THINKING ABOUT AMERICA
The United States in the 1990s
Annelise Anderson and Dennis Bark, editors
Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press
590 pp., $19.95
Is the West mopping up?
Annelise Anderson and Dennis Bark of the Hoover Institution have compiled forty-nine essays on the United States in the 1990s Scenario, the grand dame of the 1980s. With a few exceptions, the contributors seem convinced that America has done pretty well in the 1980s and laid the ground-work for another round of the Gay Nineties.
The present volume is a sequel to a 1980 Hoover Institution Press book, The United States in the 1980s. That book had a youthful tone. It was filled with high purpose and grand plans. It was also filled with grievances about the way the nation was being managed, and it confidently delivered a new path. Of the thirty-seven contributors to that volume, seventeen subsequently served full or part time in the Reagan administration. As to the book's influence, Mikhail Gorbachev himself is the most reliable witness. On one of George Shultz's visits to Moscow, the Soviet leader told him, "We know what you think. We have read this book and watched all its programs become adopted by the Reagan administration."
So the programs were adopted, and on the whole they worked. This current collection reads like the work of a contented middle-aged Horatio Alger. The authors are satisfied with what has been accomplished in the past decade, but more than that, they are confident about the future. Their cheeks have the flush of those who eat well, their demeanor is easy, their eyes are bright.
Like the Hoover Institution itself, not all of the contributors to this volume are conservative, far from it. Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young has a chapter, as does Jimmy Carter. There are a number of writers who are not easily definable: Aaron Wildavsky, Sidney Hook, Seymour Martin Lipsett, and Gerald Ford. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the tone of this book reflects the new tone of Americans who consider themselves centrists or conservatives.
American conservatism is no longer animated by grievance, by a persecution complex. Once political paranoids were on the Right, but now the Left, with its imaginative view, of the manipulative power of corporations and of secret armies in the CIA, has a virtual monopoly on paranoia. American conservatism no longer feels alienated from American life. It has tremendous faith in technology and science. It trusts concentrated power, a strong executive, and decisive action. It no longer feels that American's best days are behind it. Paradoxically, American conservatism has turned melioristic. It is sunnier, less suspicious, friendlier, but maybe not quite s aware as it should be of its fundamental principles. Basking in the glow of its political success, it is perhaps less mindful than it used to be of its philosophical principles.
Glory days
It is impossible to ignore the successes of the Reagan years.
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