The dream of deliverance in American politics.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

The Dream of Deliverance in American Politics.

The Dream of Deliverance in American Politics. Mona Harrington. Knopf, $19.95. One of the left's great failings in the eighties has been an inability to explain convincingly why Ronald Reagan is so popular--at this point, the most popular second-term president in the history of polling. The official line is that he's "personally popular' because he's so good on television but most people disagree with his policies. Surely, though, there's more to it than that; we're not a nation of idiots.

Mona Harrington's book is a serious, careful, intellectually honest attempt at a comprehensive theory about why, now and forever, left politics have never caught on in this country. She argues that Americans have always held so dear the idea that there are no irreconcilable conflicts here (especially economic ones) that when such conflicts make themselves evident, we find a mythic scapegoat instead. The conflicts are resolved, but by brute strength, and in a way that's terribly injurious to the losers--all because we can't talk about them openly. The New Deal was a popular success because it identified a villain-- corporate power. Reagan has a clear villain too, big government at home and communism abroad, and that's why he is so popular. The war in Vietnam is an example of the flaw in our approach: we believed that if we could only get the crooks and the com-symps out of the South Vietnamese government, our side would prevail. We over and over convince ourselves that installing some simple, fair process will exorcise the demon and return the country to its natural, conflict-free, everybody-wins condition.

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