The Death of Liberalism

He not busy being born is busy dying. --Bob Dylan

The Old Liberalism is busy dying. As a theory, as a tradition, as a set of institutions, as a group of leaders, liberal anticommunism has become a God that failed. Liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller have become part of the problem--worn-out fig leaves covering the naked emperor's private parts. The New Deal has become the status quo; the old solution has become the new problem.

Let me be precise about who the liberals and the liberal center are: I'm talking about the Peace Corps, the Alsop brothers, the A. D. A. (Americans for Democratic Action), Bayard Rustin, the A. F. L.-C. I. O., The New York Times. I'm also talking about the Ford Foundation, the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Ripon Society--all self-proclaimed pillars of liberalism. There is also the liberalism of those "toughminded" professors such as McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, John Roche and Henry Kissinger, which has become indistinguishable from the kill-ratio logic of the Defense Department computers that predicted the last Viet Cong guerrilla would die 20 months ago. The liberalism of respectable institutions such as Commentary magazine, Freedom House and New York's Liberal Party has become a barrier to social change, a dead hand on the present, preventing the liberation of new ideas, new programs, new movements, new myths. After zigzagging ambiguously through the Thirties and Forties, the American electoral left fell off the track entirely about 1950, and we are still paying the backbreaking price.

We are paying that price in Vietnam, the war that began in Harvard Yard, where Bundy, Rostow, Kissinger, Pat Moynihan and John Kennedy all spent so many fine, formative hours. We are paying that price in a trade-union leadership that stands to the right of The Wall Street Journal and the Catholic Church on most public issues. (One cannot help but notice how much the C. I. O. deteriorated after it cleansed itself by purging Reds and radicals in the late Forties.) And we are paying that price in the unnatural isolation of the student, black and anti-war movements of the Sixties, which were forced to start from scratch, bereft of immediate historical fathers.

The crucial point is that during the Fifties, liberalism lost its will to fight and accepted the basic economic and foreign-policy assumptions of the right. And this pulled the center of gravity of American politics decisively away from the left. What has happened these past 20 years is not that the country has grown more conservative but that liberalism has grown more conservative. By failing to organize F. D. R.'s "one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," by remaining silent during Joe McCarthy's attack on the Bill of Rights and by getting us into Vietnam, liberalism did the work of the right while claiming to represent the left.

Now we must move beyond and transcend the Cold War liberalism of military intervention (Bay of Pigs, Dominican Republic, Vietnam) by becoming peaceful internationalists once again. And as historians such as Howard Zinn, Christopher Lasch and Staughton Lynd have pointed out, we must go back and rediscover the deeper roots of the indigenous American left in fragments of the Populist, feminist, black, Socialist and Progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

No insurgent movement has ever succeeded that was rooted in hatred of its own country--a fatal mistake of which parts of the New Left (Weathermen, Yippies) are guilty. By retrieving the banner of the left as it was before it was corrupted by the Cold War, we offer the post-linear kids something inside their own nation with which to identify, so they won't have to import exotic fantasy notions of revolution from North Korea or Bolivia. By restoring the old dignity to the Populist attack on monopolies and abusive corporations and banks, we can take liberalism out of the soft suburban living rooms and place it on the side of the workingman--the unskilled factory worker, the waitress, the gas-station attendant, the dishwasher, the taxi driver, the small farmer. And by reconnecting with the old Populist passion for participation and decentralization, we can begin to end the liberal's romance with bigness and centralization. The agrarian Populists had a healthy skepticism of organization and remote power, a skepticism that was abandoned by liberalism in its delusion that all human problems can be solved in Washington if you hire enough experts and bureaucrats and pay for enough Rand Corporation studies.

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If something lasting went out of liberalism during the Fifties, then there had to be a deeper reason than just the Cold War, or McCarthyism, or that the unions purged all their rebels. That reason was that the central intellectual formulations of liberal anti-communism were mistaken. I don't say that the liberal leaders of the Fifties were badly motivated or uncommonly corrupt, or that any large numbers were caught in the web of conspiracy woven by the CIA spider. All I argue is that their judgment was bad, and their mistakes have had grievous historical consequences.

They were wrong, first, in their total, fanatical anti-communism, which permitted no possibility for change in the Soviet bloc and blinded them to terrible injustices within their own society and within the so-called Free World. Philosopher Sidney (continued on page 122) Death of Liberalism (continued from page 99) Hook, the archetypal liberal anti-Communist, was able to write in the Partisan Review in 1952: "I cannot understand why American intellectuals should be apologetic about the fact they are limited in their effective historical choice between endorsing a system of total error and critically supporting our own imperfect democratic culture...." That was never the stark either/or choice intellectuals faced. There were always the independent alternatives of democratic radicalism, or neutralism in the Cold War, or support for the great movements against colonialism then being spawned in the womb of the Third World from Cuba to Algeria to Vietnam--movements almost all the NATO intellectuals ignored in their elitist preoccupation with white Western Europe. And one does not make this case now with the cheap wisdom of hindsight. In fact, there were American intellectuals at the time--men such as C. Wright Mills, Dwight MacDonald, Paul Goodman and Norman Mailer--who did resist the tide of fashion and held onto a saving remnant of independent radicalism.

The second conceptual mistake the Fifties' liberals made was "the end of ideology" mischief, popularized by Daniel Bell's book bearing that unfortunate axiom. Bell's theory expressed the remarkable idea that all the great structural problems of America had been solved, and all that was required now were small adjustments, some minor technological tinkering with the soft machine at the top.

