Gee’s Reviews > The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics > Status Update

Reagan’s rhetorical defense of “family and neighborhood” could not be reconciled with his championship of unregulated business enterprise, which has replaced neighborhoods with shopping malls and superhighways. A society dominated by the free market, in which the American dream degenerated into pure acquisitiveness and self-seeking, had no place for “family values.”

Those who had been raised on the Marxian theory of history, however—and this category included a number of intellectuals who later became neoconservatives—did not pay much attention to such objections. They needed a ruling class, if only to sustain their own self-image as a lonely band of truth tellers who dared to question the reigning orthodoxy, and they found it in the makers of the “managerial revolution.”

The streets, parks, and subways had been taken over by drug pushers, pornographers, prostitutes, and gangs of noisy black youths, who strutted their contempt for middle-class respectability.

Their “reverence for the flag,” according to Rieder, “embodied a style of patriotism sustained less by abstract ideals than by primordial sentiments of belonging to a particular place.” The antiwar movement, on the other hand, denounced “Amerika” as a totalitarian society

Lipset had come to the “gradual realization that extremist and intolerant movements in modern society are more likely to be based on the lower classes than on the middle and upper class.” Formerly liberals had worried about the decline of popular participation in politics. Now they began to wonder whether “apathy” might not be a blessing in disguise

The civil rights movement, originating in a powerful challenge to self-righteousness and resentment, ended by reinforcing the worst qualities in American liberalism: a sense of superiority to the unenlightened masses, a refusal to credit opponents with honorable intentions, a growing reluctance to submit their policies to public approval

Dunbar pointed out in 1966, “not every valid interest is a right…. A right is a defense against social power, not a prescription of the kind of society there must be.” Judicial decisions forbidding religious instruction in the schools or requiring the schools “to compensate for all the evils inherent in housing segregation” tended to “usurp the community’s instinctive feeling of responsibility for rearing the young”

laws against segregation and disfranchisement but drew the line at busing and affirmative action. In the absence of a public consensus in favor of reverse discrimination, as it came to be called, liberals had to rely more and more on the courts, which proceeded to create a new category of prescriptive rights and to expand their own authority into the field of social engineering

Lacking both the moral independence and the technical knowledge to organize industry on their own, the workers would soon find themselves in the same old predicament. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” would turn out to be the dictatorship of the intellectuals—the worst form of tyranny imaginable, in Sorel’s view.