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Who's to Blame?

By Msgr. George Higgins

May 29, 1998

    My friend Father Richard John Neuhaus, a prolific journalist and author, takes me to task in a recent issue of his monthly magazine, First Things, a serious intellectual journal which I always read cover to cover.
    After a ritualistic word of "admiration" for my "formidable energy over these many years," Father Neuhaus finds it regrettable that in recent years I seem unable to get through a column without attacking those awful neo-conservatives. That's rhetorical overkill on his part. I plead guilty, of course, to having disagreed with the neo-conservatives now and then.
    Father Neuhaus specifically disagrees with one recent column in which I said that neo-conservatives refuse to put any blame for American cultural decadence on democratic capitalism as such, preferring to blame what they call the "new class" of liberal intellectuals.
    Father Neuhaus responds that he and other prominent neo- conservatives have written repeatedly about corporate America's domination by the "new class" and the exploitation of the pseudo- rebellion of the counterculture to make big bucks. But where, he asks, does Msgr. Higgins suppose bankers et al get their ideas? Leftist intellectuals, he says, shape the fashions, including that of being anti-business, which corporate leadership then co-opts. 
    Father Neuhaus concludes that he nearly despairs of changing my mind on this issue. I assume, then, that he despairs of changing the minds of other more important writers on the topic.
    Two scholars come to mind immediately: Father Gary Dorrien, an Episcopalian priest, and Jesuit Father John Langan of Georgetown University. I could quote extensively from two of Father Dorrien's recent books, "The Neo-Conservative Mind" and "Soul in Society," but one brief quotation suffices for present purposes. 
    Neo-conservatives, Dorrien says, rarely find anything wrong with American society that cannot be blamed on the hypocrisy or subversion of the putative new class.
    However, he continues, they give a free ride to commercial interests that relentlessly manipulate baser human instincts; while condemning the so-called "new class," they ignore "the far more influential and subversive impact that commercial society makes by turning labor and nature into commodities."
    Father Langan, reviewing Michael Novak's writings on this, points out that the institutions of the moral-cultural system are themselves economic entities; indeed, in some cases they are large, profitable economic entities. It will not do, he argues, for neo- conservatives to direct all their fire at "new class" intellectuals. Why, he asks, are they reluctant to direct at least some fire at the capitalist system?
    He notes Novak's position that "the fundamental reason behind the capacity for self-reform in democratic capitalism lies in the independence of its moral-cultural order and its political order alike."
    Father Langan cogently concludes that one need not be a Marxist reductionist to seriously doubt the extent to which the political order and moral-cultural order are effectively independent of the economic order in the contemporary United States.
    While I despair of convincing Father Neuhaus on the point Father Dorrien and Father Langan make, I promise him I will say no more about it in this column for the indefinite future. However, I will have much more to say about my major complaint against the neo-concervatives: that they have been deafeningly silent on labor issues, a silence broken in recent months only by a terrible book, "Epitaph for American Labor," which rejoices at the alleged demise of the American labor movement and argues that, given democratic capitalism's success, unions have completely outlived  their usefulness.
    I find it rather scary that this superficial book was published by the flagship neo-conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and with extravagant blurbs by prominent neo-conservatives, including Irving Kristol, often referred to as the neo-conservative movement's godfather.
    To my knowledge, no neo-conservative journal (and I read them all religiously) has said a word in criticism of this book. I can only wonder why.