It has been called the Reagan Revolution. But the movement that Burton Yale Pines describes and analyzes in his Back to Basics (New York: William Morrow, 349 pp., $13.50) goes much deeper than politics. It is a cultural movement that is invoking a return to tradition in religion and ethics and educational methods; and its support of free market economics has more to do with its belief in the moral value of free choice than with any purely economic concern with efficiency.
Mr. Pines once wrote cover stories for Time magazine, which presumably brought him into prolonged contact with Eastern Establishment ways of looking at things. But somewhere along the line he began to have sympathy for the large groups in society that had a feeling the so-called counterculture was pushing them to the brink. A first-rate reporter, he persuaded the American Enterprise Institute in Washington to support him in an eighteen-month job of measuring the depth of the traditionalist resurgence.
As luck would have it, he caught innumerable people at the very moment when they were moving from thinking into action. Ideas, said the late Richard Weaver, have consequences. And Mr. Pines began combing the country at a time of consequences, when businessmen were beginning to fight back against excessive regulation, when taxpayers were organizing to put a cap on both taxing and government spending, when parents were objecting to sloppy methods of teaching and aggressive anti-religious secularism in the schools, and when the New Right in Washington began to make its first fruitful contact with the Moral Majority at the grassroots.
Nomenclature bothers Mr. Pines a bit. The New Right and the Moral Majority are “rightist” in a political sense, but Mr. Pines properly observes that there is nothing political about the return to basics in education, or the quest for spirituality in religion, or the pro-family movement. “Conservative,” Pines says, fits the movement better than “rightist,” but there is nothing peculiarly conservative about a concern for national defense. Many liberals share a distaste for abortion with conservatives.
The Old-Fashioned Liberalism and The Traditionalist Movement
Looking for an umbrella word, Pines settles for “traditionalist.” He notes that tradition, in America, includes a faith in conquering frontiers and building better societies, in political democracy and free market capitalism, in a federal system that protects the separate states, and in a “public ritual” that celebrates patriotism. In his discussion of names, Pines shows he has no quarrel with the old-fashioned liberalism of the nineteenth century. But to be useful today it has to be labeled “traditional liberalism,” which makes out a tacit case for “traditionalist” as against such obfuscating descriptions as “neo-conservative.”
Mr. Pines doesn’t do much with the intellectual pioneers of the traditionalist movement beyond noting that George Nash has profiled many of them in his 1976 book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. Of the pioneers he says, “prolific though they were, conservative intellectuals generally had but limited impact on the public policy process.” This may seem a bit ungenerous of Mr. Pines, for, as the history of Britain shows, a Fabian Society must come before there can be any Fabian success at the polls. But Mr. Pines’ decision to take for his starting line the emergence of such conservative or traditionalist institutes as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute was correct for his purpose. What he is giving us is contemporary reportage, which is not yet history.
Pines’ account of the epic fight of the Illinois Power Company against the Columbia Broadcasting System over an alleged mispresentation is battlefield reporting at its best. Business is only now beginning to break out of its silences, and Mr. Pines is an engaged man in his efforts to keep the momentum going. The battle of the W. R. Grace Company’s Peter Grace for a change in the capital gains tax had an enormous impact: when 106 papers had published stories about Grace’s embroilment with President Jimmy Carter, Congress cut the maximum rate from 49 per cent to 28 per cent. With businessmen turning to activism, students are also getting into the fight. There are 6,000 members of the new Students In Free Enterprise at 150 colleges, which is a big switch from the campus scene of the Nineteen Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies.
Keynes Losing Ground
Mr. Pines’ front-line reporting took him to the University of Minnesota, whose economics department has been identified with Walter Heller, described by Pines as “America’s best- known, most visible Keynesian.” Well, Walter Heller is still at Minnesota. But he is “out of step with most of the exciting work now going on in the department.” Pines notes that the new “glittering lights” at Minnesota now—Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, Christopher Sims, Neil Wallace—have all turned their backs on Keynes.
Pines quotes Tom Sargent, an enthusiastic advocate of the new “rational expectations” school of economics. “When I started teaching,” said Sargent, “I gave my students the standard Keynesian stuff.” But the “moment of truth” came for Sargent while he was working with Neil Wallace on a project at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. A study that began as the “apotheosis of Keynesianism” started to crumble after eighteen months of work.
“It was a tragic realization,” so Sargent recalls. What Sargent and Wallace discovered was a fundamental flaw in the Keynesian analytical method itself. Sargent concluded that Keynesian “economic models do not work well; they give bad predictions.”
Looking back to the days when he was teaching courses based on Keynesian analysis, Sargent says: “It makes me sick to my stomach.” “I looked up to them,” he says of the Keynesian “giants.” “I would not have believed that these men could have been so wrong. It’s been like discovering that your parents are wrong.”
Mr. Pines wrote about the Equal Rights Amendment before it had encountered its doomsdate on June 30 of this year. But he accurately notes that in fighting to keep ERA out of the Constitution, Phyllis Schlafly, Lottie Beth Hobbs, Jo Ann Gasper and other supporters of the “traditionalist” family proved that women could exercise their rights of free speech just as effectively as men even without a new amendment. Since the Constitution already guarantees the “equality” of all citizens without reference to sex, the ERA would have been redundant. Its proponents said it was needed as a “symbol.” But the fight against it by Mrs. Schlafly in favor of the “traditional” family was symbolic, too. And traditionalism, says Pines, will go on winning.
