The liberals' lost decade

The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan, by John Ehrman (Yale, 304 pp., $27.50)

THERE'S no point reviewing books unless you are going to give the reader an honest assessment. And unfortunately, delivering honest assessments is not always a pleasant duty.

John Ehrman, the author of The Eighties, is obviously a conscientious and careful historian. His research is thorough; his conclusions are fair-minded; he has obviously worked hard. His book comes recommended by conservative heroes George Nash and David Gelernter. I wish I could tell you that reading this book would be worth your time and trouble, but I can't. There is nothing much wrong with the book, but there is nothing much right with it either. It is plodding, conventional, and dull. Skip it.

Because The Eighties has so little of interest to say, it leaves one wondering: Maybe there is nothing interesting left to be said about this passionately debated period. Maybe the political controversies of the Reagan years burned so hot that they consumed all their potential fuel.

And yet, as I brood over it, it seems to me that there is at least one large topic about which there remains a great deal to say--and that it is a merit of Ehrman's book that he does seem to have noticed what this topic is.

We conservatives have told ourselves a story about the recent past. It's the story of "the rise of the Right," as William Rusher called it in his important memoir. This story usually begins with the Goldwater debacle of 1964. From that disaster, conservatives learned important lessons about political strategy and tactics. They found themselves a new and more appealing champion in Ronald Reagan. And over the next 16 years, they built themselves a political movement that won the presidency in 1980--and that now seems to have emerged as a governing national majority.

Over the past four or five years, this story has been confirmed by a growing number of nonconservative writers. (Indeed, the single best book about the Goldwater campaign, Before the Storm, was written by a red-hot liberal, Rick Perlstein.) This story is obviously very gratifying for conservatives, because it makes us the stars of the show, the makers of our own destiny. The trouble is, this story is not quite true. The country did not turn to the right after 1964 because conservatives were so convincing. It turned right because liberals made such an unholy mess of things. Liberalism was not pushed. It jumped.

Crime; riots; foreign-policy weakness; environmental extremism; disdain for the values and beliefs of ordinary voters; economic mismanagement--the list of self-inflicted disasters that liberalism brought upon itself in the 1960s and 1970s stretches on and on and on. Saturday Night Live, of all places, summed up what had gone wrong with a brilliant sketch at the end of the 1988 election: an imaginary party hosted by Michael Dukakis (played by Jon Lovitz). At the very end, a Joan Baez lookalike strums her guitar and sings a heartfelt anthem:

   Unilateral disarmament, abortions on
      demand:
   Take everybody's guns away, and toss
      them in the sand.
   Welfare for the homeless, free condoms
      for the kids--
   We'll not blame the criminal for anything
      he did.
   For who can say what's right or wrong, if
      there's such a thing as sin?
   And if it really matters, whether wars we
      lose or win?

That summed up how a lot of Americans saw the liberalism of the time. It's no wonder they rejected it.

But here's the deep question: Why did the liberals of the 1980s not do a better job of casting aside this seemingly obviously damaging image of themselves? Nobody forced them to endorse the nuclear freeze or to pretend that the mentally ill vagrants in the streets were victims of uncaring economic policies. Democrats could have nominated Sam Nunn for president in 1984 or Joe Biden in 1988; each man had his faults, but he was far closer to the mainstream than the ultimate choice in each year.

Ehrman does a perfectly adequate job of describing the mood of bafflement and defeatism that settled on national Democrats in the 1980s. He has some stinging things to say about the academic Left's trek toward absurdity and irrelevance. But he never sinks his teeth into the "why" question: Why were Democrats so unable to respond to the political changes of the 1970s and find plausible solutions in the 1980s?

It's a question of considerable continuing interest. Even now, even after the Reagan years and the 1994 loss of Congress, even after 9/11 and the unexpected Republican gains in 2002--even after all this, it is striking how void the liberal and Democratic side is of any organizing principle or grand theme that can stir the imagination of the country. There's no lack of brainpower on the liberal and Democratic side and no shortage of ambitious and idealistic people eager to grapple with the issues of our time. And yet somehow all that brainpower and ambition and idealism have failed, year in, year out, to produce a philosophy that is liberal, modern, and capable of producing a governing majority.