Needed for America: Fewer Claims, More Growth

In the wake of the familiar crises of Viet Nam, Watergate and inflationary recession, can the American experiment endure and flourish in its third century? This vexing question is tackled in special reports just published by two thoughtful periodicals, the U.S. quarterly the Public Interest and the British weekly the Economist. Both journals raise fresh and unsettling questions about the limitations of American democracy and freedom. However, in their prognoses for the next 100 years, they diverge: the Public Interest has a generally pessimistic forecast for an America that thinks small and governs modestly; the Economist foresees a country that can transcend its limits and grows wealthier.

PUBLIC INTEREST: A New Distemper

"The only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy," proclaimed New York's Al Smith in a more confident era. The Public Interest's tenth-anniversary issue, which contains articles by ten leading American intellectuals, comes to an opposite conclusion: democracy has gone far enough in America, perhaps too far. In the phrase of Samuel P. Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, democracy has contracted a bad case of "distemper." So many demands are made of the all too vulnerable system that it is in danger of breaking down. Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, writes: "Even our sense of peoplehood grows uncertain as ethnic assertions take their implacable toll on the civic assumption of unity." Like monarchy in the 19th century, adds Moynihan, liberal democracy "is where the world was, not where it is going."

It is this sense of democracy's frailty in the face of social unrest that marks the Public Interest writers, most of whom teach politics and the social sciences at leading universities and are generally labeled "neoconservatives." Most of them were once liberals in favor of Big Government, more equality and wider distribution of wealth. In recent years they have concentrated on the need to lower expectations in Government and strive for social stability.

A recurrent theme of the issue is that claims on government have grown out of control. Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Harvard, calls this phenomenon the "revolution of rising entitlements." People expect more and more of their political leaders, he writes, and insist upon increasing government help as their lawful right as citizens. Yet the government's capacity to act and satisfy is finite, and the limits are in view. Interest groups--farmers, veterans, labor--have always been part of the American political scene. But they have multiplied as environmentalists, educationalists, welfare recipients and many others have joined the clamor for funds and taken to the streets for attention. In the process, Bell thinks, everybody is pushing up dangerously against everybody else, a development that threatens the destruction of "American exceptionalism"--the nation's ability to mediate peacefully among conflicting interests by constitutional means.

Education has not helped curb the swollen claims on society, argue several of the authors in a critical assessment of the American elite, which they call "the New Class." The New Class is professionals--lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, civil servants--who have been educated to expect too much of their government and feel betrayed when it fails to meet their demands. In a biting historical analysis, Seymour Lipset, professor of government at Harvard, finds this attitude to be an outgrowth of the exaggerated moralism in American politics. Social movements, he writes, have "sought to attain their ends regardless of the damage caused by their tactics and rhetoric to the society. The moralists typically react in horror to the corrupt and illegal--sometimes extreme --tactics of their opponents, unaware that they themselves are engaging in similar illegal behavior."

Irving Kristol, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University, maintains that the crusade for more social programs and Government intervention masks a striving for power: "Though they continue to speak the language of Progressive-reform," writes Kristol, "in actuality they are acting upon a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call 'the welfare state' toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the Left." Kristol fears that under the clothing of "public interest" the New Class is trying to introduce national economic plans and other "neosocialist themes" that will radically transform society.

One of the more unexpected theses of the issue is that, in face of the increasing demands on Government, the powers of the presidency have diminished, not increased, as the critics of the "imperial presidency" allege.

For example, Samuel Huntington makes a persuasive case that Harry Truman governed with the assistance of a small band of influential Wall Street lawyers and bankers. Now the upheavals of the '60s and '70s have so weakened the authority of Government that this New York establishment has been overwhelmed by other power groups --environmentalists, consumerists, feminists, blacks, etc.--reflecting antagonistic special interests. It is much harder now for the President to put together the coalition of key groups and individuals that he needs to govern effectively.

Groping for ways to revive American confidence in government, the writers suggest the revival of compromise in politics. Huntington urges the depolarization of issues in favor of more civility; Bell urges "a policy of inclusion whereby disadvantaged groups have priority social policy." Though the authors offer an admittedly gloomy prognosis for democracy in America, the vitality of their analyses suggests that cures for at least part of the distemper of the times may be on the way.

