Starved for Ideas
The Road from Here: Liberalism and Realities in the 1980’s.
by Paul Tsongas.
Knopf. 280 pp. $12.95.
The problem that liberals continue to face, more than a year after the sweeping conservative election victory, is deciding whether to repackage their old ideas in different rhetorical wrappings or to come up with some genuinely fresh ideas.
This is no easy choice. The old ideas have the obvious virtue of familiarity. No one need tax his brain to remember them, and it is a relatively simple matter to employ smart and articulate people to devise imaginative ways of presenting them. Indeed, really clever ideological cryptographers can invent whole new codes, and so appear to the uninitiated to be saying something quite original.
Devising truly new ideas, on the other hand, takes far greater effort and is not without risks of its own. Ideological creativity is a rare gift, and one that liberals have not had to nurture since the mid-60’s (some would say, the early 30’s). It is not possible simply to hire people to come up with “new ideas” of any consequence or authenticity. Establishing Democratic “think tanks,” founding journals, and holding conferences, symposia, and seminars is like plowing and fertilizing a field; unless the right seeds are available for planting, the crop is apt to consist of weeds.
New ideas are hazardous, too, particularly within such a doctrinaire, occasionally vicious, and slightly insecure crew as American liberals. He who offers a fresh thought, a novel policy, or an unconventional way of analyzing a problem risks charges of heresy, treason, or closet conservatism. (This condition is of course not peculiar to liberals. Recall the mockery and hostility with which traditional conservatives greeted the innovative ideas of “supply-side” economics, which nevertheless provided much of the conceptual basis for Ronald Reagan’s successful campaign, however tattered those same ideas may appear fifteen months later.)
Whether liberals end up simply repackaging their old ideas or developing new ones depends more than anything else on whether they conclude that President Reagan’s triumph was an “aberration,” as Jimmy Carter termed it not long ago, or evidence of a fundamental and lasting shift in the attitude of the American people toward the role and mandate of the national government. For if the 1980 election turns out to have been but a temporary deviation from the course of the past four decades, and if the electorate can be “brought to its senses” by relentlessly calling attention to conservative failures, then one would have to be a very foolish liberal indeed to fuss about new ideas. But if a significant majority of the public has in fact lost faith in the beliefs, the diagnoses, and the prescriptions that have characterized national public policy for lo, these many years, if the “Reagan revolution” really marks the beginning of a new era, then only an unobservant, foolish, or suicidal liberal would settle for the old ideas, however fancy the wrapping.
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Senator Paul Tsongas (D., Mass.) is a card-carrying liberal; a decent and conscientious person; a competent solon; and an ambitious politician. Young enough at forty not to content himself with wistful backward glances and lamentations, and still new enough to Washington—he won his first congressional election just three months after Richard Nixon’s resignation—to elude direct responsibility for most of the policies that Reagan ran against, he seems to be searching for a political faith, for a way of viewing the nation and the world that squares with his own humane instincts, that lends itself to a coherent set of policies by which to govern, and that will be acceptable to the voters of Massachusetts and in time, perhaps, the country as a whole.
But he is not a man of ideas. His earnest and forthright meditation on “liberalism and realities in the 1980’s” is not a comprehensive policy platform on which to run for office, much less a systematic political philosophy through which “liberalism” can gain new meaning. Neither, one should add, is it a resentful diatribe against the evils, excesses, and shortcomings of Reaganism. Mostly it is a repackaging of familiar liberal ideas about how the world ought to work and what the federal government ought to do to make it work that way, as well as a chart of some of the shoals that liberalism must prepare itself to steer around if and when it regains command of the ship of state.
Senator Tsongas was scanning this particular horizon well before November 1980, and in fact won some attention and applause in June of that year when he warned the Americans for Democratic Action that “liberalism is at a crossroads” and “will either evolve to meet the issues of the 1980’s” or be reduced to something of relevance only to historians. The present volume is an extension and elaboration of the concerns expressed in that speech. It is organized around eight “realities” which, in Tsongas’s view, traditional liberal doctrine has either underestimated or mishandled.
These fall under three headings, one of which is interesting only insofar as it raises questions about Tsongas’s own powers of perceiving reality. He is a rock-solid adherent of the “limits-to-growth” philosophy, much concerned with “overloading the biosphere,” the finitude of fossil-fuel supplies, the scarcity of various other resources, and the need for policy-makers to make difficult choices among competing desiderata. It should not be necessary to point this out to a U.S. Senator, but it has been a long time since mainstream American liberalism neglected these “realities.” Indeed, a not inconsiderable part of the reason it was shown the door in 1980 was its excessive attention to them.
