AMITAI ETZIONI
435
recent work concerning Affirmative Action,
Affirmative Discrimina–
tion,
he does not attack outright the value of equality, nor, directly,
even Affirmative Action. He favors "equal opportunity," a time–
honored formula which fails to deal with the question of how to
equalize opportunities for people who begin from largely different
starting points, precisely where discrimination-in-reverse-at the core
of Affirmative Action-enters. As for Affirmative Action, Glazer asks
that it be "re-examined," because, he holds, it is not necessary for
middle-class blacks (they make it, he says, without it) and does not
work for lower-class blacks (among whom unemployment is rampant).
Similarly, it is instructive to compare pragmatic and popular
James
Q.
Wilson's views on the proper societal approach to crime and
punishment with those of ideological and controversial Ernest van den
Haag. (Each has a recent book: respectively,
Thinking About Crime
and
Punishing Criminals.)
Van den Haag's position is that improving
the conditions of the disadvantaged is no solution to the crime
problem; indeed, it is more likely to promote than to deter crime by
fueling the expectations, envy, and frustration of the poor. Wilson, in
contrast, does not deny that poverty helps spawn crime and that
overcoming poverty is therefore a useful way of combating it. Rather
he argues that poverty alone does not account for enough of the
"variance": the majority of poor people are not criminals. Hence, to
focus on overcoming poverty as a means of reducing crime is to invest
our resources and energies disproportionately to this factor's causative
weight. Moreover, explains Wilson, those who insist on combating the
" root causes" of crime-by which they often mean poverty, alienation
and associated family break-up-are also concentrating on the least
tractable of crime's causes. However meritorious such strategies of
societal reform and rehabilitation may be in theory, more is to be
gained pragmatically by tailoring our corrective efforts to the immedi–
ate causes of crime which lie in individual motivation. Thus, by a
different route, Wilson arrives at much the same concrete proposals for
public policy changes as Van den Haag: i.e., concentrate on punish–
ment and deterrence, making it clear that "crime does not pay" via
such measures as mandatory jail sentences, restrictions on judicial
discretion, and limits on plea bargaining.
Perhaps the most popular pragmatic neoconservative is Daniel
Bell, who is most reluctant to accept the label, calling himself a "right–
wing social democrat." Unlike other neoconservatives, Bell does not
argue explicitly that the division of wealth and power in America is
fundamentally a "reward system."
In
other words, "have-nots" are
