Needed for America: Fewer Claims, More Growth

In the wake of the familiar crises of Viet Nam, Watergate and inflationary recession, can the American experiment endure and flourish in its third century? This vexing question is tackled in special reports just published by two thoughtful periodicals, the U.S. quarterly the Public Interest and the British weekly the Economist. Both journals raise fresh and unsettling questions about the limitations of American democracy and freedom. However, in their prognoses for the next 100 years, they diverge: the Public Interest has a generally pessimistic forecast for an America that thinks small and governs modestly; the Economist foresees a country that can transcend its limits and grows wealthier.

PUBLIC INTEREST: A New Distemper

"The only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy," proclaimed New York's Al Smith in a more confident era. The Public Interest's tenth-anniversary issue, which contains articles by ten leading American intellectuals, comes to an opposite conclusion: democracy has gone far enough in America, perhaps too far. In the phrase of Samuel P. Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, democracy has contracted a bad case of "distemper." So many demands are made of the all too vulnerable system that it is in danger of breaking down. Or, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, writes: "Even our sense of peoplehood grows uncertain as ethnic assertions take their implacable toll on the civic assumption of unity." Like monarchy in the 19th century, adds Moynihan, liberal democracy "is where the world was, not where it is going."

It is this sense of democracy's frailty in the face of social unrest that marks the Public Interest writers, most of whom teach politics and the social sciences at leading universities and are generally labeled "neoconservatives." Most of them were once liberals in favor of Big Government, more equality and wider distribution of wealth. In recent years they have concentrated on the need to lower expectations in Government and strive for social stability.

A recurrent theme of the issue is that claims on government have grown out of control. Daniel Bell, professor of sociology at Harvard, calls this phenomenon the "revolution of rising entitlements." People expect more and more of their political leaders, he writes, and insist upon increasing government help as their lawful right as citizens. Yet the government's capacity to act and satisfy is finite, and the limits are in view. Interest groups—farmers, veterans, labor—have always been part of the American political scene. But they have multiplied as environmentalists, educationalists, welfare recipients and many others have joined the clamor for funds and taken to the streets for attention. In the process, Bell thinks, everybody is pushing up dangerously against everybody else, a development that threatens the destruction of "American exceptionalism"—the nation's ability to mediate peacefully among conflicting interests by constitutional means.