More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) [Paperback]

Hodgson bases his case on a review of history from the 1970's through the first couple of years of this century. Much of what he presents will be entirely familiar to anyone who has lived in the US during that time. Indeed, the book has a tendency to present history by anecdote, rather than analysis. Nevertheless, it contains nuggets of information which should interest any close social or political observer of the country. Where he doesn't persuade, he certainly proves himself to be a worthy debating partner. Above all, he makes us think.

Godfrey Hodgson's political concern is made transparent by both the book's title and its dust jacket, which shows two photographs: One is of a man in a suit looking at the skyline from a penthouse office; the other is of a group of people seated around a table under a freeway overpass. That neither photograph needed to be staged is unarguable. By chance, I am writing this review looking out from just such a luxury high-rise overlooking an empty lot where three men are asleep on the ground. They must remember better days, because they have lined up their pieces of cardboard against a wall like beds in a dormitory. Only feet away is one of the busiest freeways in the United States.

The question is whether Hodgson's book will play only to the liberal choir, or whether he has introduced enough new facts, or presented existing facts in a sufficiently original manner, to persuade any of those freeway drivers to stop.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. - George Orwell, Animal Farm"

All good and well, one might think, but the result is like reading a collection of special Newsweek articles. We are not learning anything new. The total is not really very deep. Although Hodgson is aware of the limits of Clinton's policies his book is not much more adventurous or radical. There is some good stuff about the blind hostility of many Americans to mass transit. Hodgson is also more interested in trade unions to be sure, and cites Nelson Licthenstein to good effect, but it would be better to read Lichtenstein than Hodgson himself. Tom Frank, whom Hodgson also mentions, would be a better critic of the cant of "free market populism." One would be better off reading Susan Faludi and Deborah Rhode on women, Stephanie Coontz and Rickie Sollinger on the family, or Mike Davis on Hispanic immigration. Raymond Garthoff would be a better guide on foreign policy in the seventies and eighties. The bibliography is anything but exhaustive. There is a whole corpus of scholarship on gender and race. Why confine oneself to the memoirs of Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem on abortion, or the thoughts of Shelby Steele and Elias Cose? A certain journalist fatuousness sets in, such as when Hodgson says the Internet "may be the most important single innovation there has ever been." (At other times Hodgson is more wary, pointing out that the effect of the internet isn't clear in some cases and its impact on productivity has been overestimated in others.) In his chapter on American politics he says that ideological differences between the two parties have never been so clear, while later he says that the political differences are actually rather slight. In fact, he confuses ideology with rhetoric, just as he earlier overestimates the liberalism of Northern Republicans before Nixon. There is a tendency in the chapter on race to discuss how people feel about it than what they actually experience. And television, films, literature, music; all of the these get only fleeting mention.

Consider, as an example, the chapter on foreign affairs. We have a brief and somewhat misleading survey of foreign policy in the seventies. The Civil war of Angola appears as an act of Soviet aggression, whereas the American conspiring with South Africa and Zaire so detailed in Piero Gleijeses' Conflicting Missions goes unmentioned. The Sandinistas are falsely said to have "abandoned their claims to be considered democrats." Samuel Huntington gets treated with too much respect. The failure of Boris Yeltsin only gets a paragraph. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets ignored, as does genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. Environmental problems and the environment in general do not appear in the Index. There are a few doubts about globalization and about the smug chauvinism of much American foreign policy. But the overall result is superficial. What could be said about this chapter can be said for all the others: one reads and realizes that it could be so much better.