Forging a Left-Right Coalition

It isn't easy to know, these days, just what is happening in American politics. This dawned on me as early as 1966, when I covered the campaign of Robert Scheer, the New Leftish Ramparts magazine editor, who was then running for Congress--in the Democratic primary--from the Oakland-Berkeley district of California. Scheer, an outspoken anti-war candidate, was not running against some right-winger nor even against a Republican Babbitt but against Representative Jeffery Cohelan, a liberal New Dealer who had had a 95 percent voting record in the ratings of the Americans for Democratic Action.

In those days, like almost everyone else, I thought left was left and right was right, and the center got elected. So I was surprised, the first time I heard Scheer speak, to hear him deride Hubert Humphrey and, when I talked to him privately, to find him express admiration for Barry Goldwater--who, as he put it, was "at least an activist." But as I became more accustomed to the New Left, I found that it had a strong rhetorical resemblance to that radical right with which the nation had become acquainted in 1964. Both flaunted moral appeals, denounced liberalism, constantly alluded to patriots and traitors and held the passionate conviction that they, and not the parties in power, were the true guardians of "the American dream."

Goldwater and the right-wingers, everybody used to say, "oversimplified the issues." But here was the New Left with such slogans as "Withdraw troops--end poverty." Goldwater set off a national spasm when he declared that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." But six years and a lot of riots and demonstrations later, it is perfectly obvious that the New Left, the militant blacks, the SDS and thousands of unaffiliated but "radical" youngsters all over the country agree with Barry, no doubt to his dismay.

What links the New Left and the radical right more than rhetorically is the genuine revulsion of each, on differing grounds, against the post-Depression, post-War order of things in America--against what each calls, with unlimited contempt, "the liberal establishment." And since the Federal Government is both the heart and the good right arm of the liberal establishment, in all its works from civil rights to "world responsibility," it is more nearly the Government than any other single force that unites--in opposition--the extremes of American politics. Whether, on the one hand, it is the war in Vietnam, the military-industrial complex and J. Edgar Hoover, or, on the other, high taxes, Government spending and a no-win policy abroad, it is the Devil's doing, and the Devil lives in Washington.

What is most interesting about this is that it is beginning visibly to affect the center, which really does live in Washington. Analyze, for instance, the substance and origins of the Nixon Administration: It's obvious, isn't it, that the instrument that returned the Republican Party to power after eight years of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the New Frontier and the Great Society, is bound to be the darling of the Republican establishment, the creature of Wall Street and "the interests"? But the Nixon Administration is by no means establishmentarian, in the sense that an Administration headed by Nelson Rockefeller or even Humphrey would have been. It has little truck with Ivy League businessmen, the big Wall Street law firms (other than Mr. Nixon's own), the New York Council on Foreign Relations, Philadelphia's main line or even the kind of respectable civil rights organizations that used to have white presidents. Mr. Nixon's Administration is more nearly a product of the new revulsion against that kind of establishment; it is an Administration of Midwestern bankers and manufacturers, West Coast advertising executives, new-rich Southern construction magnates, managerial types and ex-gubernatorial politicians. The major object of its concern is the middle-class, middle-income suburbanite. Mr. Nixon himself--nondescript college, Western origins, sports jargon, middle-class manner, earned wealth of recent origin--is its perfect symbol. Yet this Administration, product though it may partially be of the new politics of revulsion, is also staunchly and traditionally Republican in its defense of free enterprise and the value of the dollar, and it maintains tenaciously the basic post-War liberal-establishment doctrine of a powerful military stance and a hard line against communism. All the lines seem to be crossed nowadays.

Nor is it only the Nixon Administration that exhibits a split--or at least uncertain--personality in the new political atmosphere. Eugene McCarthy ran for President with the avid support of thousands of young people like those who turned out for Bob Scheer in 1966. Yet in recoiling from any low attempt to woo particular groups of voters--blacks, for example--with tailored appeals to their interests and passions, and in disdaining the clichés of mainstream politics, McCarthy resembled Goldwater in style more closely than any other recent Presidential candidate, despite their substantive differences on issues and even though Goldwater fulminated against intellectuals while McCarthy, in Oregon, claimed that the better-educated people were voting for him. There is some evidence to suggest that McCarthy's romantic appeal as an individualist unafraid to challenge big institutions such as the Democratic Party and the Kennedy family brought him some support from those who had previously found such qualities only in Goldwater. And where Goldwater openly attacked the Government, save the Pentagon, from stem to stern, McCarthy's subtler criticisms of the Government, including the Pentagon, brought from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the ultimate indictment that he was running against that establishment-liberal icon, the powers of the Presidency.

