Books, Arts & Manners: Goodbye, America

The End of the American Era By Andrew Hacker

Atheneum, 239 pp., $6.50 If Andrew Hacker doesn’t have his money in Swiss bank accounts, he should. His vision of the United States today is so morose (“America’s history as a nation has reached its end”) that one wonders why he waited around for his book to appear. Not that some of Mr. Hacker’s insights aren’t intriguing. On liberals, for instance, he writes of their “mission to locate those victims of oppression scheduled for a rendezvous with history. Indeed, an implicit assumption of liberalism has been that every society possesses a class whose hour in history is about to arrive.” He then shows how liberals die a thousand deaths for any Negro—at a distance—but don’t give two hoots about, say, impoverished white Americans. “Liberal sentiments have always been selective, choosing their objects of compassion with a careful eye for the tenor of the times. Racial minorities will occupy this special position only so long as they qualify as society’s downtrodden classes.” And he goes on, occasionally popping his shiv into conservatives, who “explicitly admit the need for repression,” but generally getting his jollies by doing in his own. The thing about much of the material on liberals is that it’s been done before, in Up From Liberalism.

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David Brudnoy

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The End of the American Era By Andrew Hacker

Atheneum, 239 pp., $6.50 If Andrew Hacker doesn’t have his money in Swiss bank accounts, he should. His vision of the United States today is so morose (“America’s history as a nation has reached its end”) that one wonders why he waited around for his book to appear. Not that some of Mr. Hacker’s insights aren’t intriguing. On liberals, for instance, he writes of their “mission to locate those victims of oppression scheduled for a rendezvous with history. Indeed, an implicit assumption of liberalism has been that every society possesses a class whose hour in history is about to arrive.” He then shows how liberals die a thousand deaths for any Negro—at a distance—but don’t give two hoots about, say, impoverished white Americans. “Liberal sentiments have always been selective, choosing their objects of compassion with a careful eye for the tenor of the times. Racial minorities will occupy this special position only so long as they qualify as society’s downtrodden classes.” And he goes on, occasionally popping his shiv into conservatives, who “explicitly admit the need for repression,” but generally getting his jollies by doing in his own. The thing about much of the material on liberals is that it’s been done before, in Up From Liberalism.