meet the simple dictionary test of misrepresentation. When journalists present these made-for-media impersonations as authentic news, they also meet that dictionary test. Journalists are almost always aware of what newsmakers and sources are really up to; it rarely happens that they are completely taken in by the fabrications.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, I had better say immediately that I am not talking here about the corruptions of truth and history that take place when journalists and newsmakers break the rules and falsify facts. I am talking about what happens when people follow the rules, when the facts are right and the relevant people have been contacted and the story has been told straight. I am arguing that in such circumstances, officials and journalists are usually lying. They're pretending that the events they're enacting and narrating are bona-fide actions, whereas in fact most news events and stories are prepared performances.
The following story, in my opinion one of the best and most important news reports to appear in America in the second half of the 20th century, is a good example of the way in which the news genre invites and validates dishonest behavior and thereby turns public life into a farrago of manipulative fictions. It appeared on the front page of The New York Times on December 4, 1964.
This is, of course, a magnificent piece of reporting and newswriting about an event that was as electrifying as it was consequential. Three decades later, the story still brings back memories (for those of us of a certain age), and reading it with the advantage of hindsight, one is struck by the prescience with which the story identifies the whole complex pattern of the campus protest and student radicalism of the '60s in its first major eruption. Nevertheless, this story perfectly exemplifies the way in which the news business makes journalism an instrument of lying and manipulation.
On the surface, to be sure, the story is a monument to facticity. This is a piece of writing that at all times is trying very hard to persuade the reader that it is a truthful, reliable, accurate report of what happened at Berkeley that fateful December day. Virtually every statement in the text is a statement of unambiguous fact. With a handful of exceptions, every statement apparently derives from the reporter's personal visual observation. The rest come from official texts put out by individuals or organizations or from earlier newspaper accounts.
The facts presented in this story are not only true, they are obviously true. Observation can be careful or cursory; it can detect small or gross distinctions; it can be in fine or rough focus; it may discern minute or broad characteristics. This story reflects a method of cursory observation in rough focus that seeks only the gross characteristics of visible physical particulars. These are statements of fact about matters that it's particularly easy to be right about, and particularly hard to be mistaken about.
This may be seen most clearly in the vocabulary employed in the story. Nearly all the words used are in widespread popular usage; they are relatively few and recur fairly often; and most of them denote tangible things or qualities. Moreover, these words are not highly specific. Thus, people who are enrolled to study at the University of California are invariably described only as students, never as graduate students or undergraduates, juniors or seniors, premed students or electrical engineering students. Similarly, people who teach at the university are always faculty members and not scholars, researchers, teaching assistants, epidemiologists, or anything else. The crudeness of the reporter's lexicon makes the story particularly easy to accept as true, since an observer is less likely to err in identifying a student than he is in identifying a graduate student or nontenured associate professor or research scholar.
The story also invites us to accept as true and precise its account of the events by narrating them in a highly impersonal voice. Although the text was in fact reported and written by a human being, he never speaks in the first person or expresses his own feelings. The prose does not evaluate or qualify. By withholding the subjective aspect of the writer-event encounter, the story is telling us that it was written by a person with an intense commitment to factual reporting and the self-discipline to bring it off. It is inviting us to trust this man. (It is also saying, somewhat inconsistently, that the events at Berkeley were so dramatic and unforgettable that they require no elaboration or rhetorical embroidery, no direct writer-to-reader communications, for the entire episode to be intelligible and compelling to the reader.)
A small indication of the impersonality of this authorial voice is to be found in the scarcity of adjectives in the story—only some 10 percent of the words are adjectives. And almost all of these adjectives in this text denote number, sequence, location, or some other objective characteristic of the noun they modify.
A further element of impersonality is provided by the story's insistently chaotic structure. As one reads the story through, the subject changes no fewer than 15 times; in only three instances are there five or more successive paragraphs treating the same general subject without interruption, and the average number of successive paragraphs on the same subject is approximately three. The impression created is that the story is a more or less random list of facts about actions, with little or no interpretation or other input from the journalist.
It isn't so, of course. The news story's rhetoric of objectivity is just that, a rhetoric, a set of stylistic devices for creating an impression that, in the case of this news report, is sharply at odds with the reality. This is no random bunch of facts. It's a story, an integrated narrative whole that possesses all the attributes classically identified by Aristotle in the Poetics as fundamentals of drama. There's action (for instance, the arrests), rhetoric (e.g., the deputies' acid comments about "sore rumps"), spectacle, character, plot reversals, and closure.
This was a story about a community in crisis. This feature of the story is perhaps most importantly and obviously conveyed by the fact that it appeared on the front page, was summarized by a banner headline spreading across four columns, and was allowed to run to over 2,000 words, very long by the standards of a daily newspaper. The urgent, danger-laden, consequence-fraught nature of these events is further evoked by the ironic sparseness and impersonality of the narrative voice—these events are so important they speak for themselves, the story suggests.
The sense of emergency is also conveyed by the way in which the events themselves are subordinated to some unnamed, superseding, larger concern. Thus, the second paragraph describes the arrests as a subordinate element of the larger, overarching enterprise of "removing demonstrators who took possession of the administration building on the campus last night."
By the same token, the actual offenses for which the demonstrators were put under arrest (trespass and unlawful assembly) are mentioned in passing as a kind of afterthought, halfway through the story. By contrast, the political issues raised by or over the arrests—the FSM's charge that law-enforcement officers had brutalized the demonstrators, the faculty's demand that police be removed from the campus, the governor's insistence that the demonstration had been an exercise in anarchy—are described explicitly and specifically in the opening paragraphs.
Notwithstanding all this, the story lies. It tells a lie; it is a lie.
The lie is the story's implication that the events are unself-conscious and authentic, and that the journalist is an uninvolved observer whose presence and interest doesn't affect the newsmakers' behavior. Both of these implications are untrue.
The presence of the journalist, with his crisis-and-emergency-response concept of news and his big audience, greatly affects the newsmakers. Each newsmaker is highly self-conscious, and his actions are carefully tailored to attract the media's attention and to advance his purposes in the public-policy arena. The journalist and the newsmaker both know all this. Yet both pretend not to know it. As a result, the journalist and newsmaker more or less knowingly misrepresent both the event and their roles in the event.
Take the FSM. As the story explains, it was dominated by liberal and leftist activist groups recently energized by the civil rights struggle in the South. Returning to Berkeley after their Mississippi summer, some of the people who were soon to become leaders of the FSM began applying to the university perspectives and tactics they'd learned in the crusade for black equality. As the story reports, they began to confront the university administration over its restrictions on their political activism.
These confrontations were both real and symbolic. They were meant to induce the university to relax or eliminate its prohibitions against on-campus activism. Alternatively, they were meant to elicit official resistance to make the point that, like Northern society as a whole, the U.C. system, contrary to appearances, was an illiberal, conservative, and repressive regime.
Thus, even if the confrontations didn't force the university to back down on the rules issue, they would, in the catch phrase of the day, raise the consciousness of the community, winning new converts to their cause and shifting the center of gravity of public opinion in their direction. For either of these outcomes to materialize, all the FSM needed to do was stage confrontations and get publicity. From such a combination, they felt sure they would emerge big winners.
So when the FSM staged the sit-in in Sproul Hall or, after the bust, called for a student strike to shut down the university in protest over the arrests, they were engaged in a highly self-conscious strategy of political action and political manipulation. It was a strategy, in effect, of conceiving, staging, and arranging to derive political benefit from news stories. For it to work, all that was really needed was for the media to cover these actions on their own terms and thereby define them as real events. With the validation and outreach such coverage would provide, the FSM's program would move forward.
The FSM's strategies and tactics would fail, however, if they were ignored, or if the news stories covering them decoded and deconstructed the actions as I've done in the paragraphs just above. Stories reporting that the FSM was staging events designed to manipulate others in various ways were likely to harm the FSM's cause. Such stories would invalidate the ploys, draw attention to the manipulative intentions and approaches inspiring them, and discourage people from engaging in the reflexive responses the FSM was hoping its actions would stimulate them to engage in.
The Times dispatch from Berkeley covered the demonstration and student strike on the FSM's terms. Except for the statements by Mario Savio and Arthur Goldberg exulting in the authorities' repressive actions—which, as given, are bewildering and cry out in vain for further explanation along the lines of the analysis above—the story reports events in a way that strongly implies that they were unself-conscious, unmanipulative, authentic. It thereby validates the FSM's made-for-media lie.
And since the reporter clearly knew a lot about this manipulative aspect of the day's events, the Times is involved in a lie of its own, or, more precisely, two such lies. The first lie consisted of all the statements that presented the ostensible, public version of the FSM's actions without indicating the existence of the other dimension. The second lie was the Times's implied assertion that it was being neutral and dispassionate in giving an objective report of the day's events, when in fact the reporter was well aware that the FSM was engaging in a made-for-media propaganda action that would achieve its effect by being covered by the news media as an unself-conscious, authentic public event.
The same analysis applies to the other major actors at Berkeley. The Times was lying about their actions, too, in precisely the same way.
Pat Brown, the governor who ordered the law-enforcement action to arrest and remove the demonstrators, was also engaging in actions that were meant to define a kind of dramatic propaganda against the activists of the FSM and in favor of centrists and establishmentarians whom the FSM was trying to discredit. A center-leaning liberal, Brown at the time was looking anxiously over his shoulder at a conservative movie star and actors'-union leader named Ronald Reagan, who was then emerging as a right-wing challenger for the governor's office and who naturally took a very hard line against the FSM.
In ordering the police action against the sit-in, then, Brown was not only enforcing the law and seeking to reestablish order at the university, he was also trying to discredit the FSM and to forestall the potential criticism and challenge of Ronald Reagan. In other words, he was taking actions designed to manipulate public perceptions and actions in his favor merely by virtue of being covered as authentic actions. He was trying to demystify the left-wing adversaries of university-life-as-usual who were pushing the FSM to confront and discredit the university as a symbol of the larger society. He was trying to raise conservative consciousness by his actions. By failing to cover this aspect of the governor's action, which of course was well known to the reporter, the Times knowingly misrepresented it, thereby validating the governor's manipulative pseudo-actions as much as it was validating the FSM's actions.
The analysis could be carried over to other actors—the university administrators, the faculty, the police departments, and so on. The news story gave each a stage on which to enact a propaganda play designed to manipulate appearances and the public, secure in the knowledge that the story wouldn't decode, deconstruct, or otherwise undermine the performance. The news story thereby gave each an opportunity to turn public attention to private advantage by activating constitutional government's emergency powers in his own interest.
This subtle and complicated mendacity is a product, ultimately, of the ironic voice in which the news story is narrated. I use the word irony here in its classical sense of disguise and inversion, by which the narrator pretends to a point of view on the material under discussion different from the one he actually holds and by which he counts on the reader to make the correction and arrive at the correct understanding of his real meaning. A central purpose of irony is to create emphasis, and through the reader's active involvement in construing meaning, intensify the communion achieved by an act of communication. Irony is what is in play when one turns to a friend who has just come in drenched and miserable from an intolerably stormy day and asks, Nice weather, huh? The understatement and misdirection, in the context of the obvious fact that the weather isn't nice, are ways of conveying sympathy for his experience and distaste for the weather without being overblown.
The news story tells its yarn in a voice that pretends not to be telling a yarn, merely reciting a list of facts. In fact, of course, what it tells is a story; the pose of objectivity is just a means of encouraging the reader to attend to and accept the story. The voice intensifies meaning, reinforces the particular story's construction of events, screens out discrepant material that might undercut the story, and invites the reader to get involved with and to believe in the text.
That pose, however, has consequences that go far beyond those intended. In real life, when we speak with others about events we have witnessed or experiences we have been through, we do not confine ourselves to facts or to objectively verifiable statements. We make whatever statements it seems to us are necessary to convey our experience as best we understand it. Some of those statements may be objective and factual in nature. Others may not be. Often the facts are unclear or their significance is ambiguous, and in such cases we switch voices, drop any pretense to objectivity, and start talking about the uncertainties and ambiguities or broader meanings we're aware of. In other words, we take responsibility for our meaning and (if any) our irony. If we come to a situation in which we can't be sure the reader will have the information he needs to decode and construe our ironies, we provide those cues. Stepping out of the ironic pose, we do what it takes to communicate experience and meaning successfully.
The news story can't or won't do this. It stays in its objective voice even when that becomes counterproductive from the point of view of successfully conveying information and understanding to the reader. There are several ways of thinking about why it does so, all of them arguably just different ways of saying the same thing. One could say that the news form is so rigid, and the news organization using and defining it so bureaucratized, that working journalists are denied the expository flexibility they need to ensure that the meaning of the news story doesn't get out of synch with what they observed of and understood about the event. One could say that the working journalist is so desensitized to his or her intellectual responsibility to the reader, or so sensitized to the intellectual demands made by the newsmaker, that he or she willingly tolerates a substantial discrepancy between what the story means and what actually took place as he or she understood it.
Newsmakers know that the news story can almost always be counted on to stay in its ironically objective voice, and they aggressively take advantage of this fact. The news genre's refusal to shift voices implies that if a newsmaker pretends to an action and the media cover it, they'll cover the action more or less on the newsmaker's terms. They won't drop their accustomed posture of objectivity, accept responsibility for the meaning their words are conveying, and start telling a story that diverges substantially from the newsmaker's performance. Thus, the genre's objective voice turns news into a stage on which the newsmaker may strut his stuff, secure in the knowledge that backstage realities will stay backstage.
I remember, during my Washington days, an evening I spent with a small party hosted by a senior White House staff member and his wife. We began with drinks at the private bar in the president's box at the Kennedy Center, stayed to watch the play, then finished up with supper at a comfortable French restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. Around the table, the conversation was dominated by the aide, who was full of amusing talk about this or that aspect of White House operations and the actual roles of various senior people. This was early in the Reagan administration, and Washingtonians were still doping out who was who and how the place worked. The aide was a member of the centrist Baker-Deaver axis on the White House staff, and naturally his stories were favorable to the personalities and perspectives of his fellow nonconservatives.
Practically every observation he made and every vignette he told, it seemed, moved the White House correspondent of The New York Times, who was among our small number, to remark, in an enthusiastic, confidential tone, "That's a story." He must have said that half a dozen times, and he wasn't just being polite, it turned out. During the ensuing several weeks, I was fascinated to note that several of the matters the White House staff guy had talked about appeared as stories in the Times under our dinner companion's byline.
None of the stories made even the most veiled reference to the White House aide who had been their true originator. None described the aide's personal and political position in the White House staff at the time. None located themselves in the context of either the White House staff's overall communications goals or of the nonconservative wing's political situation. None took any note of the actual way in which the ideas came to the author.
The point here isn't that there was anything wrong with the way the Times ran these stories. To the contrary, this was a normal, up-to-standard exercise in Washington journalism. The genre's exclusion of reflexive and self-referential information about the origins of a story is a crucial element of the way the news story attracts attention and conveys meaning.
How different the reader's impression would have been had any of the stories I saw pitched over dinner included, at the end, a little note reading as follows: "The subject of this story was suggested by a senior White House aide whom the Times has agreed not to identify as a condition of his assistance. The story idea was tendered during a theater-and-dinner party hosted by the aide and his wife; the aide is a non-Reagan loyalist and moderate who is aligned with the Baker-Deaver wing of the staff and who appeared to have been seeking to attract favorable publicity to allies of his on the president's ideologically divided staff."
No such note is written because it would be inconsistent with the ironically objective voice of the news genre. As long as that narrative style prevails, the news story will be a standing invitation for newsmakers to invent events and fabricate postures. It will be an incitement to lie.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver is a writer in Palo Alto, California.
796 Students Arrested as Police Break Up Sit-In at U. of California
by Wallace Turner
Copyright © 1964 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 3—The police arrested 796 University of California students in 12 hours today, dragging many on their backs down flights of stairs to end a sit-in demonstration.
The mass arrests were made in removing demonstrators who took possession of the administration building on the campus last night.
The Free Speech Movement, the protesting student group, retaliated by calling a student strike. Faculty members, at a special meeting, gave evidence of some support for the students. The dispute over students' political and protest activities has shaken the university for almost three months.
The strike was called after Gov. Edmund G. Brown ordered early this morning that sit-in demonstrators be removed by force from the corridors of Sproul Hall, the administration building. Mr. Brown said that the students' action constituted "anarchy."
Charges of police brutality were made as a result of the removals and arrests today.
In this 27,500-student university, the effectiveness of the strike was difficult to measure. In the morning pickets wheeled in front of the doors of all the classroom buildings and, although students continued to pass through the lines, there were reports that many classrooms were empty.
Clark Kerr, president of the university, issued a statement tonight declaring that the Free Speech Movement represented an "understandable concern" last September but that it "has now become an instrument of anarchy and of personal aggrandizement."
Representatives of about 75 of the 82 academic departments at the university, in a meeting this afternoon, found that about 20 departments were functioning normally in the face of the strike. Prof. Charles Hulten, chairman of the Journalism Department, said that individual faculty members would decide tomorrow whether to hold classes.
A meeting of 500 of the 1,200 members of the faculty voted a resolution this afternoon stating that the university faced a "desperate situation."
The faculty members favor new and liberalized campus rules for political activity and setting up a committee to which students could appeal administration decisions on penalties for violating university rules on political action.
The resolution also asked "that all pending campus action against students for acts occurring before the present date be dropped."
At the meeting, faculty members drafted a telegram to be sent to Governor Brown. It condemned the use of the California Highway Patrol on the campus and the exclusion of faculty members from Sproul Hall.
Last night about 1,000 sit-in demonstrators filled the corridors of Sproul Hall before the doors were locked at 7:00 P.M. They sat there, sleeping, singing, studying and talking until about 3:10 A.M., when Edward W. Strong, the chancellor for this campus of the multi-campus university, went to Sproul Hall.
Mr. Strong read a statement asking the students to leave. A few did, but most stayed. They had put up barricades at the stairways and were concentrated on the second, third, and fourth floors.
The police took an elevator to the fourth floor and began removing students there.
Capt. Larry Waldt of the Alameda County sheriff's office made the estimate of the number of students arrested.
By midday, the routine was standard, as illustrated by the arrest of Jean Golson.
When she found herself at the head of the line of demonstrators, Sgt. Don Smithson of the Berkeley police force told her, "You are under arrest for trespass and unlawful assembly."
Another Berkeley policeman held a microphone to record her answers and the sergeant's statements. A third made notes in a booking form.
"If you walk out, you will not be charged with resisting arrest, but if we are forced to carry you out, you will be charged with resisting arrest," the sergeant said.
Miss Golson said she would not walk out. A number was held to her chest and her photograph was taken. The Berkeley police pulled her by the arms for a few feet and then turned her over to two sheriff's deputies from Alameda County. They dragged her quickly down the corridor on her back, shouting "Female on the way."
At a booking desk, she was pulled erect and was fingerprinted. Then she was pulled into an office for searching by two matrons from the sheriff's office.
Then she was dragged back into the elevator, where other girls were being held. When the elevator was full, the girls were taken to the basement and were loaded into a van for transportation to the county jail.
The bail schedule was $75 each on the trespass and unlawful assembly charges and $100 for resisting arrest.
Booking officers at the Alameda County sheriff's office said that about 25 of the demonstrators posted bail soon after being booked. Meantime, lawyers, parents and others were meeting with a municipal judge attempting to obtain an order freeing the demonstrators on their own recognizance. The total bail involved will be more than $150,000.
