theorist Jean Baudrillard, all the rage
from academic quarters to the Village
Voice, irnagines?and ?nally exalts?a
world in which nothing has intrinsic
value, everything is made for exchange
and impression, and the representative
object is ?the simulacrum,? the copy for
which there is no original. The essential
thing in itself has dissolved. A cultural
trapdoor opens beneath our feet.
When theoretical discussions are
framed in such terms, I sympathize
deeply with Ewen?s desire to ?nd
cultural bedrock; but since social life
is coated with images?the mind it?
self and feelings are wallpapered with
them?it is not at all clear where
standards of value are to be found. As
Ewen himself says in an offhand, last-
minute recognition, [T]he ?ourishing
diversity of images has opened people?s
eyes to a wide variety of new possibili-
ties, new ways of imagining.? But such
tributes to style rattle around loose;
they are not integrated into his argu-
ment, which is more about closure.
In the end, Ewen grows murky. He
wants to criticize style in the name of

BOOK REVIEW

?our own experiences??but which
experiences, understood how, are ?sub-
stantial?? If feeling is the essential
determinant, how do I know which of
my feelings to take seriously? Ewen
wants to overcome ?the dominance of
surface over substance?; he wants ?a
reconciliation of image and meaning,
a reinvigoration of a politics of sub-
stance.? But what would that be? The
reason for Ewen?s failure to be clear
is that ?surface? and ?substance? are
fatally blurred in our very categories
of understanding. So no one who writes
about these matters, in fact, has done
better than Ewen. As he says, ?The
way out of this confusion is dif?cult to
imagine.?

Inside an argument that keeps clamp-
ing down, a Coney Island of the mind
is bursting to get out. All Consuming
Images is overstuffed with ?ne riffs
from the history of architecture and
design, and with some marvelous read-
ings of texts?the ?Charlie Chaplin?
in which the free-spirited tramp sells
IBM the Rita Hayworth poster
fusing desire and alienation in The

Why the Liberals Lost

Bicycle Thief. Ewen also recognizes that
when culture pivots on celebrity, celeb-
rity deserves an analysis of its own?
toward which he delivers some excel-
lent pages. FollowingWarren Susman?s
valuable Culture as History, he realizes
that ?the phenomenon of celebrity
re?ects popular longings. In celebrities,
people ?nd not only a piece of them-
selves, but also a piece of what they
strive for.?

The insight deserves to be extended.
That striving?for pleasure, for happi-
ness, for identity?is not induced from
on high by the marketers; it is a great
deal of American culture. We desire
what we miss; style makes its empty
promises. In the age of Trump, this
Regilded Age, the public world is ?lled
with corporate logos and Charlatans. We
hire our con?dence men and women,
then, weary of them, turn the rascals
out and hunt for replacements. Style
is the siren who also sells earplugs
stamped with her logo. Finally, this is
a problem with style as politics: yester-
day?s counterimages are tomorrow sold
over the counter. El

 

Theda Shocpol

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal
Order, 1930-1980, edited by Steven
Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Princeton
University Press, 1989, 311 pp.

he 19805 have been a perplexing
and demoralizing decade for every-
one on the broadly progressive side of

 

Theda S/eocpol is a professor of sociology
at Harvard. Her hooks include States
and Social Revolutions: A Comparative
Analysis of France, Russia, and China
(Camhridge University Press, 1979) and
Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge
University Press, 1985). She is the co-
editor of The Politics of Social Policy in
the United States (Princeton University
Press, 1988).

112 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4

American life. Successive rightist vic-
tories have apparently signaled an ex-
haustion of the liberal forces which
seemed hegemonic as recently as the
late 1960s and early 19705. Many intel-
lectuals have an overwhelming urge to
look several decades backward, toward
the New Deal, as the alleged starting
point for whatever has now ended.
Aged liberals and neoconservatives
can examine the past with pure nos-
talgia?celebrating the policy-making
triumphs of their contemporaries who
shaped and inherited the New Deal?s
accomplishments. But looking back is
far more challenging for intellectuals
of the ?New Left? or ?sixties? genera-
tion. Many in this group once thought

of liberalism as The Enemy, not antici-
pating that much worse lay ahead (and
not understanding how much worse lay
behind and alongside modern Ameri-
can liberalism). These intellectuals are
now in midlife, facing uncertain and
often hostile tendencies within as well
as beyond the professional worlds where
many of them seem to be securely en-
sconced. Moving beyond either cele-
bration or condemnation, they must
reconsider the possibilities and limits
of liberalism in order to understand
the alternative political directions that
America might take from here.

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal
Order exempli?es both the breadth of

vision and the blinders that intellectuals

from the sixties generation can bring
to the daunting task of reconsidering
US. history since the Great Depres-
sion. Capably edited by Steven Fraser,
an editor at Basic Books, and Gary
Gerstle, who teaches at Princeton, the
collection includes empirically rich and
intellectually provocative essays by a
dozen authors who for the most part
are employed at assorted universities
(and in one case at the lWasbington
Post). In the words of its editors, the
book offers ?a historical autopsy? of
the New Deal ?as a dominant order
of ideas, public policies, and political
alliances? whose ?ghost still hovers
over a troubled polity.?

