Psychodynamics of the Status Quo : New Politics: The marketplace drives an ethos of self-interest. The end of the Cold War opens room for community and caring.

If ever there was a moment when a fundamental rethinking of political and cultural assumptions was in order, this is it. Both conservatives and liberals espouse politics that are increasingly immaterial to the post-Cold War world, and the perceptible decline of interest in politics in the United States is at least in part a recognition that the old debates are boringly irrelevant.

Consider, for example, the current exuberant celebration of the capitalist marketplace in the wake of the collapse of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. Leave aside that the American conservative program of cutting taxes on the rich and lifting restrictions on corporations led to immiseration for millions--homelessness and hunger at levels not seen since the Depression. Leave aside the monumental irrationality of corporations using their resources for mergers and buyouts rather than to invest in modernizing their plants or to develop technologies and products for the next decades. Leave aside that defense spending squandered hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been used for retooling industries or alleviating social ills and left us as a debtor nation whose resources are now being bought up by other countries.

Leaving aside all that, the celebration of the status quo may turn to mourning quickly enough if the freedom of the marketplace continues to prevent the development of a universal system of rational allocation of the world’s resources and capacities. I’m not talking, for the moment, about the fact that every year 30 million children die of hunger worldwide as a consequence of our current system. Such “merely” moral outrage is not likely to divert the ideologues of the right from their festivities. Rather, I make reference to the fact that the much-touted marketplace has encouraged--some would say required--a pillaging of the world’s resources and a wildly irresponsible destruction of the physical environment that may soon lead to ecological catastrophe for the entire human race.

Adam Smith and contemporary conservative theorists assured us that if we all pursued our own self-interests, the invisible hand of the marketplace would miraculously reconcile these competing interests and produce a common good. The escalating destruction of the life-support systems of the planet that has resulted from the “free play of market forces” is only the most dramatic proof of the irrationality of building a society around the principle of individual selfishness.

While undermining America’s economic future, the conservative economic agenda also undermined the conservative social agenda. The values of “looking out for No. 1” and “getting mine” were precisely what was needed to succeed in the capitalist marketplace. Yet those were the very values that taught our children to put material goods ahead of spiritual needs, to develop competitive rather than cooperative skills, and to become the very kinds of selfish people who would have little use for values or for any community of meaning that might require them to sacrifice self-interest for some higher good. The marketplace fostered the development of a narcissistic personality structure adept at manipulating and controlling others. Yet these personalities, the very kinds that “make it” in the world of work, are maladapted for building lasting relationships. No matter how much people may want to make their families and relationships work, once they have developed the personality traits that make them successful in the marketplace, they cannot simultaneously become loving, caring and nonmanipulative people in their personal lives. The result has been a monumental crisis in family life and a world in which friendships and relationships are harder to sustain than ever before in our collective memory. Of course, most Americans blame this on themselves, think that they are personal failures in some way, and rush out to buy some remedy (psychotherapy, diet, exercise, 12-step programs, drugs, alcohol, television-based religions) to “fix” themselves or at least deaden the pain. It is only this self-blaming that keeps Americans from rising in anger at the world that the free marketplace has wrought.

So, you might think, this must be a great moment for liberals. After all, the collapse of the Cold War has proved the right-wingers wrong on one key element of their dogmatic faith. In the late 1970s Jeane Kirkpatrick solemnly defended America’s double standard of giving aid to right-wing dictatorships (she called them “authoritarian” regimes) while militarily confronting the spread of communist dictatorships (she called them “totalitarian” regimes) by her insistence that totalitarian regimes could not reform themselves from within, while U.S.-friendly dictatorships could. Through Mikhail Gorbachev’s influence, we have seen the kind of revolutionary transformations in Eastern Europe that right-wingers were so sure couldn’t happen that they bet more than a trillion dollars and our children’s economic futures against it.

Liberals should benefit from the collapse of Eastern European communism. Anyone who listened carefully to the American left knows that, since the 1960s at least, it has been unequivocally hostile to the Soviet Union and to other dictatorships that misappropriated the label “socialism.” Yet the right has always been able to manipulate Americans’ correct anger at Stalinism into an inappropriate discounting of the fundamental ideas of socialism. The very reason that the command economy didn’t work in Eastern Europe is that the system was not democratic, and hence depended on the most implausible assumptions: that people could be motivated to work for nonmaterial incentives like social solidarity at the very moment when they felt alienated from the society and saw it as being dictatorially controlled by a ruling communist elite. Any sensible democratic socialist would, and did, explain that this could never work--that if people had no sense of power and control, they would work only for material rewards such as those provided by the capitalist marketplace. But it was almost impossible to explain that East European socialism isn’t really socialism because workers didn’t have any control--that it was just another ruling elite exploiting the word socialism for its own exploitative purposes--as long as both the American right and the East European communists both agreed that what was being tried was socialism.

Better, then, that the whole system has collapsed. At least now the liberals don’t have to try to explain why the mixed economy they support, with elements of democratic planning and elements of the marketplace, has nothing in common with the dictatorships of Eastern Europe. Perhaps now it will become possible to talk about extending democratic control to investments and production, and about using resources in ways that would save our endangered planet.

Moreover, with 10 years of Republican rule generating ever-higher levels of drug abuse and family breakdown, this would certainly be a moment when the Democrats and the liberals could come forward with an analysis of the inner crises facing American society that could point to the failure of conservative solutions. So, you’d think this was a grand moment for liberals.

But it isn’t. The liberals have lost their way--and in the process have lost the support of the American people. Stuck in a model of politics that focuses exclusively on the problems of political rights and economic entitlements, the liberals’ only audience is the dispossessed. They can gain momentary popularity when the political right tries to overstep some civil-liberties boundary (for instance, the attempt to curtail women’s abortion rights), but the liberals seem oblivious to the psychological and spiritual needs of the American people. The oppression facing most Americans is no longer primarily a matter of economic or physical survival; it is rather the destruction of the moral and spiritual environment necessary to human well-being.

