ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the emerging American dilemma. America's political demographics have evolved into something disturbing. America's free market advocates, an uneasy coalition of conservatives and libertarians, find themselves speechless. The historical literature on independent action, the aspect of American society so many foreign observers thought most distinctive and important, is thin and uneven. The thirties and forties and fifties produced a large, ardent literature that imagined the boundless possibilities of activist government. The sixties, when Reclaiming the American Dream was published, saw the beginnings of a literature of an entirely different sort—sadder, saner, sometimes hair-raising chronicles of the failures of the state's efforts to improve society. The radical message of Reclaiming the American Dream was that in the long run political democracy and free markets would not survive unless the independent sector began to compete aggressively with the state for all—or practically all—its responsibilities.
