Books in Brief
The Democratic Century by Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason M. Lakin (University of Oklahoma Press, 478 pp., $34.95). Over the past half century, the political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has produced a prodigious body of work--both authoritative and highly readable--on a mind-boggling array of subjects, from Canadian socialism to American exceptionalism, from the internal politics of universities and trade unions to the history of extremist movements in the United States. Now the University of Oklahoma Press has published an expanded version of three lectures Lipset delivered in the mid-1990s that synthesize many of the themes with which he has dealt during his career.
Among Lipset's accomplishments is the success he had as a mentor to several generations of scholars. This volume owes its appearance to the faithful work of a student, Jason Lakin, who completed the text following a debilitating stroke that Lipset suffered in 2001.
The book is divided into two sections. The first returns to the comparative political analysis Lipset first developed in the 1950s and brought together in his seminal volumes Political Man and The First New Nation. The analysis has even more resonance today in light of the "third wave" of democracy that began over a decade after The First New Nation was published. In this first section, Lipset examines the ways in which democratic countries differ from nondemocratic ones: how institutions that constitute democracy interact with one another, how political parties develop in new democracies, why the quality of civil societies matters more than the mere existence of civic associations, the centrality of legitimacy to the success of democratic regimes, and the relation between democracy and capitalism.
Lipset has long been interested in the linkage between cultural factors and the quality of democracy. The Democratic Century demonstrates that cultures incompatible with democratic values--such as tolerance of political opposition and acceptance of a secular sphere--must find a way to incorporate those principles if they are to democratize. Still, the book concludes, "in the long run, most cultures appear to have the potential to converge with democratic culture."
The second part of The Democratic Century applies Lipset's analytical framework to Latin America, following his pathbreaking comparative analysis of the United States and Canada, which showed how two countries on the same continent could have such different social and political systems. The strong emphasis is upon historical factors, including not only the differing patterns of colonization and struggles for independence but also on the values and institutions that characterized the colonizing countries. In contrast to Britain's relatively laissez-faire approach to its colonies, Spain created tight regulations that promoted unequal distribution of property and a legacy of statist economic control. Such historical factors interact with cultural, structural, and institutional ones to explain why (with a few exceptions: Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay) the countries of the region have experienced repeated cycles of democratization and breakdown.
Is The Democratic Century optimistic about the world's prospects for democracy? On the one hand, a global consensus has developed around the need for market-oriented strategies. On the other, the steady growth of civil society has not been matched by strong and durable political parties. Cultural factors also present a mixed picture. Still, we can all be grateful to Lipset and Lakin for improving our understanding of the challenges that lie ahead.
--David Lowe
The Long Goodbye by Patti Davis (Knopf, 199 pp., $20). When Patti Davis was a teenager, she danced on her father's feet at a debutante ball. "I didn't know how to waltz," she writes, and so her father, Ronald Reagan, told her to stand on his feet. "It felt like floating," Davis wistfully recalls. "My father was tall and strong, and he glided around the floor with me balanced on his feet as if I weighed no more than a pair of laces."
But in the summer of 1996, Davis would be the one to take her father--then suffering from Alzheimer's--by the hand. The Long Goodbye is a compilation of heartfelt journal entries from April 1995 to June 5, 2004, the day she witnessed her father succumb. Davis's relations with her famous parents weren't always happy. She railed against the Vietnam war and, later, against her father's policies as president. Then, at age forty-two, Davis made peace with her family. "I used to be so angry . . . and I didn't even know why half the time. I missed so much, let so many days roll by, not realizing how fast they were going, and now they've come back to ache inside me."
For Davis, it's the little things that make a father great in his children's eyes. Whether he was teaching her to bodysurf or ride a horse, or helping her with a science project, Reagan always had a life lesson to impart to his youngest daughter.
--Erin Montgomery
Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (And the Rest of Us) by Mona Charen (Sentinel, 288 pp., $25.95). Just as President Bush has vowed to rid the world of evildoers, Mona Charen is ready to take on the do-gooders. Following up on her bestselling Useful Idiots, Charen seeks to debunk liberal discourse and unearth the facts that never make the New York Times. To carry out this task, she becomes a genealogist of how liberal discourse emerged in "the Great Disruption of the 1960s" and now distorts our thinking and public policies.
For Charen, the "do-gooder Don Quixotes" inaugurated a "compassion binge" and "comfortable morality play" in which society, an empty abstraction, is always blamed and individuals are always exonerated. If only people could be freed from the chains of society, peace and goodwill would reign. Or so they claim.
Of course, this utopian vision hasn't turned out so peachy; nearly everyone liberals reached out to help is now worse off. Charen rightly asks what is behind the liberal project. Far from compassion, it seems a "paternalistic nihilism," a term Cornel West coined to name the outlook of the liberal elite who "become ineffectual by having bought into the corruptions of a power-hungry system." Real compassion encourages responsibility, as conservatives insist.
The strength of Charen's Do-Gooders is also its limitation. The book amasses empirical evidence to buttress the author's genealogy of liberal discourse. But facts need interpretive adornment. Charen's "chronicle of failure" invites in addition a robust argument about human nature and politics.
--Christopher Benson
A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People by Steven Ozment (HarperCollins, 416 pp., $26.95). German history, the whole enchilada, in four hundred pages, from an obscure tribe called the Cimbri in 113 b.c. to Gerhard Schröder, the Iraq war, and Berlin's attempt to reform the German welfare state.
Steven Ozment, a professor of ancient and modern history at Harvard University, does not write like a professor. Ozment is actually a pleasure to read. But brace yourself. This is a dizzyingly fast excursion at times. Nietzsche gets a page and a half; Goethe three. You are in and out of Weimar in a heartbeat.
Moreover, Ozment's approach to his subject will not be to everyone's liking. The author concedes at the outset of the book that he is not a fan of the "gloomy moralizing" school of World War II historians, who generally sought to "muckrake and accuse." Ozment follows instead the path of the late German historian Thomas Nipperdey, who believed that history ought to be written from past to present, not the other way around.
In other words, Ozment does not find it very productive to treat history as a hunting ground for clues that help us explain the barbarism of Germans during the Nazi years. Likewise, Ozment is not at all taken by the idea, as he puts it, that the history of modern Germany is to be seen as "a progressive genetic disease."
Fair enough. And Ozment is not out to whitewash German history either. He admits the anti-Semitism of Martin Luther and Otto von Bismarck. He writes of how Nazi propaganda captured the imagination not only of beerhalls but also of boardrooms and universities. He concedes readily that the plotters who tried to kill Hitler in 1944 were hardly liberal democrats.
The full history of the Germans is remarkable and rich. Try to imagine the development of music these last centuries without Bach, Händel, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner, and Schönberg. It must be truly a curse to be German and know that your entire history is often reduced to the Holocaust. It is also surely a good thing that Ozment brings passion and genuine affection to his subject.
Nevertheless, you have to wonder about some of Ozment's conclusions. A successful, problem-solving Weimar Republic, he writes, would have "mesmerized far more Germans than all the ranting speeches of Hitler." Maybe. Schröder's refusal to rubber-stamp American foreign policy in Iraq was a "proper action for a normal nation." This is not the spin I would have given. Ozment praises novelist Günter Grass as an idealist. I always thought of Grass as a cultural pessimist and cranky cynic who dislikes American power and hates the idea of fellow Germans' choosing unification.
In a concluding passage Ozment gives postwar Germans a thumbs-up for "refusing on moral grounds to let [Germany] become a riven land of haves and have-nots like the United States." It is good to know that some things at Harvard never change.
--Jeffrey Gedmin