Robert Kennedy, on the other hand, took the establishment-liberal line on Presidential activism, wooed the ghetto madly and, in his own inimitable style, sought the support of illiterates and intellec-tuals alike. But he, too, was revulsionist in his attacks on the welfare system, in his calls for greater community responsibility and local self-government, in his recognition that the big labor unions are no longer engines of reform, in his apparently growing mistrust of overbureaucratized and underfunded Federal programs, no matter how worthy of purpose. Mr. Nixon's campaign exhibited about the same proportion of revulsion and tradition that his Administration now displays. George Wallace was, of course, the most outspoken revulsionist of the campaign, although his focus was far narrower than McCarthy's or Kennedy's, or even Nixon's. Of all the major 1968 contenders, Rockefeller and Humphrey seemed most nearly tied to the liberal-establishment line, which suggests its essentially bipartisan nature.

To some extent, the new revulsionism has been complicated by the semantic confusion of American political history. In the post-Roosevelt period, a "liberal" came to mean one who was in favor of strong Federal action to achieve desirable ends--say, the minimum wage--that didn't seem attainable by any other means. But over the years, this once-pragmatic attitude hardened into dogma; Federal action became the accepted--almost the only acceptable--means of proceeding, a development that was sped along in an ascending spiral by the consequent atrophy of state and local government and by Washington's swift pre-emption of the major sources of revenue. Liberals of this breed became, all too often, dictionary conservatives with a philosophy actually based on a new kind of traditional and social stability, stressing established institutions and preferring gradual development to abrupt change. The New Deal, in short, became orthodox, and the New Dealers became the dominant center of American politics, reaching their peak of power in the Johnson landslide of 1964.

On the other hand, those who came to political activity long after the Depression-ridden Thirties and World War Two, and who found in the liberal establishment not only an outdated political ethic for automated and affluent post-War America, not only a smothering intellectual orthodoxy but also a dangerously autonomous and unresponsive bureaucracy, were often textbook liberals. That is, they were open-minded in the observance of traditional forms and concerned about the autonomy of the individual. But many people who had, for largely selfish economic reasons, opposed those erroneously known as liberals had pre-empted the term "conservatives," so that (continued on page 140)Left-Right Coalition(continued from page 130) by the Sixties, the degradation of American political nomenclature left nothing for the new revulsionists but imprecisions such as "radical," "militant," "activist"--or "revulsionist."

This confusion aside, root causes have been at work, the most basic of which is simply the passage of time, the coming on of a new generation. The Cold War, the Communist menace, the lesson of Munich--it all had a faintly historical ring, suddenly, and what did it have to do with the world of jet excursions abroad, John XXIII and astronauts to the moon? Was not communism Evtushenko as well as Brezhnev--Tito, Mao and Ho as well as Stalin? Missiles, nuclear bombs, napalm, aircraft carriers, the draft, huge military appropriations, starving American children, the Strategic Air Command and decaying American cities--none of this could make as much sense in 1966 as it had in 1956, if for no other reason than that the experience of many of those who thought about it in 1966 included little of the historical origins of the Cold War. The world had turned.

As for domestic affairs, somewhere in the post-War era, it now seems clear, the basic substance of American politics changed almost imperceptibly. In the rising and spreading affluence, when factory workers moved to the middle-class suburbs, played golf on weekends and sent their kids to college, the New Deal's gut issue--the old reliable pocketbook appeal, the question of the standard of living--slipped down the scale of values. Poverty had become, Kennedy and Johnson were forced to recognize, merely an interest-group problem, like farm income or textile quotas. At the heart of American politics, suddenly, there was something else, something not quite definable but having to do with the quality of American life. For some, it involved the kids' schools and who attended them, "law and order," job security, taxes for welfare programs and all sorts of tricky, alarming questions such as sex education, prayer in the schools, hard drugs and pot, student unrest, long hair on boys and short skirts on girls. For others, the new gut issue of life quality meant the military-industrial complex, racism, liberating new styles in music, attire, sex, occupation. "Relevance" in education, "participation" in politics, the right to "do your own thing"--all became part of the larger issue of the quality of life. And if the one group concerned about this issue was frequently at odds with the other--call it the generation gap, the education gap, square vs. hip--the one thing that most nearly united them was the apprehensive and angry conviction that the individual citizen could not make his voice heard, his presence felt, his views heeded, in 20th Century America.

