pears doubly arbitrary: not only is the weight of empirical evidence against it, but the argument from abstract rights fails her too.

Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (1987), makes a similarly unconvincing and halfhearted case for desegregation. Gutmann believes that desegregation is the only means of reducing "racial prejudice among whites," but the most generous reading of her own evidence leads to the conclusion that integrated schools reduce prejudice only under optimal conditions and only when every other goal has been systematically subordinated to this one. These conditions are precisely the ones most destructive of local control, which Gutmann rightly considers one of the most important prerequisites of participatory democracy. How to reconcile integration and local control, she concedes, is an unresolved dilemma—the "greatest dilemma of democratic education in our time." But that does not prevent her from advocating a more aggressive program of desegregation. In effect, she chooses liberalism over democracy, while clinging to the hope that it is unnecessary to make such a choice.

When democratic liberalism carries so little conviction, those who once supported liberal policies begin to look to the right for clarity and direction. Legalism is a poor substitute for moral passion and a sense of purpose. As Fred Siegel has shown, liberals' growing inclination to give every question a legalistic answer has contributed to the right-wing reaction against liberalism; see his book Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (1984) and his penetrating articles on the 1968 campaign, "Campaign across Cultural Divides," Commonweal 115 (II March 1988): 137-41; "Competing Elites," Commonweal 115 (7 Oct. 1988): 523-25; and "What Liberals Haven't Learned and Why," Commonweal 116 (13 Jan. 1989): 16-20. Liberalism has been further weakened by its increasingly explicit identification with elitism. "Elitism," Hochschild writes in defense of court-ordered busing, " ... is perfectly compatible with liberal democracy," which "has always relied on elites to save it from itself." Such opinions have the effect of driving people away from liberalism and of making it possible for the right to claim the populist tradition as its own. The best analysis of right-wing populism is Kevin Phillips, Post-Conservative America (1982). See also his earlier book, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969); Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1971); William A. Rusher, The Making of the New Majority Party (1975); Richard A. Vigueri, The New Right: We're Ready to Lead (1981) and "A Populist and Proud of It," National Review, I9 Oct. 1984, 42-44; Samuel S. Hill and Dennis E. Owen, The New Religious and Political Right in America (1982); Robert W. Whitaker, ed., The New Right Papers (1982); and John Kenneth White, The New Politics of Old Values (1988). John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1988), sheds light on the tense relationship between the populism of the new right and Buckley's patrician conservatism. Donald T. Regan's memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (1988), show how little the moral program of the new right influenced the policy of the Reagan administration.

William Schneider, "JFK's Children: The Class of '74," Atlantic, March 1989,

-567-