The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus

Author:Sam Tanenhaus [Tanenhaus, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-948-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t just right-wingers who were saying this. The social critic Paul Goodman, whose book Growing Up Absurd was a favorite text of the New Left, suspected that Great Society gigantism concealed totalitarian designs. “We must note the change in slogans,” he wrote in The New York Review of Books in October 1965, two months after Watts. “‘Fair Deal’ and ‘New Deal’ used to refer to political economy and were a legitimate bid for votes; ‘New Frontier’ and ‘Great Society’ are more spiritual … The concept of a national mission … is not merely a fraud. It is an ideology.” Goodman’s critique of the establishment, particularly its reliance on a “large stable of mandarins to raise the tone, use correct scientific method, and invent rationalization,” echoed James Burnham’s claim that ideology itself was the political equivalent of “‘rationalization’ in the sphere of individual psychology.” And just as Burnham theorized that the managerial elite was covertly advancing Marxism, so Goodman warned that the new priesthood was betraying the legitimate goals of a responsible politics. “Instead of tackling the political puzzle of how to maintain democracy in a complex technology and among urban masses, it multiplies professional-client and patron-client relationships.”

Burke, it was true, had said government was contrived to furnish “human wants”—that is, whatever people couldn’t furnish for themselves. But this formulation had come in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, before it was clear that a vibrant federally supported market could itself satisfy many of those wants. In times of emergency, like the Great Depression, the government had every reason to reassert its strength. But if government assumed such power in an age of abundance, as the 1960s decidedly were, it threatened to sap individual initiative and, even worse, create dependency in its “clients,” who would expect an unceasing flow of gratification. But what happened when people’s wants, as they multiplied, began to conflict?

It was possible to hear in this the echo not only of Burnham but also of Herbert Hoover, who had said the danger of “big government” inhered not in all the bad things it threatened to do to us but in the surplus of good things it promised to do for us. The argument could be traced back further still: to John Stuart Mill, who had warned (in his classic On Liberty) that “the absorption of all the principal ability of the country into the governing body is fatal, sooner or later, to the mental activity and progressiveness of the body itself,” not least because it threatened to cancel the influence of autonomous critics and monitors, a vital presence “if we would not have our bureaucracy degenerate into a pedantocracy.”

In 1972, David Halberstam would pin the phrase “the best and the brightest” on the Kennedy-Johnson brain trust, its Ivy-trained “organization men”—the efficiency experts and market researchers, the bold, outside-the-box “ideas men.” The most driven planner in JFK’s cabinet, his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, the number-crunching prodigy of the Ford Motor Company, rigorously applied systems analysis to Pentagon

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