For men, the handling was significantly different once they were turned over to the sheriff's deputies after arrest. Those men who would walk were dragged down four flights of steps to the basement. Those who remained limp were dragged by the arms down the steps, departing to the cries of "Good luck" from their friends.
There were about a score of sheriff's deputies whose job was to drag the men down the steps. As the day passed, their humor became more acid. Some bumped the buttocks of their male prisoners as they dragged them down the stairs.
"There'll be some sore rumps in jail tonight," one deputy said.
After the corridors of Sproul Hall were closed, a floor at a time, the litter of the sit-ins remained. There were empty fruit cartons, crushed soft-drink cans, a guitar, stacks of textbooks, sleeping bags and blankets and scores of notebooks with lecture notes in them.
When Mario Savio, a protest leader, was taken away by the police, he shouted, "This is wonderful-wonderful. We'll bring the university to our terms."
Another leader, Arthur Goldberg, said as he was led away, "Good. The kids have learned more about democracy here than they could in 40 years of classes. This is a perfect example of how the State of California plays the game."
Mr. Savio is a New Yorker who is the president of the Berkeley Chapter of Friends of S.N.C.C., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was involved last spring in recruiting demonstrators who slept in at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. He was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace. He also worked in the S.N.C.C. program in Mississippi last summer.
Another leader of the Free Speech Movement is Bettina Aptheker. She is a member of the W.E.B. DuBois Club which has been described by Department of Justice sources as a front among college students for the Communist party.
The dispute that led to the arrests began last September when the university administration announced that it would no longer permit the use of a strip of campus property for soliciting political funds and recruiting protest demonstrators.
The students objected, and a series of demonstrations resulted. Eight students were suspended and the demonstrations were stepped up.
Last month, the university regents ordered that the students be permitted to recruit demonstrators and collect political contributions on campus. But the regents said the students must be held accountable for off-campus violations of the law in projects begun on campus.
They also said that discipline must be tightened.
Earlier this week, four students received letters from the administration indicating that they were to be disciplined, and perhaps expelled. Yesterday the newest demonstration began in protest.
The Free Speech Movement was organized with an executive committee of about 60 members, each representing some campus organization. Initially, conservative groups belonged, including the Young Republicans, but these recently disassociated themselves.
The leadership is concentrated in an 11-member steering committee that appears to be dominated by representatives of campus chapters of the Congress for Racial Equality, the Young Socialist League, the Young Socialist Alliance, Slate (a student political organization) and the W.E.B. DuBois Club.
At a noon rally of about 5,000 students, Steven Weisman, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, called for an investigation of what he termed police brutality. He also demanded the removal of Mr. Kerr as president of the university.
In his statement tonight, Mr. Kerr denied that freedom of speech had ever been an issue and said, "The protest has been over organizing political action on campus."
Mr. Kerr accused the Free Speech Movement of violating the law, of intolerance, distortion of the truth, irrationality, indecency, and ill will.
In Sacramento, Governor Brown said, "We're not going to have anarchy in the state of California while I'm Governor, and that's anarchy. I did plan to go to Berkeley, but I have other things to do."
Opposition to the Free Speech Movement was in evidence here today. Some students standing at the noon rally held signs reading "Throw the Bums Out" and "Law Not Anarchy—The Majority of Students Do Not Support This Demonstration."
The post The Great Pretenders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>No Excuses Management: Proven Systems for Starting Fast, Growing Quickly, and Surviving Hard Times, by T.J. Rodgers, William Taylor, and Rick Foreman, New York: Doubleday, 296 pages, $35.00
Michael Hammer and James Champy's Reengineering the Corporation has been the past year's major management best seller, and on the strength of its success Hammer, a former business professor at MIT, has emerged as one of America's hot new management gurus, jetting hither and yon to talk to conclaves of corporate executives for daily fees running into five figures. The book offers an interesting glimpse of the state of the big corporation in the '9Os and of the management doctors who tend to its ills.
Hammer and Champy style themselves radicals. The traditional big corporation is dead, they argue. The principles it rested on—the division of labor and hierarchical control—have been invalidated by new competition and information technology, and if the General Electrics and Citicorps and Procter & Gambles want to survive, they must transform themselves into substantially unhierarchical, self-managing networks of teams avid to serve the customer, beat the competition, and embrace change. In effect, the authors argue, the big corporation must recast itself in the image of the traditional small firm.
Reengineering the corporation, the authors argue, means ceasing to think in terms of jobs and objectives and other such traditional management concepts and starting to think in terms of "process." The entire "work process" must be reconceived and restructured, with everything up for grabs and nothing taken as a given. Reengineering requires strong leadership from the top. It empowers people at the bottom.
As for what specifically an executive could do to implement Hammer and Champy's program at his company, the book is curiously silent. To be sure, it describes the experiences of some well-known companies that have reengineered themselves. It lists mistakes often made by firms trying to take the reengineering cure. It describes the benefits of the process. But the case studies are superficial and the lists are short. Both enthusiasts who want to go ahead with the authors' program and skeptics who want more information are left with little choice but to call Hammer and Champy's offices and arrange for an in-person consultation, suitably compensated of course.
In other words, behind the authors' professed radicalism, there is—nothing much. The authors' advice is so general, so far removed from real life and practical experience, so anxious to avoid giving offense, so desirous of making a good impression as to be almost totally devoid of practical value. Telling a CEO at IBM or G.M., as Hammer and Champy effectively do, to "be radical" or "start with a clean sheet of paper" without getting down to cases is about as useful as advising him, as a way of improving his relationships with subordinates, to "be a good listener."
The Polonius-to-Laertes-style homilies, in the context in which Hammer and Champy present them, are not just unhelpful, they're positively pernicious. At the core of the plight of the big corporation these days is a powerful capacity to deny painful truths, tell comforting lies, and thereby make it possible for business as usual to go forward even as everyone gives lip service to the idea that they're finally facing up to reality and putting a bad old dysfunctional past behind them. With its glib generality, Hammer and Champy's best seller is a recipe for precisely such a defense of business as usual.
In this, Hammer and Champy are very much in the tradition of the modern management bestseller, the bizarre genre brought into being a decade ago by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence. The book itself was an interesting exploration of the conditions under which good performance occurs in big firms. Its message, however, was grossly distorted by the circumstances surrounding its publication—severe inflation, a long recession, and the shocking competitive decline of some of America's biggest corporations. Anxious Americans read Peters and Waterman as saying that, contrary to the impression given by recent events, the IBMs and Fords and International Harvesters were still the rocks of economic vitality they'd always been. Fortune 500 firms bought copies of Excellence by the thousands and distributed them far and wide to spread the good news. Ever since, the nonfiction best-seller lists have seldom been without a feel-good management book that cashes in on the growing uncompetitiveness of big companies in the United States by pretending to acknowledge their need to change. With their pseudo-radicalism, Hammer and Champy are just the latest in a long list of doctors of denial.
No Excuses Management tells the story of the management techniques and perspectives with which T.J. Rodgers built innovative, fast-growing, profitable Cypress Semiconductor from a 1983 Silicon Valley startup to a $300-million chipmaker with plants from Texas to Taiwan. A sharper contrast with Hammer and Champy is hard to imagine. Rodgers is specific where they are abstract, practical where they are academic, savvy where they are naive. His book distills the lessons of direct personal experience, whereas Hammer and Champy dimly observe others from afar. A reader finds no loose chitchat in this book about the decline of hierarchy—this is every inch the testament of a boss who insists on being in charge, expects to win, and doesn't mind being in your face if that's what it takes to get the job done. It is an outstanding contribution to the literature of American management that deserves a place in the tiny circle of classic books by practitioners of management, including Alfred Sloan's My Years with General Motors and Chester Barnard's Functions of the Executive.
Rodgers has been making a name for himself in recent years as the "bad boy of Silicon Valley," in the phrase of a Business Week cover story. He's a Stanford Ph.D. in electrical engineering and onetime Dartmouth varsity football player who sometimes receives visitors to his office dressed in his running clothes. As CEO of Cypress, he not only broke ranks with the industry to oppose federal subsidies, antitrust exemptions, and other government-given goodies for U.S. chipmakers but struck terror in the hearts of procrastinators everywhere when he created "killer software" to automatically shut down the computers of business units with projects that have fallen behind schedule by a certain length of time.
Rodgers got the idea for the software when, at a management meeting, exasperated by the lateness of some vice presidents in submitting quarterly performance reviews for the employees in their units, he yelled, "What do you people want me to do? Cut off your paychecks until your managers do their reviews?" A light bulb went off. Rodgers stopped the meeting, summoned the human resources director, and issued the fateful instructions to take effect in two weeks' time. One of the eventual victims was a Cypress founder, who immediately came to the boss to object that he had tuition and mortgage payments to meet. "You won't get another paycheck until your manager does his reviews," Rodgers replied. "I'm prepared to watch your kid drop out of school and your house be auctioned off on the courthouse steps." Rodgers adds: "For effect, I followed my macho tirade with my best impression of the vacant glare of a crazed killer, Robert De Niro style." Two days later the reviews were in and the vice president got his paycheck.
The book exudes Rodgers's combative style at every turn. The cover features an extreme close-up portrait from which he glares balefully at the prospective reader. Inside, the book reproduces a memo in which the CEO takes two line managers to task for trying to shift responsibility for a shared problem onto one another and denounces the data and arguments they used as "bullshit." Another memo, entitled, "FOLLOWING THE RULES—THIS MEANS YOU," begins, "I was very disappointed today to find out that—once again—you deliberately violated a Cypress specification." A third memo to the managers of one of the company's "fabs" (factories) notes that their billing practices ranked last in a survey of customer satisfaction and tells them to remedy the situation. "I do not view the solution to this problem as a 'program' in which you use 'kaizen' to reduce the defect level over time," the memo concludes. "I view this problem as a 'slam-dunk, kick-some-ass, get-it-done-now problem.' The next billing should be perfect. Thank you in advance for your cooperation."
Once one adjusts to T.J.'s testosterone-drenched persona, this book offers a candid and engaging picture of the way an unusually thoughtful executive does his job in a challenging industry. Its outstanding quality is a passionate, almost novelistic sense of reality. A fascinating chapter describes Rodgers's intriguing computer-based system for giving salary raises based on both merit and equity considerations. There is a long example told with such a relish for the practical issues and physical activities involved that it even identifies the keys Rodgers punches on his keyboard to activate various tests built into Cypress's special compensation software. (Included with the book is a floppy disk for IBM-compatible PC's that demonstrates the program.) Another chapter tells how Cypress developed its elaborate and apparently quite effective system for hiring people in an industry in which talent is the single most important resource.
This is no mere compendium of management technique, however. At the core of Rodgers's book is a critique of and strategy for dealing with the politics and careerism that have made the large corporation so ineffective in our time. Rodgers is a bear on internal politics. In a memo titled, "Politics Is Forbidden at Cypress," the boss scolds one of his top managers: "I thought you would have picked up this fundamental feature of our culture by now. We do not undercut each other. We do not plot against each other. We do not tell stories about other people when they are not there to defend themselves."
Rodgers's main strategy for minimizing corporate politics at Cypress is an extraordinary policy of openness and deliberation. Essentially all information about every aspect of company operations is available to essentially every employee at all times. If a shipping clerk wants to see how up to date or behind his supervisor, or his supervisor's supervisor, or even the chief executive, Rodgers himself, is with respect to his schedule of goals, he can access the person's file with a few strokes of the keyboard, no questions asked. As a result, there are few secrets, and correspondingly few opportunities for people to empower themselves at the expense of their fellow workers.
More important, the key management decisions to authorize new capital spending and new positions are made in a weekly meeting at which all managers are present, every request competes with every other request, and no request for money or personnel is granted unless the unit involved—and, in general, the company as a whole—has had a record of increasing its output per employee. The meetings are naturally contentious, but they get all the issues out on the table, guarantee that a consistent set of standards is applied across the board, make favoritism and inside deals difficult, and impress on everyone the absolute necessity of constantly increasing productivity. Rodgers reports that when he (mistakenly, he now believes) suspended the committee for almost a year, when profits and productivity were off and new spending and hires were on hold, hallway politicking for special dispensations from the CEO picked up dramatically—and that without the presence of other managers and competing information, he found himself hard pressed to say no to special pleading. When regular capital-and-headcount meetings resumed, the politics subsided.
Most ambitious of Rodgers's anti-politics strategies is Cypress's effort to turn itself into a confederation of largely autonomous entrepreneurial firms. At a certain point in its growth, Rodgers concluded that Cypress was beginning to fall prey to the bureaucratic tendencies that afflict big companies everywhere and decided to generate future corporate growth through substantially free-standing startup enterprises, undertaken either by talented employees or by ambitious newcomers. The company would provide venture capital, have a seat or two on the board, and exclusive rights to the product, which would go into Cypress's catalogue. The entrepreneurs would be entitled to the normal founders' rewards if the venture was successful. Rodgers reports that once the managers of his big Texas fab became equity owners of the facility they ran, their demands for capital and headcount fell sharply and they found ways to do more with less.
Rodgers evinces an ability unusual in a CEO—or any American these days—to admit mistakes. For example, a passage about Cypress's killer software casually acknowledges that, at the time it was being written, the CEO's own computer had shut itself down because a number of T.J.'s own tasks had fallen unacceptably behind schedule.
There's nothing wussy or self-abnegating about this—T.J., it's clear, has about as much ambition and ego as it's possible to fit in a normal human psyche, and he obviously hates to be less than perfect at anything. But, on the evidence of this book, at least, when he screws up, he does admit it. As he told some new employees in Minnesota in a briefing on the Cypress culture, "We make no excuses when things go wrong" and "success does not go to our heads."
As much as any system, it's this willingness to subordinate even the CEO's own ego and convenience to the same rules and goals he sets for everyone else that accounts for the importance of this book and differentiates it from what Hammer and Champy have written. The problem of the big corporation today is, in the end, a problem of the disjunction—intellectual, psychological, and moral—between company interests and individual interests. Hammer and Champy scarcely recognize the problem, let alone offer a solution.
Rodgers sees the problem with crystal clarity, and if he doesn't have the entire answer to it, he certainly puts his finger on a big part of it. Rodgers shows that realism in the conduct of a business depends ultimately on the participants' capacity for idealism—for sacrificing present pleasures for the sake of future fulfillments, for avoiding narcissistic politics and perks, and channeling personal pride and ambition to achieve corporate success. Not a new lesson, to be sure, but one that a lot of supposedly sophisticated people these days evidently need to study again.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver, a writer in Palo Alto, California, is the author of The Suicidal Corporation.
The post Down to Details appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>And the result is…Bill Clinton.
Clinton, the center-seeking crypto-leftist Democrat, illustrates both how much has been accomplished and how much remains to be done. People, even leftish Democrats, have put away a lot of the old statist rhetoric, taught themselves to speak the language of freedom, and are experimenting with the methods of freedom. It was a Democrat named Jimmy Carter, let us not forget, who was the deregulation president, and quite possibly his cousin from Little Rock will rack up an equally awesome pro-market achievement in one policy arena or another. But much of this new interest in freedom ends up advancing the same old authoritarianism. In other words, while the world has begun talking the language of freedom, it is still seemingly a long way from really internalizing the values of freedom.
The task facing classical liberals in the quarter century to come is to study, discuss, and proselytize for those values of freedom—for self-respect, toleration, rationality, and commitment to constitutional processes. Having established a beachhead in the rhetorical lowlands of modern politics, we should now resolutely push inland and seek to conquer the entire territory. In other words, we should start focusing on the purposes people pursue within the political system and the culture that shapes those purposes. The time has come to wage a war for hearts as well as minds, and to recover or re-create a classical-liberal culture.
This will be a difficult mission for libertarians. Not because a liberal culture is a particularly tough sell in America—to the contrary, if ever there was a society that was ready to return to its true philosophical roots, this is it—but because building a liberal culture will require perspectives and character traits and skills radically different from those that brought libertarians, and REASON, to where they are today.
Throughout most of the 20th century, classical liberalism was a fringe movement in a statist world, and its message often—and quite rightly—came down to little more than the injunction, no! Sometimes in a spirit of high moral seriousness, at other times in the less exalted spirit of an adolescent or even a 2-year-old, classical liberals have said no: no to the state, no to government intervention in the market, no to the wars that have been such a central feature of modern society, no to the sometimes well-intentioned efforts by liberal reformers to make the world a better place through public policy, no to the self-serving pragmatism that dominates the university, no to most of the political movements that have shaped our century. Last summer, when the editor of REASON sent me off to Michigan and Connecticut to cover the campaign of the Libertarian Party's presidential ticket, nothing was more striking than the polemical, negatively framed quality of the pitches and personae.
The negative posture, though sometimes perverse, made a lot of sense in the 20th century. In the first place, it enabled classical liberals to survive in a world that was almost monolithically hostile to their point of view. And it preserved their core beliefs intact. Thus, when conventional liberalism collapsed of its own dumb weight in the '60s, the classical liberals were there to pick up the pieces and get the credit. They were one of the very few groups to which a disillusioned ex-liberal could rally and feel that he really was saying goodbye to all that, once and for all. To me personally, coming to classical liberalism in middle age during the Reagan years, its uncompromising and uncompromised quality was one of its most compelling attributes.
But if "no" worked fine when the historical mission was to discredit and defeat an authoritarian polity, it won't get us far in the years ahead. Now the name of the game is not simply to stop authoritarianism and the state but to build a classical-liberal culture to replace the now-discredited statist ethos. And to do that, classical liberals will have to turn to the positive side of their creed and their natures.
Politics is not a debate; you don't win if you refute your opponents' arguments. Politics is the mostly cooperative activity of coming together around a set of values and institutions. It isn't combat so much as it is community. It's affirmation more than negation. To build successfully on the last quarter century's progress and remain at the cutting edge, libertarians will have to transform themselves into activists, glad-handers, do-gooders, reformers, idealists, and scourges of injustice. They'll have to learn to think like the last group of classical liberals in America who found themselves in a situation like the one we're in today, the founding fathers.
In practice, this means making three big changes in the prevailing classical-liberal Weltanschauung.
First, classical liberals have got to become obsessed with the injustice that is rampant in our world. They should always have been obsessed with injustice, since they're committed to such high and demanding ideals, but the truth is they've been squishy soft on it. They have been obsessed with the growth of the state and with the ideology and ideologues that justify the state. By contrast, they have tended to turn a blind eye to fraud and coercion in the private sector, ignoring the active threat to classical-liberal values posed by private power and private ambition for privilege.
Ordinary people in the real world are only too acutely aware of the injustice and politicization that are rampant in every area, from the hiring hall to the family dinner table to the local zoning code. When they hear classical liberals assail wrongs in the public sector but not in the private sector, they worry that the talk about markets is a cover for private injustice. And this is no mere theoretical concern. After all, since the early New Deal days, big business has advocated markets and limited government with respect to the agendas of labor unions and consumer groups, while quietly seeking government intervention in their own interest. In much the same way, racists, sexists, homophobes, and others who would dishonor and trample their fellow citizens' rights have urged freedom as a cover for their unjust behavior—but have denied the same freedom to the people they hold in contempt.
