The Hidden Crisis in American Politics, by Samuel Lubell (Norton, 306 pp., $5.95). Mr. Lubell’s book contains valuable insights both into current American political trends and into the social phenomena which underlie them. He has achieved these insights through a deep analytical understanding of American political and social processes—which is, unfortunately, not matched by a comparable understanding of the roots of the crisis concerning which he writes. Consequently, he gives the reader a brilliant analysis of the overloading of our political system in the Kennedy-Johnson years, but blames the disaster on bad planning, not on the inherent inability of government to handle the competing pressures of the “claimant society” brought into being by its liberal policies. Mr. Lubell refuses to accept the fact that the “new politics of impatience” he describes so well is a consequence not of the mismanagement of, but of the existence of, the welfare state. On the other hand, I believe he may well have crucial insights when he identifies the breakup of the New Deal coalition as the (proximate) cause of the present crisis and when he asserts that the formation of a new governing coalition is necessary to end this crisis. His ideological beliefs, however, appear to blind him to the logical conclusion that any new coalition, and hence any new President seeking to form such a coalition, cannot refurbish, but must discard the basic liberal ethos, because it is the national rejection of this ethos, both on the intellectual and on the instinctive level, that is the cause of the death of the old coalition.
J. C. MEYER
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