Meritocrats Vs. Rockefeller Republicans

I don’t know as much about Robert McNamara as I should.  I do know he was the Lyndon Johnson adviser who was responsible for the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam.  His recent death brings David Brooks and Gail Collins, on their New York Times blog, “The Conversation,” to discuss a question the caption writer words as, “Has our ruling class gotten better or worse over the ages?”

Brooks starts off.  He compares the bureaucratic elite of the 1950s to the elite of the 1960s (McNamara’s time), and presents McNamara’s failings as of a piece with what he as a conservative considers the decline of America generally over those two decades.  He presents a narrative in which the “wise men” of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were great men, innovators, responsible for creating the institutions that made the America of the second half of the twentieth century what it was.  The corresponding “best and brightest” of the succeeding decade, however, were entirely different.  In their hands, everything fell apart.

In case you were wondering why, Brooks offers up a handful of possibilities: the kind of education they were given, their belief that they were in possession of scientific knowledge that could tell them exactly how to govern, their belief in their own competence, and their belief that they could improve conditions for other people at home and around the world.  Basically, they were Democrats.  The men of the 1950s, on the other hand, were wealthy industrialists (and the sons of industrialists), plutocrats with Wall Street values who believed their wealth and opportunities gave them the responsibility and the competence to participate in government.  In other words, Republicans (though probably Rockefeller Republicans, as they’d later be called, not necessarily conservatives).

Undeniably, something happened sometime between 1958 and 1974.  The difference between the bureaucrats of the immediate post-war period and those of the Vietnam era makes a nice example.  But the question remains what the causes of the difference really were.

With the data Brooks relays to us, it seems that the only way of explaining the change is by the subsequent generation’s being inexplicably dumber than its predecessor had been (not its parents: the only subsequent political Harrimans that Wikipedia lists exist in science fiction).  Or we might invent some theory of inevitable decline—where the men of the 1950s were indeed better than those of any other period in recent memory, but where the law of reversion to the mean shows that all good things must come to an end, and that they correspondingly did.  What seems certain is that, for Brooks, many other possibilities, though imaginable, are not likely.  The men of the 1950s did not leave weak or fragile institutions to their successors.  The men of the 1950s did not leave nearly insuperable problems, of their own creation, to those of the 1960s.  The men of the 1960s did not do the best they could under bad circumstances, and certainly did not lay the groundwork for improvement in the next two or three decades.  (Any of these possibilities would cast in doubt Brooks’ assertion that the 1960s were a sad falling off from a high place.)  No: what you see is what you get.

What you see is what you get.  Americans were generally happy in the 1950s, and the presidents of the 1950s were Republicans.  Americans were increasingly unhappy in the 1960s, and the presidents of that decade were Democrats.  In the 1950s there wasn’t yet much in the way of the social sciences, and bureaucrats could be only generally educated yet govern with little outside criticism.  In the 1960s many people felt a lot more was known, and at the same time problems were being identified with increasing frequency.  Conservatives like David Brooks are asking you to do the math.  He thinks you’ll be forced to draw the right conclusion.

Comments

[LFC]

There is more continuity, I would say, between the governing elites of the 50s and 60s than David Brooks seems to believe (based on your summary of what he says). McNamara, after all, came from the world of business, if not from that of inherited wealth. Dean Rusk was a Rhodes scholar, IIRC -- you presumably can't get much more generally, liberally educated than that. (Walt Rostow, for that matter, was also a Rhodes scholar.) McGeorge Bundy came, IIRC, from a privileged milieu not unlike that of his predecessors in high posts. The Brooks thesis that broad-minded plutocrats were replaced by narrow-minded technocrats is, charitably put, an overreading of the evidence. Uncharitably put, it's BS.
Incidentally, McNamara was not single-handedly responsible for the escalation decisions of 1965; it was a group thing, though McNamara and Bundy were among the prime movers. (McNamara also soured on the bombing and the war earlier than some others in the administration, though he didn't resign until '68.)

[bianca steele]

Hi LFC,
Thanks for the additional info (and I was surprised to see I had a comment!). Most of the reading I've done about the period has concerned the ideas that were in circulation then, not so much specific government bureaucrats, so I don't know much about the individuals involved.

To the extent that I think Brooks actually has a thesis (rather than incrementally synthesizing bits he gets from scholars as they e-mail them to him), I'd guess he means to contrast, not liberal and technical education, but men who come from "the people" (Republicans not having as much trouble as you might think seeing plutocrats as populists) and men who were formed by universities.

More importantly, Brooks relies on the idea most Republicans and a large proportion of independents have that the problems they are opposed to are a product of developments in the 1960s and of welfare-state type thinking, thus he needs to believe the government bureaucracy developed in the 1960s, and not in the 1950s among the people he would really prefer to be in power. His politics is really very simple: X, Y, and Z development occurred in the 1960s, problems originate in developments of the 1960s, solution must be to fight against X, Y, and Z.

[LFC]

"his politics is really very simple..."
I agree.