Most of the authors in Rise and Fall
hold what might be called a post-
New Left, cultural interpretation of
the subject?an argument not so much
about the New Deal itself, but about its
destiny. Their basic purpose is to make
sense of trends in the United States
since the 19605. Why, these authors
ask, did New Deal?descended liberal-
ism (which seemed so powerful when
we were young) suddenly collapse?

The answers point to the connections
between economics and culture. New
Deal liberals, we are told, were seduced
by the domestic expansion that was
propelled by World War II and its
aftermath. They gave up the idea of
a strong state that would restructure
capitalism, settling instead for mild
Keynesian techniques devoted to saving
capitalism through mass consumption.
Macroeconomic successes fostered a
secular religion of mass consumption
and individual ful?llment married,
ironically, to bureaucratized work and
expert professional manipulations of
an otherwise intensely privatized family
life. In her essay, Elaine Tyler May
offers some brilliant speculations about
how the climate of the
cold war intersected with consumer
capitalism to encourage American men
and women to turn inward, to look for
security and satisfaction in nuclear
families built around sharply differen-
tiated gender roles.

Thus, the New Deal order brought
to the fore, in the editors? words, the
values of ?secularism, rationalism, and
emphasis on individual expressiveness,?
a thoroughly nontraditional culture that
brie?y reigned in the America of the
19505. Yet even as this culture tri-
umphed, the seeds of the New Deal?s
destruction were being sown. Accord-

ing to these authors, three factors
were most prominent in causing the
destruction. First, the South was never
fully integrated into the New Deal
order, even as ?civil rights? were prom-
ised to everyone and racial problems
kept simmering. Second, at the very
moment of its greatest organizational
triumphs through the CIO, the ?culture
of resistance? of the industrial union
movement was, in Steve Fraser?s analy-
sis, undercut by a ?profoundly con-
servative? commitment to obtaining
economic security for working-class
families. After World War II, organized
labor became subordinated within a
bureaucratic and managerial capitalist
order, which ended organized labor?s
role as an important force for social re-
form. Third, according to Maurice Isser-
man and Michael Kazin, the privatized
consumer culture and the rigid cold
war antinomies of the 19505 ironically
fostered the moralistic and antiauthori-
tarian New Left of the 19605. The young
radicals ?zzled out organizationally, but
they left enduring marks on American
politics.

Completing the story of the New
Deal order?s demise, Jonathan Rieder?s

essay on ?The Rise of the ?Silent
Majority?? shows how racial and life-
style tensions, since the 1960s, have de-
tached from the Democratic party the
southern whites and northern working-
class ethnics who had historically sup-
ported and bene?ted from New Deal
economic and welfare policies. These
groups, Rieder argues, never agreed
with the secular rationalism of the
New Deal, and they defected when
liberal elites advocated affirmative ac-
tion for Blacks and tolerance for ?Acid,
Abortion, and Amnesty.? At the end
of the 19805, the editors of Rise and
Fall tell us, in ?the lexicon of American
politics, ?liberal? now bears the oppro-
brium once reserved for ?communist.? 

uch as I admire the broad sweep
of the anthology, I also ?nd its
central thrust overly single-minded.
A holistic account of ?the New Deal
order? tends to downplay the political
con?icts that originally shaped the
New Deal and sbarply limited its re-
formist possibilities. Such an account
attributes too much about postwar US.
history, right down to the present, to
an undifferentiated ?liberalism? under-
stood as the product of the New
Deal?s inherent flaws. We do not gain

an understanding of what alterna-
tive possibilities existed for consumer-
oriented capitalist democracies during
the Keynesian Era.

 

Tbe New Deal was not
really sbapea' by liberals.
Conservative soutbern
interests were always
central to the Democratic
party and to tbe
congressional coalitions
tbat narrowed
tbe scope of New Deal
policies daring
tbe Great Depression.

 

The political and ideological limits
of the modern US. economy were set
only in the second half of the 19405
when social democratic forces in the
labor movement, in intellectual circles,
and at the edges of the Democratic
party suffered defeat. The ?survival of
capitalism? was not at issue; but the

fate of specific policies had profound
consequences for the political future.
Either the United States would evolve
into a full?employment welfare state or
-it would become a more privatized ver-
sion of mass-consumption capitalism, in
which the wages and welfare of ?core?
workers would ?ow through large cor-
porations, while marginal workers were
left to fend for themselves with only
minimal public protection. Only after
Congress eviscerated or killed such key
pieces of reform legislation as the Full
Employment Bill of 1945, the Wagner-
Murray-Dingell social insurance bills
of the same year, and Truman?s propos-
als for national health insurance did
the nation clearly take the more con-
servative route.

