The Liberal Dilemma

The Prolonged Oratorical Binge that is a Presidential election campaign does not in the normal course of events lay down guidelines for future policy. Our political dialog is too amorphous, too charged with the cult of personality. But a national election can and often does serve a useful end in knocking down, if only for the time being, bogeys conjured up out of fear and distrust.

That is what happened last November. Two specters were put down in an overwhelming response from the great majority of Americans. The racist appeal was rejected decisively throughout the nation—except in the South, where it is endemic. The blackmailing threat of the extremist was denied, particularly in those sparsely populated states where a little organization and a generous use of money had gone a long way.

These were formidable achievements to come out of a campaign full of sound and fury signifying little. But it would be unrealistic to take these achievements as a kind of automatic go sign for the new initiatives at home and abroad that the times call for. It is rather, for the liberal who has long been aware of the need for such initiatives, a reprieve—a temporary opportunity to appraise the drift of recent years and to try to chart a course for the future.

If the liberal looks at his situation in the light of sober reality, he will acknowledge that he has been a rather unwelcome fellow traveler in the overcrowded center of the political highway. A freeloader, a hitchhiker, he has been part of the incongruous company moving down the congested middle corridor. The principal—some would say the only—access route to political office and political action, this route required a protective coloration of neutrality if the traveler was not to be pushed toward the left and possible political oblivion.

The reprieve of November owes a great deal to the Negro. In a sense it represents a pause in the Negro revolution. The lines were clearly drawn. Was it to be more riots and arson—precisely what the racist appeal needed to feed on? Or was it to be a massive procession to the ballot box? The latter was the answer, and it is therefore now in this hour of reprieve that new initiatives must be pushed forward with all possible vigor.

The inhibiting fear of the McCarthy era has been a great roadblock to social thought and action. But even before the election cleared the air, the Negro revolution had become the inevitable cause for the liberal. Something quite extraordinary had been occurring. This was the way in which hundreds, thousands, actually, of the young in colleges across the land embraced the cause of Negro equality. For the first time since the New Deal and, a little later, the war against fascism, the young had a cause which they felt they could rush into with a whole heart. They have been called pawns of the hard-line Negro leaders. They have been accused of seeking a self-righteous martyrdom. But I saw them in Mississippi and I was impressed. One may find them foolish, naively idealistic, sometimes smug and intolerant, but they know what they want and they are not afraid to work for it, often in the face of great hazards. This is a development of first importance—because part of the liberal's unhappy plight, as he sought safe haven in the center, was that he lacked a goal.

He was determined to be part of the movement that is the principal force for change in American life. Yet because he feared that the white majority—more than 80 percent of the population—could so readily be turned against the minority by Negro tactics of violence and extremism, he was sorely tried. He became aware of this at the start of a political campaign which threatened to put an unprecedented strain on the effort to reach a reasonable consensus (continued on page 184)Liberal Dilemma(continued from page 93) in the American tradition. Yet November third showed that it was possible to reach at least a decent level of tolerance despite prolonged efforts to stir prejudice and passion.

The liberal's search for goals has seen many historic objectives fading from view. Not so long ago, Justice Brandeis' The Curse of Bigness was a rallying cry. (There was a curious and distorted echo of this cry in Senator Goldwater's campaign.) Brandeis' goal was fair competition, which would bring low prices; if competition could not be enforced by government regulation, then government as competitor would provide a yardstick. That was the theory behind the Tennessee Valley Authority. Theodore Roosevelt and a generation following him inveighed against the trusts and corporate greed. The little band of Senate liberals that set out in 1962 to frustrate the proposal of the Kennedy Administration to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars in government research to a great private corporation, dominated by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, was in this tradition. After a futile filibuster, only 11 votes could be mustered against the Comsat Corporation.

If bigness is indeed a curse, the public has seemingly become reconciled to it. There was little evidence of public support for the lonely 11 who tried to hold the line against the giant corporations and their grip on communications. The fall of this last redoubt may have had greater meaning than was understood at the time. One of the ancient battlegrounds of the liberal army was left to dusty neglect with scarcely a mark to note where it had been. Bryan's populism and the thunder of T. R. against the trusts are only a faint memory in the affluent society of today.

