Beltway Books: The enemies of America

Even President Clinton believes in individual responsibility and family values, or so he recently told students at Penn State. That America's moral fabric is under siege is evident from Maggie Gallagher's excellent The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love.

Ms. Gallagher's message is a sober one: "The overthrow of the marriage culture and its replacement by a postmarital culture is the driving force behind almost all of the gravest problems facing America-crime, poverty, welfare, dependence, homelessness, educational stagnation, even child abuse." Two statistics sum up her book: One-third of children are born out of wedlock and two-thirds of new marriages will fail.

The onset of what she terms "the culture of divorce" was incredibly sudden. Between the 1940s and the 1970s divorce rates tripled. Since then, she reports, "the marriage rate has fallen almost 30 percent, while the divorce rate has jumped nearly another 40 percent." Four of every ten unmarried women in their thirties have had an illegitimate child.

She sees no easy answers, but rightly concludes that "trying to remake divorce and illegitimacy into a substitute for marriage" is but a distraction. Rather, we must confront the divorce culture head-on and work-consciously, steadily, and vigorously-to strengthen the marriage covenant.

Much less serious is former Sen. Warren Rudman's valedictory effort, Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. His book is filled with whining about "nasty partisanship," "self-commissioned Christian soldiers," a dying "spirit of civility and compromise," and the like. Indeed, he inadvertently helps explain why the Republican Party did so poorly for so long. "I had enjoyed sitting down with colleagues like George Mitchell, Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Joe Biden, and Ted Kennedy and saying, 'We have a problem here-let's find a way to solve it'," he writes.

No wonder, then, that we constantly seemed to get Ted Kennedy's solutions, with a little bit of Warren Rudman's moderation thrown in-the result of the latter's attempt to reconcile "divergent views with compromises that served the country's interests." Unfortunately, because of these compromises government constantly expanded, infringing our freedom, confiscating our wealth, and wrecking our communities.

That freedom is both desirable and possible is evident from reading Robert Skidelsky's wonderful The Road from Serfdom: The Economic and Political Consequences of the End of Communism. The end of communism, he writes, is "the most hopeful turn of the historical screw" since 1914. The job now "is not just to dismantle dysfunctional systems, releasing new energies, but so to manage the transition that the job can be completed."

That transition includes eliminating collectivism in not only the former communist world, but also the West. The answer, he says, is "deep cuts in public spending and the taxes needed to finance it-cuts of the order of 10 to 20 percent of national income." He concludes, "The collectivist age will not be over until state spending has been drastically pruned."

Focused on a different aspect of the collapse of communism is Jay Winik's On the Brink. Mr. Winik provides a detailed account of the Reagan administration's strategy to win the Cold War. He may underestimate the Soviet Union's pre-Reagan weaknesses, but he provides an interesting account of one of the most dramatic periods of American history.