As Nelson Lichtenstein argues, in
one of the best contributions to Rise
and Fall, this political turning point
meant that organized labor would
henceforth put most of its energy into
bargaining with employers for wages
and bene?ts rather than into build-
ing a universal welfare state. It also
meant that, henceforth, American econ-
omists would no longer think it realistic
to advocate direct state interventions
in markets. Gradually, ?commercial
Keynesians,? who were committed to

REVIEWS 113

stimulating the economy via tax cuts
and automatic budget stabilizers, dis-
placed ?social Keynesians,? who had
wanted to use a high level of social
spending and full-employment plan-
ning to ensure continued expansion.

As my collaborators and I have ex-
plained in The Politics of Social Policy
in the United States, the New Deal was
not really shaped by liberals. Conserv-
ative southern interests were always
central to the Democratic party and to
the congressional coalitions that nar-
rowed the scope of New Deal policies
during the Great Depression. World
War II also hindered New Deal reform-
ers, even as the con?ict was aiding the
cause of liberals and social democrats
in many European nations. In the U.S.,
the economic expansion of the 19405
strengthened state and local govern-
ments and boosted congressional au-
thority in relation to the Executive
Branch. Wartime strikes and local
reactions against federal power left
New Deal liberals?many of whom
had become virtual social democrats
by the end of the war?more vulnerable
than ever to their conservative oppo-
nents in Congress."?

New Deal liberals should not be
held responsible for creating a ?awed
postwar order. What happened was that
their ideals were defeated politically,
and many of America?s later problems
can be attributed to this defeat. Had
the United States created a compre-

*Alan Brinkley argues in Rite and Fall that
New Deal liberalism lost its transformative
potential after the idea of state regulation
of markets was given up in the late 19305
and early 19405. He sees an undifferenti-
ated ?Keynesianism? represented in a direct
capitulation to mass-consumption capitalism
under corporate auspices. Yet a glance at
postwar Scandinavia reveals that growth-
oriented capitalism and social security for
workers? families could be achieved through
high levels of taxation and social spending
and strong public commitments to worker
retraining for full employment, but without
direct state ownership or administrative
regulation of markets. Something along
these lines was the vision of American
social Keynesians between 1937 and 1948.

114 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 4

hensive full-employment welfare state
in the late 19403, labor unions would
have continued to expand. And the
transition of rural Black sharecroppers
into urban dwellers and industrial
workers would have been cushioned
both by a stronger labor movement
and by social policies that could have
softened the racial con?icts that ended
up tearing the Democratic party apart.

hat I am questioning is the very

notion of a New Deal order
stretching from the 19305 to the 19805. If
some sort of ideological, economic, and
political ?order? did lock into place, it
was fostered chie?y by America?s po-
litical experiences and policy choices
during and right after World War II. As
exempli?ed by the GI. Bill (not even
mentioned in this volume, despite its
critical role in fostering private family
homebuilding and the individualistic
consumerism associated with it), these
policy choices were more of a biparti-
san hodgepodge, mediated by complex
executive?congressional compromises;
than they were anything recognizably
?liberal,? no matter how one de?nes
the term. The economic and social
policies of the postwar United States
cut off, and often reversed, many lines
of policy begun during the domestic
New Deal of the 19305.

Our assessment of the New Deal?s
potential will be more respectful, and
more historically accurate, if we realize
that some of its goals were defeated
rather than successfully institutional-
ized or inherently ?awed. This point
matters because there may be analogous
opportunities in the future to forge
social democratic policies compatible
with capitalist growth. In addition, the
US. experience in World War II and
the cold war should draw us to analyze
the shifting balance of global power,
economic transformations in Japan and
Europe, and ideological upheavals in
the state-socialist powers. A5 in the
past, alternative political outcomes in
the United States will be profoundly
affected by the ways Americans ex-

perience and interpret changing inter-
national realities.

If we regain a full sense of the
political con?icts and choices of the
past, perhaps we can also look more
hopefully to the future. In contrast,
Rise and Fall ends on an unremittineg
pessimistic note, apportioning some
blame to both New Deal liberals and
sixties radicals for the current triumph
of privatist and inegalitarian politics.
The editors say virtually nothing about
alternative possibilities for the future,
declaring simply that

[t]he old order is dead. Nothing
with the same combination of pro-
grammatic coherence, ideological
credibility, and mass political
appeal has risen to take its place. . . .
fter eight years dedicated to
the pursuit of private interests the
very concept of ?commonwealth? is
scarcely credible. The year 1988
recorded the lowest voter turnout in
any presidential election since 1924.

It seems that the editors can see no
option but to wait for another external
shock like the Great Depression to
bring a renewed ?burst of political
energy? such as the New Deal.

But, surely, this approach is both
too simple and too pessimistic. Even
if it is true that the United States is
currently in a phase that faintly re-
sembles the 19205, the future is sure to
bring economic and political challenges
very different from those of the 19305
and 19405. Among the social forces
that will, in political ways, address the
new realities are several that could em-
brace a reform agenda in the best spirit
of the New Deal tradition. These forces
include employed women and dual-
worker families, employees displaced
by new international competition, and
middle-class citizens with deep concerns
about the environment and foreign
policy. Intellectuals from the sixties
generation will be there too?armed
with whatever insights they can gain
about the past and its lessons for

the future. 13