Bill Clinton's last days in office were an unintended gift to George W. Bush. The outgoing President made it so much easier for the new President to establish his moral authority, despite the controversy surrounding his election. In a final spasm of the reckless self-indulgence that blighted his presidency, Clinton made off with White House furniture and china, and granted outrageous pardons to lawbreakers under the most questionable of circumstances.
Even Mr Clinton's mates were appalled. Last Sunday the New York Times, a bastion of left-liberal thinking, editorialised about the "national need to come to grips with the wreckage, both civic and legal, left by former President Clinton". These were exactly the sentiments that Clinton's opponents had been expressing for years, to the scorn of the liberal elites.
Clinton is a child of the 1960s, and he embodies the excesses of that turbulent decade. His neglect of propriety and restraint, and his indifference to the consequences of his actions brought him undone; as they did to many other baby-boomers who also thought they could extend their adolescence into middle age.
Of course, George W. Bush is a baby-boomer too. And in the past, he also led a dissolute life, although he reformed himself before taking public office.
But the new President's take on the cultural revolution of the sixties is quite different to that of his predecessor. One of the most important influences on his philosophy of "compassionate conservatism" is a book by social critic Myron Magnet, called The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass, which Bush read soon after it was published in 1993.
Magnet pointed out that the cultural revolution of the 1960s was essentially a creation of the privileged and educated -- the "haves" as he called them -- who hoped to achieve two related kinds of liberation.
The first was the honourable goal of political liberation for the "have nots", the poor and the black. It was guided by worthy democratic ideals, the realisation that poverty and racial discrimination still disfigured American society, which would have to become more open and inclusive.
The second was a personal liberation. The "haves" wanted to free themselves from what they saw as the shackles of middle-class values relating to the family, work, and the gratification of desire. To them, mainstream American culture was repressive, hypocritical and destructive, underpinning an unjust society which oppressed its own citizens and those of the Third World.
These notions did not remain confined to the counterculture, but spread into the mainstream, particularly as the young radicals grew up and took positions in the universities, the media, and other opinion forming institutions.
Magnet argued that the union of political and personal liberations had a terrible effect, especially on those it was most supposed to help. Instead of empowering the "have nots", it played a major part in creating a large urban underclass.
By constantly emphasising that the poor were victims, the "haves" made it ever less likely that the disadvantaged would take responsibility for improving their own lives. The remade culture of the "haves" denigrated the very values that would assist the "have nots" economically and socially -- the "bourgeois virtues" of deferred gratification, hard work, sobriety, and the like.
Furthermore, the new culture permitted -- and even encouraged -- behaviour that "when poor people practice it, will imprison them inextricably in poverty". Scions of the upper middle class could experiment with alternative life styles or dabble in delinquency, confident that when it all ended in tears, a network of family and friends would pull them back up. Yet when ghetto girls in their early teens got pregnant, or got hooked on crack cocaine, there would be no such help.
Magnet gave a delicious twist to the bleating refrain "it is all our fault". "Yes it is", he was saying, "but not in the way you pretend". The devastation was largely caused by "elite, mainstream culture, which underwent a series of convulsions that left it communicating to the poor exactly the wrong message and the most self-destructive values".
But because their commitment to social justice gives them their sense of self-worth and moral superiority, the left-liberal "haves" refuse to acknowledge the wreckage that has resulted from their failed programs for liberation. To them, Magnet's account is anathema.
So while Bush's endorsement of the role of The Dream and the Nightmare in crystallising his own thinking has brought the book to a much wider audience, it has also brought opprobrium from the "progressives". As one commentator put it, Magnet is a "cultural hawk" and an "atavistic adviser" who harked back to a "bygone Victorian age", when "the poor knew their place".
Neither Magnet's analysis nor Bush's interpretation of it can be portrayed as a plan by economic rationalists to strip the state down to bare essentials, absolving it from all obligations to the poor and the marginalised. They are not Thatcherites, claiming that "there is no such thing as society".
Bush acknowledges that government "has great responsibilities for public safety and public health, for civil rights and common schools". But these responsibilities mean directing assistance so as to encourage people to take charge of their own lives, and facilitating a sense of civic participation in the nation as a whole.
As he made clear in his inauguration speech, Mr Bush will use the prestige of a revitalised presidency to stress four virtues -- "civility, courage, compassion and character". A bracing antidote to the greed and sleaze of the Clinton years.
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