The breakdown of families, the crisis of friendships, the deep trouble people have in finding and sustaining long-term, committed, loving relationships--all the core issues of crisis of contemporary life rooted in the psychodynamics of the capitalist marketplace are the central political issues of our time. A successful liberal movement would help people develop compassion for themselves and stop the self-blaming, and would struggle for a workplace that encouraged us to develop our abilities to be cooperative and caring. Such a politics would challenge the materialism and ethos of self-interest of the capitalist marketplace, just as it would demand changes in the world of work to facilitate and reward the development of caring human beings rather than the narcissistic personality structures that currently receive the greatest rewards.

Well, for most Democratic Party politicians, talk like this might as well be coming from Mars (back East they criticize it as sounding “too California”). For them, as for most advocates of social change, to be hard-nosed is to avoid moral categories altogether. Sure, they can talk about child care or health care in technocratic terms, but they are strangers to the notion that such programs must be rooted in a larger moral and spiritual framework. No wonder, then, that each liberal program appears to be merely special pleading for a special-interest group rather than the logical outcome of a moral vision that could energize a society that has lost its way.

The outcome is that most Americans agree with the Democrats and the liberals on the substance of their ideas, but withhold their votes because they don’t trust that the Democrats and the liberals really understand the psychological, ethical and spiritual crisis that the country faces. Moreover, they suspect that the Democrats and liberals don’t really care--that in fact they only care for people who are victims of the most overt economic or physical brutalization.

I hope it is clear by now why I think that this is a moment for a politics that rejects much of the old thinking of both the left and the right. A few years ago I started Tikkun magazine as “the liberal alternative to Commentary magazine and the voices of Jewish conservatism.” A major part of its agenda was to encourage the liberals and the Democrats to abandon their old ways of thinking. Tikkun has grown to be the largest-circulation Jewish magazine, and one of the largest-circulation political/cultural magazines of any sort, precisely because it rejects the standard categories. Our conference at UCLA this weekend is one of a series we have been sponsoring around the country to provoke this fundamental rethinking.

The collapse of the Cold War raises some specifically Jewish problems as well. We Jews have our doubts about the kinds of regimes that will emerge in Eastern Europe. The rampant anti-Semitism that led many East European nationalist movements to embrace Nazism before World War II was never really extinguished--it only went underground. Having wiped out most of their Jewish populations, the peoples of Eastern Europe have lost the scapegoat that served them in every calamity for centuries back. While some Eastern Europeans may still try to blame the Jews if nascent capitalism fails, anger fed by racist and xenophobic attitudes may resurface in national or ethnic or religious groups turning against each other. Without in any way supporting communist totalitarianism, which in many ways only intensified the problems by forcing them underground, it is easy to understand why many Jews were drawn to the communist movements that fought East European nationalisms, and why many Jews had little sympathy for allowing the peoples of East Europe to determine their own fate, as they had done, with anti-Semitic consequences, in the inter-war years.

Nor are we particularly heartened by the prospect of a reunified Germany. Had the German people, East and West, really engaged in a serious process of de-Nazification, had each German child been required to study the history of anti-Semitism and come to understand how Germans democratically voted for Hitler in 1933, had there been a systematic attempt to uproot the rigid character structures that were encouraged by German cultural and educational norms, we might be feeling very differently as we watch Germans celebrate a potential reunification. But when we hear talk of a resurgent German nationalism, when we read about Germans singing World War II songs as they dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, we have to question why the American occupiers of Germany seemed to think that fascism (and anti-Semitism) was suddenly not a problem, that the struggle was solely against communism.

Thus, the Cold War never served Jewish interests. Yet conservative spokesmen and organizations within the Jewish world hoped that they could benefit by arguing for American support for Israel as a potential ally in the anti-Soviet crusade. With walls and curtains falling and the Cold War waning, the continued occupation of the West Bank looks even more incomprehensible--and the pressure for Israel to live up to its democratic ideology will rightfully grow more intense. The dinosaurs who run the official institutions of the Jewish world have tried to repress all dissent by labeling as “self-hating Jews” those who call for talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization and those who support a demilitarized Palestinian state. Yet increasing numbers of younger Jews have come to believe that our commitment to the highest ethical principles of Jewish life requires that we give to the Palestinians the same rights to national self-determination that the Zionist movement has rightly claimed for the Jews. Those who try to hold on to the assumptions of the past in the Jewish world, much like those American liberals and conservatives who seek to perpetuate the old debates, are likely to be as irrelevant as they are boring.

A new generation of Jews is coming of age that thinks of America as home, not as host. For us, raised after the Holocaust, it is precisely our trust in non-Jews that makes it possible for us to feel safe in being openly critical of some aspects of American society and to feel safe in criticizing current Israeli policies as well. We do not fear that we will suddenly liberate a latent anti-Semitism that many of the more conservative Jews tend to suspect still lingers in the hearts of all non-Jews. On the contrary: We believe that the task of creating a world based on love and mutual caring, fundamental to a restructuring of the priorities of American political liberals, must also be the central item on the Jewish agenda. Yet, unlike liberal Jews of the past, who felt that they needed to hide their Jewishness to prove that they had no special Jewish agenda, our concern for healing the world flows specifically out of our affirmation of Jewish values and our own Jewishness.

The good news, then, is that the collapse of the Cold War has opened up space both in American politics and in the Jewish world for a whole new way of thinking and talking about politics and culture. And that could produce much excitement in the ‘90s.