Saturday Night Fever

Odd to think it, but at the advanced age of not-quite-40, I have lived long enough to see my own political faith, and that of a whole generation, explode like the dirigible Hindenburg and fade into antiquity. In 1975, when I was a high school debater, the national topic was this: “Resolved, that the development and allocation of scarce world resources should be controlled by an international organization.” Imagine it: Thousands of teenagers all over America earnestly arguing about establishing an international body to ration oil, minerals and maybe food. Today the very suggestion seems ridiculous. Back then it seemed mainstream. How else, after all, would one deal with scarcity?

We ‘70s people were not radicals. There was plenty of radicalism running around, of course, but that was another story. A defining feature of the prevailing intellectual ideology of the 1970s was that it did not regard itself as an ideology. It was--so we thought--a pragmatic approach to a lot of problems. It rejected not only the pro-business complacency of the postwar years but also the rambling and often disheveled idealism of the psychedelic ‘60s. Instead it was an extension, in our eyes, of the orderly progressivism of a century ago. Planning, centralization, controls, yes, but only when they made sense.

The ‘70s worldview was bounded in time, roughly speaking, by the first Earth Day (in April 1970) and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979). Its distinguishing traits included, among other things, virtually unbounded confidence in the problem-solving capacities of the federal government, a parallel disdain for state and local governments (amateurs!), a benign view of bureaucracy and planning, an almost exclusively urban political base, a disdain for the suburbs and their lifestyle, the belief that poverty is a distributional rather than a behavioral or a demographic problem and a presumption that rules and legal process make the world a better place.

Contrary to what its critics may have thought, this was not a sinister package of ideas. On paper, it made sense. The trouble was that in practice it was all wrong, for reasons that were mostly not obvious and that had to do with the ineffable and glorious messiness of the world. Maybe encouraging everyone to sue everyone else is not such an efficient way to solve problems. Maybe the campaign finance laws and the independent counsel law and the rest of the post-Watergate apparatus criminalized politics without making it a whit cleaner. Maybe gas rationing and wage and price controls were not great ideas. Who knew?

After the 1970s thinking collapsed with the discrediting of price controls and the Federal Reserve’s conquest of stagflation, most of us 1970s people adapted or converted to market-friendly thinking, and today we wonder what ever seemed so objectionable about it. But not everybody left the old views behind. Some fight on from their foxholes, often either in universities or in pressure groups. Others, however, are too honest to believe that lawsuits or postmodern textual analysis can solve the world’s problems, yet they cannot bring themselves to believe that a bromide-spouting actor or a union-busting Iron Lady got things more or less right. This honest but unreconciled remnant is the most interesting sort of reactionary, and Thomas Geoghegan is in their number.

“When I was thirty and sick of D.C., I thought: ‘Oh, go! Just pick out a city and be a citizen of it!’

“It was 1979, everyone was going. I decided, there must be a city, maybe to the north.”

So begins Geoghegan’s search for citizenship, which for him means a search for a civic community where he will be at home culturally and politically. He does not find it.

“I picked out Chicago, our political city. Precinct workers knocking on doors. It would get me out of my room.

“And the whole thing ended badly. Now in one or two city elections, I’ve lost even the heart to vote.”

His book must count as one of the most idiosyncratic of the season, engaging and puzzling by turns. Geoghegan apprentices in journalism at the New Republic, does a bureaucratic stint in the Energy Department in the 1970s and then immerses himself in Chicago politics, searching for the feeling of political belonging that finally eludes him. The book is equal parts memoir, political polemic, intellectual travelogue and stream-of-consciousness musing. It is like a monologue or a performance piece, only written, generally in chatty, short paragraphs, often just a sentence or two each.

Geoghegan, though a lawyer by trade, is a writer by avocation, whose previous book, “Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a man of literary craft and is a pleasure to read, and he is also a writer of restless curiosity. Let him take you along on his tour of Chicago’s jails or night narcotics court and he shows you scenes from Dickens, Dante and Hieronymus Bosch. In the maximum-security ward of the jail, a guard points to a cell.

“I looked at the door, and there was a tiny hole and an eye looking out.

“ ‘Yeah,’ said the guard. ‘This is the guy who killed the fifteen prostitutes. Put them in the trash bin.’

“Oh.

“The eye bobbed, violently.”

Yet even as the writer revels in scenes from Chicago’s nether world, the intellectual agonizes. He is troubled, obsessed even, by poverty, by declining wages, by growing inequality. True, the troubles are masked for the moment by the lurid sheen of a bubble economy. But this bubble will pop, and then what? “No country, not us, no country . . . can survive for long both a declining median wage and rising inequality.” He wanders, wraithlike, through a landscape of soup kitchens, homelessness, exploitation. “Our factories look like our country, i.e., an elite telling the low skills where to move things.”

Now, to see America, or even Chicago, as a place of post-industrial misery requires a certain selectivity of vision. The sort of myopia that is required is common among moralists of whatever stripe. Conservative Christian moralists talk much as Geoghegan does, except that where he sees declining wages, they see declining morality, and where he sees soup kitchens and lousy jobs, they see abortion clinics and godless schools. Both views have something in them, but both see too little of the world.

Economists can argue all day about whether wages and poverty and income equality, properly measured and adjusted for this and that, are rising or declining. But never mind. One soon realizes, as Geoghegan travels around Chicago and Washington, D.C., that his book is not so much an argument as an attitude, a frown of disapproval and a moan of regret. “It was sad, the end of the Carter period, not just the end of planning, but even the idea of public service.” He is nostalgic for planning, morose about deregulation, irritated by suburbs, resentful of the states. For him, poverty persists and working-class wages perform disappointingly because the nation lost its will. “Why did we lose our nerve?” he asks plaintively. “. . . It is often said that the Democrats in the 1960s promised too much. . . . But in what way? If we wanted to eliminate poverty we could have. We still could. If we wanted the median wage to rise in a broad and long-term way, we could do it.”

We could? How? To his credit, he does not pretend to know how, beyond dropping hints that he wishes America were like Sweden (which, by the way, is itself no longer quite so much like Sweden). He is honest enough to understand that the obvious answers of the era of planning failed. He understands that America will not become a northern European social democracy and the poor will not rise up to vote for higher wages. He seems to understand even that voting for higher wages might not, at the end of the day, produce them. And so what remains is a man unhappily adrift in his own time, an idealist without an ideology, a problem-solver without a solution: a cultural ghost.

Over and over, Geoghegan says he is “haunted”: by the poor, by teenagers working late into the night, by his own failure to find a city, meaning really a country, where he can feel at home. But it is he who haunts. To him, his book is a work of gentle protest, an act of conscientious objection to an America that has lost its ideals. To me, it is a reminder of what my generation left behind, and why I, unlike him, look back without regret.