ECONOMIST: Democracy's Go-Getters

At the threshold of its third century, America is afflicted by a "drift from dynamism," which threatens to allow the nation's global leadership to slip into "less sophisticated hands, at a perilous moment." So concludes the Economist's deputy editor, Norman Macrae. A longtime expert on world economics and political affairs, Macrae, 52, first gained attention in the U.S. in 1969 by writing a penetrating survey on the American dilemmas of race and poverty. Now he has produced a provocative if discursive report suggesting that the U.S. may be at the close of its industrial empire. He argues persuasively that the U.S. can no longer hold onto its economic might unless it immediately undertakes a major new drive for industrial growth.

America, which has held hegemony over the world from 1876 to 1975, may be losing its global influence for the same reason that British industry, dominant in the world from 1776 to 1876, decayed. The threat comes from "industrophobia"--the mood among intellectuals, ecologists, students and others from the educated and monied classes, which view business as vulgar and dangerous. On U.S. campuses, he writes, an "antigrowth cult is being taught to a generation of idealistic kids as if it was high moral philosophy or even a religion."

He scathingly criticizes these groups for delaying construction of the Alaskan pipeline. The slowdown retarded U.S. economic growth and helped the Arab-dominated OPEC oil cartel grossly inflate oil prices and expand its powers. Among the consequences: "The unemployment of black teen-agers in New

0 York City has been pushed up the last

1 few percentage points towards 40%, a ? few tens of thousands more brown men I in Bangladesh, and several hundred P thousand Israeli families have been put

in greater danger."

Macrae is also angry about American industry. The growth of U.S. output per man-hour in manufacturing in the past 25 years has fallen behind that of other industrial nations because of a slowdown of U.S. investment in new technology. American businessmen, like those in Britain, have succumbed to the rule of corporate bureaucrats. The spirit of entrepreneurship is broken.

Yet Macrae has great faith in America's potential to lead the world to vast new wealth. Indeed, he harbors few of the conventional worries that the world is running out of resources. He does not think, for example, that there will be an energy scarcity; alternative sources --nuclear, solar, geothermal, and others --will supply man's needs. Nor does he expect a food crisis, because land can be farmed more efficiently now through new scientific methods and the "green revolution" can be extended to most arable land. He downplays the famous "population explosion," claiming that the world's population growth has probably already dropped to 1.7% a year, which is the target of the United Nations Secretariat for 1985.

The sharpest perils in America's future will arise out of the modern offsprings of progress, claims Macrae. The most frightening possibility is the rapid spread of atomic weapons into the hands of global terrorists. The major industrial countries must meet this predicament by improving the living standards of the poorer nations, thereby increasing the commitment of all human beings to maintaining an unwarlike status quo.

Modern Molds. For the U.S. to reassert its economic primacy in its third century, argues Macrae, the nation will have to go back to its "longstanding, history-given, go-getting" economic pragmatism. He calls for a return to the old incentive-filled free-market philosophy, but in modern molds. Americans, he contends, must restructure their private companies and redesign their governmental bodies in order to free themselves from the bureaucratic shackles that now stifle their growth. They must also broaden the types of community living in the nation to include choices on the political right and left--meaning new concepts like puritan towns, local governments run on contract by private businesses, and towns that emphasize full individual participation.

The prototype for new private corporations may be "confederations of entrepreneurs." Individual entrepreneurs within a single corporation, he predicts, may soon be given even greater independence to run various departments in the company or set up competitive ones. Within the immense federal and state governments, Macrae proposes a new form of market competition called "performance contracts." By this method, citizens will vote regularly for the private contractors--garbage collectors, transit companies and sewage disposal firms--that best deliver the services.

An unapologetic growth advocate, Macrae warns that America must crusade for economic expansion--by investing more, loosening environmental restrictions and breaking bureaucracies. If the world's richest nation fails, he says, the consequence may be that "half the world will remain hungry, and that half-world may blow us up."

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