522
DANIEL BELL
to the adequacy of America's classic national style. For that style with
its
ad hoc
compromise and day-to-day patching of problems, rather
than the formulation of consistent policy, no longer gives us guides
to action. The classic notion was that the individual was the unit of
action. But the chief realization of the past thirty years is that not the
individual
but
collectivities-corporations,
labor unions, farm organi–
zations, pressure groups-have become the units of social action,
and that individual rights, in many instances, derive from group
rights, or have become fused with them. But other than the thin
veil of the "public consensus" we have few guide lines, let alone a
principle of distributive justice, to regulate or check the arbitrary
power of many of these collectivities.
A second sign that the classic style has broken down appears
in the lack of any institutional means for creating and maintaining
necessary public service. On the municipal level, the complicated
political swapping among hundreds of dispersed polities within a
unified economic region, each seeking its own bargains in water
supply, sewage disposal, roads, parks, recreation areas, crime regula–
tion, transit, and so on, makes a mockery of the
ad hoc
process.
Witho~t
some planning along viable regional lines, local community
life is bound to disintegrate under the burdens of mounting taxes
and social disarray.
And, third, foreign policy has foundered because every ad–
ministration has had difficulty in defining a national interest, morally
rooted, whose policies can be realistically tailored to the capacities
and constraints imposed by the actualities of world power. The easy
temptation-and it is the theme of the radical Right- is the tough–
talking call for "action." This emphasis on action, on getting things
done, on results, is a dominant aspect of the traditional American
character. The moralizing style, with its focus on sin and on the
culpability of the individual, finds it hard to accept social forces as a
convincing explanation of failure, and prefers "action" instead.
Americans have rarely known how to sweat it out, to wait, to
calculate in historical terms, to learn that "action" cannot easily
reverse social drifts whose courses were charted long ago. The
"liberation" policy of the first Eisenhower administration was but a
hollow moralism, deriving from the lack of any consistent policy,
other than the traditional need to seem "activist," rather than from
