The Real American

“A funny thing happened on the way to the Bicentennial,” says Ben Wattenberg. “The dominant rhetoric of intellectual discourse turned gloomy—surely on the Left, often on the Right.” For years now, Wattenberg has been limning America’s prettier profile in books (The Real Majority, with Richard Scammon, and The Real America) and articles (he created a stir a few years back by arguing in Commentary that blacks have indeed made great progress). Now he is making his case on television, with the second season of his series In Search of the Real America. A demographer by training, he makes his case for America with hardnosed optimism: “The technological optimists,” he argues, “have been the realists.” He is the world’s most rigorous booster. He makes gloom seem like a superstitious sentiment.

Each installment of In Search of the Real America takes up a tenet of the Galbraithian creed and refutes it— buries it with stats, charts, graphs, film clips, interviews, and gentle humor. The first in the new series, “The Bomb That Fizzled,” pooh-poohed the population “explosion.” New York’s “ritzy Upper East Side,” Wattenberg remarks, is more thickly populated than Calcutta; we forget this because Manhattan’s well-heeled masses are distributed in skyward layers. As for the postwar baby boom, that was nothing but a slight kink on a graph that has been diving for more than a century. And the trend to slow population growth is apparently global. Is it possible? At the least, Wattenberg makes it possible to listen to the Paul Ehrlichs with a skepticism born of the understanding that there is more than one intelligent opinion on the subject. An interview—an argument, really—between Wattenberg and a ZPG leader makes it clear that it is she, not he, who speaks from deep reserves of shallowness.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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“A funny thing happened on the way to the Bicentennial,” says Ben Wattenberg. “The dominant rhetoric of intellectual discourse turned gloomy—surely on the Left, often on the Right.” For years now, Wattenberg has been limning America’s prettier profile in books (The Real Majority, with Richard Scammon, and The Real America) and articles (he created a stir a few years back by arguing in Commentary that blacks have indeed made great progress). Now he is making his case on television, with the second season of his series In Search of the Real America. A demographer by training, he makes his case for America with hardnosed optimism: “The technological optimists,” he argues, “have been the realists.” He is the world’s most rigorous booster. He makes gloom seem like a superstitious sentiment.

Each installment of In Search of the Real America takes up a tenet of the Galbraithian creed and refutes it— buries it with stats, charts, graphs, film clips, interviews, and gentle humor. The first in the new series, “The Bomb That Fizzled,” pooh-poohed the population “explosion.” New York’s “ritzy Upper East Side,” Wattenberg remarks, is more thickly populated than Calcutta; we forget this because Manhattan’s well-heeled masses are distributed in skyward layers. As for the postwar baby boom, that was nothing but a slight kink on a graph that has been diving for more than a century. And the trend to slow population growth is apparently global. Is it possible? At the least, Wattenberg makes it possible to listen to the Paul Ehrlichs with a skepticism born of the understanding that there is more than one intelligent opinion on the subject. An interview—an argument, really—between Wattenberg and a ZPG leader makes it clear that it is she, not he, who speaks from deep reserves of shallowness.