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The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass

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I read the original edition of this book and it is still the most important social commentary I've ever read. For those who have ever asked, "Why is the world the way it is today?", this book will explain it.

Magnet traces all of our current social problems- from crime to drug addiction, broken families to pregnant teenagers to school violence - to the liberal social experimentation of the Sixties and early Seventies, using pure a priori logic, not demagoguery.

Additionally he shows how those once radical ideas have become our mainstream, unquestioned assumptions, the very Establishment itself; conservatives are now the radicals shaking up the system.

Enormously enlightening for anyone who really wants to understand our current social predicaments.

THE DREAM AND THE NIGHTMARE is an exceptionally important book. President George W. Bush specifically referred to it as one of the most influential books he has read and made it the cornerstone of his compassionate conservativism. In the book, Myron Magnet of the Manhattan Institute attempts to answer one of the true riddles of our time: In a society of such opportunity, why is there an underclass that seems totally entrenched in failure and that seems incapable of finding its way into the respectable mainstream of American life?

For those in the middle class, this really is a puzzle. The answers seem so obvious. Get a job; gain work experience in order to climb the ladder; do not expect something for nothing; be selective about who you have sex with and use those precautions necessary to minimize unwanted pregnancies; when you do have kids, read to them and oversee their upbringing so that they can properly interact with others; and if you do take drugs, well, just make it the occasional joint, don't get all crazy there. The answer Magnet reaches has less to do with policy and more to do with philosophy. THE DREAM AND THE NIGHTMARE is a manifesto to the concept that ideas have consequences.

Magnet points to the significant paradigm shift of the 1960s, in which many elites thought it was progressive, even compassionate, to denigrate traditional notions of morality and the American way of life. Shifting the concept from personal responsibility among the poor to the idea that the poor are victims of society entitled to handouts, racial separation among blacks, sexual liberation, permissiveness regarding drug use, and other attitudes that demonstrated an oppositional mindset to the traditional notions of how to get ahead filtered down from the upper classes who espoused them to the lower classes who adopted them.

The results have been disastrous. As Magnet points out, many members of the upper class knew that there was a limit to how far they could go before jeopardizing themselves. And even for those who did go over the edge, there was usually some safety net among one's family and social structure that softened the blow. Yet when these same ideas were adopted by those at the lower end of the ladder, without the socialization which might have provided an internal barrier to holding back before the edge and without the external social structure to soften the landing, the results were something else indeed. The destruction of the two-parent family, rampant drug use and its attendant violence, laziness and a 'I deserve something to be handed to me' attitude have combined to stop the advance of a large section of our society in its tracks.

Magnet's theory explains not only how the underclass was created but also why so many factors of urban life seemed to erode at the same time. Specific policies may have an effect on this or that issue. But significant changes in a people's philosophy, the zeitgeist in which they live and breathe, will have a far wider impact. That is what we now see and it is a deeply disturbing sight for those of us who are witness to the results.

Unfortunately, the biggest impediment to change is also philosophical. It is all but impossible for someone to even discuss these issues without those on the political Left howling about racism, blaming the victim, blah, blah, blah. And the underclass itself is now so violent and disfunctional that it is nothing short of flat-out dangerous to address its members directly. Even then, the members of the underclass are so enveloped in their thinking that it is like talking to a brick wall. It is so bad that telling it straight is simply interpreted as racism or naivity about what life on the street is really like. The underclass displays that most damaging of traits - an imperviousness to negative yet accurate feedback. The road ahead looks dark indeed.

History and political science blend in this survey of the 1960s' legacy to modern times. Here Magnet argues that the radical events of the 1960s brought today's underclass and minorities into existence, producing changes in marriage and parenting which often led to dependency and closed doors for the underclass. An eye-opening treatise, The Dream and the Nightmare advocates a return to values honoring work, responsibility and law to help lift the barriers of poverty.

Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare is brilliant because it not only gives the statistics and endless accounts of what has gone wrong since the start of the United States' mid-20th century cultural revolution, but it also explains WHY those areas deteriorated (some have improved, obviously) and how they can be reversed. Along with Marvin Olasky, Myron Magnet is considered a foundational author of the compassionate conservatism philosophy that President Bush campaigned upon during the 2000 presidential election. This is Magnet's manifesto for that philosophy.