The fact is—libertarians know this, of course, but don't really take it to heart—that we live in a society that has been deeply corrupted in all areas and at all levels by the politics of privilege. Throughout the present century the big corporation has sought to control market processes in its own interest, rather than submit to the market process and work to perfect that process. In some cases, this has happened through the pursuit of political privilege. Just as often, however, corporate executives misbehave on a far more direct and personal level—by, for instance, lying to customers or colleagues to achieve results honesty wouldn't produce. Such behavior is wrong, it violates the rights on which a liberal society depends, and classical liberals ought to be upset about it.
Similarly, throughout the present century, there has been a high level of racial, religious, sexual, and ideological aggression and exploitation. The private sector has been no haven of decency and principle; it has been essentially as much a jungle as the state has been. Yet liberalism, to triumph in the political sphere, requires certain values and behavior in the private sphere—respect for individuals, honesty, decent treatment of one another. A society based on tolerance, mutually beneficial exchange, and rational persuasion cannot be built by merely changing the structure of government.
The minute libertarians start giving equal time to private injustice, I predict they'll become a significant factor in electoral politics in America. The unfair politics and public policy and management that prevail in our often illiberal society bother the American people a lot. Classical liberals have superior answers to these problems, but voters won't take them seriously until they see in libertarian thought a far more energetic intellectual engagement with the problem of private injustice.
The second thing classical liberals need to do to keep their movement at the forefront of the next quarter century's politics is to become tireless advocates of measures to improve and strengthen the state. Not to enlarge it—the state, of course, is far too big, continues to grow at an alarming rate, and should be urgently and drastically scaled back. But this shrinking can be brought about only by the state itself, and for that to happen, the policy-making institutions of government must acquire a greatly enhanced ability to represent, deliberate, refine public opinion, and legislate.
Classical-liberal ideals can't be put into operation by just any collection of idiots in just any institutional context. As the founding fathers well knew, a classical-liberal polity requires intelligent, dedicated, principled leaders; institutions with a capacity both to resist and reflect public opinion; and processes able to make fine distinctions and sweeping decisions. The truth about our big government today is that it has been made big by its intellectual and moral weakness, its inability to represent and interpret public needs in a principled and effective way.
Real progress in bringing the activities of government in some semblance of political control and regaining some sense of moral proportion will take place only when legislators are restored to a status more akin to that envisioned by the founding fathers, who of course were acutely aware of the dangers of precisely the kind of politics we have today and who did everything they could think of to prevent it.
You'd think that classical liberals, having read their Madison and Jefferson, would be avid government strengtheners, but they aren't. They decry the lack of coherence of modern government, they express the wish that a more principled pattern of decision making would prevail—and then they opt for punitive measures that are all but certain to further demoralize decision makers, further fragment the decision-making process, and in general render the government even more promiscuously responsive to self-serving political pressures than it is now.
An example is the Fully Informed Jury Amendment (FIJA), which would make explicit and emphatic the vague common-law tradition authorizing juries to invalidate odious laws. This measure would, in effect, introduce into the legislative process an indefinite veto power that would be present every time someone attempted to administer a legitimate act of the state. It is a script not for intelligent limited government that furthers individual rights but for chaos and injustice.
Similarly problematic was L.P. candidate Andre Marrou's oft-repeated pledge during last year's campaign to abolish the IRS, as if the IRS caused tax policy and as if the country would be better off without an agency to collect taxes while still keeping the tax laws on the books. This isn't to say that one might not eventually decide to change tax policy in a way that would make the IRS unnecessary. It is merely to say that the policy change has to come first and is the important and substantial part of the exercise. Getting rid of the agency, by itself, is, again, a script for chaos and injustice.
In this and other areas, the underlying assumption has been that big government is the enemy and that anything that harms the enemy must be good for the values the enemy is assailing. The fallacy, of course, is that big government, while something to be resisted, can't be dealt with as an enemy. The classical-liberal enterprise requires government of the right size and function. What harms the hypertrophied version of that government also harms the limited government inside trying to get out.
Classical liberals need to become not just government reformers but government strengtheners. They should be pushing not just the term-limitation amendment (which, in combination with other reforms, would help reconnect government with the public) but also more drastic reforms. My favorite is the notion of switching to a parliamentary system based on multi-member districts and proportional representation. Compared to the presidential system, with its separate institutions sharing powers, this would give a superior blend of insulation and answerability, representation and deliberation.
Last and not least, classical liberal have to become do-gooders and idealist and principled busybodies if they are to make progress in building a classical-liberal political culture. In private life, they should be entrepreneurs, tinkerers, free thinkers, meliorists, inveterate volunteers, sterling neighbors, faithful friends, devoted parents, attentive lovers. They should cultivate and exhibit the virtues associated with voluntary, mutually beneficial relationships among equals. They should be fervent egalitarians. They should lean against academic social science's hierarchical vision of society, insist on the moral equality of all human bearers of natural and civil rights, and relate to fellow citizens with the active interest and warm human sympathy that is implied by the idea of taking each individual's rights seriously.
Both historically and logically, the classical liberal is a person devoted to liberal notions of human relations, to ideals of self-improvement, active citizenship, social fraternity, reason, and toleration. Classical liberals need not just to acknowledge but to get comfortable and involved with the communitarian and subjective dimensions of political life and human nature. We are individuals with rights, but we are also political beings for whom conducting a politics of rights and limits is a need and a source of personal fulfillment as well as a necessity.
In my opinion, in short, the way for libertarians to succeed in the decades ahead as they've succeeded in the decades just past is to self-consciously emulate the first American classical liberals, the founding fathers. In the personal examples of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, et al. are to be found the keys to the future as well as to the past. America today is at an impasse not so dissimilar to that which prevailed in the first new nation during the last quarter century of the 18th century. The answer now, as then, is to be found not in ideology or principle alone but equally in its embodiment in character, in active citizenship, in community, and in constitutional institutions and processes through which individual rights and community needs are reconciled intelligently and effectively with one another.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of News and the Culture of Lying, to be published this year by The Free Press.
The post Do-Good Libertarianism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy, by George F. Will, The Free Press, 244 pages, $22.95
The electorate's growing disgust with Washington began to produce institutional changes in November, when 14 states with two-fifths of the U.S. population passed ballot measures limiting the time legislators may serve in office. The success of these initiatives appeared to boost the chances of the proposed constitutional amendment, supported by George Bush but opposed by Bill Clinton, limiting U.S. senators and representatives to 12 years in office.
These two books, one by former one-term Republican congressman James Coyne and Wall Street Journal editorial-page writer John Fund, the other by George Will, the country's preeminent center-right newspaper columnist, argue that term limitation is an idea whose time has come. Congress, they observe, has become a careerist, bureaucratic, professionalized institution that has perverted society's quest for the common good into a trove of privilege for its members and clients.
The answer, these books argue, is to limit legislators' time in office, thereby breaking their government-expanding careerism. In Will's more-expansive view, term limits would also revive the deliberative function and restore republican morality—that is, the ideals of civic virtue, dedication to society's welfare, toleration, self-restraint, and so on.
Coyne and Fund's Cleaning House is a handbook for term-limitation activists. In addition to giving a good description of the current incumbency system, it contains practical information, from phone numbers and addresses of term-limitation groups in the various states to a list of answers to frequently raised objections.
For example:
• Doesn't the high congressional turnover this year show that the incumbents' hold has been broken and that term limits aren't needed? Not at all, say Coyne and Fund. The 1992 retirement binge was the result of unusual or onetime factors—the decennial redistricting, House bank scandal, and scheduled termination of congressmen's right to pocket leftover campaign funds after 1992. In fact, the power of the incumbent is at an all-time high-water mark, and only term limits can break it.
• Won't term limits restrict voter choice? No, the authors say, they'll actually increase it. It's the current system, with its massive subsidies to incumbents and its suppression of electoral competition, that really narrows choice.
• Won't term limits deprive Congress of needed skills, knowledge, and experience? No, according to Coyne and Fund. Incumbency protects the mediocre as well as the able, so opening Congress up will open the way to people with often superior capabilities and knowledge. In any case, professionalism in Congress is the problem, not the solution.
Left unaddressed by these books, unfortunately, is the central issue about term limitation: Can it be counted on to break Congress's "ruling-class mentality," or is it just a gimmick and diversion? The question here is, in part, a technical one: How stringent do the limits have to be to produce the desired effect? If we were talking about limiting legislators to a single two- or six-year term in office, we'd feel fairly certain that term limitation would work.
But 12 years? That's a long time in the framework of a career, especially these days; with several terms in local offices leading up to the full permitted period of service at the federal level, followed by a stint at a Washington law or lobbying firm, a 12-year limit seems all too compatible with the perpetuation of the current system.
Beyond that issue lies the larger question of what, politically speaking, would flow from the deprofessionalization of Congress. The public and Coyne-Fund clearly hope that a smaller, less promiscuously active government would result. If term limits were imposed as one element in a broader, pro-market, pro-constitutionalist program to return America to her Lockean roots, the effort would have a good chance of succeeding. It's noteworthy, however, that while Coyne and Fund are Jeffersonian conservatives, they don't advocate term limits as part of a broader conservative agenda. They urge term limits in isolation as a technical fix for big government, as if it were a pesticide that you apply once and forget about.
The implied notion of a technical, non-ideological conservatism that can be put into effect without any messy political struggle and risk reminds me of the supply-siders 15 years ago, when they were arguing that tax cuts by themselves would automatically restructure the incentives at work in the policy process, both reversing the real growth of government and eliminating the need for anyone to advocate anything as unpopular and risky as limited government. It wasn't so, of course. What came of it wasn't automatic conservatism, but a perpetuation of liberalism. Tax cuts without the decision to make spending cuts led to an expansion of the public sector, plus the rise of the mega-deficit.
It's easy to imagine term limits conceived in a technical spirit having a similar outcome. Given the liberal, pro-spending ideological and political forces that have been in play for years, a noncareerist, term-limited Congress would probably go right on voting for ever-bigger government.
This is where George Will's interesting but unsatisfying book, Restoration, comes in. It's a much broader-gauge and more ambitious exercise that, though thrown together in haste, succeeds in placing the term-limits idea in its broader context. The book's view of the dysfunctions of modern government seems highly sophisticated. A delicious story about the growth of the taxpayers' $100-million-a-year subsidy to producers of mohair neatly limns the utterly shameless, insensate, exploitative quality of our careerist state.
For Will, the purpose of term limits isn't to shrink or rationalize the corporate state. It is to defend it and to rekindle Americans' love affair with big government. Will is alarmed that disaffection from big government has thrown politics into gridlock, preventing institutions in Washington, D.C., from solving problems and meeting needs. He advocates term limits as a way of reducing the gulf between government and the people, making government admirable and trustworthy again, and restoring public confidence so that Will and his friends can get on with the business of ruling. He rejects the scenario in which a term-limited Congress shrinks the government; he argues against spending limitations.
Will's idea of a big government made lovely by a revival of deliberative processes, republican morality, and a new closeness between private society and public institutions is mostly nonsense. In the abstract, it may sound nice. But what we're talking about here isn't an abstraction, it's the mohair subsidy. Will talks as if a reformed Congress would give us mohair subsidies a disinterested citizen could take pride in.
But the point about the mohair subsidy is that it is publicly indefensible by its very nature. Its aim isn't to advance public purposes but to confer private privilege. A true renaissance of deliberation and public spiritedness will lead not to better mohair subsidies but to the rejection of mohair subsidies.
If Will really is in favor, as he says he is, of a revival of constitutional government, then he has no choice but to want, or at least anticipate, a reduction and reshaping of the role of government along Lockean lines. And if he wants to keep the big government we've got, then the talk about term limitation and deliberation and republican morality is empty rhetoric—a gesture to placate and distract an angry public rather than to respond to its sense of grievance.
Thus Will's book exemplifies the careerists' effort to co-opt the term-limitation idea. What's genuine and controlling in this book isn't the desire to reform a corrupted system but the desire to use term limits to maintain politics as usual.
Signs of the perverse and disingenuous quality of Will's interest in term limitations are everywhere in Restoration. In the introduction, for instance, he tells us that until recently he'd had nothing but contempt for the term-limitation idea but that now he's changed his mind. Yet he describes no transformative experiences leading to this reversal; he merely cites the growth of public support for term limits, plus his discovery that some of the Founding Fathers supported the idea. In other words, in typical careerist manner, he's seen which way the wind is blowing, and this book is his effort to run before it.
Then there's the matter of the dedication. "To Pat and Liz Moynihan and Jack and Sally Danforth," Will declares. "Were more of the people who came to Washington like these four, this book would not have been written." The reference, of course, is to the senior senators and senate wives from New York and Missouri, who are, it's true, admirable people. But they are third termers and professional Washingtonians and politics-as-usual types who, their intellectual abilities apart, exemplify what term limitation is trying to put an end to. What in hell is a book about increasing rotation in office doing making fervent declarations of admiration and affection for people whose careers embody the principle of a low level of rotation in office?
Consider, by contrast, Will's treatment of Rep. Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republican from suburban Atlanta and House minority whip who has been at the forefront of a small group in the House who have been working aggressively to embarrass, confront, and defeat the Democrat-dominated system of House politics, the ending of which term limitation is all about. In his personal guerrilla war against the system, Gingrich hasn't been perfect. He accepted the traditional whip's perk of a government-provided car and driver, bounced two checks at the infamous House bank (one of them made out to the IRS), and ran against his first serious primary challenger in years on the promise that with his clout he could do "more for Cobb County."
Will heaps ridicule on Gingrich as the prime example of the effort to service constituencies without regard for the public merits. This attack is an act of monumental hypocrisy. Gingrich has based his career on assailing the system Will now concedes must go. But on the basis of a few mistakes of judgment, which Gingrich has admitted and apologized for, Will turns him into a symbol of the abuses of the system.
Meanwhile, he dedicates the book to Pat and Jack, big spenders who embody, defend, and benefit from the system of constituency service and who have never apologized once for any of thousands of votes cast for indefensible interest-group ripoffs. They are celebrated as paragons of deliberative brilliance and republican virtue, while poor Newt Gingrich, the uncool gadfly and sweaty Lockean crusader, is the villain of Will's save-the-system melodrama.
Will professes to have learned, in a career spanning academe, the Hill, and journalism, not just that ideas matter, but that ideas are practically all that matters in public life. He's quite right, and it is with respect to the ideas at stake in the Washington problem that Will's book is at its emptiest.
In response to the intelligent, constitutionalist arguments of economist William Niskanen for a spending-limitation amendment, Will scoffs, "The doctrine of enumerated powers [that the federal government may do only what is explicitly authorized by the Constitution] is as dead as a doornail. The modern state is a sprawling, palpitating fact, and here to stay." This, of course, isn't an argument or an answer, just hostile bluster that whatever is, is right. It's a response typical of a Washington careerist practiced in the arts of turning public matters to private advantage.
Will notwithstanding, term limits are part of a fundamental critique of the way the Washington world works. Advanced within that framework and as part of a larger program of change, they're an excellent idea. But urged in isolation and by themselves, as a technical fix, they're readily subject to co-optation. The book the term-limitation people need is one combining George Will's political sophistication with James Coyne and John Fund's political values.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of News and the Culture of Lying, to be published this year by The Free Press.
The post The Limits of Reform appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In his 11th book, Nicholas von Hoffman has lost none of the pitbull aggressiveness and razor-blade lethality that made him the enfant terrible of left-liberal journalism in the '60s. By the time the preface is half over, the author has his Freddy Kruger finger knives on and is penetrating the jugular of a deliciously vulnerable subject, the corporate chief executive officer.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the abattoir this time. The writer fell in love with some of his villains.
Originally, the book was supposed to be a hatchet job on Malcolm Forbes, the proprietor of the eponymous business magazine who a few years back caused a furor by throwing a multimillion-dollar birthday party for himself and flying hundreds of the rich and famous to Morocco for a celebratory lifestyle augmentation. The ink on von Hoffman's book contract was barely dry, however, when Malcolm died and his obituaries disclosed that the capitalist tool had been a closet homosexual. Suddenly it wasn't politically correct to trash Malcolm, not even as a symbol of the wretched excess of the Reagan-era rich.
So von Hoffman wrote Malcolm out of the story. The book was recast as a portrait of Malcolm's peers, the CEOs, and it was decided that as much attention would be paid to earlier generations of business leaders as to Malcolm's contemporaries. Malcolm and his father, magazine founder B. C., a Hearst alumnus and Scottish immigrant who pronounced his name the old-country way, FOR-bes, would play cameo roles. Plan B in hand, the author canceled his interview schedule and went off to the library to read business history.
There in the stacks, Nick von Hoffman, child of the New Left, lost his heart to the robber barons. The men who invented the corporation in the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, von Hoffman writes, were rough customers, and some of them were crooks. But they were real people creating real products and businesses bringing real benefits to customers and society.
Rockefeller, monopolist and terrorist though he may have been, did sell oil for less than what the competition was charging and brought home lighting to the masses, extending the usable day and significantly boosting the quality of life. Pulitzer and Hearst were sensationalists and megalomaniacs, but they made news accessible in a semiliterate, largely immigrant urban society. Sam Insull, the man who transformed electric power from a mishmash of small competing electric companies into vast regulated monopolies, may have been a criminal stock manipulator, but his vision of cheap electric power remade America. The same goes for Theodore Vail, the apostle of a universal telephone monopoly. Von Hoffman even celebrates William K. Vanderbilt—the man who said, "The public be damned"—for building strong railroads providing stable, integrated services on a continental scale.
Von Hoffman fell in love with the robber barons' minds as well as with their achievements. These, he found, were men passionately pursuing large ideas in science, technology, organization, and management. Pierre du Pont and William Durant and Alfred Sloan were veritable Einsteins of the modern business organization. Charles M. Schwab, the brilliant U.S. Steel executive who invented the modern I-beam and, after U.S. refused to use the idea, left the company to run Bethlehem, was the ultimate business intellect, von Hoffman kvells, wrapped up in high-tech creativity, practically a Mozart of management and metals.
They weren't perfect, von Hoffman concedes. The CEO disease—insatiable egomania; feverish lust for money, perks, and pleasures of the flesh; and an underlying belief that la corporation, c'est moi—was present at the creation. But their vices were minor afflictions. The robber barons were giants who created modern business and society. In any sensible scale of values, their peccadilloes didn't amount to a hill of beans.
Today's CEOs, by contrast, are pygmy voluptuaries without redeeming social value, von Hoffman argues. They build nothing. They know nothing. They are parasites on the body corporate, abusing the powers of their offices to give themselves astronomical compensation deals and princely lifestyles and corrupting organizations whose purpose is to produce goods and services of ever greater modernity and with ever greater efficiency. They are the wreckers of American society, whose growth they are blocking and whose resources they are dissipating.
The culture of the CEO came into its own during the postwar years, von Hoffman writes. Its first major scam was the concept of the diversified corporation, organized as a holding company, comprising any number of separate business units, and focused on expanding into new industries by acquisition. The cover story was that it would achieve new efficiencies from synergy. The real goal was to balloon revenue and profit growth artificially, add new layers of bureaucracy, and levitate top management's compensation, generally based on company size.
It was management by Ponzi scheme, and the markets quickly rendered a harsh judgment. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, most big, diversified companies were worth more broken up into separate business units than they were worth whole. Bringing various businesses under a single management's control, in other words, destroyed rather than created value. This set the scene for the pygmy parasites' next major scam: the leveraged buyout, in which managers liquidated their failed strategy by buying up their companies at depressed open-market prices, selling off some or all of the business units, and sharing with investment bankers and junk-bond holders the vast profits that resulted.
