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The Reagan Administration--Bitter Afterthoughts
| Article
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13612 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
2,620 Words |
| Author
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John Lukacs
John Lukacs, professor of history at Chestnut Hill College,
Philadelphia, is the author of many books, including
Historical Consciousness. |
This writer is not a prophet but a historian. I am writing this article a contrecoeur, without the enthusiasm that the love of a topic inspires in a writer. My heart contracts at the sorry sight of what goes on under the name of Reagan "conservatism." I am no longer inspired by the hearty rage of the polemicist, having arrived at the condition where rage and resentment can no longer eat into my heart. But sill: a historian is a prophet of the past. This is not a paradoxical aphorism. Every one of us sees the past through the gauze of the present, through a filmy curtain that the imagination may penetrate but which is a condition we cannot avoid. Conversely we cannot avoid seeing the present save through our knowledge and understanding of the past. That knowledge should include our understanding of the wondrous unpredictability of history: The historian cannot, and should not, predict what is going to happen; he may, at most, predict what is not going to happen.
What is not likely to happen is a powerful revival of American "liberalism'--another term that, because of its inflation and imprecision, has lost its original meaning. Since the New Deal--indeed, since the Progressive era--"social democracy' may be a somewhat more precise term than liberalism. The Democratic Party embraced social stands, which it enacted as policy. The party is now near the very end of that development, having attempted to extend all forms of "equality" to vocal minorities, including homosexuals, feminists, and so on. By doing so, it has alienated large portions of the American people. Moreover, in the short run, the Democratic Party and its presidential candidates do not seem to be able to divorce themselves from such social programs. It is possible that because of Republican ineptitude the Democrats may come up with a winning president in 1988, but even that development will not likely change the ideological reality that American liberalism has run its course. By this I mean that its appeal grows fainter and fainter, even among those social minorities who are, at present, still non- or anti-conservative. The Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans who have abandoned the Democratic Party since 1945 will eventually be followed by socially mobile Hispanic and Asian-Americans.
The American intelligentsia and the American professorate in the larger universities do not matter. Their narrow-minded hatred of bourgeois society will give way--to opportunism. I am inclined to believe that by the year 2000, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Guggenheim, and the Twentieth Century Fund will follow the New Republic and a number of foundations into the neoconservative
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