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311 Don’t Think, Smile! High on my list of petty urban irritations are those signs posted by smug possessors of driveways: “Don’t Even Think about Parking Here.” I fantasize about plastering their premises with superglued bumper stickers that say “Down with the Thought Police” or “Don’t Even Think about Telling Me What to Think.” It occurs to me, though, that the signs are an apt metaphor for the one-way conversation carried on by driveway guards who call themselves journalists: “Don’t even think about questioning the need to balance the federal budget.” “Don’t even think about workers getting a fair share of the wealth they produce .” “Don’t even think about the problems with the institution of marriage that punishing unmarried mothers won’t solve.” Commentators are always inviting me to accept as a foregone conclusion conservative dogma on some issue I had foolishly imagined was debatable. Consider the Wall Street Journal’s obituary of Barry Goldwater, which assures the reader, “Today even liberal Democrats agree that some part of Social Security should be privatized.” Or the Manhattan Institute’s James Pinkerton, opining in Newsday about the high rate “among some groups” of unmarried childbearing , “leading, everyone now agrees, to the chaos and crime of the urban underclass.” Or the New York Times’s classic “News Analysis” of the 1996 budget battle: the president, the reporter remarked, was disinclined to move because “he now can make the argument that Democrats . . . are the defenders of education and the elderly while all the Republicans care about is tax cuts. It is a flawed argument, especially on Medicare, for Mr. Clinton knows as well as the Republicans do that spending on such entitlements must be curbed eventually.” Not “Mr. Clinton believes,” which is undoubtedly true, but “Mr. Clinton knows.” Selections from “Decade of Denial” 312 THE NINETIES Don’t even think about the government raising revenue for social spending by restoring the progressive income tax, or making steep cuts in the post–cold war military budget. If you’re the kind of crank who has to have irrational doubts about what everybody knows, go join the Flat Earth Society. For the past few years, everybody has known that we are enjoying a terrific economy, with out-of-sight stock and real estate prices, jobs going begging, even the wages of bottom-tier jobs beginning to creep up. Never mind that the statistics don’t measure involuntary part-time and temporary employment, or the steady flow of people (especially people over fifty) out of jobs with good pay and benefits to those offering neither, or the conversion of real jobs to sub–minimum wage “workfare” slots; that a minority has garnered most of the wealth, while real estate inflation has displaced all but the rich and the subsidized from boom towns like Manhattan; that the current growth rate depends on an unstable mountain of debt. Meanwhile, much of the world economy is in crisis. Sooner or later, Roadrunner will figure out that he’s treading air, and Americans will rediscover their enduring reality: growing economic insecurity, a long-term decline in real wages, and fewer social benefits and public services. No doubt the gatekeepers of our collective wisdom will revert to their usual strategy of convincing people there’s nothing much to be done about these miseries other than blaming themselves for not striking it rich as everyone else seems to have done, or blowing off steam at corrupt politicians, the undeserving poor, the immoral cultural elite, the unqualified blacks who are supposedly getting all the good jobs, and so on. But there’s a problem looming: call it the euphoria gap. If you can’t get with the most marvelous expansion since the ’60s, you’re a sorehead. But when the bubble sags, your discontent will once again be worrisome to what might be called the “conservative center”—that is, the financial and corporate establishment , the “new Democrats,” those Republicans whose antiliberal zeal stops somewhere short of radical right-wing anarchism or militant Christianity, and their countless flacks in the think tanks and mass media. For the CC, it’s not enough that Americans “know” they have no choice but to accept a declining standard of living; it’s essential that they accept this adversity with good grace. The ultra-right traffics in anger, which it hopes to enlist in behalf of its vision of counterrevolutionary change. But the CC wants to...

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