Mortal splendor, the American empire in transition.

• Author: Mosettig, Michael D.

Mortal Splendor, The American Empire in Transition.

WalterRussell Mead. Houghton Mifflin, $18.95. More important than the contents of this maddeningly uneven book is its publication now--as another liberal effort to prepare an intellectual and political agenda for the post-Reagan years. Once again, a liberal book is talking of limits, openings to the Third World, and the inability of the U.S. economy to spread its wealth adequately among all its citizens. These were common themes of the late seventies that suddenly sound topical again at a time of collapsing currencies, mounting debts and interest rates, and high comedy disguised as national security policy.

Mortal Splendor does not pretendto be a work of original scholarship; rather it is part polemic and part prescription.

In an effort to score rhetoricalpoints, Mead is given to excesses and plain sloppiness. That Britain, France, and Germany "progressed simultaneously' to democracy would come as a surprise to most Europeans. And to assert that Stalin, Hitler, and Roosevelt were equally preoccupied with the need for their governments "to establish and maintain an intimate link with even the humblest of the nation's citizens' boggles the mind.

Fortunately, Mortal Splendor istwo books. Mead's prescriptive analysis, while inevitably controversial, at least offers some thoughts for Democratic liberals before they begin assigning themselves downtown office space for 1989. His analysis certainly highlights the question of whether the gulf between neoliberals and institutions such as labor can be bridged. He criticizes institutional prescriptions such as protectionism but is more critical of the neoliberals for failing to understand the threat of Third World low-wage competition. He offers...