America's Two Revolutions

__"A Tale of Two Reactions" by Mark Lilla, in The New York Review of Books (May 14, 1998), 1755 Broadway, 5th floor, New York, N.Y. 10019–3780; "The Southern Captivity of the GOP" by Christopher Caldwell, in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1998), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114.__

Two cultural revolutions have occurred in recent decades, and together they are redefining American politics—but neither Right nor Left has been able to bring itself to accept the fact. So argues Lilla, who teaches politics at New York University.

The first revolution—call it "the ’60s"— delegitimized public authority, weakened the family, and undermined standards of private morality. Conservatives continually deplore this decline but fail to explain its causes, pointing instead to such culprits as moral weakness, self-indulgence, and nihilism. "What they refuse to consider," says Lilla, "is the darker side of our own American creed" of individualism and egalitarianism.

The second cultural revolution, he contends, is "the shift in political and economic attitudes" in the 1980s. Thanks to the Reagan revolution, "most Americans now believe (rightly or wrongly) that economic growth will do more for them than economic redistribution, and that to grow rich is good. It is taken as axiomatic that the experiments of the Great Society failed and that new experiments directed by Washington would be foolhardy. Regulation is considered dépassé, and unions are seen as self-serving, corrupt organizations that only retard economic growth." Liberals of the Nation school deplore this seismic shift in attitudes, Lilla observes, and usually blame it on a corrupt campaign finance system that favors the wealthy. Nearly everyone is worse off because of the Reagan revolution, according to the Left, but they somehow have been fooled into thinking they’re better off.

In reality, Lilla writes, both cultural revolutions have been successful, are over— and are basically one revolution. The result is "a morally lax yet economically successful capitalist society." President Bill Clinton’s " ’60s morals and ’80s politics do not seem particularly contradictory to the majority of the American public that supports him," Lilla points out. Indeed, any political agenda that rejects one—but not the other—of the two revolutions is "doomed to failure."

Republicans seem determined to prove that point, according to Caldwell, a senior writer for the conservative Weekly Standard. He argues that the GOP is increasingly in thrall to the South, and that its "tradition of putting values—particularly Christian values—at the center of politics" is alienating even conservative voters in other regions. "The Republicans would like to think that Americans are the dupes of a lecherous Arkansas sleazeball, just as the Democrats in the 1980s saw voters as gulled by a senile B-movie warmonger. But Clinton’s success, like Reagan’s, has to do with American beliefs and the extent to which he embodies them and his opponents do not." On issues such as gay rights, the environment, and women in the workplace, Caldwell says, "the country has moved leftward." The GOP may cling to power, but it will not "rule from a place in Americans’ hearts" until it changes.

Clinton-style blending may be a good short-term solution, but in Lilla’s view, "healthy democratic politics" requires a "perceptible distinction between right and left." This vital divide "will naturally reappear," he believes, once the political system fully assimilates the two revolutions.