As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers, my father a charter member of Missouri’s New Left, and my mother a Greenwich Village folkie by way of the bus from Jersey. And so I grew up with endless New Deal and Great Society nostalgia — could it happen again?? — and watching tons of PBS.
Some of that viewing included The McLaughlin Group and occasionally Firing Line and whichever right-of-center guests made it onto Moyers and MacNeil/Lehrer. So, while we typically presumed that most conservatives were simply too callous, greedy, and probably prejudiced to willingly pay enough taxes to end poverty and save the environment, it was undeniable that some of them were pretty smart and made a few valid points here and there.
But in the big picture, if federal government experts had solved the Depression and won World War II and even put a man on the moon, then surely that much more funding and political will and good old American know-how could lift all boats and usher in a better, more centralized social democratic society. It was all ours if only the bigots and yokels got out of the way.
That sort of hyperconfident postwar zeitgeist, and its gradual crumbling, is viscerally captured in the recent documentary Moynihan, about the iconic intellectual, senator, and New York City train hall namesake, which premiered March 29 on PBS’s American Masters.
With the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, as with that of FDR three decades earlier, had come an influx of ambitious idealists eager to apply their talents to public service. Among the most talented of them all was one Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who rose from humble circ*mstances in grody precincts of Depression-era Manhattan through various academic and political appointments to become an influential architect of the war on poverty at the White House and proved adept and nuanced enough to bounce back from his years with JFK and LBJ to a senior policy role in the Nixon administration for a spell.
Due to his frankness on delicate social matters (most famously regarding the erosion of black families) and broader willingness not only to critique his own side but to collaborate across the aisle, Moynihan managed to get lumped in among the founding fathers of neoconservatism, back when the label was associated more with domestic than foreign policy, despite many years beginning in the late ’70s as a liberal senator and reliable Democratic vote from New York.
Meanwhile, out a week later, another chockful American Masters documentary, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, chronicles an equally talented gadfly. The ultra-patrician William F. Buckley went from heckling his alma mater Yale to founding National Review to hosting Firing Line, becoming the bane of the center-left establishment’s existence as the maximally respectable/quotable grand aristocrat of the burgeoning conservative movement. Amid his “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling stop,” and staunch anticommunism, little sums up his role so much as the famous quote that he’d “rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” The first time I heard that line, I found it absurd and presumed Buckley was just a pandering crank, but after many disillusioning years studying and reporting across the Ivy League, I’ve reluctantly been persuaded that he had a point.
There’s no doubt which side I’d have been on had I been a young idealist kicking around as of the extensive grainy footage from the ’60s and ’70s these twin films present: Moynihan, the ambitious but earthy liberal social engineer with an expansive vision for national policy to lift the downtrodden out of poverty, was by no means a doctrinaire ideologue and might well have struck me as not nearly radical enough. He’d taken extensive fire from his left for many of his frank conclusions, which just made him look that much more reasonable in a lot of people’s eyes. Plus, while Moynihan was undoubtedly grandiose at times, his was an engaging and inclusive pomposity, whereas Buckley’s whole stuck-up yachting Yalie persona can rankle anybody with egalitarian sensibilities.
And yet, in the terrible fullness of time, it’s Buckley who’s been looking better and better. What Moynihan largely failed to anticipate or at least fortify against, for all of his brilliance and best intentions, is that his sort of thoughtfully multifaceted approach to policy as informed by real-life experience, and indeed his fierce organic commitment to uplifting the common citizen, would become less and less relevant as sprawling, self-interested bureaucracies and NGOs metastasized.
For all the good that’s been done over the decades by various Great Society programs (including Medicare and Medicaid) and the many millions of decent people who have benefited, year by year, the administrative apparatus grows more sclerotic, more indifferent to its supposed clients, more immune to reform, and more cynically fixated on its own funding and growth. These are classic textbook examples of institutional dysfunction, known as the dreaded “principal-agent problem” and “iron law of oligarchy,” that I heard a lot about as a policy major at Brown.
Ultimately, irreducibly, public policy is a subtle, interdisciplinary, and profoundly confounding discipline, in certain ways far more complex than wartime tactics or launching folks into orbit. The art of policy isn’t just math and logistics and public relations but grappling with exasperating paradoxes more familiar from psychology and the arts. The highly erudite Moynihan — who, as George Will quipped, wrote “more books than many of his colleagues have read” — couldn’t possibly have foreseen the collapse of progressive discourse into slogans and ad hominems and empty postmodern jargon before his death in 2003. Neither, of course, could Buckley, before his own death in 2008, have foreseen the version of the same that has played out on his own side, and he would have been at least as appalled with what’s become of much of the rightish discourse as of late.
But fundamentally, Buckley’s far lower expectations of institutions and intellectuals didn’t depend nearly so much on very competent experts making everything go to plan. Moynihan’s vision relies on a critical mass of sufficiently thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest public servants, most especially toward the top, of whom I’ve seen painfully little evidence over the years. In his prime, perhaps, giants still strode the Earth, people who thought in pages and talked in paragraphs. And maybe if we had a million Moynihans marbled all throughout government, some of that elusive Great Society promise might still be conceivable. But we only had the one. And the telos of federal bureaucracy writ large seems headed toward the proverbial self-licking ice cream cone.
So, in this day and age, the locus of struggle has moved to reclaiming, reforming, or otherwise renouncing ostensibly respectable institutions as they still go through the establishmentarian motions. Can they possibly still be cajoled into being and doing better? Perhaps tentatively day by day, with careful supervision. But I’m not holding my breath. The best we’re left with is hope, hard work, and some fascinating examples from history whose varied lives, it pleases this lifelong PBS viewer to report, are earnestly and faithfully presented in these two rich documentaries.
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Jesse Adams is the New York-based writer and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.
