NY Times Book Review, March 7, 1999
Without a Cause
An attorney bemoans the decline of liberal political passions in America.
By ROBERT B. REICH
Today's young adults are the first generation born this century to have
missed the passion of American liberalism. Previous generations witnessed
the crusading muckrakers and suffragettes, the zeal of the New Dealers and
of the labor leaders Sidney Hillman and John L. Lewis, the vigor of John
and Robert Kennedy, the righteousness of Martin Luther King Jr. and the
freedom riders, the ardor and agony of the Vietnam War protesters and the
fervor of the women's rights movement. There were excesses and hypocrisies
all along the way, but also a thundering insistence on broader democracy
and a more inclusive prosperity.
Now, at the century's end, most liberals would be content to save Social
Security, not exactly an issue that gets the blood flowing. In this era of
the most conservative Democratic President of the century, political
passions seem the exclusive province of the right, those who want to slash
taxes and end affirmative action and abortions.
What happened? Thomas Geoghegan, a crafty writer who moonlights as a
Chicago attorney, blames the hollowing of America's great Northern cities,
which were once incubators of progressive politics, and the withering of
the Federal Government, which once gave such a politics a national scope.
In Geoghegan's view, the states have quietly sucked the energy out of both
and substituted lowest-common-denominator governments more responsive to
the rich and the wacky than to the blue collars and the underdogs.
Geoghegan does not actually make this argument in ''The Secret Lives of
Citizens.'' Instead, he circles it like a dog chasing a scent. His is a
whimsical, personal journey that never quite gets anywhere but stops at a
lot of interesting and oddball spots along the way. The trail begins and
ends in Chicago. The city is shrinking, surrounded by ever-expanding
suburbs run by faux governments (DuPage County to the west, transportation
authorities, mosquito abatement districts, the Northeastern Illinois
Planning Commission) that meet secretly in hotel conference rooms to decide
things like where to locate new runways and tollways. Once seething with
ethnic ward politics, Chicago has become dull and soulless, Geoghegan says,
filling up with young corporate achievers who don't even know where the
wards are.
What's worse, power has tilted toward the Sunbelt states. New baseball
teams don't even bear the names of cities anymore -- they're Texas Rangers,
Arizona Diamondbacks and Florida Marlins. The original sin, according to
Geoghegan, was Franklin Roosevelt's failure to apply the New Deal to the
South. The ploy enabled Roosevelt to get legislation through Congress, but
it proved a long-term curse. The South had no labor unions or wage
bargaining. ''It was as if a hole had been punched in the bottom of the New
Deal. The wages, the jobs could leak slowly into the South. . . . Drip,
drip, at first. Then gushing, in a flood.'' After revenue sharing became
the core of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, the Sunbelt got the
infrastructure it needed to attract Northern industry. As competition
intensified, the South's population and share of the gross national product
exploded. And places like Chicago began emptying out.
Devolution to the states is all the rage now in Washington, whose officials
seem oblivious of the states' tradition of corruption and ineptitude.
Geoghegan remarks that United States attorneys could exist simply to
prosecute state governments. After all, the savings-and-loan scandal
happened after the states took on responsibility to regulate the companies.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is busy reviving the ghost of John C. Calhoun,
who once claimed that states could nullify laws of Congress. But if the
Calhounists were correct, Geoghegan asks, how could we have ever abolished
slavery? It's not just Roosevelt who's under attack now; it's Lincoln. The
progressive writer Herbert Croly had warned early on: if the states got
stronger and Washington weaker, all the old evils would return --
inequality, stagnant wages and big business running the country.
What's a citizen to do? It's the serious question that lies at the heart of
the book, but Geoghegan answers it ironically. Democratic Presidents used
to give Americans things to do, he writes. Roosevelt told us to join a
union, Kennedy asked us to join the Peace Corps, Johnson to go to the inner
city and teach children. But Carter didn't say. And although Clinton urged
us to volunteer, he was evasive. ''Volunteer for what?'' Geoghegan asks.
''Join a militia in rural Michigan?'' National Democrats haven't a clue
what to do, other than raise campaign money. You can't even find out at a
place like Harvard's Kennedy School, where it's ''all microeconomics. Cost
benefit. Deregulation. Getting prices right -- which usually implies, I
have found, getting wages wrong.'' A young woman at the school sobs, ''I
came here because I wanted to help people, and now, now . . . now they say
.. . . I can't do anything!''
What's Geoghegan himself to do? His grandfather, we learn, was a popular
county commissioner during the Depression. ''It would take us half an hour
to walk a block, people coming up to shake his hand,'' he boasts. But
Geoghegan won't run for office (''the shame was: I'd never live like my
grandfather''), and he never quite decides what else would be worth doing.
He comes to Washington in the 1970's, an idealistic young lawyer (from his
previous book, ''Which Side Are You On?,'' we know he worked for a time
with the unions); gets a job at the Energy Department, which turns out to
be a big bumbling bureaucracy; moves back to Chicago and campaigns for
Harold Washington, but once Washington becomes Mayor his program is blocked
by a group of white aldermen.
Later, Geoghegan considers suing Chicago for failing to control an outbreak
of tuberculosis but then realizes it won't end the poverty that lies at the
root of the disease. He considers a public-interest lawsuit to challenge
residential parking, but it won't help the poor either. He wants to prevent
poor youngsters from working, but it's not practical. He fantasizes about
becoming a teacher. He briefly volunteers to help poor kids get jobs as
movie ushers. He ponders how to get speedier trials for jailed defendants
but is told by a public defender that a brief stint in jail may not be so
bad for them.
This is a sly and ultimately sad book, written more as a prose poem than a
serious argument. Geoghegan's language is playful, as when he describes
regional governments as ''little asteroid bits'' that ''float around, with
no clear boundaries,'' and sometimes purple (''Every city in America seems
the same now, doesn't it? One half: Girls, in tennis whites, dawdling over
cat calendars. The other half: Babies, in crack houses, sitting in
feces''). The paragraphs often run no more than one or two sentences,
personal reminiscence mixing with historical anecdote, dipping into complex
themes and then out again, mood shifting from wistful nostalgia to dark
comedy.
At the end, Geoghegan finds himself at an interracial, interfaith,
urban-suburban rally on crime control. Afterward, he drives home with a
friend who asks what the group is going to do. ''I don't know,'' he
answers. ''But that's the problem, nobody knows what to do.'' Geoghegan
liked the meeting anyway, because it brought people together. The conclave
was a symbolic gesture, and he gives it a metaphorical shrug. What to do
besides shrug? With liberal passions gone and Chicago hollowing out, the
author never quite decides.
Robert B. Reich is University Professor and Maurice B. Hexter Professor of
Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
