The Triumph of Meanness - America's War Against Its Better Self.

The Triumph of Meanness--America's War Against Its Better Self by Nicolaus Mills (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); 260 pp.; $25 cloth.,

There is a widespread feeling in A America that we are living in a less civil and compassionate society than in the recent past. There is more to this feeling than a nostalgia for what sociologist Stephanie Coontz has called The Way We Never Were in her book--a fantasized 1950s America of generalized prosperity, stability, and social harmony. The symptoms of an actual reduction in civility and compassion are all around us: the growing marginalization of the poor; the downsizing of corporations and the fear it induces in working people; the heightened antipathy toward immigrants; the decline in standards of political debate; the personalization of politics by a scandal-mongering press; an accompanying decline in political participation; the contraction and deterioration of the public space; the retreat from community involvement (as illustrated by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his essay "Bowling Alone"); and the outbreak of venomous new conflicts between the races, sexes, and generations. For Nicolaus Mills, all of these things constitute The Triumph of Meanness.

Mills, a professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and a coeditor of Dissent magazine, has written a depressing account of the decline of social cohesion in America during the 1990s. He contrasts this "new savagery" with the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt's second inaugural, which declared that "we will never regard any faithful, law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous." In the period following World War II, this ethic of inclusion was put into practice by the GI Bill, the Peace Corps, the War on Poverty, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Mills acknowledges that, at one level, a spirit of meanness is nothing new in America, as demonstrated by the anti-Semitic and anti-New Deal views of Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s, the rabid political intolerance by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, or the racial segregationism of Alabama Governor George Wallace in the 1960s. Yet the meanness of the 1990s is a more disturbing kind in two ways. First, it is no longer confined to the speeches of individual right-wing demagogues. In an impressively broad and eclectic survey of politics, journalism, and popular culture, Mills shows how the new meanness has permeated every level of society and all walks of life. He focuses in particular on the growth of savagery in public tastes, as illustrated by the descent of television talk shows, the popularity of "extreme fighting" on pay-per-view, and the public's morbid preoccupation with true crime.

Second, the new meanness emphasizes and exacerbates social and economic divisions to the point of jeopardizing the very notion of America itself. Though many of the country's current problems can be traced back to the Reaganite 1980s, Ronald Reagan was at least animated by a vision of America as a coherent nation united by a common history and set of values. However simplistic and idealized the former president's conception of national unity may have been, Mill prefers it to the present dissolution of American society into groups that, to all intents and purposes, inhabit different worlds.

This can be seen in the widening of the gap between rich and poor. On New Year's Day 1996, the communications giant AT&T announced that it was to lay off 40,000 employees. The result was a rapid increase in the price of the company's stock (a personal windfall for the chief executive officer and other top executives with stock options) and a heightened sense of insecurity in the American economy as a whole. For Mills, the personification of the new "corporate Darwinism" is Al Dunlap, CEO of the Sunbeam Corporation. In his book, Mean Business, Dunlap dismisses as vacuous sentimentality the stakeholder conception of corporate governance (which stresses the company's obligations to its employees and to the community in which it is located) and argues instead for the aggressive maximization of shareholder dividends.

In the face of such a crude management philosophy, the need for labor unions is arguably greater than at any time in the past half-century, Yet the power of unions has declined sharply, with membership down to 14 percent of the overall workforce and to 11 percent in the private sector. Furthermore, in the 1990s, insecurity is not the sole preserve of blue-collar workers. As Scott Adams' highly successful Dilbert cartoon strip illustrates, expendability is an instrument of discipline and coercion at every level of the modern corporation. The precarious nature of working life in the new economy has intensified the ever-present individualism and competitiveness of American culture, sapping the energies and resources previously available for more public-spirited community engagement.

Meanwhile, in the culture wars waged by political activists and postmodern campus intellectuals, there is a renewed emphasis on the division of American society into race and gender groups, whose antagonisms are now held to be mutual and irreconcilable. Mills shows how the contemporary American left, in its obsession with identity politics, has all too often mirrored the racism and sexism of the Republican right. Drawing on the distinguished African American scholars Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Mills examines the disintegration of the civil rights coalition assembled by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and its replacement by a gulf of understanding in which, as Gates comments, "O. J. Simpson is a suitable remedy for Rodney King and reductions in Medicaid are entertained as a suitable remedy for O. J. Simpson: a discourse in which everybody speaks of payback and nobody is paid."

A new player on the field of American social antagonisms is intergenerational conflict. As the fiscal redistribution of wealth across the classes draws to a close, the redistribution of resources across the life-cycle is assuming center stage in political debate. Once again, the meanness is not confined to any one side of the debate. However, the most ominous symptom of this unraveling of the American social fabric is the decline of civic life. The Reaganite assault on "big government," later adopted by Bill Clinton, has come to undermine the belief in government itself. Elected public bodies no longer work effectively as forums in which the nation, or its constituent communities, debate matters of common concern. Cynicism and alienation have replaced civic responsibility, as indicated by the falling voter turnout at federal, state, and local elections.

Mills has given us a compelling account of the unacceptable level of selfishness, spite, and aggression in today's America:

The security that in the past we

derived from a Cold War that

defined our enemies, an economy

that offered each generation a

brighter future, and a civil rights

movement that gave us moral purpose

is gone, replaced by the belief

that it no longer makes sense to act

as if we shared the same fate or

could find common cause. Our best

option, we now imagine, is to save

ourselves and those like us on the

basis of a lifeboat ethics that

rewards ruthlessness.

He has also been scrupulously fair in his allocation of responsibility. No one reading this book should doubt the need for a rational social philosophy that respects the integrity of the individual while working for the creation of cohesive communities based on economic justice and genuine race and gender equalities.

Peter Grosvenor is an assistant professor of political science at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He recently received his doctorate in government from the London School of Economics and was previously a research officer for the Trades Union Congress in London.