Not all businessmen are like that, von Hoffman concedes. There are "hundreds of thousands of business executives who do their jobs superlatively well." To these stalwarts of productivity and creativity "the rest of us owe so much." Alas, we may not be able to count on them to make up for the pygmy voluptuaries' rip-offs, for they're up against another negative force, invited and in many cases actively sought as a result of the aggressive stupidity of CEOdom: big government.
"The one mitigating circumstance business can justifiably plead [in extenuation of its poor performance] is government," von Hoffman writes, in a statement that could have been lifted from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Government hasn't "learned to regulate effectively at a cost which business and society can bear. The problem with the Reagan Revolution is that it didn't revolt. The paperwork, the legal costs, the delays and foul-ups were as great from a business point of view when he left office as when he arrived. Yes, the business plaint about government interference is self-serving, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is untrue. If consumer groups and other special pleaders want anything in the long run beside less merchandise of poorer quality at higher prices, they will have to learn that not all business squeals of pain arise from greed denied. The making of the things we need and want…at prices we can afford to pay is the obligation of business, but the maintaining of a society to make it possible for business to live up to its obligations falls on us all."
It's an astonishing statement, considering the left-wing politics of the source. But free-marketeers shouldn't congratulate themselves on winning another convert to the faith of Adam Smith. Von Hoffman's sympathy for business is utilitarian in nature. He likes the well-run corporation and the robber barons for the specific social benefits they provide, not because he believes in freedom. Von Hoffman goes to some trouble to express his contempt for the idea of the free market, which he dismisses as a "dumb…hypothetical construct." The way to reverse our decline and wipe out the CEO disease, then, isn't a strengthening of market mechanisms, in von Hoffman's view. What's needed is merely some "deliberate and thoughtful action"—that is, pragmatic, case-by-case decisions carefully insulated from, rather than informed by, the "hypothetical constructs" some of us call principles. Von Hoffman means it. His one concrete policy proposal is federal chartering of corporations, a pathetic leftover from the old Nader agenda that, in practice, would afford the same hog-heaven comforts to pygmy-voluptuary CEOs across the board that, as the policy of the Federal Communications Commission, it has been affording heads of regulated radio and TV companies for upwards of half a century.
This, of course, is where Nick von Hoffman and the New Left came in three decades ago, with their ideology of "just do it"—the infantile belief that spur-of-the-moment protest and off-the-top-of-the-head polemics could be the stuff of a genuine democratic politics, and that sober deliberation and traditional political philosophy were a crock. Nick von Hoffman fell in love with the robber barons not because he's becoming reconciled to business or the market but because he's still afflicted by the peculiar New Left blindness to the philosophical and ethical dimensions of politics.
Contrary to von Hoffman and the conventional wisdom, the true problem with the robber barons wasn't that they were a bit greedy. It was that most of them rejected the idea of the market and pursued monopolistic business strategies. The men who built the corporation were trying to transcend the limited state, the free market, and representative politics. The institutions they created were designed not only to produce new goods and services but to do so in ways that would enable them to gain competitive advantage and extract monopoly rents. They tried anything they thought might work to these ends—government subsidies and charters, cartels, regulatory barriers to entry or technological change or lower price, systematic bribery of legislators, whatever. To classical liberals, then and now, this indifference to Lockean ideals, this rage to control rather than submit to the market process, was their besetting sin.
To von Hoffman, of course, the robber barons' hostility to the market is no great negative; it may even be a part of their charm for him. But it also brings to light the weakness of von Hoffman's critique of today's CEOs. For the only fundamental difference between the corporate founders von Hoffman admires and the successors he scorns is that the first generation of would-be exploiters had no choice but to build, since nothing was in place that would enable them to realize their exploitative ambitions, whereas the later generations of CEOs, who came into power at a time when all manner of limits on the market were in place, could enjoy the luxury of taking without giving. In short, the difference between the early good giants and the later pygmy wreckers lay not in their intentions, only in their circumstances.
Von Hoffman doesn't see this. To him, with his perverse disdain for the ethical abstractions that spell the difference between peaceful civil-rights protests (New Left, circa 1963) and active support for the totalitarian butchers of Hanoi (New Left, circa 1968), there are, in the end, only good guys to promote and bad guys to be put down. Contrary to the philosophy of this book, however, what makes good business executives the socially useful folks von Hoffman concedes they often are isn't some mysterious personal knack for pragmatism or altruism. It is, as management expert Tom Peters has done so much to explain over the past decade, a positive personal and institutional commitment to the values of liberal political economy, in particular to the ethic of the informed, consenting, mutually beneficial market transaction.
In business no less than in politics, von Hoffman's supposed pragmatism is actually a philosophy of the rip-off—the same thinking that has given rise to the sleazy schemes through which the pygmy voluptuaries are enriching themselves and wrecking the country. Von Hoffman is right to denounce these schemes, and the value of his book lies in the witty acuity with which he skewers them. Too bad he doesn't see the whole picture.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming News and the Culture of Lying (The Free Press).
The post Giants and Pygmies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"What do you stand for?" J. P. asks after a brief introduction. The Constitution, limited government, Marrou replies. "What would you do as president, cut taxes?" I'd repeal the income tax, abolish the IRS, bring the troops back home to defend America, and stop replacing federal bureaucrats, Marrou declares.
"What you say has everyone nodding their heads," McCarthy says. "It seems to make sense."
The remark is an aside, tossed off as part of the windup for a question about what makes Andre run, but it is the most important event I witness in four days following Marrou in Michigan and his running mate, Dr. Nancy Lord, in Connecticut and New York. WJR is the top public-affairs radio station in the nation's sixth-largest metropolitan market, and J. P. McCarthy is a mainstream broadcaster in a city that relates to power and position the way Hollywood relates to physical beauty.
For years, Michigan Libertarians' efforts to get a spokesman on the program have been rebuffed. Now J. P.'s longstanding Drop Dead has turned into a tentative Let's Talk. In this citadel of statism, with its leftish unions and protectionist corporations, in a medium that puts love-bombing and blame-mongering ahead of rational deliberation, the political philosophy on which the world's oldest constitution was built seems poised for an incongruous comeback.
To Marrou, the civil reception is evidence that his strategy for the 1992 campaign is taking hold. Unlike previous L.P. candidates, who, he says, have emphasized print media and long, reasoned, formal declarations, Marrou is focusing on the broadcast media and using humor. TV, he argues, is where the people are, and humor is a good way to connect with them. With these "secret weapons of libertarianism," Marrou predicts, the L.P. this year will make progress in its effort to become "the next major party."
Specifically, Marrou says he'll be on the ballot in all 50 states (by mid-August the count was up to 44, with only Alaska and Missouri looking somewhat iffy) and will win more votes than any of his five L.P. predecessors—at least 1 million. These are bold predictions, and some L.P. watchers are skeptical. But 1992 is the year of change, of outsiders, of widespread disillusionment with Washington, and Marrou is positioned to catch that wave and ride it, if not to the White House, then at least to new visibility and respect.
As I join up with the campaign in Lansing, Marrou's strategy still hasn't struck sparks among the national media, which, interested mainly in winners, have given him practically no coverage. But the campaign is making headway among the local media. Everywhere the candidate goes, it seems, a camera crew or newspaper reporter is on hand and a talk show on the schedule. In mid-August the campaign has amassed a sizable collection of clips and videos, most of them respectful.
There is an emerging sense that, as courtly black cable-TV talk-show host Lou Farrell tells Marrou after a taping in Dearborn, "This is your time." The libertarian view of where the country stands and the direction in which it should be heading—widely dismissed as the theoretical ravings of an intellectual fringe a decade ago—has begun to find a popular audience.
The object of this modest swell of interest is a slight, balding, neatly bearded 53-year-old with a penetrating bass voice and warm smile. Born a South Texas Democrat and raised on his father's cattle ranch, Andrew Verne Marrou acquired his French nickname while rooming with some French students at MIT. ("If you're looking for someone with a French name from Texas, here I am," Marrou tells an audience in Dearborn, smiling broadly and holding his arms wide in a welcoming, embracing gesture as he appeals for the Perot vote.)
Following graduation, he stayed in Boston and worked as an engineer for more than a decade. Divorce prompted a move to Alaska for the "freedom and opportunity," he recalls. There he dabbled in living off the land, launched a successful liquor-supply business, and, at a seminar for small businessmen, first encountered free-market ideas. Marrou was an instant convert. Reading the pamphlets he'd been given by a libertarian who attended the seminar, he says, he immediately realized that "this was what I'd believed all along."
In 1982, having achieved prominence as a citizen leader of the successful drive to repeal the state income tax, Marrou made the first of three runs as a Libertarian Party candidate for state legislator, the second of which was successful. In Juneau, he was a tireless critic of prevailing views, a role that brought him to the attention of REASON readers. (See "Mr. Marrou Goes to Juneau," October 1986.) In 1987 Marrou moved on to Las Vegas, where he works as a real-estate broker when he isn't campaigning. In 1988 he was the L.P.'s vice-presidential candidate under ticket leader Ron Paul, and last year he sought and won the party's nomination for president.
At a meeting of Justice Pro Se of Michigan in the serene, modernist Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn, Marrou finds a friendly hearing for his populist libertarianism. Justice Pro Se is an association of people who have been defendants in government prosecutions involving such offenses as nonpayment of income taxes. Tonight's gathering includes some 150 members and guests, many in their 20s. A show of hands reveals that about half the attendees have never before attended a Libertarian event.
After an introduction by state L.P. chairman Bill Shotey, Marrou, nattily dressed in a double-breasted dark blue suit, white shirt, and artistic-looking tie covered with painterly splotches of color, strides down the aisle and mounts the stage. He opens with a joke. Have you heard about the derivation of the word politics, he asks? It comes from poly, which is the Greek word for many, and ticks, which are blood-sucking parasites.
The audience roars with laughter.
Marrou moves on to the story of how, with assiduous campaigning, he carried the tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. Dixville Notch is the place where by tradition everyone casts an absentee ballot so that the polls can close at 12:01 on the morning of the election and the results can be covered as an election-day news story. On primary day 1992, the Dixville Notch result was: Marrou, 11; Bush, 8; Clinton, 3; and others, 2 each or less. The vote, he says, shows that the Libertarians are well organized this year and can win. And the way it was covered in the media, he adds, shows one of the difficulties the L.P. campaign is up against.
While CNN and the A.P. wire carried the story of the Dixville Notch victory, many of the major national media either played it down or ignored it completely. For three days, Marrou says, PBS—the Proletarian Broadcasting System, he calls it—refused to report any of his votes in its stories about the New Hampshire primary results even though he ran 10th in a total field of 63.
Soon the candidate has segued into Marrou's Laws of Politics:
1. People are afraid of freedom.
2. If you smoke marijuana, inhale. Otherwise, what's the use?
3. When it rains it pours.
4. The press is always hostile to visionaries.
5. If guns are outlawed, how will liberals collect taxes?
The audience loves it, cheering and clapping. Smiling broadly, Marrou mimics George Bush's voice and accent as he reads a long, funny cartoon lampooning the president. Dana Carvey he isn't, but no one seems to mind. The Henry Ford Centennial Library rocks with merriment.
Now Marrou, turning serious, launches into his main theme. There's a crisis in the United States, he says. We're in the worst recession since World War II. Inflation and unemployment are high. The Los Angeles riots were the worst since the Civil War. Taxes of all sorts total 47 percent of GNP, the highest in our history. Regulations have ballooned by 50 percent in just the last four years. Things are bad, very bad.
The crisis was caused by the Democrats and Republicans, who between them have enacted the entire 1928 Socialist platform and seven out of 10 planks in the Communist Manifesto. Only the Libertarians have a clue as to what caused the crisis, Marrou says, and only the Libertarians understand what to do about it.
Government is the problem, he says, and the solution is to get rid of the problem. End the income tax. Abolish the IRS. End the recession with the vastly increased disposable income freed up by the tax cut. Stop hiring new government bureaucrats. Abolish the Federal Reserve Board and monetize gold and silver. Restore constitutional government.
Then some more jokes and aphorisms:
The Democrats favor welfare, the Republicans favor warfare, and the Libertarians favor none of the above.
The Democrats want to be your mommy, the Republicans want to be your daddy, the Libertarians want to treat you as adults.
The Democrats are always afraid that somewhere, someone is making more money than they are and they want to put a stop to it. The Republicans are worried that someone, somewhere is having more fun than they are. The Libertarians are in favor of both making money and having fun.
Amid the fun and laughter, the candidate moves swiftly to a brief coda. The Libertarians, Marrou says, will be the next major party. We won't win this time around, but we will win sooner or later; the only question is when. Help us, join us, vote for us.
The room explodes in sustained applause. When decorum returns, the candidate takes questions, and the event, if this is possible, becomes even livelier, with the exchanges continuing for an hour and a half until the building closes.
It is a brilliant performance but, I later wonder, of what? Most of the time Marrou is staging an attractive, sharply etched classical-liberal candidacy for high office. Some of the time, however, he's more like a stand-up comic than a constitutional politician, and in such moments his thinking sometimes seems to detach itself from the luminous, rational, moral world of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, imploding into a nasty mass of opportunistic government bashing and flaky anarchism. On these occasions, Marrou sounds as if he'd say anything if he thought it would lower people's regard for the existing system, and as if he has little idea of or interest in the limited state he'd erect in its place.
The problem here isn't really Marrou's effort to use humor, which, though not always hospitable to precise communication, is a valid means of differentiating himself from Bush and Clinton and conveying his basic message. His funny distinctions among Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians, for instance, frame good reasons why a voter might decide he's had it with the major parties and cast his vote for Marrou. At another point, the candidate's acid humor neatly limns the "insanity" of a system that simultaneously subsidizes the growing of tobacco and discourages the smoking of tobacco; that stations more troops in Japan, and spends more on the defense of Japan, than the Japanese do; that first armed, then went to war against Saddam Hussein.
The problem is, rather, the highly polemical, somewhat oversold, negatively framed concept of libertarianism lurking behind the jokes, and this pattern isn't limited to Marrou. A similar tendency is evident in the L.P. platform. In this not always cogent document, the party declares, among other things, "We recognize the right to political secession. This includes the right to secession by political entities, private groups, or individuals." In other words, if the Libertarians have their druthers, a state, interest group, or person strongly opposed to a policy or act of government would have the right to declare its independence of the unit of government and proceed to do whatever it feels like with respect to it. No conditions, no explanations, no need to show a decent respect for the opinions of mankind—just a blank check for anyone to exercise an unlimited veto over anything that rubs him the wrong way. They can't be serious. Yet there the idea is, spelled out in black and white, in the party's most important official document.
Similarly, Marrou, in response to a question about defense issues, suggests that Washington delegate the defense function to the states, and that the state of Michigan in turn delegate the defense of its own borders to General Motors to perform gratis as a corporate promotion. Huh? Leave aside the question of whether 50 state defenses add up to a national defense and consider only the matter of competence. G.M., which has lost about a third of its market share in recent years, is barely able to make and sell cars any more. What reason is there to think that it would learn to wage war to our satisfaction? Why would someone who believes in a market economy and the profit motive imagine that a business would provide defense services on a not-for-profit basis?
The proposal sounds like pie in the sky, part of an indirect promise that a Libertarian president could wipe out virtually all federal taxes while still maintaining a strong military, eliminating the budget deficit, and paying down the national debt. Defense is one of the two functions, along with the maintenance of a court system, that Marrou says he'd have the federal government retain. He and his running mate officially call for maintaining a military of 1 million troops—less than half today's level but still a large and expensive force. The G.M. scheme seems to be Marrou's way of suggesting that we might get something for nothing, that we can persuade companies to pay for defense the way the Olympic committee persuades them to pay for the Olympics. This isn't just a harebrained defense idea, then; it seems to be a load-bearing element of Marrou's antitax political economy.
Later, when I ask for more detail, Marrou backs off. He says it's just a new idea some libertarian theorists are putting about, not a solid policy proposal that he and the party have a real investment in. He quickly steers the conversation to the more traditional notion of basing America's defense mainly on the state militias.
On a wet afternoon three days later on the veranda of a shopping mall on the northern shore of Long Island, Marrou's running mate, Nancy Lord, decides she's waited long enough for a local TV crew to show up as promised and goes ahead without them to deliver her stump speech before a bare dozen people, most of them members of the Suffolk County Libertarian Party, who have braved the rain that patters down during her remarks.
There are obvious points of similarity to Marrou's pitch. Like him, Lord evokes a sense of national crisis, draws attention to the economy's chronic weakness, calls for a radical cutback of government, expresses anger over the chronic abuse of state power, and summons hope for a day when the nation's traditions of freedom and constitutional government will be recovered by a robust, growing Libertarian Party. The differences, however, are also striking.
Where Marrou is humorous, polemical, demotic, opportunistic, Lord is fact-filled, issue-oriented, intellectual, eloquent. She doesn't eschew the parts of the Libertarian creed that remain a tough sell in George Bush's America, such as the legalization of drugs, a topic Marrou avoids. Neither does she let the comedian or salesman in her get the upper hand over the constitutional politician. In fact, there is no discernible trace of the comedian, and not much of the salesman, in her public persona. Lord is, paradoxically, both more doctrinaire and more moderate than Marrou.
Despite massive increases in education spending, our public schools are failing to educate, Lord says. American students test behind children in 10 other major countries. In math and science, the best American students are only as good as the average Japanese student. On a national test, only 12 percent of 17-year-olds could solve math problems using fractions. Only 20 percent can write a coherent, grammatically correct, two-paragraph letter applying for a job. The time has come to take education out of the hands of bureaucrats and put it back into the hands of parents, where it belongs.
Government programs for the poor are a bad joke, she says. Nearly $200 billion a year is spent on programs that trap people in a dependency plantation. Some 70 percent of welfare funding goes to pay the salaries of bureaucrats. For poor people trying to work their way out of poverty, government has regulated away the first rungs on the economic ladder. Today, if you want to sell hot dogs on the streets of Washington, D.C., you must first put up $500 for a license, $1,500 for a tax bond, and $7,500 for a government-approved cart.
Government should get out of our personal lives, Lord continues. People should decide for themselves what to eat, drink, read, or smoke and how to dress, medicate themselves, and make love. She isn't preaching moral relativism, she says. Libertarians' belief in freedom is based on the idea that morality grows out of ethics and education, not the police. Those who want government to enforce moral standards are actually undermining moral responsibility, she says. And once the police are freed from the hopeless task of controlling private behavior, they'll do a better job of putting criminals in jail and making the streets safe for the law-abiding.
Lord closes characteristically with a careful answer to the person who asks, Why should I vote for you if you can't win? For one thing, she says, an election isn't a horse race. You don't win anything if you pick the winner, and the lesser of two evils is still an evil. Moreover, a vote for the L.P. candidates isn't wasted if they don't win. It will tell officials that they aren't fooling you, and that you aren't putting up with politics as usual anymore. The message will get through.
