Books, Arts & Manners: Paradigm Lost

What Comes Next: The End of Big Government—And the New Paradigm Ahead, by James P. Pinkerton (Hyperion, 404 pp., $24.95)

IN THIS puzzling book the author ponders America’s problems and concludes in effect that progressive Republicans—people like Gingrich, Bennett, and Kemp—are right about most of them. You’d expect that the title would be Proud to Be GOP and that the book would run maybe a hundred pages, because most of James Pinkerton’s proposals are excellent but familiar: privatization, much smaller bureaucracy, school vouchers, medical savings accounts, radical tax reform. So how come the book is four hundred pages, the title says something about a “new paradigm,” and the author, who worked in the Reagan and Bush Administrations, wants us to believe that Republicans and Democrats are equally out to lunch? On social issues he is, granted, closer to Republicans like Weld, Wilson, and Whitman than to Bennett, but so what? There is little here that some prominent Republican wouldn’t cheerfully endorse. Why Pinkerton’s paradigm is “new” and not “Republican” is a mystery that deepens as you read.

DG

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David Gelernter

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What Comes Next: The End of Big Government—And the New Paradigm Ahead, by James P. Pinkerton (Hyperion, 404 pp., $24.95)

IN THIS puzzling book the author ponders America’s problems and concludes in effect that progressive Republicans—people like Gingrich, Bennett, and Kemp—are right about most of them. You’d expect that the title would be Proud to Be GOP and that the book would run maybe a hundred pages, because most of James Pinkerton’s proposals are excellent but familiar: privatization, much smaller bureaucracy, school vouchers, medical savings accounts, radical tax reform. So how come the book is four hundred pages, the title says something about a “new paradigm,” and the author, who worked in the Reagan and Bush Administrations, wants us to believe that Republicans and Democrats are equally out to lunch? On social issues he is, granted, closer to Republicans like Weld, Wilson, and Whitman than to Bennett, but so what? There is little here that some prominent Republican wouldn’t cheerfully endorse. Why Pinkerton’s paradigm is “new” and not “Republican” is a mystery that deepens as you read.