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IRVING HOWE
gives rise to new kinds of trouble with which it is poorly equipped
to deal.
• It fails to acknowledge sufficiently that the very " rules of the
game" are prearranged so as to favor inequities of power and wealth.
III.
Some Complications of Reality
The welfare state does not appear in a vacuum; it arises at a
certain point in the development of capitalist society and must there–
fore confront the accumulated traditions and peculiarities of that
society. In Britain it comes to a society where serious problems remain
of a premodern and predemocratic kind, difficulties having to do with
aristocracy and caste. In France it comes to a society where the neces–
sary industrialization has just been completed. In Sweden it comes
to a society with a minimum of historical impediments or world poli–
tical entanglements and therefore functions best of all - though here,
as Gunnar Myrdal describes it, the welfare state tends to break down
organs of rural and village self-government. In the United States it
comes at a time of severe historical and moral tensions: the former
concerning our role as a world power and the latter a long-term
shift in the country's pattern of values. Let us glance at the second.
For some decades now there has been noticeable in this country
a slow disintegration of those binding assumptions which, operating
almost invisibly, hold a society together and provide its moral dis–
cipline. These values can hardly
be
evoked in a phrase but we can
at least point to a few: a creed of individualist self-reliance linked
with a belief that the resultant of unrestrained struggle among pri–
vate persons (atomized economic units) will be to the common good;
a conviction that the claims of conscience, seriously entertained, and
the promptings of will, persistently accepted, are in fact equivalent; a
belief in work as salvation and therapy; a steady devotion to privacy,
rigor, control and moral sobriety. In short, the whole American mythos
which we have inherited from the nineteenth century and which in
retrospect has been remarkably successful in unifying the country.
During the last few decades, however, this creed has proven in–
adequate to the American reality, with the evidence ranging from the
crisis of urbanization to the gradual decay of religious belief. Perhaps
the most striking evidence has been the way in which the WASP
elite has slowly been losing its hegemony in American society. So far
