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PARTISAN REVIEW
do with women. I'd like to know what your position is on the Equal
Rights Amendment, or on the fact that women get fifty-nine cents to
every dollar that men earn.
James
Q.
Wilson:
I'll start. One of the tendencies of public discourse
that
'I
find most lamentable is that everybody must have an instant
opinion on issues, and the list of issues could go on and on. I'm not
sure I'm obliged to have an instant sloganized opinion on those
questions. The North-South question, that is to say the relationship
between rich and poor nations, is a question on which a different
answer must be given depending on the country and the commodity.
To generalize about it would deny everything that is important to
intellectuals. With respect to women it would do little good to give
my views on the Equal Rights Amendment. I signed a petition to
have it placed on the ballot. On the whole I think I'm in favor of it.
On the other hand I really don't think that is what you 're getting at,
because you're really getting at the status of women in society as a
social fact and not as a legal hypothesis. This social fact is an issue
that cannot be summarized by asking people
to
raise their hands to
vote for or against women. Or to say that it is lamentable that women
earn fifty-nine percent of men's salaries. I don't know all of the
reasons for those facts. Some may be lamentable. Some may be
explicable. Some, probably the largest number, are unknown.
Norman Birnbaum:
I'm not sure that Hanna Papanek is right in
saying that the neoconservatives have an appeal precisely because
they don't have answers to these questions. There is, sometimes by
implication, a neoconservative program as inchoate as the different
components of the movement are.
It
seeks a break on further
movement toward equality, income redistribution, and economic
planning. It seeks an end to, or at least a slowing down of, move–
ments like the women's movement. With respect to foreign policy,
the North-South issues are very important to neoconservatives who
are for regrouping the Atlantic alliance into a global one for
defending the United States against "excessive demands" by the
Third and Fourth Worlds. I think the program will fail, because it
entails not only starting another set of journals like
The Public
Interest,
which cannot be created by funding from the American
Enterprise Institute. It involves the forging of a political consensus
in the United States, which members of the intelligentsia and other
groups are not prepared to go along with. That is why we have many
hawks who are perfectly willing to demand action against Iran but
refrain from volunteering for military service, and who are unwill-