In this book Mr. Magnet traces the roots of the radical shift that the privileged classes, the "Haves" as he labels them, enacted upon the culture of America and the entire Western world. He documents how in the middle 1900s these intellectuals, with a worldview based in Marxism and Freudianism, used America's universities and judiciaries to take hold of the system and transmogrify it to fit their causes, many which were originally well-meaning but ultimately, and tragically, misguided. The results of their success in turning America's previous culture on its head are seen throughout our society, but its effects have been far more pernicious to the impoverished, or, the "Have-nots." The change in crime, illiteracy, illegitimacy, income and many other telling rates from the American underclass began almost instantly and are now staggeringly depressing. Most of us have seen these numbers repeated ad infinitum, but this book will show you how and why these things happened in a way that many other social commentaries will not. This is a fantastic work that addresses a sad topic with an optimistic tone. It is one that all Americans should read and explain to their families and children as well.

An excellent work identifying the New Left's underlying moral base as creating the culture of poverty that now characterizes North American inner cities, particularly those in the United States. Unlike similarly-conceived works, Magnet discusses the work of authors who oppose incarceration of mental patients. He also acknowledges some of the weaknesses of Charles Murray's seminal work on welfare, *Losing Ground*, as that book was indeed flawed in some respects. My only criticism is that he draws upon many of the sources that are familiar to those who read in this area, such as Dinesh D'Souza's *Illiberal Education* and Thomas Sowell's works, and so many of his examples are known to some readers. Nevertheless, the tragedy of Magnet's message is that most educated people are *not* reading fine works such as these, so the evasions about poverty and how it is created continue. One of the texts Magnet examines deserves special mention: "The White Negro", an essay! Norman Mailer had published in 1957. Mailer casually defends murder of shopkeepers by thugs, on the grounds that such an action attacks the institution of private property. Mailer should be made to pay for such irresponsibility; using Magnet's book as ammunition, those who want peace and freedom - not egalitarian attacks on the productive - to prevail in North America ought to make such writings of this "well-respected author" more widely-known. (Magnet also reveals that Elridge Cleaver defends black men that rape white women; how many feminists have condemned Cleaver for such views?)

Myron Magnet's book is an excellent example of why 1960s leftists should be having second thoughts. In a nutshell, he argues that the mindset and the values of the sixties are largely responsible for America's urban underclass. The sixties counterculture and the sexual revolution both put in place a set of values and beliefs that for many turned poverty into a way of life.

The liberations promoted by the counter-culturalists - sexual, personal, political, economic - did not liberate. Instead, they enslaved people. Says Magnet, the no-fault way in which the counter-culturalist conducted his personal life was "mirrored by his no-fault social policy, all rights and entitlements without responsibilities".

These counterculture values had a very real bearing on the issue of poverty. The traditional values that either prevented poverty or helped one escape from poverty - thrift, hard work, responsibility, deferral of gratification, sobriety - were eschewed. In their place were enshrined the values of hedonism, sensualism and selfishness. These values can only entrap, not liberate. As Irving Kristol put it, "It's hard to rise above poverty if society keeps deriding the human qualities that allow you to escape from it."

Take the sexual revolution for example. The reshaped values of the sexual revolution were directly responsible for the breakdown of families, for easy divorce, for illegitimacy, for sole-parent households. Not that these problems didn't exist before the onset of the sexual revolution, but they were certainly exacerbated and compounded by it.

The new culture, as Magnet explains, "permitted, even celebrated, behavior that, when poor people practice it, will imprison them inextricably in poverty. It's hard to persuade ghetto fifteen-year-olds not to get pregnant, for instance, when the entire culture, from rock music to upscale perfume commercials to highbrow books, is intoxicated with the joy of what before AIDS was called `recreational' sex."

Moreover, the new culture "held the poor back from advancement by robbing them of responsibility for their fate and thus further squelching their initiative and energy. Instead of telling them to take wholehearted advantage of opportunities that were rapidly opening, the new culture told the Have-Nots that they were victims of an unjust society and, if they were black, that they were entitled to restitution, including advancement on the basis of racial preference rather than mere personal striving and merit."