For, above all, the massive era had arrived, borne on the twin carriers of affluence and technology. Now each of us--left, right and center--feels threatened by gigantic, faceless institutions that rise like the Rockies from American soil: the Government, first and most visible of all, but also the cities, the universities, the corporations, the unions. These tangible entities are powerful and real to virtually all of us: to Americans stacked high in their beehive apartment buildings or scattered for aimless miles in their endless suburbs; to housewives pushing through the impersonal aisles of the supermarket; to husbands driving anonymously to work on vast, eight-lane, roaring rivers of concrete; to students sitting in the 50th row of a 1000-seat amphitheater while a graduate assistant reads the lecture notes of a well-known professor, who is in Washington advising the Government or in New York consulting with Chase Manhattan or the Ford Foundation, both of which--along with the professor--are part of the new interlocking directorate of the liberal establishment. But how much more menacing are those intangible, even legendary, forces that have acquired institutional status: the liberal establishment itself, the Eastern internationalists, the military-industrial complex, the white backlash, the sensationalist press, the ghetto--or just "the system." Who can reach or influence them?

Add to these the continuing nightmare of Vietnam--the first American war so widely believed to be unjust and unwarranted, so strenuously opposed at so many levels and for so many reasons, generally considered lost, yet so single-mindedly pursued by a Government so apparently beyond control. Coming almost simultaneously with the revelation, in Watts and Newark and Detroit, of the desperate and terrifying underside of American life, the war has shaken lifelong assumptions, cast the nation and the world in which it exists in a new and unsparing light and raised questions about all kinds of institutional functions--Selective Service, the President's foreign-policy powers, the setting of priorities, the elections system--that were once thought beyond criticism. The war has shaken Presidents, universities, churches, the dollar, even the United States Senate. Is it any wonder that it has shaken Americans in general? Moreover, since the Vietnam enterprise failed, as most saw it, the question "How did it happen?" inevitably arose. The search for an answer to that question led unerringly to a re-examination of political procedures and beliefs taken as gospel since the dawn of the Cold War; it led unerringly, that is, to a new and skeptical way of looking at and challenging the Government, state power, the established order of things--again, the liberal establishment.

So, amid changing generations, rising affluence and the resulting new political concerns, shocked by Vietnam from their old passivity, Americans of all political persuasions--notably, radical right and New Left, as the sensitive extremes--are in revulsion. If the most visible evidence of that feeling is the student revolt against the university, the most widespread sentiment, coming from all directions, is against the gigantic Governmental engine created by and sustaining the liberal establishment. As Karl Hess, once Barry Goldwater's speechwriter and now a practicing New Leftist, wrote his former boss in an open letter printed in Ramparts, what has come about is a "basic crisis, the sort of broken faith in state power that you have urged, the sharp awareness of the meaning of political power as the power of people against the power of overriding institutions."

Hess was urging Goldwater to follow him into the New Left, which is politically unlikely but does have a certain logic; after all, Hess reminded the Arizonan, "In a historical sense, you were a prominent leftist when you attacked established power, as you used to attack it." But few Americans, including Barry Goldwater, have that kind of historical sense; not many recognize or accept the idea of militant left and radical right allied, even in revulsion against state and institutional dominance of the individual, let alone in constructive political action. This is why it is so difficult to predict what might come of the new revulsionism, whether it is anything more than a momentary upsurge against ultimately irresistible pressures. The American center appears now to be doing what it usually does under well-founded challenge: It is accommodating itself to the bumptious trend of revulsionism--accommodating no more than it has to in order to shape the trend, accommodating probably not so much as it ultimately may have to in order to contain it. The Nixon Administration, half revulsionist, half traditionalist, is the primary result of the accommodation, as its two principal domestic programs suggest.

The first of these, a plan for sharing Federal revenues with smaller units of government, if carried out successfully and on a large scale, could make the Federal Government a giant tax collector, the purpose of which would be to finance state and local governments as they develop into the major social and (continued on page 282)Left-Right Coalition(continued from page 140) administrative agencies of the American system. If well financed, these smaller units might prove more effective than a centralized national Government; at the least, they are closer to the citizenry, so that, theoretically, they would be more responsive than Washington's vast machinery and more flexible in identifying and remedying local needs. The crucial questions are whether sufficient funds can be found to make revenue sharing mean anything and whether the Federal bureaucracy can be browbeaten politically into permitting anything like real operating autonomy at state and local levels.

The second major Nixon program, welfare reform, represents creeping motion toward an income rather than a relief system. In present circumstances, that makes sense, too, if not quite so obviously as revenue sharing. It plays to the right-wing revulsion against "bums on the welfare rolls" and to the left-wing revulsion against the state policing of the poor, which is a feature of the present system. By providing immediate money incentives for people not working to get jobs and earn something, as well as vital assistance to the marginally employed in their efforts to keep working and improve their lot, the income approach actually builds an economic-aid program on a free-enterprise base; it is no more a "handout" than certain tax incentives or farm-subsidy programs, and it has the same purpose. But here, again, it remains to be seen whether welfare reform will be pushed into a genuine anti-poverty program.

