America in the Middle

Barone’s Hard America / Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling examines the mean between hard and soft cultures, risk and security in economic decisions, and accountability and indulgence in the culture wars. Hard America values risk, innovation, effort, and enterprise. Soft America values security and equality. Hard America is ruled by the market, while Soft America is directed by government planning. Hard America creates wealth; Soft America reassigns it. Hard America causes undeserved suffering by making no distinction between poverty caused by sickness and poverty caused by laziness. Soft America causes its own suffering by making no distinctions between poverty caused by bad luck and poverty caused by bad habits.

America at the start of the twentieth century was creative, assertive, productive–and very hard. For those on the short end, it could be unforgiving. “At eighteen you were on your own,” as Barone writes. “Employers could dismiss you for any reason–the death of a breadwinner was a disaster–the contrast between rich and poor was stark.” The country was booming, but the slums and sweatshops were enough to make a progressive of Theodore Roosevelt and create the first age of reform. Thirty years later, the stock market crashed, bringing to power Theodore’s fifth cousin Franklin. With him came a raft of security measures to cushion the edges and dangers of life: Social Security, retirement funds, monthly payments to single women with children (assumed to be widows), and a series of efforts to soften the workplace.

After World War II, measures such as the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Federal Housing Administration extended the benefits of higher education and home ownership to millions of people. These programs, Barone says, changed the country from one in which “most people did not graduate from high school to one in which most people attended college; from a nation in which most people rented housing to one in which most people owned their own homes.” It was very much a kinder and gentler America, if one that was not wholly softened: Veterans had to have earned their opportunities through prior service and had courses to pass and mortgage payments to meet for their benefits. But there was a safety net, of sorts, and a helping hand from the government, and a state of mind that put a great stress on security.

In his analysis of this history, Barone begins with Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, in which a girl is driven to sin on the mean streets of Chicago, and he ends with Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a novel of corporate politics, in which a young veteran trades off the fast track and promotions and money for a less pressured, more leisurely life. “America at midcentury was a far Softer country than it had been,” Barone notes. “Security, a word seldom heard and a concept that seemed unrealistic in 1900, became a watchword. The New Deal gave Americans Social Security, protection against the hard threat of economic disaster, and the Softening in many other spheres likewise aimed to protect Americans against hard realities–who wanted to return to the Chicago of Sister Carrie when you could live in the Connecticut suburbs of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit?”

SOFTENED ALREADY, the culture would soon become softer, not always through deliberately chosen means. The country that emerged from the Roosevelt tenure was what Barone calls a “Big Unit” culture, made up of giant and cumbersome parts. “While Big Business was the dominating force, it was disciplined not by the Hard market but by the Soft countervailing power of Big Government and Big Labor,” Barone insists. “The Big Unit economy was inherently soft. In time, these institutions became sclerotic and sluggish, unable to meet new competition.”

To explain what befell the industrial sector, Barone cites John Updike’s 1979 novel Rabbit Is Rich. Gas prices are rising, a shortage mentality has a grip on the nation, and Rabbit is selling Japanese cars. “If you ask me, Detroit’s let us all down, 200 million of us,” he says to some customers. “I’d much rather handle native American cars but between the three of us they’re junk. They’re cardboard. They’re pretend.”

To evoke what occurred on the cultural level, Barone invokes Saul Bellow’s 1970 Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in which Artur Sammler has survived the Holocaust in Europe–only to find a life almost as frightening in 1960s New York. Five years into Great Society politics, with an administration that equated police work with oppression and encouraged people to go on to welfare and stay there, the city was sunk in a mire of crime and dysfunction, where doors were secured by multiple locks, muggings were frequent, and nothing at all seemed to work. On the Number 5 bus, Sammler sees a thief lifting purses and wallets, tries to report it from a broken pay phone in a booth reeking of urine, and finds the police unimpressed.

“Welfare dependency and crime built on each other,” Barone writes. “We tried to produce more for the poor and produced more poor. We tried to remove the barriers–and inadvertently built a trap.” As in the Hard America of the turn of the century, the slums were filling up with miserable people. If a hard culture was prone to its signal dysfunctions, a soft one also had its signature weaknesses, which were proving themselves just as destructive.

To make things worse, a therapeutic approach to foreign relations led to a traumatic pullout from Vietnam, a make-nice approach to the Soviet Union, and a hostage crisis in Iran. By the end of the 1970s, America was scraping rock bottom, its economy shaky, its culture in tatters, its confidence shot. Near the close of the decade, Jimmy Carter, the sultan of soft, said the one memorable thing of his tenure when he declared that “malaise” had seized hold of the country. He was right.

AROUND 1930, Hard America ran into a ditch under Herbert Hoover, who had no idea what was happening. Around 1979, Soft America ran into the ditch on the other side of the road, under a leader just as clueless and inept, and the nation once more was pulled back just in time. Crucial to this would be two key elections: 1980, in which the well-meaning and inept Jimmy Carter was ousted by Reagan; and 1993, when Rudy Giuliani beat the well-meaning and inept David Dinkins to become mayor of New York.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, such reform governors as Tommy Thompson, Evan Bayh, and John Engler slashed welfare rolls while nudging the underemployed into self-reliance. As they once soared together, crime and welfare statistics now tumbled in unison: Peaking in 1993 at 14.2 million, federal welfare rolls had been cut in half six years later, and would fall to 5.4 million by 2001. Meanwhile, the economy had started to right itself: The softer Big Units continued to flounder, but the growth came from millions of low-level start-ups and new giants–Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Federal Express–which were started on a shoestring by people outside the establishment and thrived on the Hard virtues of innovation and risk.

Perhaps the signal event of this counterreaction was the passage in 1996 of the federal welfare reform act, signed in an election year by a Democratic president who had earlier vetoed it twice. The key note in this act was the placement of a time limit on benefits, a statement that people had a right to assistance in times of great trouble, but not to a lifetime on taxpayers’ money: a blow to the concept of endless entitlement at the core of the Soft way of life. “By the beginning of the twenty-first century, large parts of America had become much Harder,” Barone notes with approval. “Will the Hardening of America continue? Or will we move toward a Softer America as the twenty-first century goes on?”

Probably both, as the struggle for balance continues. Meanwhile, in Hard America / Soft America, Barone has given us a fascinating way to look at the past and the present. With the excesses of softness still fresh in memory, Barone thinks the system could use more hardening, especially in the area that seems most resistant: education and the public schools. But the problem is really in striking a balance that gets people to strive without making them desperate–that gives them support without sapping their will.

Too hot or too cold, and we can’t eat the porridge; too firm or too soft, and we can’t sleep in comfort. Extremes in either direction, Barone insists, are dangerous and end in the same place–slums filled with unhappy and desperate people, with too much or too little to do.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.