John Ingraham

Government Pirates: The Assault on Private Property Rights and How We Can Fight It, By Don Corace. Harper Collins, 288 pp., $14.95 paper.

This book is exactly what its subtitle declares, and the author has done a fine job. It is well written, concise and direct. In short, succinct chapters he covers each area of concern -- eminent domain, zoning, wetlands preservation, the Endangered Species Act -- first defining the issue and then describing illustrative cases. Mr. Corace knows his subject, and when the reader is done, he will know it, too. An excellent final chapter explains why we should care about these issues, and outlines ways to take action. For those who do not know the full story, this is a very useful account.

There is, however, something missing: history. We are not told if the problem has changed over time, nor do we learn why the assaults seem so determined now (as in the Green cases). Of course, attacks on private property are nothing new; officious bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, and greedy developers are always with us. That is, the problem has an ahistorical dimension. But it has a history, too, and if we don't know it we are apt to think this is the same old story of general injustice. I think, however, the attacks are more widespread and more determined than that, and the answer is to be found in the history of ideas since World War II.

The most significant development, the one that underlies all the subsequent changes, was the favored position of the United States in the world economy after the war as the only unscathed major power, a situation which generated enormous wealth, widely apparent by the latter 1950s. This had subversive consequences for the prevailing American world view, the liberalism that had grown out of pre-World War I Progressivism, reaching its perfected form in the New Deal years, because that view, ripened during the Depression and war years, was Spartan, almost ascetic, happy with Norman Rockwell rustic types at the mythic town meetings, clean-limbed working men in uncorrupt unions, unthreatening patronized Negroes, benign in its smug benevolence, the framing narrative of all right-thinking Americans. The creation of unprecedented prosperity worried those people at the time, with good reason, although the aspects they worried about were the wrong ones -- I recall a college colloquium on "What shall we do with our leisure?" -- they did not see that their sparse world was about to be transformed by a flood of material things. Meanwhile, the Cold War had begun, there was much international tension, and we belatedly discovered Communist subversion in our sunny homeland.

The temptation is to say that the world had become more complex, but that's an illusion. Every period is complex for the people living in it; only when we look back at the past do other times seem simpler than our own. And every new period seems more complex because its outlines are unfamiliar. So the postwar period, with its international challenges and domestic strains seemed much more difficult than the 1930s and 1940s. The important point to grasp is that the picture of America in our minds no longer fits the frame; the benign liberalism of the past is increasingly irrelevant.

It must also be noted that stabilizing and unifying forces, so influential in the middle class, like the mainline Protestant churches, were beginning their steep decline. Nor should we forget that even such a humble thing as popular culture, once a unifier (remember the "Hit Parade"?) was splintering. The liberal American conversation with itself was fading, faltering. In its perplexity the cultural elite turned to the remedy it thought had worked in the 1930s: government. Programs proliferated, culminating in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, a venture that not only inflated governments but also spawned quasi-governmental agencies of all sorts as well as pseudo-independent bodies supported by grants, multiplying the number of people with officious attitudes, at the same time that they were given more intrusive powers.

The postwar consensus collapsed during the student protests of the late 1960s, not because the movement was so strong, but because everyone vested with authority revealed under pressure that their convictions had been hollowed out over the years. They did not really believe the sonorous phrases they had been mouthing, and suddenly no one else did either. Over the next few years, colleges gave up what had been the reason for being, humanistic learning: it had been discredited along with classical liberalism. To understand what this meant for a generation of students, consider one of the results of postwar affluence: many children of working class or lower middleclass background were able to go to college, and they went at a time when a college education was losing its traditional meaning to become loosely vocational or merely fatuous. These people would eventually find employment largely in government agencies and government-linked offices, an affluent class of time servers in fluff jobs, one of the most densely ignorant (but superficially sophisticated) schooled groups ever to emerge in America, the yuppies. The growing affluence and leisure of this class, combined with the decay and disappearance of authority figures and stabilizing institutions, prepared a fertile soil for the growth of the irrational causes so destructive of our society: feminism, no-fault divorce, unlimited abortion, racial and other preferences, homosexual marriage, Greenism, and so on, all group ideas and group movements.

So the last sixty years have given us a huge intrusive bureaucracy, always inherently suspicious of individuality, now reinforced by groupthink; an ignorant semi-elite dedicated to utterly irrational causes underpinned by groupthink; and the rabid promoters of the causes themselves, intent on marshaling their followers in militant, serried ranks. The reason private property rights take such a beating in this kind of climate is that it is the ultimate refuge of autonomy, feared and hated by group thinkers. That's what we must keep in mind as we read this book: that it's not simply a compilation of outrages, it shows a determined attack against individual autonomy.

There is a hopeful note in this gloomy history. Since the collapse of the postwar consensus "right-thinking" people have been trying to impose a new consensus: America the ogre -- what we might call the Jeremiah Wright vision -- but conservatism has been growing as a counter force, and the growing hysteria of the right-thinkers tells us that they are no longer secure in their hegemony, that they are desperately afraid they have lost control of America's framing narrative. *

"The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat." --Robert Lewis Stevenson