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PARTISAN REVIEW
ity and society is never inappropriate, but recently it has been advanced
rather too joyously. A vision of community in America has never been
entirely secularized. Perhaps only a religious vision can sustain belief
in the transcendence of the present sufficiem to inspire tens of millions
of Americans to think differently about our common future.
The new American conservatism, in any evem, lacks the pathos of
Burke or Burckhardt.
It
is, in fact, devoid of moral elegance-urging,
with no visi ble reluctance, an intensification of the currem structure of
inequality. Asceticism, our new Calvinists seem to think, is good for
everyone but themselves. Expenditures on public services, on the arts
and education, which might show us to be a nation of heart and spirit,
are deemed frivolous. The private sector, it is held, can be coumed
upon to maximize the public good-and interference with it must
nearly always have deleterious consequences. What is surprising about
these views is neither their appeal to a crude doctrine of sell-interest,
nor their revival of socioeconomic theories which events stubbornly
refuse to verify. What is disturbing is that these notions are connected,
although not by a systematic structure of argumem, to a view of
American history which is both static and self-congratulatory. Our
history is urged upon us as a morality play, even as a sacred drama.
It
is
a history which ends now, since it is improbable-even impossible–
that it can be improved upon. The new conservatism is not like the old,
a careful attempt to navigate the shoals of history'S tempestuous sea.
It
is, instead, a charter for immobility.
Was it less than two decades ago that Presidem John Kennedy, in
an address at Yale, declared that our economic problems were now
technical? The economists, these days, show a proper reticence about
writing presidential speeches. Our economy was laboring even before
the 1973 increase in the price of oi l, that convenient (and false)
explanation for a deepening crisis. A drastic comraction of our
production has been averted by a gigantic increase in credit, especially
consumer credit. That increase cannot continue indefinitely. Inflation–
ary in effect, it imposes a growing burden of debt on a larger segment of
the population, and must in the end sharpen the social antagonisms it
is supposed to minimize. Meanwhile, our economy has become en–
trapped in a global system it once dominated. A third of our agricultur–
al production, a sixth of our manufactured goods, go abroad. Internal
prosperity (and a measure of social peace), despite our large domestic
market, depend upon maintaining and increasing our share of world
trade.
The West Europeans and the Japanese have plemy of difficulties