Lord delivers these thoughts in a loud, low-pitched, emphatic voice that conveys seriousness, lucidity, and, often, anger. A taller-than-average, striking-looking woman who, at 40, could be in show business, she captivates her audience. She is the perfect complement to Marrou, and together they turn the high-road, low-road cliché of presidential campaigning upside down: It's vice-presidential candidate Lord who stresses ideas, policies, and high national values, and the presidential candidate who attacks the opposition, tells jokes, and seeks to arouse the animal spirits of the audience. In a further reversal of roles, it's the female candidate who puts on a display of intellect and learning within the formal framework of the speech, while the male campaigner is the one who plays down the substantive, rational elements of his candidacy, strays from formal structures, and reaches out to touch his listeners' emotions and make human contact.
Lord comes to her role naturally, having spent no small part of her adult life in the formal settings of medical school (she received the M.D. from Maryland in 1978) and law school (J.D., Georgetown, 1990). She's been something of a rebel and outsider all her life, a nice Jewish girl who, growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and was expelled from high school briefly for selling an alternative newspaper banned for publishing a nude photo. Unhappy working as a physician, she took a job testing medicines for a pharmaceutical company, then developed an expert consultancy serving attorneys bringing medical malpractice suits. Finding that she loved testifying in court, Lord entered law school. In her second year, on a project on drug issues, she discovered libertarianism.
Two years later she entered the Washington, D.C., mayoral race as the Libertarian Party's alternative to incumbent Marion Barry. "It was a role I found irresistible," she says, "the drug legalizer against the drug addict." At last year's L.P. convention she was persuaded by party leaders to run for the vice-presidential nomination. Marrou says he'd wanted a woman as a running mate, but his own pick, Dr. Mary Ruwart of Michigan, lost to Lord on the second ballot.
There is little contact between Marrou and Lord, who at any given time are usually working different parts of the country. They travel by car from event to event, city to city, each driven, tended to, and advanced by a single young assistant. Marrou is in the care of Adam Dick, a slender, shy, well-spoken sophomore at the University of Texas in Austin who wears his blond hair in a pony tail and dresses in neat Italian-cut suits. Lord's Girl Friday is Alic Franklor, an enthusiastic, talkative, warmly charming metalworking major who's president of the Libertarian Society at the University of Georgia in Athens and who has turned the rear end of her white Nissan Sentra into a showcase for Libertarian bumper stickers and rock-band poster art.
The candidates and their drivers are obviously fond of each other. Marrou describes Adam as open, friendly, and unsectarian. He hopes that these qualities will be more prominent in the libertarian movement of the future. Lord swears, perhaps sincerely, that the folk-rock tapes Alic plays on the road have won her over to the musical art of Toad.
Inside these vehicles of idealistic dissent and new politics, criss-crossing the country under the protection of their blithe youth-culture icons, spirits often run incongruously low.
Lord, newly married, misses her husband and dog and, having just moved to Atlanta so he could take up a new job as president of a think tank, wonders anxiously what line of work awaits her when the campaign is over. Her days are filled with the stress of having to cope with an unending stream of new people and situations. She is acutely aware of the possibilities for disaster lurking in her schedule. Reviewing the plan for the day with the chairman of the Suffolk County L.P., Lord peremptorily nixes a mall walk-through when she learns her host hasn't cleared the event with the mail's management. She explains that an uncleared walk-through in an Arizona mall earlier in the year led to her eviction by security forces, with the media picking up the story. The campaign was embarrassed and she felt humiliated.
Behind the anxiety about events and logistics lies a certain diffidence about meeting the general public. Lord readily concedes she isn't the type to kiss babies (she's done so only once in the campaign, as a stunt). Walking through a large Polish street festival in rural Long Island, she seems more interested in the dogs we pass than in their owners.
Every once in a while, however, she gathers up her resolve and begins introducing herself to members of the passing throng. Many hurry on, but those who stop to chat are soon captivated. The candidate has long, lively conversations in the wind and rain with a black-leather-clad motorcyclist (they talk about helmet laws) and a heavily bearded clammer (local clam beds are being wrecked by the runoff from the municipal road system). In these open-air events as well as in formal appearances, she lights up—and makes human contact—whenever she is able to talk about substantive topics of mutual interest.
For Marrou, in his fifth campaign and second national effort, the physical and psychic demands of day-to-day electioneering are no sweat. A professional politician by now, he mixes as easily and cheerfully as he feels like. He, too, is lonely, however. Several times in my days tagging along he speaks longingly of his girlfriend, a talk-show host in Illinois. (Marrou, four times divorced, describes himself as "in between marriages.")
What bugs Marrou—and, between events, he sometimes seems grumpy—isn't the campaigning but his lack of control over the process and his dependence on people—from L.P. leaders to journalists—who, as he experiences it, show him no respect. He is in frequent conflict with the campaign steering committee over the concept and particulars of the campaign, he reports, and the issues of humor and his desire to maximize the use of TV are among the points of contention.
The candidate is also in a standing rage over journalists who dwell on the questions of why he runs and whether he can win. Marrou says that discrimination against political minorities, expressed by an insistent denigration of their chances of success and a refusal to take their ideas seriously, is the last great unremedied form of bias in America. If I were a black or a woman applying for a job, he expostulates, no one in this day and age would dream of sitting on the other side of the desk and asking me, in a dismissive tone of voice, why I, as a black or woman, was bothering to apply, and what made me think I had a chance of being hired here, and why I imagined that anyone would be the least bit interested in my qualifications and ideas. Journalists may not realize it, he adds, but they're doing something precisely analogous when they dismiss me as a minor candidate with deviant views and negligible chances.
Intensifying Marrou's backstage anger is his bitter brush with the Character Issue thanks to a series of charges brought this spring by his campaign manager. Without warning, the members of the Libertarian National Committee in April received a 14-page letter, with supporting documents, alleging, among a long list of complaints, that Marrou had failed to pay some small private obligations, profited from the sale of land to an Alaska municipal authority while in a position to influence its decision to make the purchase, used a campaign credit card inappropriately, and fallen behind in child-support payments. Marrou vigorously rejects the charges, saying that most are innocent acts taken out of context (his bills eventually got paid, and he was unemployed when he missed some of the child-support payments; his ex-wife didn't bring a complaint) and the rest are lies. The LNC investigated the charges in a day-long executive session and decided against asking Marrou to withdraw as candidate.
Marrou is still shaken by the attack. "I thought it would be fun to run for president. I thought being a candidate would be something I'd feel proud of," he says ruefully. Before the charges, he adds, he'd considered the man who became his accuser to be his best friend. So far, the story hasn't been picked up by the general press.
Like Lord, Marrou, currently between jobs, wonders what will happen in his life after November. He rules out another run for the White House and expresses interest in a television career, perhaps hosting a public-affairs talk show using humor and satire. It sounds like a good idea to me—Nancy Lord would also be good on the tube—and for what it's worth, I tell Andre I'll be happy to get him together with a public-affairs TV programming entrepreneur I know. In the meantime, emboldened by my campaign-trail experiences, this fall I guess I'll break with my lifelong pattern of voting for major-party candidates and pull the lever next to the names of these two interesting, intelligent, spirited bearers of a venerable political message that really does have something to offer a nation that has strayed a long way from the ideals it started off with and finds itself sorely troubled as a result.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His forthcoming book is News and the Culture of Lying, to be published in 1993 by The Free Press.
The post Going for the Bronze appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Adding insult to injury, Perot didn't apologize and tried to deny that his supporters had any cause for complaint. The decision not to run, he implied, was actually an act of patriotic self-sacrifice. His recent fall in the polls, he said, made it clear that a Perot candidacy would throw the election into the House of Representatives. Not only did he, as an independent, have no chance of winning there, but the turmoil that would surround the House's choice was apt to disrupt the government. Rather than subject the nation to all the dangers that would involve, Perot said, he was swallowing ambition and bowing out now.
Diversifying his portfolio of excuses, Perot also presented himself as a victim of negative politics. Through friendly reporters he put out the message that he and his family had been extremely upset by a barrage of hostile news stories in June alleging that a paranoid, authoritarian Perot had hired detectives to spy on employees, rivals, tenants, and even his own children. Perot and his family had known intellectually that they'd be targets, the reports observed, but they hadn't been prepared for the ferocity of the process, and they just couldn't take any more of it. The presidency wasn't worth the degradation its pursuit was involving.
Not least, Perot tried to forestall criticism by refusing to rule out the possibility that he might resume his candidacy. This was nonsense—campaigns can't be turned on and off like water in a spigot. But by saying he might get back in, Perot was pressuring supporters to stifle their fury and say nice things about him in hopes of reviving his candidacy. He was also threatening supporters that if they did express their anger, they'd be the ones responsible for his candidacy's ultimate demise, not him. In short, Perot was trying to shift the blame for his betrayal onto his victims.
The gamesmanship fooled no one. Perot backers knew they'd been screwed and were mad as hell about it. In the immemorial manner of a victim of injustice, they proceeded to have a good, long, loud, public talk about the man and his behavior. According to a poll taken the night of the abdication, 56 percent of Perot's supporters felt betrayed. A Florida woman filed a class action against Perot for breach of contract. A street vendor in San Francisco was spitting mad at being left with $750 of "Ross Is Boss" T-shirts in inventory. In Phoenix a woman told the news cameras that the experience felt like a divorce.
Perot's perfidy teaches a lesson about politics in our time.
Perot, with his brilliant business success and outsider's status, was supposed to define an alternative to the usual Washington politics mired in made-for-media postures and the special interests they serve. Perot's pragmatic, can-do, take-charge, enterprise-building, value-creating skills were supposed to bring something new and revitalizing to the national political scene. In fact, however, the alternative Perot presented was empty. In the end, he was just another news celebrity bending in the breezes, cultivating fame and power by saying things he figured the media would cover and the people would like.
Perot's fatal flaw was that he defined and conducted his candidacy through the news media. Rather than going among the electorate, listening to them, talking with them, presenting himself for inspection, and finally winning them over in the time-honored manner of the constitutional politician, Perot went on talk shows to perform the role of the Celebrity Outsider. It was a decision that guaranteed that sooner or later his supporters would be disappointed. A media candidacy is no weapon for an attack on politics as usual.
Media politics is inherently a politics of government intervention and special privilege. It's driven by news stories depicting crises and scandals that require emergency action that can't be informed by—and couldn't stand up to the test of—full deliberation. Attention is fixed on the leader who unilaterally expresses the emotions, takes the actions, and embodies the virtues called for by events. Backstage, unnoticed by a distracted public, the media politician works quietly to turn to his or his constituent's advantage the fine print that governs the practical effects of the legislation or executive actions undertaken in response to front-page dangers.
Media politics is deceptive. It seems popular but is oligarchical. On the surface it is all about political topics reflecting societal needs. Beneath this surface, however, it's mostly about special interests creating or using the events to further themselves at the expense of the community. Media politics appears to be a source of political energy and cultural vitality, but in fact it functions as an engine of decline.
Not least, media politics is opportunistic. Since it operates in the framework not of values and issues and deliberation and legislation but of current events, it requires a politician or citizen to translate himself and his ideas into the language of news. He has to hitch his wagon to the star of a story and hope that, with as much help as he can give it, it gets him someplace he's happy to be. If not, he has to bail out and wait for another accessible story to come along. Media politics is a hit-or-miss proposition, full of false starts and sudden changes of course and periods of inactivity.
Perot's candidacy never got beyond the opportunism problem. Having gotten in the race because events made a winning run possible for him, he got out when events turned against him. Had he stayed in, however, the other problems would sooner or later have materialized. Ross Perot was a betrayal waiting to happen. It's probably just as well that it happened now, when national attention can focus on the lesson the Perot debacle teaches. The lesson is that the way out of the dishonest, exploitative, abusive politics that is wrecking America is to be found in candidacies that genuinely do what Perot's only pretended to—recover America's original liberal, constitutional ideals in ways that are consistent with those ideals, which include deliberation, persuasion, and personal participation in constitutional processes.
While it lasted, to be sure, Perot's candidacy was intriguing and sometimes attractive, not least for the dazzling innovations it brought to the presidential campaign process.
In presidential elections, the media politician campaigns by seeking favorable roles in media dramas, both the short, paid, prescriptive, self-made ones called commercials and the free, discursive, journalist-made ones called news. This is done by conceiving, scripting, and staging actions to enable the press to portray him—and the audience to treat him—as a hero. The hero of a media campaign story is a man or woman of the people, a candidate who takes the stands, embodies the virtues, utters the sentiments, and undertakes the actions that, amid the crises and alarums of the front page, satisfy the electorate and win elections. Media depictions of a candidate's popularity function as self-fulfilling prophecies. By showing the candidate looking good and winning people over to his cause, they invite more people to support him. Alternatively, when the news stories make the candidate look bad, they drive people away from him.
Normally, presidential candidates practice the art of media politics within the framework of the primary campaign. They take positions, raise money, electioneer, and interpret the voters' and party leaders' judgments with a view toward cutting an attractive and masterful figure in the news. The purpose is to gain votes and drive competitors from the field. It's a process that ends up making everyone look bad. Candidates' ideas and personal merits are ignored by journalists obsessed with the question of who's winning and losing. Front-runners are alternately idealized and roughly probed for faults. Losers are ridiculed and ignored. Everyone attacks everyone else, since the easiest way to make headway is to drive voters away from your competitors. The winners emerge only a little less soiled than the losers.
Ross Perot created a completely different way to be a presidential hero this year. As others ran the primary gauntlet and attracted the usual amount of news coverage, he stayed out of the process and went on TV talk and magazine shows as a celebrity. He wasn't running for president, he said. He was a businessman and wasn't exactly without things to do or money to enjoy. However, he said, he'd agree to be a candidate if "the people" wanted it. He thereby positioned himself to harvest the other candidates' negatives while escaping being saddled with any negatives himself. In the meantime, he was quietly funding a volunteer, nonpartisan draft-Perot movement so that about the time the party conventions were launching their nominees, he would emerge from his self-made noncampaign as a full-fledged national candidate with a proven popular base. He'd also enjoy several technical advantages—no taint of previous political associations, a platform tailored to the special circumstances of the fall campaign, maximum public interest in his positions, and of course the ability to buy any amount of television time to supplement or bypass normal electioneering.
It was a brilliant plan, and it came off almost without a hitch. Americans liked Perot a lot.
For one thing, we liked his astonishing accomplishments and winning qualities—the $3-billion fortune, the twangy, down-to-earth charm, the achievement of building a huge company with a good idea and a $1,000 incorporation, the heroic rescue of his employees from the Ayatollah's prison, the gutsy leadership on Texas school issues, the take-no-prisoners ambush of the corporate bureaucrats wrecking General Motors, the staunch opposition to the self-serving betrayals of the Bush administration and Congress.
We also liked what we thought Perot could do for us. After two decades of economic decline under the supposedly best people applying the supposedly best ideas, Americans had had it with the usual presidential types and were ready to take a chance on someone different. Perot seemed to fit the bill. While much of America was slowly destroying itself, he'd been creating value on a fantastic scale. We hoped he'd do the same for us and piece together a strategy for making America as rich as he'd made himself and his employees.
Above all, we liked Perot because he'd been through what we'd been going through as a nation, and because he responded to and emerged from the experience in a way we could identify with easily.
Perot has spent a lifetime in an active love-hate relationship with big, established, powerful, American organizations. From his first job in the Navy through IBM, EDS, G.M., and Perot Systems, he's exhibited a recurrent pattern:
? First he idealizes the organization as the nurturer of his heroic destiny. For instance, dreams of military-style glory appear to have attracted the kid from Texarkana to the Naval Academy even though he never intended a naval career.
? Next Perot becomes horrified by the internal politics that thwart his plans and endanger his ascent. At IBM, he proposed the idea of offering programming services to the companies he was selling computers to, but Big Blue's bureaucracy couldn't be bothered.
? Angry and vindictive—after two years in the Navy, Ensign Perot denounced the service as "godless"—he quits to join or create a new organization in the image of his disappointed ideal. He succeeds beyond anyone's wildest expectations.
? Finally, longing to be vindicated by the big organizations he felt spurned by earlier, Perot returns to them or their people. At EDS, he hired a lot of ex-Marines and ex-Navy people, and he lavished his own selling efforts on the senior executives of the big IBM- and Navy-style organizations that were the bulk of EDS's clientele. With his charisma, Perot wins his way back into the hearts of these people. (G.M. chairman Roger Smith was sure, at first, that Perot was "a G.M. kind of guy.") The disfunctional politics disappear, and the organizations go on to bigger and better things.
It's a wonderful story. We wanted to be part of it.
As a nation, we are stuck just now in the scary early phase of Perot's myth. We would like to live happily ever after in the seemingly heroic, progressive, comfortable, secure world of large governmental, corporate, and educational institutions. But we're awakening to the fact that this destiny is evaporating before our eyes. The wonderful postwar world we've lived so agreeably with for so long is well on its way to disappearing amid a rising tide of aggressive, unprincipled, shortsighted selfishness that has turned our institutions into engines of decline. We identified with Perot because he went through what we're in the midst of and came out a winner without having to reconsider his postwar-era, big-organization ideals.
Perot enlivened this appealing talk-show persona and positioned himself as an outsider who would confront the politics of decline by borrowing a leaf from the conventional media politician and bad mouthing insiders at every imaginable televisual opportunity this year. One of the most frequent locutions in Perot's talk-show lexicon was the phrase sound bite. Usually he deployed it as a noun; sometimes it became an interesting, back-formed verb, as in "Bush is sound-biting that issue." In either form, the phrase was a sneering reference to the collaboration of politicians and journalists in reducing issues, positions, and personae to brief, colorful performances that can be reproduced as five- or 10-second (or one- or two-sentence) passages in news stories. Perot rightly denounced the practice as part of the politics of private advantage and public ruin.
Watching these performances, however, one quickly realized that Perot was himself a master of the sound-bite demagogy he pretended to be putting down. He showed a breathtaking ability to frame his thoughts in simple, colorful, memorable sentences. Perot rose to success this year mainly on the strength of a sparkling talent for political sound bites putting down sound-bite politics.
In this, Perot was no unwilling victim of a mindless press. To the contrary, he obviously liked speaking at sound-bite length. On many occasions this spring he passed up opportunities to address issues in as much detail as he wanted. During an interview with Fortune magazine, he was asked, "How do you feel about the federal government? Is it too big in absolute terms? Ought it to be smaller? Is it maybe involved in aspects of American life where it has no business being? Or is it maybe not involved enough in other areas where it ought to be?" Replied the man who spent the spring ridiculing sound-bite politics: "Interesting question. Never thought about it. Have to think about it."
Many of Perot's sound bites, like this one, had a hostile and condescending ring. This was no happy warrior, trilling encouragingly that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself or heroically summoning his countrymen to their destiny as a great society. Perot presented himself this year as an ungenerous little man in a permanent snit. His one-liners railed and sneered and put people down. The prime targets were the press and George Bush, but no one escaped undiminished. Perot's volunteers were "locusts moving across a wheat field." National problems were personalized and scapegoated.
This, for instance, is how Perot was discussing the merits of the Desert Storm war this spring: "We did recover Kuwait for the emir, but he ran like a rabbit when the war started, he never touched it while it was dirty, and he would not come back in his own country until enlisted men from ordinary homes all over the United States cleaned up his palace and reinstalled his gold faucet fixtures." (Substitute the name "Perot" for "emir" and you have a description eerily reminiscent of Perot's behavior once the attack politics began in June.)