Revulsionism can have questionable political effects, too. Mr. Nixon's relaxed policy on school desegregation is no doubt mollifying some of the right-wing revulsionist pressures against severe Federal control of Southern school districts and may be quashing symbolically the irrational notion that the blacks are getting too much, too fast. Interestingly enough, old-line liberals such as Roy Wilkins seem more angered by Southern school developments than do black or white militants. That suggests one large paradox in the consequences of right-left revulsionism. Local community school control in the South is advocated by most whites in order to maintain as much as possible of a segregated social system; local community school control in the city ghetto is advocated by some blacks in hopes of improving the education of their children through greater community participation in the schools. That paradox makes one revulsionist point--that local problems vary in a vast and complex nation and require a variety of local solutions, rather than a Federally controlled national program. At the same time, it suggests how difficult it is to get left and right in bed together for any kind of concerted action.

Mr. Nixon contended in his 1968 campaign that there was a "new majority" in America made up of Southerners, black militants, liberals (by which he apparently meant the New Left, rather than the New Deal variety) and Republicans; it was founded on revulsion against an outsized Federal Government, he said, and could dominate politics. Maybe it could, numerically; but in winning and exercising power, Mr. Nixon's particular majority--and a narrow one, at that--has consisted more nearly of what he calls "the forgotten man." the well-behaved middle-income suburbanite who pays taxes, goes to church, works hard and wants law and order. The forgotten man is often a revulsionist, all right, but he usually wants nothing to do with black militants and New Leftists, whom he is likely to call "hippies."

Whatever is happening in our politics is not likely to result in an organized alliance or coalition between New Left and radical right. We need not look for Barry Goldwater and Eugene McCarthy on the same ticket; the Northern inner cities and the Southern state capitals are likely to have their differing reasons for wanting community school control for quite a while; and if General LeMay and Dr. Spock are both disgusted with the war in Vietnam, they would not yet agree on what ought to be done. What is far more likely is a glacial but continuing and significant response in the dominant center to the new pressures from the far-out wings. That is the way political change has usually come about in America, and both the election of Richard Nixon and his first year in office suggest that nothing more drastic is in store today.

Mr. Nixon can hardly be expected to give things a stronger lead. Not only does he believe, as he told Theodore H. White last year, that "this country could run itself domestically without a President; all you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy." But even if he did try to take a stronger leadership line in domestic affairs, it would inevitably run counter to the basic revulsionist notion--on the left as well as the right--that the Presidency is already too powerful, too nearly out of control. On the other hand, the revenue-sharing plan is about as far as any President is likely, any time soon, to go in diffusing his own powers.

Nor can the political parties make much of revulsionist politics, except negatively. The George Wallace brand of revulsionism, embodied in his American Independent Party, in fact only weakens by dividing the forgotten-man revulsionism of the Nixon Republican Party. And since the pivotal figure in the Democratic Party, Edward Kennedy, is for the moment eliminated from national competition, the chances are strong that left-wing revulsionism will also be splintered. It is at least an even bet, in fact, that in 1972, there will be a regular Democratic candidate--it could well be Hubert Humphrey again--and a fourth-party candidate representing the old, 1968 McCarthy--Robert Kennedy faction of the party. All of which would guarantee nothing but Mr. Nixon's re-election.

The best that can be hoped for, oddly enough, may come in Congress. There, the disillusionments of Vietnam already have combined into a concerted resistance to the Pentagon--at least in the Senate--as was demonstrated in the extraordinary closeness of the anti-ballistic-missile defense-system vote and in the continuing guerrilla warfare against such military items as the C-5A, nuclear carriers, chemical warfare and our mysterious involvement in Laos. Almost as a by-product, Congress seems to have got the bit in its teeth on such purely executive and bureaucratic concerns--as they seemed only yesterday--as tax reform and foreign policy. And one of the landmarks of revulsionist politics so far is the so-called "commitments resolution"--a remarkable Senate document that attempted to establish the doctrine that a President could not make a "national commitment" to another nation or group of nations without prior approval of Congress. This was a direct and astonishing assault on the citadel of the Presidency.

There may be real hope that in the left-right reaction against powerful centralized Government, the liberal establishment and the activist Presidency fostered by both, the major development will be a newly vital and active Congress, actually fulfilling its historic mission as both check on and balance against the Executive branch. If that kind of Congress actually functions in coming years, Americans need scarcely fear either the Presidency or the vast Federal bureaucracy spawned by the liberal establishment in the post-Depression, post-War years. It may be, therefore, that the politics of revulsion will have its greatest effect in this kind of institutional development, rather than in new parties and new programs--that, as in the past, a little evolution is still the most to be hoped for from the American system.