PARTISAN REVIEW
683
Andrew Hacker pictures for the future a dull apocalypse and a glooIDY.
twilight of American power. This strangely passionless prediction of
di–
saster
is
sustained through eleven chapters which examine individuality,
scholarship, corporations, racial tensions and politics. In every field,
Hacker has it the same; the rising expectations of the lower and lower
middle classes, brought on by unprecedented wealth, has led to a debase–
ment of hierarchy
in
America, and the feeling of absolute equality among,
he notes, unequals. The pressure that this democratic-materialism creates
upon the social structure is overwhelming, to the point where all the
values of social order, such as self-sacrifice, saving, asceticism, have been
cast out and replaced by a kind of absolute hedonism. "Tensions and
frustrations," he says, "are bound to arise when 200 million human
beings demand rights and privileges never intended for popular distribu–
tion." In effect, the poor slobs who live in the suburbs have no right
to think of themselves as individuals nor their dull lives as meaningful.
The subversion of order by democracy is especially disastrous (one
is not surprised to find) in academics. Hacker laments the decline
of
good, clear, original thinking. Nothing but small minds publishing mono–
graphs, he argues, is the mark of scholarship today, and is the inevitable
result of allowing more men and women into professions than their
intelligence merits. And so it goes, through each aspect of American
society.
Perhaps the only interesting point of this book is the discussion of
the sort of order which persisted before the democratic breakdown.
Answering his father, the historian, Louis Hacker, he says at first that
America's distinctive political history is due to the absence of feudal
institutions. But then he says that America did have a feudal psychology,
with all sorts of built-in deferences, an unofficial hierarchy and a class
system of learning. This is the order which Hacker now finds
in
decline.
Finally, Hacker indulges in a lengthy attack on the middle and
lower middle classes, primarily for the unworthiness of their aspirations.
There is little mention of anyone in American society with power, either
political, cultural or economic. The burden for America's ills thus is
made to rest upon the victims, and, of course, democracy is to blame.
By the time one has slogged through this muddy treatise, one is con–
vinced that Hacker really doesn't care much. He lacks the wit and
nostalgia to be a conservative and certainly has none of the liberal's
optimism or sustained appetite for chewing on the present.
If
this book
suggests any comparison, it is with the writings of Brooks Adams who
was even more terrified of the new American. But, unlike Adams whose
passion carried him from one perception to another, Hacker
has
written