Perot continued, "Now, let me say this. If I'm ever running the store, and you see American enlisted men rebuilding a palace for an emir, you know, just have me shot and call it a mercy killing. I mean, I've lost it. I've lost it. Seriously. Seriously."
Perot was also a severe if conventional critic of Washington's isolation, of what he called the "bubble" separating policy makers from ordinary people. Part of the bubble, he said, is the "best-kept secret in America, 1,200 private jets worth $2 billion, flying government officials around. These folks are our servants. They're flying around like royalty. What are they in such a hurry about? Why can't they fly and act like we do? OK, go to the airport, get in line, lose your luggage, eat a bad meal, have a taste of reality. Now this is important." But not so important that Perot, who gets around in his personal jet, gave himself a taste of airline reality, or acknowledged the hypocrisy of attacking officials in Washington for using the same method of transportation he himself was using.
Perot addressed his personalizing-scapegoating rhetoric to social and economic problems of all sorts. In Ross Perot's America, he declared confidently, "Everyone works," as if there would be no business cycle and no structural change, as if all those without jobs today were unemployed as a result of having chosen a life of indolence and parasitism. Moreover, in Ross Perot's America, he explained on the Larry King show, there would be "a strong family unit…a great mom and dad in every home." With that "we [would] wipe out most of our problems right there"—as if weak or broken families were weak or broken as a matter of preference, or as if a Perot administration could count on being able to restructure and reprogram the large majority of American households that aren't patterned on the Ozzie-and-Harriet model.
Hypocritical and demagogic though it was, Perot's precandidacy worked brilliantly—for a while. As Democrats and Republicans savaged one another in the primaries, he attracted a vast amount of favorable attention and soon surpassed Bush and Clinton. No sooner had he become No. 1, however, than his candidacy collapsed. For it quickly turned out that Perot hadn't thought through, and didn't have a way to deal with, the problems that would flow from political success. In particular, he didn't have a strategy for neutralizing the counterattacks that his opponents were bound to mount against him.
Once Perot became the front-runner in the polls, it was inevitable that the free ride he'd received outside the normal campaign framework would come to an end and that he'd find himself on the receiving end of the same kind of attack politics and negative journalism he'd directed at his opponents. In June the big guns of the Bush and Clinton forces wheeled to begin targeting Perot. With The New York Times taking the lead in rushing to disclose Perot's failings and misdeeds, the effect was immediate and devastating. From the roughly 40 percent support figure he registered in the polls around Memorial Day, Perot plummeted to roughly 10 percent in a month and a half.
The problem wasn't just that Perot was losing a lot of ground fast; candidates have come back from 20- or 30-point summertime deficits. The real problem was that the negative news opened a wound in the Achilles heel of the Perot candidacy—its shallow motivation.
For most of the men and women who run for president, the campaign is a high point in careers whose overriding objective is to rise toward the White House. These candidates naturally give the effort everything they've got, win or lose. For Perot, by contrast, running for president wasn't the culmination of a lifetime of longing preparation. It was a look-see at an intriguing potential deal that happened to come his way. If it worked out, fine; if not, fine, too—there was nothing riding on the run except the few months and (for him) paltry sum he'd put into checking the opportunity out.
Perot, in short, approached the presidency opportunistically. For him, the reason to run was that he could win. If victory became less likely, or if the contest also began to impose costs he found onerous, Perot's motive for making the campaign disappeared. The June attack-politics barrage was designed to exploit this fact. By both dimming his chances of winning and raising the costs of running, the bad-news barrage eliminated Perot's motive to run. It didn't just weaken his candidacy, it vaporized it.
Perot didn't anticipate or protect himself against the Bush-Clinton counterattack because, in the classic manner of the media politician, he's always had a blind spot when it comes to his own relationship to the nasty, aggressive, self-serving side of politics. In the Perot myth, he's a man who instinctively rebels against the dysfunctional politics of large organizations and eventually returns to quell these forces by dint of sheer charm and brilliance. But like all myths, this one is part exemplary truth, part useful lie.
The true part is Perot's revulsion against shortsighted, harmful, exploitative, personal/organizational politics—the undeserved firing, the cynical subservience to a rule-flouting boss, the dismissal of an idea that was Not Invented Here, the witting creation of shoddy products, the campaign for protection against better products made at lower cost. Most of us have seen such behavior up close and personal and let it pass. Perot is different. He doesn't let it pass. He gets mad, speaks out, and doesn't let go.
The false part of the Perot myth is the part at the end in which, having achieved success as an entrepreneur, Perot returns to the world of the big organization, makes the politics vanish, gets things back on track, and wins everyone's admiration. In fact, Perot's encounters with big organizations and the swirling machinations of interest groups have usually taken place on their terms, not his. The encounters have almost always entailed personal and pecuniary benefits to Perot—a better job, a big new client, a huge piece of income, a dashing part in the daily drama of the media, etc. The underlying relationship between Perot and organized interests has usually been the relationship typical of media politics—mutual back scratching under a cover story of confrontation and triumph by the forces of public good over the forces of organized selfishness. Consider the way Perot's 1984 merger with General Motors worked out.
EDS, a $1-billion-a-year computer services company looking to keep on growing fast, was seeking G.M.'s computer business, which was worth as much as $2 billion or $3 billion a year. G.M.'s Roger Smith was attracted to EDS not just by the efficiencies it could effect in his car business, but by the contributions EDS could make to G.M.'s growth and corporate culture as a permanent part of the firm. Smith made an offer: EDS could have the entire G.M. account, instantly tripling its sales, and in return it would merge with General Motors. G.M. would pay $2.5 billion in cash, or over 30 times earnings. Perot's share: $1.4 billion. Perot also would get a seat on the board and have a free hand in running EDS, and the EDS management team would get millions of new EDS-series G.M. common shares with guarantees of a price equal to twice the 1984 market value, giving Perot alone a value of $750 million after seven years. Perot said yes.
Within months, Perot and Smith were at war. Perot, at board meetings, was openly criticizing G.M.'s style and products and urging a more competitive approach. Smith was incensed that Perot and other EDS executives were being paid more than he was. There was unpleasantness in Dallas when Perot refused access to EDS's books to a team of G.M. auditors sent by Smith to conduct an independent audit. G.M. divisional managements, which wrote the checks for EDS's services, were up in arms over the high, cost-plus pricing called for in the contract. They were further enraged when EDS refused to temporarily lower prices amid a company-wide belt-tightening drive under which G.M. renegotiated the prices it paid most suppliers.
Within two years Perot and his top people were out.
It was an outcome anyone with even an inkling of the people and institutions involved could have foreseen from the outset. G.M., as the owner and biggest customer, was going to be in control regardless of anything Smith may have told Perot about having a free hand and helping shake up an ossified megacorporation. Perot, aggressive and arrogant, was bound to step on toes. A deadly explosion, with Perot the victim because G.M. was in control, was inevitable.
Smith may have anticipated or even desired this outcome. For G.M., EDS was the main attraction, Perot just part of the price of admission. Getting G.M. and EDS together in a way that paved the way to Perot's departure may have been, or quickly become, Smith's intention.
It clearly wasn't Perot's intention. Perot didn't anticipate the explosion. As one used to positive-sum deals with big organizations, he expected that as founder and chief executive of EDS he could take a ride on the corporate tiger and not end up just another high-ranking bureaucrat inside. He didn't anticipate or understand the powerful forces he'd be up against. He had no strategy for dealing with them when they materialized. He was blown away by the first big storm to come along.
The deal was a good one for G.M., which rationalized its computer operations and got a fast-growing, high-tech subsidiary. It worked well for EDS, which got vigorous sales growth; today EDS is 10 times bigger than it was pre-G.M. For Perot, by contrast, the deal was a disaster. He lost his job, had no impact on G.M., and got nowhere in the race to succeed Smith. Six years later he's still looking for work and doing almost nothing with the money. Perot lives modestly for a billionaire. He has $2.7 billion parked in T-bills and equivalents, which is a modern version of stuffing it in a mattress.
Thus the book on Perot reads as follows: brilliant salesman, fertile conceiver of new enterprises, intrepid leader, specializing in deals with big, powerful, political institutions that leave him rich and famous, sometimes at the expense of his closest associates, amid much populist posturing.
Perot's weakness for the politics he puts down in others and practices himself was intensified by his reliance on the news media and television.
A media politician contains a large contradiction. On the one hand, he must have a talent for presenting himself as a bold leader who responds heroically to pressing dangers. He must be full of convincing talk about high ideals and steadfast devotion to the community. On the other hand, he must also be effective working backstage and conniving with others to analyze, plan, script, and stage opportunistic public acts and news stories that create occasions for delivering the private privileges that crisis news events occasion and camouflage.
Campaigning as an outsider through the media-politics medium only intensifies the contradiction. Media politics is the ultimate exercise in insiderdom. Nothing about the process or people is innocent. It is a politics of maneuver and hypocrisy and performance, and since the news media don't cover outsiders, it can only be played on the inside.
Thus the media-based outsider is always playing a disingenuous role. He or she mounts a critique of privilege and oligarchy in the name of ordinary people and liberal ideals of freedom, equal rights, limited government, rule of law, and the centrality of the individual. But the medium through which this politics is expressed, oriented as it is to activating illiberal, nonconstitutional emergency powers of government, is always at odds with the message it conveys.
The fact that Ross Perot chose to mount a media candidacy meant he wasn't serious about, and would inevitably betray, the classical-liberal themes he touched on. An outsider candidacy that went public the hard and real way, by organizing and responding to the views of people at the grass roots and forging them into a political movement, might well have succeeded, especially if Perot had stayed with it and invested the time, talent, and money he had available. This is the classic way of making outsiders matter again in a democracy.
The outsider media candidacy, by contrast, essentially feigns opposition to the welfare state from within. Jimmy Carter, the last successful practioner of the genre, demonstrated the pattern, running on Southern charm and modesty and against Washington, then appointing Naderites to the regulatory agencies once he was in the White House. Perot, with his studied lack of specific positions on issues and quiet but persistent flirtation with protectionism and industrial policy, was well on the way to reenacting the Carter formula by the time he dropped out.
Had Perot stayed in and given it his all, he might very well have won. The techniques of the outsider media candidacy are powerful and proven. Perot was a clever and ambitious fellow with unlimited funds. Had he kept on responding to the attacks, counterattacking, and sounding his own positive themes in the massive way his money made possible, he might very well have regained the lead. Attacks by Bush and Clinton on Perot's fuzziness on the issues, though perfectly legitimate, would have gone nowhere or boomeranged, since their own prior fuzziness and lack of principle formed the background against which Perot came to look like a plausible alternative in the first place.
The only thing sure to have stopped a Perot-style candidacy would have been something only a true outsider could have supplied—leadership in helping Americans turn away from the media-candidate myth that common sense and charisma are enough, and in embracing the fundamental lesson of politics in our time: that what is left open and flexible by a pragmatic posture ends up being co-opted and turned to private ends at the expense of the common good, and that the cure for what ails America is a return to a politics based on the classical-liberal principles and constitutional ideals on which the country was founded.
In our time, people have accomplished real and valuable things in public life only the old-fashioned way: by being committed to the projects and the principles underlying them, by taking risks for their sake, by running on them unapologetically, by giving the electorate a clear choice and a corresponding opportunity to establish meaningful directions. The great recent example was Ronald Reagan, who got committed to conservative ideas of anticommunist foreign policy and tax cuts long before they were popular, campaigned for them even at the cost of losing, stuck with them in adversity, and then had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing the nation slowly but massively come around to his own way of thinking. Reagan was far from perfect, but in office he did accomplish the two big things he'd been pushing for all his political career. He thereby demonstrated the crucial difference between a media politician—that is, one who is defined by the evanescent myth of news—and a politician who uses the media process but avoids being co-opted because he's defined by his own values and independent organization.
Because Reagan stood for something positive, however unpersuaded some of us may have been about the substance of some of his positions, he didn't need to be negative. Reagan was unique among recent public figures for his unruffled good nature. Liberal Pat Schroeder once called him in frustration a Teflon president because others' charges and his own failures didn't seem to stick to him. What was protecting him wasn't Teflon, however. It was just the man's natural decency standing out in sharp contrast to the industrial-strength nastiness of public figures in a media-drenched age.
Reagan didn't need to diminish others because he meant to accomplish something positive. He was able to believe the best of people, not merely because he was himself a nice man, but because he was so devoted to his cause that he never gave up on the possibility of winning others over to it. His only real failing was in caring about so few things on his own, and in imagining that the lack of a coherent philosophy disciplining the practical inside politics he undertook in their behalf wasn't a weakness.
Thus the ultimate lesson of Perot's humiliating collapse is the same as that taught by Ronald Reagan's limited, now-fading successes: that in the real world, classical-liberal constitutional principles are highly practical. It's modern pragmatism and the institutions associated with it that don't work.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His forthcoming book is News and the Culture of Lying, to be published in 1993 by The Free Press.
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]]>In the summer of 1989, as the Soviet empire crumbled, the West was swept by a wave of media hype over a 15-page essay, "The End of History?," by an obscure State Department policy planner named Francis Fukuyama.
With communism out of the picture, the article argued, the last major alternative to democratic capitalism has collapsed, and the liberal idea of man as a free, rational, ethical, individual being has gained universal acceptance. In other words, Fukuyama noted, the world has entered the era that the 19th-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had looked forward to as the end of history.
Hegel had believed that the appearance, 2,500 years ago in Athens, of an image of man as an end in himself set human society wheeling down an evolutionary road. Slowly the Athenian ideal won converts, displacing the tribalism and tyranny of man's prehistory. The advancing liberal ethic, Hegel had held, would eventually become dominant everywhere, bringing history, in effect, to its logical conclusion in a kind of steady state from which there would be no exit because, he had concluded, liberalism has an unmatched ability to satisfy the moral and psychological needs of the human species.
Life on a totally liberal planet will have its good and bad points, Fukuyama predicted. With illiberal ideologies in retreat, the level of organized beastliness in human affairs will likely decline. On the other hand, in the absence of great issues, life at history's end will be something of a bore, and meanwhile all the bad old forces, such as religious intolerance and aggressive nationalism, will continue to wreak havoc, albeit, Fukuyama thought, with slowly dwindling virulence.
The response to Fukuyama's thesis was a thunderous outpouring of fascination and cold feet.
Yes, said commentators at every point of the political spectrum, communism's collapse is a momentous event. But no, they continued, Fukuyama is crazy if he thinks it sets the stage for the final triumph of anything but their own political point of view.
Leftists argued that the collapse of Marxism-Leninism merely brings liberal democracy in the West that much closer to inevitable extinction. With the artificial stimulus of the Cold War gone, they said, capitalism will soon come a cropper on its natural tendency to create intolerable economic inequality. When it does, they said, people will have no choice but to turn to something like socialism.
Conservatives, wrapping the mantle of realpolitik tightly against the warm West wind, dismissed the notion that liberal ideas had won a decisive victory. Money and power and national interest, they declared, are what makes the world go 'round. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, they felt sure, the planet will remain a nasty and dangerous place, and the United States will have no alternative but to keep on bearing any burden and paying any price to assure the survival of the American way of life.
Even Hollywood got into the act. In the final scene of Star Trek VI, Captain Kirk puts down the wimps and wusses who see the future as "just the end of history." To the contrary, Kirk says, it's an "undiscovered country" that summons the species to glorious adventures yet to come.
Now, nearly three years after the Fukuyama flap, the Soviet Union has officially disappeared, and the 15-page essay has grown into a 400-page volume, The End of History and the Last Man. I exaggerate only a little when I say that it's hard to know which of these two is the happier or more important event.
This is a splendid book that explains where we've been, and maps the territory we inhabit now, in a way that will find spellbound readers everywhere. As amplified by the author's always-intelligent analysis and pleasantly conversational prose, the Fukuyama thesis turns out to be that rarest of modern occurrences, a media event that actually manages to illuminate events.
Fukuyama turned article into book, not by trying to add detail to his picture of the future, but by explaining in much greater depth why, in Hegel's analysis, liberal democracy ends up on top. This plunges him into political theory, from which he returns with the old-fashioned and highly persuasive notion that liberal ideals correspond uniquely well to basic human needs. Fukuyama's discussion of human psychology, and its relation to politics and economics, is the core of this book.
In the Anglo-Saxon version of liberalism, from which the American tradition stems, man is a creature mainly of material desires, and he's satisfied whenever his appetites are satisfied. To Hegel, by contrast, the core of human nature was a quality the ancient Greeks defined as thymos—spiritedness, the desire for recognition, self-esteem, and the need to create through work. Man's thymotic needs, Fukuyama argues, are what make individual freedom, equal citizenship, liberal democracy, and market capitalism so humanly satisfying and so superior to alternative forms of social and political life.
Fukuyama's Hegelian version of liberalism defines a persuasive and needed alternative to the too-narrow economic viewpoint that dominates much libertarian and individualist thought in America today. It shows a way to think about freedom that preserves the political and social side of man while still affirming his free and individual nature, and that makes room for transactions among consenting adults without reducing everything in life to economics. It's a perspective that can explain, as some latter-day economic Lockianism cannot, why Chile or China aren't models to emulate—why authoritarian governments presiding over market economies aren't enough, and why people need constitutional democracy, the experience of citizenship, and a sense of a common destiny as well.
This is no mere theoretical issue. Much of what's amiss in America today reflects a confusion, and not only among classical liberals, as to the relationship between economics and politics. Fukuyama's Hegelian liberalism makes it clear, as the Anglo-Saxon type doesn't, what's wrong when business executives, in their pursuit of sales and profits, welcome government interventions in the market that they figure have no public merit but will help their companies' bottom lines. Similarly, it spotlights what's wrong with racial discrimination and other private actions aimed at creating advantages or disadvantages that aren't consistent with the thymotic aspect of individual rights.
Readers will find plenty to quibble with. Fukuyama generalizes a bit broadly. Liberal democracy may be ascendant, but it hasn't triumphed everywhere. While kaput in the former Warsaw Pact countries, Marxism is still the public philosophy of a billion Chinese, who hear "bourgeois capitalism" lambasted daily in official forums.
Moreover, while political fascism is dead, the economic part of fascism—that is, state management of key markets in the interest of private producer groups—is very much alive, not only in Japan, but in Europe, much of the Democratic and Republican parties, many big American corporations, and the Third World, among other places.
This book is also irritatingly complacent. Fukuyama is so fixated on the failures of Marxism that he ignores the mess in liberalism's own house—in the United States, for instance, a budget deficit that's headed for catastrophe, declining real per-capita wages, rising racial conflict, chronic trade-war fever, and the public's well-founded alienation from its leaders. These are not the negligible problems that Fukuyama, by his silence, implies.
Fukuyama is no Pollyanna about our liberal future, but some will object, as I do, that the anxieties he does define are misplaced. The book argues that the thymotic need for recognition often entails a need for superiority over others and deference from others, and it worries, with Nietzsche, that the end of history will be so egalitarian that this side of human nature will be frustrated, causing ambition to languish and creativity to wither. Judging from his unsympathetic remarks about black activism, feminism, curricular cultural pluralism, and the rest of the campus political correctness scene, Fukuyama also believes that such an egalitarian demolition job is well under way, and that the best among us, and in us, is already being stifled.
Fukuyama's neoconservatism is showing. He's trying to have his liberal democracy both ways—as a general claim to equal rights and equal recognition on the part of everyone, and as a personal claim to superiority over Marxists, feminists, and other ideological opponents.
