Tough Luck : A Yuppie Manifesto : THE END OF EQUALITY, <i> By Mickey Kaus (New Republic Books/Basic Books: $25; 293 pp.)</i>

Mickey Kaus’ “The End of Equality” is a book of almost perfect self-in-dulgence, like an absurd cocktail-party rant--which would be fine were it a gourmand’s guide or an erotic novel. Unfortunately, it passes for this season’s hot political theory or, as the cover proclaims, a new agenda for the Democratic Party.

Forget the S&L; and junk-bond scandals, ignore the flight of American manufacturing and breathe hardly a word about the national debt. And play down the corruption of the political process by the wealthy. Mickey Kaus may be the last person in America who believes the political/judicial system is not rigged: “The courts still treat a Michael Milken or Leona Helmsley with an inspiring lack of deference.”

No, it is the black underclass that is the main source of our problems--”a class whose values are so inimical to America’s potential universal culture that its negation, and transformation, will allow those universal values to flower.”

What Kaus proposes as a new “Civic Liberalism” is a worst-case example of social engineering. And an expensive one at that. Kaus attacks what he derides as “Money Liberalism,” but his plan to abolish welfare and replace it with a public-jobs program modeled on the WPA would, by his own calculation, cost three times as much as the existing program.

What legislature, state or federal, is going to go for that one? And if such money is available, why not spend it on job training for poor people--which has never been seriously funded--or Republican Jack Kemp’s proposal for enterprise zones?

Kaus’ answer: Such programs would tend to keep poor blacks in the cities, and he wants them dispersed. On this basis, he derides Kemp’s call for “empowering” poor people through private home ownership and business investment in the ghetto because “it tempts the underclass to stay put.” Instead, he suggests, “you have to somehow deny benefits to one-parent families, unplug the underclass culture’s life support system.”

Welfare, in this view, is a cause of rather than a response to poverty, and should be eliminated. Instead, the human “dregs of the labor market” would be put into a program that is “relatively authoritarian, even a bit militaristic”: If they cannot find real jobs, they must perform below-minimum-wage public work. He doesn’t spell it out, but by “militaristic” he must intend that these workers would not have the right to join unions or to strike. No matter, middle-class taxpayers would be in charge. Kaus writes that he can already hear the demand: “Why hasn’t my subway stop been cleaned yet?”

Although he admits that black unemployment drops dramatically when decent jobs are available, he does not take seriously calls for a new industrial policy that strengthens the manufacturing sector. We can’t tell multinational companies where or how to do business without endangering the entrepreneurial spirit Kaus adores; but it’s a piece of cake to take a check away from a welfare mother.

Go after the Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), Kaus urges--though it’s an already cut-to-the-bone program that made up less than 1% of the federal budget in 1991. Make those black welfare mothers work for their bread and civic life will return to the halcyon days of the 1950s, when the Negroes knew their place.

Call it neo-liberalism or Kaus’ preferred term, Civic Liberalism, but what we have here is another set of harebrained schemes concocted without serious consultation of the millions of people expected to conform to these bizarre prescriptions. He does occasionally consult his own experiences, beginning the book with his disillusionment after a brief stint as a “leftish lawyer” in the Carter government and ending with thanks to his wealthy parents for supporting him into middle age.

Kaus grew up in privilege, the son of a prominent California Supreme Court justice, but seeks to end all welfare assistance to poor women with children--”them.” Welfare mothers need to learn the harsh truths of the marketplace, yet he concedes: “This book was made possible by a series of grants from Peggy and Otto Kaus,” his parents. This from a guy who knocks Head Start programs.

Outside of Kaus and his offended sensibilities concerning the deterioration of urban life, there are no real people in what purports to be a book on public policy. There are only categories beginning with the scary black “underclass” whose members are “lurking” behind trees in our public parks and must be turned into a vast new WPA-type army of street sweepers and the like.

The most disingenuous feature of this work is that it assumes, indeed savors, sharp income differences as essential to the healthy working of the capitalist system. (On the other hand, since he acknowledges that democracy requires some common ground, economic segregation would be balanced under the Kaus regime by a peacetime draft: “The only way to guarantee class-mixing,” he argues, “is to make national service mandatory. That means a penalty harsh enough to be coercive. It could be jail.” Does he now regret he avoided service in Vietnam?)