Tsongas’s second clutch of concerns has to do—somewhat contradictorily—with economic growth and how to foster it, preferably without inflation. To this end, he rounds up all the usual suspects but jails none of them. His policy prescriptions are familiar, mostly government-centered, and ultimately unpersuasive. He breaks with traditional liberal doctrine only in suggesting that “productivity and quality-control issues should receive due consideration in collective bargaining” and—in a particularly anguished passage—that anti-trust laws and various regulations (such as those enforced by OSHA) may have to be “modified” in order to make the American economy more competitive in world markets.
Finally he turns to foreign policy, having determined that the Soviet Union and the Third World are also “realities” worthy of consideration. Unfortunately, Tsongas’s chapter on “War and Peace and the Soviets” is at best vacillating, at worst schizophrenic. Beginning with a candid acknowledgment that the Soviets are aggressive, relentless, and untrustworthy, it wanders into a long disquisition on how they, too, have problems that we must understand and try not to exacerbate; it warns that we “must come to grips with the actuality of Soviet military build-up” only to assert that the SALT II treaty was, on the whole, well-conceived and worthy of ratification; it argues loftily for “leadership” on both sides and then reminds us of our supposed obligations to the conquerors of Afghanistan, the supporters of Vietnam, and the overlords of Poland: the United States must “provide an environment that enables the Soviets to adjust to the fact that history is no longer on their side, but without being overly threatening to them.”
Tsongas, who was a Peace Corps volunteer (in Ethiopia), fares little better when he turns to human rights and the Third World. Again he starts off well enough, advocating a single human-rights standard, evenhandedly applied. He suggests that foreign aid should be regarded as an “investment” that in time will forge stronger bonds between the United States and the nations we aid—but the evidence he cites is the Marshall Plan, and he all but ignores the more tortured and less predictable geopolitical consequences of our assistance to ex-colonial societies that are not already allies.
His heartfelt belief that we should “stop giving up nations to the Soviets” is coupled with the altogether remarkable sentiment that East-West issues can and should be detached entirely from American relations with individual Third World nations. Perhaps the silliest foreign-policy observation shows up in the chapter on inflation, where Tsongas avers that one way of “attacking inflation at its roots” is to “be responsive to the Third World,” so that “we don’t throw away men and equipment and money on oppressive and unsupportable governments. Always remember that Vietnam is mainly responsible for the severe inflationary pressures still being felt today.”
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The most striking thing about The Road from Here, however, is the omission of social policy from its range of concerns. Aside from a few pious sentences at the end, Tsongas makes no mention of the galaxy of issues most prominently associated with liberalism in the minds of most Americans: health, welfare, education, individual and group “rights,” and the myriad of programs, regulations, laws, court decisions, incentives, and restraints associated with them. Though one can understand why Tsongas might tread lightly on such shaky ground as abortion, school prayer, busing, and quotas, it is extraordinary that he also chooses to ignore the aging of the population, poverty, illiteracy, children in need of day care, delinquents in need of understanding, abused spouses, discriminated against minorities, rat-infested housing, decaying urban transit systems—in short, the mainstream issues of American liberalism in the modern era. That is where judicious application of the “limits to growth” mentality might be most constructive. The exhaustion of the Social Security trust funds looms much more imminently for Americans, after all, than the exhaustion of domestic oil reserves—and is a far more obvious candidate for governmental attention.
True, Tsongas is attempting to write a new agenda for liberalism, and believes that one liberal failing has been overmuch attention to social programs and insufficient awareness of problems and concerns on the minds of ordinary citizens. But there is not likely to be any renaissance of liberalism or restoration of Democratic rule until and unless those responsible for the major domestic policies and programs of the past forty years figure out why the ideas that animated them were so decisively rejected in 1980. The initiative still rests with conservatives, who already show signs of falling victim to excesses of their own but who are not apt to be stopped or even significantly slowed until there are authentic liberal alternatives, both domestic and international. That means more than retooling old ideas, or stringing together a selection of trendy new issues, or making pious pronouncements about the need for a politics of “compassion.” It means nothing less than defining an ideology for what some are already terming neo-liberalism, and doing so before that phenomenon is given a bad name by its own prospective standard-bearers.