The problem here is twofold. First, Fukuyama sees a moral equivalence between the thymotic desire for equal recognition and the thymotic urge for superiority. The classical liberals didn't, and we shouldn't either. Their solution—to deny the reality of the thymotic part of the soul, to insist that the human personality is just an economic consumption function, and thereby to attempt to banish issues of recognition from liberal society—was wrong. But it's possible to acknowledge thymos and to make the distinctions among its forms that can begin to translate a partly troublesome natural urge into a moral principle.
Alas, Fukuyama doesn't undertake this necessary labor. If he had, I doubt he'd have ended up so uncritically sympathetic to what he calls, in a nasty neologism, megalothymos. I also doubt he'd have dismissed as blithely as he does the complaints by blacks, feminists, and others that the university invidiously denies them certain forms of recognition that it accords to other groups. And not least, I doubt that he'd have failed as much as he does to take note of the free market and the free society generally as a means of resolving conflicting thymotic needs harmoniously.
But Fukuyama can't address these issues as long as he remains a neoconservative, that is, an oligarchist in democrat's clothing. So for him as for those on the left and right who were so quick to dismiss his otherwise brilliant thesis, the fall of Soviet Marxism ends up only confirming what he'd been saying all along, too. The difference between him and his critics is that what he's been saying, taken more seriously than he himself does, and pressed farther beyond the intellectual confines of Cold War–era debate than he does, gets you somewhere really interesting and politically valuable.
Contributing Editor Paul H. Weaver is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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]]>Some 160 years ago, a young Frenchman set out on a journey to study prisons in the United States, returning home after many months to write, in addition to the planned monograph, a truly great book about politics in a democratic age. His name, of course, was Alexis de Tocqueville, and Democracy in America is without peer in plumbing both the character of the first new nation and the political trends that shaped the century that followed.
Now a Dutch journalist named Karel Van Wolferen, based in Tokyo for the last 25 years, has written a book that does something similar for Japan and, I fear, for the next scene in the global melodrama. It's called The Enigma of Japanese Power, and it paints a somewhat terrifying picture of the world's dominant economic power.
Van Wolferen argues that Japan, behind a facade of constitutional democracy and free markets, is actually an oligarchy. Seemingly modem institutions supposedly under popular control are in reality insulated from outside influences and are run by tiny, self-appointed cliques in their own interest. Politically speaking, no one is in charge. Formal policymaking and representative institutions (parties, parliament, prime minister, elections) are shell games worked by ministries, top bureaucrats, and corporate interests to their own self-chosen ends. The state is weak; sovereignty scarcely exists. Big issues concerning the public interest and the fate of the nation aren't addressed or dealt with. Japan is a juggernaut on a course no one can predict or control.
Power in Van Wolferen's Japan is located mainly in the huge, cartel-minded, export-oriented megacorporations. They are coddled by policies making capital cheap, labor docile, investors loyal, and customers abject. They're carefully exempted from any really dangerous foreign competition in the home market. They're free to pursue an obsessive desire for sales volume and market power with little regard for the costs and risks that such a strategy entails in ordinary circumstances. Proof of the corporations' privileged position is the fact that the Japanese, though they out produce everyone in the world, enjoy a living standard not much above that which prevails in the Soviet Union.
Contrary to most observers, Van Wolferen argues that the Japanese system isn't a simple case of pluralism or corporatism with an Oriental accent. The Japanese system, he holds, stymies the popular participation that pluralist and corporatist theory assume. It is, in an ancient and useful term he doesn't make use of, an oligarchy.
Van Wolferen has written a subtle, richly detailed book that ranges widely through Japanese history, culture, and postwar politics. Though written by a person immersed in Japanese events and personalities of the past two decades, Van Wolferen's book is much more than journalism. It's a work of high social theory that rises above the conventional social science because the author isn't isolated in a methodological and disciplinary cloister. His theory grows out of intimate, direct, personal knowledge based on experience as well as scholarship. One quickly comes to trust and like the author.
This is a scary book. Van Wolferen writes in part to warn the West that Japan really is different. Uniquely among modern nations, Van Wolferen's Japan is capable of behaving in ways harmful to itself and others. Oligarchy has a profound blindness to the consequences of actions that serve the oligarchs' interests. That, says Van Wolferen, is why the Japanese military regime attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 despite the vastly superior industrial might—and, therefore, the superior eventual military might—of the United States. Van Wolferen's main point is that Japan today is quite capable of undertaking the economic equivalent of Pearl Harbor, for example, by continuing to expand exports but not imports regardless of its increasingly protectionist-minded trading partners' rage, thereby inviting a global economic holocaust.
If Van Wolferen is right about this, the implications for U.S. trade policy are ironic, however. In the months since the book was published, Van Wolferen has been assailed by Japanese and their many American academic apologists and warmly embraced by American protectionists, as if the book called for tough retaliatory measures against what Peter Drucker terms adversary trade. Actually, what Van Wolferen's thesis suggests is that it's futile to pressure the Japanese to lower their trade barriers on pain of being shut out of the foreign markets that have made them so rich. If Japan works the way Van Wolferen says it does, section 301 retaliations by the United States won't have the slightest impact on Japanese trade policy. They'll merely touch off a fresh chorus of Japanese self-pity over their unfair victimization by the gaijin losers and fresh PR to hypocritically reassure foreigners that Japanese protectionism is on its way out even as the trade barriers that are driving Japan's trading partners around the bend are given a new lease on life. Van Wolferen's subtext is that only the United States can prevent a protectionism-induced worldwide depression à la 1930—that no matter how badly the Japanese may act, the correct U.S. response is never to respond in kind. Thus the people who really ought to be celebrating Van Wolferen's thesis are the adversary traders in Tokyo and the free traders in Washington! U.S. protectionists can take little comfort in this book.
I am not sure, however, that Van Wolferen is entirely correct in his analysis. Like Tocqueville's effort to explain everything about America in terms of equality of condition, Van Wolferen's oligarchical thesis slights some important realities. The Japanese system has an ability to change directions and act prudently that Van Wolferen doesn't do justice to. He eloquently explains the extraordinary political career of Kakuei Tanaka, prime minister from 1972 to 1974 and for a decade thereafter the kingmaker of the Liberal Democratic Party. It was Tanaka who set Japan on its present course of export-oriented economic growth; who ditched the left and built a new (if corrupt) foundation under the dominant LDP; who presided over the forging of an entente between industry and environmentalism; who, in short, put together the Japan the world has come to know and respect and fear over the past two decades. Yet Van Wolferen's theory in effect denies that leadership on such a scale, involving the exercise of sovereignty and a change in national direction, is possible in Japan.
Van Wolferen's failure to acknowledge Japanese political leadership is paralleled by a slighting of Japan's business achievements, which he attributes largely to public policies that starve the consumer sector and to corporate structures that enable Japanese managers to invest vast sums over long periods at little or no profit. These, to be sure, are important advantages, but they are far from telling the whole story.
Van Wolferen says nothing about the leadership and organizational resources that, in less than a decade, enabled the Japanese automakers to shift from producing tiny, ugly, underpowered, rickety econoboxes for the domestic market to producing what are by far the best cars in the world, vehicles that dominate the biggest auto markets despite protectionist barriers and that are earning enormous profits in the process. And the case of Japanese car companies isn't unique. In industry after industry, the Japanese have shown an astonishing ability to boldly respond to markets different from their own and to outperform non-Japanese competitors well entrenched in those markets. Where have Japan's supposedly pampered business oligarchs, supposedly isolated from any need to deal with others on the others' terms, found the incentives and skills to undertake the redefinition of their own businesses—and their own managerial roles—that their recent competitive success has entailed? To my mind, this is the central puzzle about Japan. Van Wolferen doesn't illuminate the issues involved.
The Enigma of Japanese Power is Toquevillian in the prophetic as well as the analytic sense. Reading this volume, I was often struck by how strongly the United States and other industrial societies are coming to resemble Van Wolferen's Japan.
The book calls to mind the extent to which the Western economies are tranforming themselves along Japanese lines. Responding to the challenge from the East, many American and European firms are following their Japanese competitors in improving product quality, involving employees more intimately in the life and affairs of the workplace, and developing better products for new or newly segmented markets. In Washington and the state capitals, there's been growing emphasis on tax and other policies to boost economic efficiency and growth.
But there are sharp limits to the extent to which the West is apt to reproduce Japan's economic miracle, which Van Wolferen's analysis suggests is sui generis to a very substantial extent. For example, it'll be a cold day in hell before policymakers in the West start starving consumers and fattening producers in the Japanese manner, or before Western corporations develop the social homogeneity and unity of purpose that enable large, bureaucratic Japanese firms to attain levels of creativity and competitiveness usually associated with small, new, entrepreneurial firms.
For me, the really striking areas of convergence between East and West suggested by Van Wolferen are political and cultural and involve not the Americanization of Japan but the Japanification of the American political system. Van Wolferen's demonstration of how Japanese leaders create the illusion of governing in the public interest while actually avoiding issues and serving the oligarchical powers that be reminded me of how, in an age of news media, spin management, and political action committees, our own politics seems increasingly to work the same way. Our political parties, like Japan's, neither represent nor govern. Our policymakers, like Japan's, spend most of their energy posturing in behalf of the public interest while always making sure that nothing they do would give offense to any substantial organized interest and that most of what they do serves those interests. Our media, like theirs, generally cooperate with dominant institutions in putting out the deluge of thematic events that conceal and legitimate oligarchy. Our culture, with its modernist relativism, has less and less room for universalistic notions of morality and truth whose absence in Japan, according to Van Wolferen, is a key reason for the oligarchy's ability to manipulate the system.
In only one way—but it may be a decisive way—does the United States appear not to be converging on the Japanese model: in the scope we give to the individual as a cultural ideal, legal reality, and fact of social life. In Japan, writes Van Wolferen, the individual scarcely exists, and Japanese rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, there's little reason to think that the individual will become a force anytime soon. The Japanese, Van Wolferen argues, can't change jobs or residence at will, are subject to minute (if polite) police surveillance, and have limited rights at law and very few lawyers to help enforce them. Indeed, the system of social control he describes is so tight that in many respects the Japanese individual seems less free than a Russian under Stalin or a Chinese under Mao. In Japan, there are no dissidents. Though Van Wolferen doesn't make this explicit, the implication is that U.S. survival may well rest on its ability to remain true to the better angels of its individualist nature.
Paul Weaver, author of The Suicidal Corporation, is a John M. Olin media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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]]>Nathaniel Branden, the Objectivist psychologist who was Ayn Rand's protégé, lover, publicist, and cultmanager in the 1950s and 1960s, has written a fascinating memoir of the 18 years he spent at the side of the brilliant, somewhat loony woman who wrote Atlas Shrugged. It's not a biography—while Rand is a constant presence, she hovers in the background. The focus of the book is Branden himself; this is the self-portrait of a protégé. It's a tale of adventure and betrayal that casts light, not only on the Objectivist movement, but on the nature of the political intellectual in our time.
Branden grew up in Toronto in the 1940s as Nathaniel Blumenthal, son of a Russian Jewish immigrant clothing-shop owner. As a teenager, he felt alienated from the stolid world of his parents, "in which," as he recalls, "life was perceived not as an adventure but as a burden, and in which growing up was equated with giving up." Nathaniel longed for the "laughter and challenge and high-energy excitement" he'd experienced as a child. "I wanted to find heroes."
He found them in a book. "Howard Roark laughed," he read one day as he glanced at the first page of a novel his sister had left on the coffee table. By the time he'd finished The Fountainhead, his world had been turned upside down. The liberal pieties he's been brought up on suddenly seemed "preposterous" to him. They "missed the point of what life—and greatness—demanded. Not to sacrifice the self but to remain true to it at all costs—that was [Rand's] heroic vision." From age 14 to 18, "I read and reread the book almost continuously," Branden says. "It was the most important companion of my adolescence."
Nathaniel remained the obedient kid he'd always been, relating to Objectivist ideals the way he says his parents related to their liberal ideals: by cherishing them in his rhetoric and fantasies, but acting on the basis of what others expected of him—and by denying the contradiction. Then, as later in life, Nathaniel was an expert at denial. When he blocked out a problematic reality—as, for example, when he committed himself to the woman who was to become his first wife despite, he says, her lack of ardor and continuing involvements with other men—Branden experienced what he describes as "lightness," and "drama," or flight through air; that is, feelings of distance, numbness, dissociation, unreality.
Lightness and drama became a way of life for Branden when, as a UCLA freshman in 1950, he met Ayn Rand. He'd written Rand to ask what economic philosophy she believed in—"certainly not capitalism," he guessed—and she had replied with an invitation to visit her ranch house in the San Fernando Valley. It was love at first sight. Nathaniel, Ayn, and her husband, Frank O'Connor, talked from 8:00 in the evening to 5:30 the next morning. She invited Nathaniel to call later that day and to come back later in the week. In the 18 years that followed, Ayn and Nathaniel mentored and protégéd each other almost daily in a complex relationship that was both a wonderful success and a bitter failure.
Their intellectual collaboration was a triumph. They shared a genuine love of rationalist-individualist ideas and had complementary needs and strengths as intellectuals. Nathaniel was an ideal student—intelligent, needy, aggressive, deferential—and Rand a born teacher. He got an incomparable education. At a time when she was lost in the world of her novel-in-progress—Atlas Shrugged took her 13 years to write—she got a sounding board for her ideas, an approving first reader for her chapters, and an impresario who recruited a circle of fawning disciples. Later, his Nathaniel Branden Institute lectures helped turn her ideas into an intellectual-political movement and crowned her as its queen.
Their personal relationship, however, was sick, sick, sick. Ayn's philosophy held that people should be honest with themselves and others. That's the last thing Ayn and Nathaniel were, according to Branden. They threw themselves into exploitive, dependent relationships. They were false to their hearts' desires. They coerced, manipulated, lied to, and hurt the people around them. They betrayed themselves and the values they held dear.
Ayn Rand, the exponent of heroic individualism, was an intensely dependent person in private life. In matters ranging from personal transportation (though a long-time Angeleno, she didn't drive a car) to friendship (she and Frank were socially isolated until Nathaniel began bringing his friends and relatives around) to stimulation (she took amphetamines daily to control her weight), Ayn relied on others for the material and psychic wherewithal to sustain daily life. This inability to stand on her own two feet, Branden's account suggests, reflected the deeper fact that the great American novelist of pride and self-esteem had very little regard for herself.
Seeking a sense of self-worth in the attention and approval of the people around her made Ayn domineering, possessive, jealous, manipulative. "You have no right to other concerns…, no right to casual friendships, no right to vacations, no right to sex with some inferior woman," she yelled when Nathaniel once said he'd like a little space. She demanded total loyalty from, and was highly suspicious of, the members of her circle (with wonderful irony, they called it "the Collective"). She and Nathaniel spent much of their time together evaluating and disciplining the Collectivists, and over time most were banished. One who wasn't: future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
Ayn could be amazingly cruel. Before starting the affair with Nathaniel, he recounts, she asked his wife, Barbara, and her own husband for their consent, and from time to time she discussed with them the liaison's progress and problems. And she was a past master at making people feel guilty. At the end of the conversation in which they broke with each other, she pronounced this memorable curse: "If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you'll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve any potency sooner, you'll know it's a sign of still worse moral degradation."
If Ayn was a tyrant, Nathaniel was a hypocrite and a traitor. Like all protégés, he professed a childlike devotion to his mentor that, as a young adult aggressively using her patronage to further his career, he couldn't and didn't entirely feel. She was the active one, the initiator in their relationship; he was passive, reactive, opportunistic. From the beginning, and especially once their sexual liaison was established, Nathaniel felt the accustomed sensation of lightness in connection with the emotional side of their relationship. Yet her abuse didn't drive him away; it merely intensified his space-cadet numbness.
Nathaniel's hypocrisy deepened into a general pattern of betrayal that infected many of his relationships. In 1968, when at 38 (she was then 64) he gave Ayn a letter announcing the end of their sexual relationship of 14 years, he was still married to (though not living with) his first wife and for seven years had been increasingly involved with a third woman he would later marry. He had become so detached from the moral and psychological reality of human relationships that he felt he didn't need to tell Ayn about the new woman, and he imagined that after the break he and Ayn would remain friends. "You bastard. You nothing. You fraud," Ayn shrieked when she got the drift of the letter. "Everything you have professed to be is a lie."
Branden says of this reaction that it was vintage Ayn, rewriting history to deny the pain she was feeling. But Branden's book, taken as a whole, suggests that he had compromised himself so deeply for so long in connection with so many relationships that her judgment, far from being a flight from reality, was actually pretty close to the truth.
Sometimes Branden appears to sympathize with Rand's perspective. At a number of points in this book, he writes as an older and wiser man who in the twilight of his middle years has set himself the task of revisiting the folly of his youth with new insight and compassion.
In this spirit, Branden argues that her paranoia and his own hypocrisy teach a lesson about the flaws of Objectivism. Ayn and her circle, Branden says, insisted on "unbreached rationality," by which they meant "a commitment to use one's mind to the fullest of one's ability, a respect for facts, reality, and logic, and a refusal to indulge [mere] wishes by evading knowledge or evidence." In theory, it's a fine idea. In practice, Branden says, it was a formula for elevating the mind at the heart's expense and for denying or repressing emotions.
Now the scales have fallen from his eyes, Branden suggests at a number of points. He's learned that emotion and mystery have a necessary place in the human scheme of things; that while reason is a virtue, rationalism is a destructive vice; that being true to yourself can be the most difficult of tasks. In these passages, Branden is in effect confessing error and imploring others to take to heart the lessons he learned at such a cost to himself and those around him.
Most of the time, however, Judgment Day is an exercise in self-aggrandizement. From the vengeful title onward, the book seethes with unacknowledged animus against first-wife Barbara (author of a successful and mostly adulatory biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand) and Rand herself. In memory as in life, Branden relates to them with veiled hostility. He dwells on their unattractive traits and actions and describes them with a minimum of context.
By contrast, the narrative puts his own actions in a sympathetic and rational context—Branden, we soon realize, isn't a man to tell a lot of stories at his own expense. I don't know how many times Branden reports infidelities on Barbara's part and fits of jealous rage on Ayn's. But on the one occasion when Branden purports to explain why he rejected Ayn, he merely says, as if reporting an objective fact of scientific physiology, that a 64-year-old female body lacks sex appeal. At length it becomes apparent that Branden at 60 isn't in much better touch with his feelings and motives than he was at 20. He's still a prisoner of lightness.
In the closing pages, Branden shifts from self-exculpation to self-glorification. "We were ecstasy addicts," he declares. "No one can understand Ayn, or her appeal to people, or the force that held all of us together back in New York, who doesn't understand that there exists in human beings [a] need for an ecstatic state of consciousness. That's what Ayn transmitted through her novels, and that's what we fell in love with and fought against leaving, because it was through her that we first entered that other plane."
Branden apparently means it. He says that in the effort to satisfy their need for ecstasy, people should do whatever turns them on. If sex is your thing, Branden counsels, get thee into the sack. If religion, athletics, drugs, or war is what you get off on, he declares, do it and don't look back. And if, he implies, the quest for ecstasy draws you into a 14-year-long exploitive affair with a married woman old enough to be your mother whom you don't love and eventually abandon in full view of both betrayed spouses, that's great, too. Branden wants us to understand that he has no regrets, that he's hall-of-fame material. At the same time, he also lets us know that he's getting his ecstasy in less problematic ways now—from a happy marriage to his third wife, Devers, and from his writing and therapeutic practice dealing with self-esteem and romantic love.