Viewing poverty primarily in terms of a poverty of values is not a new thesis: Other social commentators, like George Gilder and Thomas Sowell, have argued this thesis. Moreover, earlier commentators like Max Weber have pointed out the connection between values and socio-economic development. Historical examples can be cited. For example, many historians now agree that the spread of Methodism in England in the 18th Century helped spare England the bloody revolutions taking place around it. John Wesley's preaching imbued the English people with a conservative orderliness that helped to avert revolutionary violence and upheaval.

Magnet's book confirms the thesis that the major operatives in a society are not just economic ones. Moral, religious and cultural values even more strongly determine how a society will fare - politically and economically. The question of crime also must be seen in terms of values. The use of force and threat - police, courts, prisons - is one way to restrain aggression and crime. However, "The most powerful curb isn't force at all: it is the internal inhibition that society builds into each person's character, the inner voice".

Instead of worrying about lenient sentencing or cumbersome legal procedures - as important as they are - of more value is ensuring that "inner barriers to violence and aggression are strongly in place. This is a cultural matter, a matter of how people bring up their children, a matter of the messages that get passed from the community to the parents and thence to the children.

The object is both to transmit the necessary prohibitions against aggression to each individual and to win each individual's inner, positive assent to the social endeavor."

And that of course is what is not happening in black urban America. Sixty-eight per cent of all black children are born without a father at home. Thus it is much harder for positive values to be transmitted. But the tragedy of broken black families is perpetuated by counterculture values: love'em and leave'em is the natural expression of the sexual revolution, and the economic reinforcement of illegitimacy is the logical outcome of welfarism. As Charles Murray noted, a welfare mother's child "provides her with the economic insurance that a husband used to represent."

Thus counterculture values reinforce and perpetuate the crime, poverty and despair of the ghetto. The poverty of values that emanated from the 1960s counterculture have left their mark. And welfarism simply ingrained the problems. Best of intentions, we have learned, unfortunately are not enough. Reformist zeal needs to be backed up by hard thinking and common sense. Simply throwing money at a problem will usually not suffice. The less politically tangible route of changing values and belief systems is generally more effective.

This book is one of the most articulate explanations for post-1960s socio-economic trends and the damage the cultural movement left in its wake. TO THOSE NEGATIVE REVIEWERS: I wonder if any of you even read the book. The depth at which Magnet covers the connection between the ideological shift of the "haves" and failed social policies is extensive. This book is not a party-based flag waver. It is an unbias, multi-dimensional study that should give any open-minded person something to ponder. It's time to realize that the "haves" in this country aren't just big conservative blood-thirsty corporations, but that the privileged in this country often reside in the secular entertainment industry and the halls of congress itself. If you don't read this book, just know this: we live in the most privileged society ever to exist in history, even with our shortcomings, and people can only find true compassion, and create true change, if they choose to see the real problems and destructive social codes facing our communities.

I read the original edition of this book and it is by far the most important social/political critique I've ever read. If you've ever asked yourself, "Why is the world the way it is today?", this book will help provide an answer. It indicts liberalism for its devastating social experimentation, utilizing a priori logic while never demonizing the intentions of liberals (a break the left never gives conservatives). Magnet explains that it's not liberal intentions which were wrong, but the incentives and disincentives created by liberal social policies which were so tragic, particulary for poor minorities. Ideas which were radical just thirty years ago have become unquestioned mainstream assumptions, the very Establishment itself.

Every social problem we face today, from crime to drug addiction, broken families to school violence can be traced back to the absolute sea-change America and the rest of the West went through during the Sixties and early Seventies. The impact of that time can not be overstated yet Magnet manages to explain this in a rather slim volume. Anyone looking for answers will find them in this excellent, passionate book. Things will make sense after reading it.

For those who have a true interest in understanding the realities of American Society. I would rank this book in my top ten within social sciences. It allows the reader to see the evolution of social and moral decay that has overtaken America. Students of sociology and theology will find it fascinating. Liberals likely will find this offensive as it points out some holes in victimhood theory.

The Dream and the Nightmare is one of the rare books that will
change your perception of reality forever. Magnet uses all kinds of data and analysis to show what a tragedy welfare has been for the poor. Those who earnestly wanted to help the less fortunate instead sent them on a downward spiral towards despair and desperation. The welfare system created by the Federal Government was much worse than a $5 trillion waste of money--it undermined and set back the progress of Americas poor by a hundred years. Myron Magnet has done a service to the country, as he wrote, first thing to do when you're in a hole is to stop digging!