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PARTISAN REVIEW
tion, lagging productivity, high energy costs, stiff foreign competi–
tion against the products of American industry, and foreign policy
reverses ending detente with the Soviet Union. Now it is the turn of
faithful conservatives to learn that history "gives when our attention
is distracted . . . Gives too late what's not believed in, or if still
believed, in memory only, reconsidered passion."
Virtually every competent economist has observed, including
sotto voce
at least a few associated with the Reagan administration,
that the tax cuts favored by the supply-siders, monetarist anti–
inflation strategies, increased military spending, and the old fetish of
balancing the budget work at cross-purposes with one another.
Reagan so far has been fairly lucky with inflation, prices having
risen more slowly because of the temporary oil glut. But high inter–
est rates have thrown the economy into a deepening recession
marked by rising unemployment that increases the political vulner–
ability of the Republicans a year before congressional elections. The
belief that the tax cuts will stimulate production is no more than a
pious hope, obviously not shared by Wall Street. The supply-side
argument about the effects of marginal tax rates is patently a
dreamed-up, pseudo-scientific piece of political rationalization taken
seriously only by a few amateur enthusiasts like George Gilder.
Monetarism, on the other hand, is a serious, if largely unproven,
macro-economic theory. The trouble is that the practice inferred
from the theory is politically insupportable in a democratic society
that experienced the Great Depression. Can the United States, a less
cohesive country subject to more frequent elections, put up with
rates of unemployment equalling or surpassing those already
attained in Margaret Thatcher's Britain?
But the failures of the Reagan administration and the utopian
character of its anti-statist ideology have not been countered by
renewed intellectual vigor and political creativity on the part of the
Democrats and the left. An indication of their disarray is the fatuous
harping, still heard over a year after the election, on Reagan's
alleged lack of a "mandate" to enact his economic program. One
hears this not only from predictable left-liberal partisans in the
media but from professional Democratic politicians who might be
expected to know better, especially when they address intraparty
affairs, such as last October's conference in Baltimore . Reagan, after
all, has only carried out what he plainly said was his intention
during the campaign, and it seems improbable that many voters
expected him to redistribute wealth and power in any direction other