The liberal questions how real that affluence is. But many of the aims of those who formerly carried the banners of the army fighting for a good life have been achieved. Medical care under Social Security was pushed aside once again in 1964. Yet with the changes that have come in the House of Representatives and the force of President Johnson's victory, it will come this year, despite the fulminations of the right and the anguish of the American Medical Association.

By the continuing development of the welfare program begun in the mid-Thirties, the content of political exchange has been cut down. There is less to argue about. The dimensions of political life, not only in this country but in western Europe as well, are foreshortened, and the managerial revolution in government—executive government—takes precedence over legislative government. One consequence is that the liberal finds himself without a cause; and without a cause, he fights a rear-guard action to hold off his attackers on the right.

Turning to the field of foreign policy, the liberal cannot feel very much happier about the dilemma of the center. Here the damage done by World War II and the Cold War to the left lane is incalculable. The nature of communism for many years was obscured in part by very skillful propaganda, but largely by the passions of war itself and our alliance with the Soviet Union. Many Americans, and in particular hopeful liberals, were wholly unprepared for the hard realities of Stalinist Russia in the immediate post-War period. Much of their hope had been reposed in the United Nations—with the result that its inherent limitations were overlooked.

Today the UN appears an amorphous body with the United States and Sierra Leone each having a vote of the same weight. It is doing splendid work in a dozen different directions, and in at least a half dozen instances it has kept perilous brush fires under control. But this is the work of a dedicated bureaucracy of which the late Dag Hammarskjold was the embodiment. It is hard to become impassioned about the partition of Cyprus when that quarrel seems merely another outbreak of the old Balkan blood feud. Even Senator Goldwater, having retreated from an earlier position calling for American withdrawal, ultimately favored improving the UN.

What this comes down to, perhaps, is that liberals have fallen into the habit of tiptoeing nervously around those subjects that arouse passionate opinions. Plain speaking has been in short supply on the liberal side. No world organization that ignores Red China with its 800,000,000 people and pretends that the island of Formosa is China can be really effective, but the UN is seldom criticized from this standpoint. The voting system, the veto in the Security Council, all the defects are treated as one would treat infirmities in an aged invalid. This—and here is the nub—leaves a great silence that the right fills with its shrill and uncompromising indictments of the United Nations.

Until recently the same cautionary silence shrouded the ticklish subject of deficit spending, which bears on both domestic and foreign policy, since the outflow of gold and the stability of the dollar are part of the stake. In the center the ancient signs, "a balanced budget," "spending into bankruptcy," completely hid the view. Only lately and somewhat timidly has a new banner with a strange device, "deficit spending to stimulate the economy," been held aloft slightly to the left of center.

This last, one does not need to be told, has been the standard practice of every nation in post-War Europe. It was here in the field of economics that the late President Kennedy proved he could learn the hard lessons of government management and bite the liberal bullet. He flew in the face of the orthodoxy not only of Republicans but of many Democrats, among them the most powerful committee chairmen in the Congress. For Senator Byrd, a balanced budget is all the Ten Commandments rolled into one noble injunction.

Under the persuasion of Walter Heller, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisors, Kennedy came out for a tax cut even though this would mean putting the Government deeper into the red. He made this proposal, radical in that it came from a President of the United States, against loud prophecies of doom from the budget balancers. It was a decision to use one of the devices which Germany, France, Britain, Sweden and other countries have made part of their normal fiscal policy. The deficit as the fiscal year ended in mid-1964, after passage of a sizable tax cut, was larger than any ever before in peacetime, except the Eisenhower recession deficit in 1958. But a recession had been averted and the level of prosperity was rapidly rising, with no serious inflationary cloud on the horizon.