The fact is, however, that the very healthy capitalist systems of Europe do a great deal more than the United States in the way of income transfers. Recent data compiled by the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law show that there would be a comparable percentage of people living below the poverty line in the United Kingdom and Germany as in the United States were it not for a far more generous redistribution of income and a much higher social safety net. No matter which party is in power in Western Europe, they go far beyond Money Liberalism into the world of social democracy.

And the Western Europeans assist a lot of single-parent families. Which brings up another of Kaus’ people-less social categories--”illegitimate children” (a vile phrase)--always faceless and most often criminal. Plenty of welfare kids are nourished by their mothers. Yet if those women refuse to work at one of the new WPA jobs and can find no other, they will, under his plan, no longer be permitted food stamps or other aid. Don’t worry about the kids: “She,” the mother who doesn’t fall into line, loses her check and can’t feed the kids, “is subject to the laws that already provide for removal of a child from an unfit home.” So putting kids into “new institutions such as orphanages” is the neo-liberal’s contribution to the family-values debate?

Kaus’ most despised category--welfare mothers--are assumed to be primarily black, urban and long-term dependents on the rolls. While black women make up a high percentage of longer-term welfare recipients, they are not a majority of those who turn to the welfare system in need. In his eagerness to get at the “underclass,” Kaus is willing to destroy a system that has proven useful to many Americans who can in no way be associated with his specter of the underclass.

Most people who turn to the welfare system are not black, and the average stay on the rolls is for less than three years. Welfare mothers also, on a national average, do not have more children than other mothers. Will the system be abolished for them as well or just for those who fit the underclass profile? Even the current Supreme Court might have trouble with the equal-protection implications of that one.

The problem with all welfare- reform proposals, including the one now on the ballot in California, is that the stern injunctions to get a job, even a make-work job, sound all right until the fact emerges that most welfare recipients are children.

Welfare in America, as Kaus concedes, has been whittled down largely to the AFDC program. Most of the payments which he wants to take away go to children and their mothers. Maybe it’s a defensible to compel those mothers to “pick up garbage” and “sweep a floor,” but is this always the best use of their time? “The alternative,” he cautions, “is to pay her to stay home and raise children.”

But don’t welfare mothers do work, called parenting, in a difficult situation that society ought to reward? Kaus’ response is that plenty of middle-class women go to work and the children do just fine. Perhaps, but is raising a kid in a ghetto project really no more demanding than raising a kid in a safe suburb with the help of a nanny?

Kaus summarily dismisses past efforts at welfare reform that emphasized job-training and education for better jobs, such as the 1988 Moynihan legislation, which has been underfunded but has produced some successes. Moynihan’s Family Support Act attempts to move welfare mothers into the work force by requiring them to complete their education and engage in job-training programs. The idea is to prepare women for something better than dead-end jobs, and some slow progress has been recorded.

Kaus couldn’t care less about such success stories because “that won’t solve the underclass problem.” He faults the Moynihan legislation for allowing states to exempt mothers whose children are under age 3 from mandatory participation, which he points out is “half the current caseload.” And then the contemptuous line: “When the child reaches three, the mother can remain exempt by having another one.”

Just like that, pop another one out of the oven to avoid going to that damned training program. Yet, he concedes elsewhere that the evidence shows the opposite: Welfare women do not have babies to stay on welfare, let alone to get out of some classes. Could a Democratic Party increasingly responsive to women ever adopt a program based on this view of woman as cunning lower animal?

Plenty of useful and serious criticisms can be made of the welfare system, and most reform proposals aim at preparing people for work that pays enough to lift a family from poverty. For many families, particularly in this recession, welfare is what lies at the end of unemployment insurance payments, and it should certainly be offered without stigmatization. No, says Kaus, stigmatizing those people is a good thing:

“Those people who fail at work will be thrown into the world of austere public in-kind guarantees--homeless shelters, soup kitchens--and of charitable organizations. This aid will be stigmatizing (as it must be if work is to be honored).”

Kaus’ work shuns any reportage of what life is like in the ghetto; it must, or the book’s authoritative stance would collapse. But shame on those who treat this gimmickry as refreshing at a time when the bashing of welfare mothers has become a bipartisan blood sport.

Rather than setting a new agenda for the Democratic Party as its cover promised, what we are left with is the paltry manifesto of an aging Yuppie who has elevated profoundly felt personal irritation over not being able to walk safely through public parks into a nasty bit of punitive social ideology. If this is the face of the new liberalism, then thank goodness Jack Kemp is still around.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The End of Equality,” see the Opinion section, Page 2.