For me, this is an often tantalizing and frustrating book. On the one hand, it affords a uniquely intimate glimpse of Ayn Rand and, through her, of the world of a modern political intellectual movement, with its authoritarian patrons and hypocritical protégés, its pretensions to scholarship, its rabid sectarianism, its mind-bending hypocrisy. I can't think of another nonfiction work that probes these important and ill-appreciated topics as deeply or that reflects my own experience of the intellectual world as well. And as someone who has tried his hand at memoir, I'm in awe of Branden's achievement in courageously and often movingly bearing witness to so intimate and vast a range of personal experience.
On the other hand, this book has a credibility problem. It's not just that Branden isn't a disinterested witness or that he hasn't fully owned up to his part in the story he's telling. The problem is that it's hard to trust a man who, after everything that happened and everything he says he felt, insists that the only thing amiss in his relationship with Rand was an age difference that made it inevitable that eventually he'd lose interest in bonking the old girl. Or who, at the end of a wrenching, dark, real-life tragicomedy, sees fit to get off stage with a trite credo of '60s narcissism and nihilism. After all he's been through, first as protégé and more recently as a memoirist, Nathaniel Branden deserves a larger, more humane perspective on what he's seen and felt than the one he projects in his book.
Paul H. Weaver, author of The Suicidal Corporation, is John M. Olin Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The post The Unbearable Lightness of a Protégé's Being appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I was a young neoconservative. With my fellow neocons, as members of our then-tiny political movement were sometimes called, I believed that the American political and economic system—democratic capitalism, we called it, or liberal capitalist democracy—was a good system. We liked its values: individual rights, reasonably free markets, representative government, economic growth, and a well-tempered welfare state. We also liked the fact that, in the real world, it outstripped the competition, providing more freedom, more opportunity, and more material well-being than any other system. In practice, it even provided more equality than socialism.
The system was under attack, we believed. It was being run down by a barrage of news, advocacy, and legislation that stood the truth about capitalist democracy on its head. Far from being the best system in the world, the attackers implied, capitalist democracy was beset by failure and crisis.
The private economy wasn't an engine of prosperity, growth, and opportunity, but a source of death, inflation, unemployment, and deception, the critics said. The political system wasn't the world's most open and responsive, they argued, it was under the thumb of the rich and powerful. As a result, problems from malnutrition to noise pollution were being ignored, the critics complained—whereas the reality, we neocons believed, was that the powers of government and incomes of taxpayers were being deployed aggressively against a long and growing list of problems, real and imagined.
This attack was coming, we neocons thought, from the professional classes, which were exercising growing power over American society through the media and universities. Led by Naderites, environmentalists, adversary journalists, and the other ites and ists who flourished in the 1960s and '70s, the attacking forces presented themselves as moderates trying to make the system work. But we neoconservatives believed they were in fact radicals—they didn't like capitalist democracy and were trying to destroy it.
And we believed they were succeeding. Democracy was giving way to manipulative media politics, big government was subjugating the private sector, the public was being robbed of respect for decent institutions. If business and other private institutions didn't wake up and start defending themselves, we neocons believed, capitalist democracy would soon be a fading memory.
But we also believed that supporters of the American system had a golden opportunity to reverse the tide. Our strategy for defending democratic capitalism was simple: Tell the truth. Tell the truth about the radicalism of the adversarial movements. Tell the truth about their policies' bad effects. Tell the truth about what thoughtful, pro-capitalist policy solutions to public problems would be like. Tell the truth about how business works to the benefit of customers, shareholders, workers, and the public as a whole. In short, seize the high ground of public policy debate, put the liberals and Naderites on the defensive, and trust the truth to discredit these movements with the unradical American public.
I had become convinced of these views as a writer for Fortune magazine, for which I covered government regulation of business. Each new story I wrote deepened my belief that business and government were badly mishandling economic issues, so when an executive search firm contacted me in behalf of "a large industrial client in the Midwest" that was looking for talent to beef up its public affairs staff, I was interested. The auto industry offered a textbook example of regulatory excess, and my idea of telling the truth seemed the answer to its problems. Two interview trips to Dearborn later, the Ford Motor Co. offered me a job at a salary that made it easy to say yes.
I was on a fool's errand. My idea of defending business was based, not on knowledge of the corporation, but on the ideology of some brilliant but insular New York intellectuals. I imagined that Ford would be an orderly place where I would be allowed to develop information, arguments, positions, and texts that reflected my strategic ideas. I imagined Ford executives would be delighted with the results and would quickly seize the opportunity to go public with spellbinding new rhetoric that would rise to the defense of the company by telling truth to power.
My first week in Dearborn, I could see something was wrong. I was immediately put on a task force that would be handling Ford's announcement of a decision by Henry Ford II to locate a new plant in Canada, rather than Ohio, in the face of Carter administration opposition to nation-states bidding for plants. But the pitch we scripted for Ford spokesmen was mostly a tissue of fictions. In a series of little and not-so-little white lies of corporate diplomacy, we said a final decision was still pending, omitted any mention of a crucial agreement between Ford of Canada and the Canadian government, indicated the decision would be made by Ford of Canada, and insisted we had no view on plant-location inducements.
On none of these points was the truth really embarrassing or damaging. So why did we speak as if it were? Why were we telling lies to no apparent benefit to ourselves? I was mystified.
A few weeks later the mystery deepened. Under mounting pressure from the press, product liability lawsuits, and the government's auto-safety regulators, Ford recalled 1.5 million early-model Pintos and Mercury Bobcats for modifications to make their fuel tanks less likely to leak or rupture and catch fire in rear-end collisions. Weeks later Ford Motor Co. was indicted by a grand jury in Indiana on charges of criminal manslaughter for the deaths of three girls killed when the Pinto they were in caught fire after being rear-ended by a van.
Like my fellow public affairs staffers, I began following the Pinto case, and, as I got up to speed on it, it dawned on me that here, too, we weren't telling the truth. Not only that, but we were lying about a truth that helped us. We were lying against our interest!
The charge that the Pinto was particularly susceptible to fuel-tank rupture or fire in rear-end collisions was a bum rap. The design of the car's fuel system was essentially the same as that of other cars of its size and generation. Unsurprisingly, early-model Pintos had about the same rate of injury and death from fire due to rear-end collisions as other cars of their generation and size, according to data from the government's Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS). In short, there was nothing unusual about the Pinto and no good reason for believing that Ford was significantly negligent in designing the car.
We should simply have told the truth about the car. We had nothing of substance to be ashamed of—and in product safety issues, manufacturers should always level with customers, no matter what. Failure to do so is a guarantee of disaster, and acting with a punctilious regard for customers' safety is the honorable and effective thing to do, as Johnson & Johnson later showed with its Tylenol product. The minute it appeared that someone was poisoning Tylenol capsules, J&J immediately removed the product from the market. That action made it possible for the company not merely to reintroduce Tylenol but to regain its original industry-leading market share once poisoning concerns were resolved.
But we didn't tell the truth about the Pinto. We did issue a bland denial of the charge that the fuel system was unsafe, but essentially we said nothing.
We did not explain the point about the Pinto's design. We did not tell people about the FARS data. We did not explain how the public's impression that the Pinto was unsafe was created by aggressive product liability lawyers and adversary journalists making tendentious use of internal documents and testimony by ex-Ford safety engineers who had developed a new, safer fuel-tank design.
Above all we did not act on the basis of the truth. We did not fight to vindicate ourselves, we did not go hither and yon making speeches and running issue ads explaining why we were taking a bum rap, we did not act like an innocent person who is wrongly accused.
To the contrary, we acted the part of a person who has done something wrong but can't bring himself to admit it. Under pressure from private lawsuits and government regulators, we recalled the car to rebuild a fuel system that was no different from those in millions of Ford cars we weren't recalling. We settled many lawsuits out of court on condition that the plaintiff not disclose anything about the settlement. In short, we acted guilty.
We suffered fearfully as a result. In the summer of 1978, the Pinto, previously our biggest-selling car, was selling at a rate about 40 percent off the previous year's level. Johnny Carson was peppering his monologues with Pinto jokes. The company's product reputation plummeted. It was no accident that a year later, when gasoline lines caused sales of small cars and imports to soar, General Motors's 46 percent share of car sales in the United States stayed essentially constant while Ford's 24 percent share dropped by a third.
When the grand jury handed down its criminal indictment in the case of the Indiana Pinto deaths, I had the idea of interesting a friend on the editorial page staff of the Wall Street Journal in writing an editorial on the case. The theme I would suggest: that the indictment shows how, amid the rise of the no-fault idea in torts and the erosion of the distinction between civil and criminal law, manufacturing is on the verge of being defined as a criminal enterprise.
The point was a small example of the kind of truth I thought would defend our company and put capitalism's critics to rout. The senior public-relations staff member in charge of Pinto PR nixed the idea.
Stimulating an editorial that would take our side on the Pinto was a terrible idea, he said. No matter how effectively it might argue our case, its main function would be to remind people of the original charges against the Pinto. The correct response to a damaging and unfair charge against a company is to say nothing and wait for the charge to die away. Saying anything, no matter how persuasive, only keeps the charge alive.
The weeks went by, the bad publicity didn't stop, and a feeling grew that something had to be done. It was decided to stop the public relations beating we'd been taking and stage a comeback. Each of us was to submit ideas for PR programs to accomplish this, and the executive director for public relations, an ethereal Lee Iacocca loyalist who was soon to leave the company, was put in charge of screening the proposals.
In a metaphor I have never forgotten or entirely understood, he dubbed the program "Smokestacks for White Hats." I guess the smokestacks in his image represented visible PR gestures that would remind folks that Ford people were good guys who wore white hats.
Out of the woodwork came the priority items on my colleagues' hidden agendas. The executive director for public relations, who was a member of the board of the Detroit Symphony, proposed a costly series of Public Broadcasting System (PBS) concert specials with—the Detroit Symphony. Another executive director proposed a series of issue advertisements in which we would extol the cause of auto safety and describe our contributions to it. From someone else came the thought that we should hire Jimmy Stewart to do a series of TV image ads. No one proposed that we cut out the nonsense and start telling—and acting on—the truth about the Pinto.
I was no exception. I tossed some neoconservative smokestacks—or were they white hats?—into the hopper. Ben Wattenberg, the spirited neoconservative publicist, was looking for corporate underwriters to back his upcoming PBS series, "Wattenberg at Large," so I submitted a copy of his prospectus and urged that Ford help Ben defend capitalism.
I also turned up a fascinating program developed by a neoconservative community activist at the American Enterprise Institute named Michael Balzano. Mike's idea was that, through appropriate agents, corporations would contribute large sums to meals-on-wheels and other local social-service programs, and in return the agents would mobilize the beneficiaries to support the donors' positions on regulatory or other issues. In effect we would create a series of neighborhood political machines to oppose Naderite regulation.
My suggestions met with horrified disapproval. No, no, no, I had it all wrong, I was made to understand. The idea of Smokestacks for White Hats wasn't to take issue with anyone or flog our corporate agenda. It was to associate ourselves with people and institutions that had no connection with our agenda—that might even be our opponents—but that were well regarded by publics whose good graces we were trying to get back into.
The winning proposal was that we put up money for a public television public-affairs program. And that is how it came to pass that Ford Motor Co. became the principal underwriter of the weekly PBS news program, "Washington Week in Review."
The established journalists who appear on the program may think that they are discussing the week's events, but that is a superficial view of their activities. The deeper reality—at least from the viewpoint of the company that has put up millions to flash its logo on the tube as the program begins and ends—is that they are acting out Ford Motor Co.'s idea of how to recover from Pinto problems. They are smokestacks for white hats.
After nine months at Ford I began to realize that I was going to quit. A promotion delayed my departure as I savored new perks such as: first-class air travel, a nicer and more competent secretary, and a reserved space in the world headquarters indoor garage, where my company car (it was replaced with a new one three times a year) was fueled and washed every day while I worked upstairs. When these entitlements lost their charm, I began looking for a job. Soon I was back in Manhattan, back at Fortune, back seeing old neoconservative friends.
But things didn't feel the same. The world to which I returned after two years in Detroit seemed uncomfortable, even alien. Something was happening between me and my neoconservative friends.
I had kept in close touch with them during my stint at Ford, and throughout the two-year period we had talked at length about the company. They had listened to my tales of life and politics inside a giant corporation with interest, shock, and sympathy, or so it seemed to me.
Now that I had quit Ford and returned to journalism, my stories took on a harder edge. Ford was a pathological institution, I argued. It was behaving in a way harmful to itself, its owners, its customers, and the larger society. It was abusing the support neoconservative intellectuals had given business over the years.
And the problem wasn't confined to Ford. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that a lot of other big corporations were acting the same way. Business didn't need defense, I started telling my friends, it needed criticism and reform. It needed to become the capitalist institution we neoconservatives had mistakenly thought it was all along.
The neoconservatives airily dismissed all this. Ford was just a badly managed company, they said, you couldn't draw any conclusions from it. It's always a mistake to meet the people you're defending, they said. ("God knows I was happier defending Israel before I got to know the Israelis," said Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine.)
Anyway, what you saw in Dearborn is no big deal, the neoconservatives said; why, Adam Smith himself conceded that businessmen are always conspiring against the marketplace. And if I was right, it still didn't matter, they said. Any propensity to take self-destructive positions would automatically correct itself, as companies taking smarter positions, if in fact they were smarter, did better than companies taking dumb positions, if the positions were as dumb as I seemed to think.
Soon there was practically nothing my old friends and I were able to discuss civilly. Even casual conversations quickly disintegrated into squabbling followed by sullen silence.
But what exactly was my objection to the corporation? How did the pathologies I witnessed—the lying, self-destructiveness, etc.—fit together? What was the larger whole of which they were parts? I had a terrible time figuring out the answers to these questions.
At first I took a reformist approach to what I'd witnessed at Ford. I told myself that once upon a time American business had been a pro-market, capitalist institution; that in the post–New Deal environment, it had been captured by professional managers, the social-responsibility doctrine of management, big government, and other liberal forces; and that now it needed to return to its roots and its founders' vision. That is, I tried to account for the corporation the way neoconservatives account for most everything they object to—by assuming that existing institutions are at bottom good and by attributing everything that is objectionable about them to the accidental intrusion of liberal political ideas and liberal political power.
Then I started reading history. I began to reconnoiter the vast literature on the corporation's past, because I wanted to know more about business politics in what I supposed must have been the Golden Age, back when the people who ran big corporations were unreconstructed capitalists, back before liberalism began spreading its blight across the polity. So back I went, back to before the New Deal, back to before World War I, then back into the 19th century.
I found, to my surprise, that there was no Golden Age. According to a fascinating and fast-growing body of historical scholarship, the 19th-century corporation wasn't at all as I had imagined. It had never been for markets, limited government, private property, or the other values associated with the business cause. It had always spoken of the "social responsibilities" of business. It had always tried to derive private advantage from public policy. It had never been the rockribbed, pro-market, straight-talking institution I had imagined.
It was becoming impossible for me to continue thinking of myself as a neoconservative. If the corporation had been a manipulative, politicized institution from the start, the neoconservatives' idea that it should be defended against the left was absurd. You can't defend an institution against groups it has nothing in principle against or against views it often shares or exploits.
Moreover, if the corporation had been a manipulative, politicized institution from the start, the neoconservatives' conviction that liberal, capitalist democracy is a good system that should be systematically defended against the left is unpersuasive. A more sensible conclusion is that the corporation is a flawed institution, that democratic capitalism is a flawed system, and that both are in need of criticism and reform.
If one goes ahead, as many neoconservatives do, and defends the corporation against criticism anyway, attributing dark anti-American sentiments and illiberal values to all corporate critics, one is merely defending the corporation in its corruption and manipulativeness. One is defending an institution that collaborates with liberal groups the neoconservatives oppose and that tramples values neoconservatives support.
As these implications sank in, my political sympathies began shifting. I found myself cooling to groups I had long identified with and warming to groups I had long opposed.
I became disenchanted with the Reagan administration. While Ronald Reagan still strikes me as a sincere advocate of classical liberal ideals, it's clear that the administration he heads is cut of a different, more corporate cloth. It has not so much applied the ideology as used it as a cover story for a pattern of policy meant to advance business interests in the traditional corporate manner.
I also began to see why the neoconservatives and I had had such a falling out. Neoconservatives believe in institutions, prudential management of society's affairs, experts, social policy, a well-tempered welfare state, and the idea of the corporation as a quasi-public institution. They reject as simplistic the principles of limited government, individual rights, direct citizen participation, and the marketplace. The corporation stood for the neoconservative ideals. By becoming a critic of the corporation, I saw, I had become a critic of neoconservatism itself.
I also began to feel new sympathy for groups I had once bitterly opposed. For example, I came to have much higher regard for the New Left historians who burst upon the scene in the 1960s—much to the disgust and scorn of conservative, neoconservative, and many liberal scholars. Leaving aside their socialism and anticapitalist animus, which I found as alien as ever, the strictly historical conclusions of the New Left historians now struck me as persuasive and even revelatory.
There was something exploitative, aggressive, and constitutionally subversive about the corporation as it emerged in the 19th century, as they had argued. There clearly was something corporate about political liberalism in the 20th century, and something liberal about the corporation, as they insisted. And both the corporation and liberalism, as they had suggested, were connected with a corruption of both markets and democracy.
The New Left historians, I now believed, were definitely onto something. They clearly explained part of the broad phenomenon I had witnessed in Dearborn.
And I discovered in my heart a feeling that shocked me much more—I was starting to sympathize with Ralph Nader. His antimarket ideas and humorlessness left me as cold as ever. But the Naderites' anger at the corporation, their aggressive efforts to manipulate it into changing, their extremism in behalf of social goals when dealing with corporate adversaries—all this, which I had once thought pathological, I could suddenly sympathize with.
Above all, I felt growing sympathy with the scholars and policy analysts I began meeting at the pro-market Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. We seemed to agree about everything, in fact. Not only were they for the market and limited government, but they understood precisely what I had encountered at Ford and they shared my critique of business.* They accepted that corporations needed reforming, they wanted to submit business to the discipline of the marketplace, no ifs, ands, or buts.
As a neoconservative, I had considered the libertarian viewpoint simplistic. As someone who now had first-hand knowledge of the corporation, however, I saw profound wisdom in the market idea.
And so it slowly came to me that I was no longer a neoconservative. I had become a libertarian.
Paul H. Weaver has been an assistant managing editor of Fortune, economic communications planning director at Ford, and assistant professor of government at Harvard University.
Copyright © by Paul H. Weaver. From the new book The Suicidal Corporation by Paul H. Weaver, published by Simon and Schuster. Printed by permission.
*Just as my encounter with one of the world's biggest corporations led to painful but necessary changes in my thinking, so did the markets of the the late 1970s and early 1980s push Ford into some painful but necessary changes of its own. Most of these changes, which took place after my departure from Dearborn, fall outside the scope of a personal memoir. But they show that there is nothing inevitable about the corporate behavior I witnessed. It is possible for a company to change and renew itself. Ford did.
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