Timing in these matters counts for so much, as does the luck of the draw. The example of Britain is instructive. The Liberal party in the early years of this century put through a great series of reforms that meant a profound modification of the old, openhanded capitalism of the age of Victoria. The needs of the time and the party met by fortunate coincidence; and another piece of luck was the magic of Lloyd George, whose demagogy was of a singularly subtle and insidious kind. But when the reforms were put through and the times changed, the Liberal party was squeezed between the Socialists and the Conservatives. It is today a splinter, led by attractive, articulate men and women who have little popular support and only a handful of seats in the House of Commons.

A political party, a political movement, must be able to stay the course. The liberal in America finds this difficult in an era in which the Toynbeean pattern of challenge and response has come to have a monotonous and repetitive quality. Take, for example, the annual struggle over foreign aid. This is like a dreary morality play or a television Western in which the good guys and the bad guys say the same lines each time. The passion for charging up the hill is harder to generate each year, the troops more indifferent and lackluster.

But here again, it seems to me that it is plain speaking that has been badly wanted. Or, rather—and this may be merely putting it another way—the failure is in not confronting the truly controversial aspects of foreign aid, a confrontation that has been sidetracked by the attackers who raise all sorts of tangential prejudices to cripple and limit the program. Few defenders are bold enough to say out loud that it is an absurd illusion to believe that the underdeveloped countries can adopt America's free enterprise system. The kind of capital formation that took place here for a century is simply beyond the reach of the new struggling Asian, African and Latin-American nations. To think that our economic system can be imposed with foreign aid as a weapon is probably in the long run to insure that very little (if any) good will come of the effort. A signal example of this folly was the refusal to grant a loan to India for the Bokara steel mill because it was to be operated by the government. There may have been other valid reasons for such a denial. But to say, in effect, that India's mixed economy is improper, if not downright immoral, was a piece of nonsense that could only do harm all around.

For liberals more than perhaps any other element in the political spectrum, the sticking point is that ancient American bogey: the authority of a centralized government asserted over the rights of the states. From the time of the Articles of Confederation, a hopeless coalition of sovereign state governments unable to agree even on how to operate a postal service, this has plagued a people who still reflect the frontier distrust of the sheriff. Throughout the South and in other areas, hostility to the Government in Washington is considered the beginning of wisdom. It is a passion played upon by the propaganda of innumerable organizations running a curious gamut from the John Birch Society to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Nor is it altogether a bogey. The liberal is suspicious of centralized authority, especially as manifested in a police force. He tends to look with distrust on the FBI and its increasing size and scope. When President Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General, set out to discipline the United States Steel Corporation for raising prices, there were disquieting reports of agents calling on possible sources of information in the early hours of the morning. Whether real or fancied, here was an echo of the midnight knock. Hardly anyone, not the liberals and not J. Edgar Hoover, would want a Federal police force. Yet faced with the resistance of a state's authority to the enforcement of Federal law—as in Mississippi—where is the power to uphold a valid statute? Is nullification to be the answer?

Eleven years after the United States Supreme Court, in Brown vs. Board of Education, declared school segregation unlawful, only token changes have taken place in most Southern states. It is between these two horns—the lack of Federal power of enforcement, and nullification—that the hopeful reformer often finds himself helpless. The rule of law is a noble concept. But when laws are passed that mean a profound alteration in patterns of living, the conflict between authority and individual freedom is bound to occur.

As the right hardens in areas such as Southern California, it becomes progressively more determined to stamp out any opinion that differs however slightly from ultraconservative orthodoxy. Public libraries, schools, and agencies of local government come under suspicion; individuals who resist the pressures are harassed and in some instances driven out. In these areas even the term moderate is regarded with suspicion. It was this conformity that the voters rejected in instance after instance last fall.

To be doctrinaire, as the conservatives have become, is to have a body of doctrine. While the doctrine of the right is thin gruel, it is nevertheless doctrine. The contemporary liberal is too often doctrinaire on the doctrine of the past—doctrine that has withered away or ceased to have any meaning. This is the most formidable challenge: to seek out a new body of belief that will take into account the profound changes of the past 20 years. It will be far from easy. A growing alienation on the left and the right leaves less and less room for reasoned conviction. But in this search, the issue, it is fair to say, is survival itself. Survival, that is, for free and independent opinion.