Mr. Magnet's latest book, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, posits, as Mr. Buckley starts by telling us, that the persistent problems of the underclass are owing not to economic factors but to "a new culture," defined not only by the Woodstock Nation but also by "such as Michael Harrington and Norman Mailer and R. D. Laing." Mr. Magnet takes it from there: "The great magic of America is that we rest not on any kind of racial identity, not on the history of a single people, but on the great American liberal democratic idea. And it is being so devalued by talk of how we have a culture which victimizes people, which oppresses people, the thought that all those American values are elitist and racist or sexist... I think what we need to do is restore what was the unique American idea... that anybody who relies on himself, is energetic, will work, and will take care of his family, can be anything he wants to."