The foolishness of this notion has been proved many times by the mass movements and social dislocations of the Sixties. But the same problems were all there during the Fifties, too: between 30,000,000 and 40,000,000 poor people, the growth of the arms budget, McCarthyism, the oppression of women, imperialism, migrant farm workers, slums, the destruction of the environment and, most clearly, the systematic racism of the South. But the intellectuals didn't care to look. Professor Bell's book was published in 1960, five years after Martin Luther King's bus boycott in Montgomery baptized the Southern freedom movement. Yet in Bell's large index, there are only four passing references to blacks, the longest one dealing with crime statistics. And none referred to the civil rights movement.

"The end of ideology" now seems to have been merely an autobiographical epitaph for a generation of weary sociologists who lost the capacity to imagine new insurgent movements taking root within tail-finned chrome America. It was an elitist generalization totally inapplicable to blacks, to the Third World or even to the generation of Americans in high school in 1960.

The third false premise of the Fifties was that--since only "pockets of poverty" remained--the next great question facing liberals was the "quality of civilization." They argued that the new issue confronting liberalism was identity and fulfillment in an affluent mass society. But the issue that faced liberalism in 1956, and still faces it today, is the ancient one of unequal distribution of wealth, power and land within America. Liberals have become absolute geniuses at inventing fads and fashions to evade this fundamental question of wealth and poverty. They have made ecology, the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the admission of mainland China to the United Nations, busing to achieve school integration, better TV programing--almost anything else--their central concern in their efforts to avoid facing up to the economic question the Populists had put first on the agenda of justice. The direct conditions of poverty--unemployment, rotting housing, inadequate health care, no land, no education, debts, foul sanitation--remain the heart of the problem. The pop sociologists might call it a "spiritual crisis" or a "crisis of confidence," but what it all boils down to is too many poor people.

The last false pillar of Cold War liberalism was the idea put forward by Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol and many others that the urgent need for a united front against Stalinism had made all the traditional distinctions among left, right and center obsolete, Again, I think this was an overreaction to the undeniable evil of Stalinism. One could oppose the Soviet Union without surrendering all sense of proportion, without equating America with nirvana and without equating the Soviet Union with all other varieties of socialism. But the fact is that certain distinctions between left and right endured through the Fifties, and endure today. The left has always had a sense of outrage against poverty and injustice, and the right has always defended order and property out of a sense of tradition.

During the Fifties, many liberals (who called themselves socialists) became conservatives out of guilt for having once been Marxists. They went straight from one failed God to a bright new religion called anti-communism without the slightest flirtation with doubt or agnosticism. Major intellectual figures such as Hook and Reinhold Niebuhr became no less dogmatic as anti-Communist liberals than they had been as socialists.

The most dramatic measure of the liberals' near-total capitulation during the Fifties can be seen in their response to the witch-hunts of Joe McCarthy. Here is a controversy in which the liberals should have appeared at their best: Liberty and reason were under assault by an anti-intellectual demagog. But the record of the liberal intellectuals during this stormy period is scandalous. Some, such as journalist James Wechsler and literary critic Granville Hicks, gave the names of former Communists to McCarthy's committee. Others wrote articles in liberal magazines agreeing with McCarthy's goals and questioning only his methods, while attacking his victims; they viewed McCarthyism as a necessary evil.

Irving Kristol could write in the March 1952 issue of Commentary: "There is one thing the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing." As late as July of 1954, Alan Westin wrote an essay in Commentary warning that the Communists were exploiting the issue of McCarthyism, and the following month critic Leslie Fiedler wrote an essay for Encounter mocking "the loud fears of the intellectuals" and then swinging into an all-out attack on the radicals.

If the intellectuals defaulted so shamelessly, how much resistance to McCarthyism could reasonably be expected from the professional politicians? Not very much. It seems almost unnecessary at this late date to document the default once again, but reading the faded yellow newspaper clippings of the early Fifties, one aches for a chance to replay history with a few pinch hitters.

When "the greatest deliberative body in the world"--the Senate of the United States--passed the historic bill making it a crime to be a member of the Communist Party (the Communist Control Act of 1954), one Senator voted in the negative: Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. All the heavy liberals--Humphrey, Morse, Douglas--voted yes.

In February of 1954, the Senate voted to appropriate an annual subsidy of $214,000 for Senator McCarthy's investigative committee. This was two years after tail gunner Joe had accused the Democrats of "20 years of treason" and called Adlai Stevenson a "Communist dupe." But only one lone vote was cast against the appropriation--by J. William Fulbright of Arkansas.

In July of 1953, the Senate passed a new McCarran Bill, which in effect circumvented the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The bill compelled witnesses before investigative committees to surrender their constitutional right against self-incrimination, to testify on the basis of immunity from prosecution; in other words, to inform. Only ten Senators voted (continued on page 246) Death of Liberalism (continued from page 122) against this bill, most of them conservatives such as Stennis of Mississippi, Kerr of Oklahoma and McClellan of Arkansas. Only two liberals joined them: Herbert Lehman of New York and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky. The others, such as Humphrey and Douglas, all went along, still trying to prove their own anti-communism.

In foreign policy, most of the liberals were mute as the CIA helped overthrow the leftist government in Guatemala; mute at the CIA's intervention in Iran; mute about the support for Chiang Kai-shek, Batista, Diem, Trujillo and all the other "free world" dictators; mute as the arms budget grew geometrically. And without the intellectuals to provide a better example, without sustained criticism and analysis from the left, the liberal Democrats enlisted as privates in the Cold War to prove themselves as tough-minded and "realistic" as John Foster Dulles. But they were too clever by half.

When they woke up, the permanent war economy and the military-industrial complex were an impregnable reality. Their own anti-Communist rhetoric became the official justification and sanction for Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs. And a new generation wanted to hold them accountable for their actions.

What I've tried to say here is not that the liberals should have acted like radicals during the Fifties but that they didn't even act like liberals. They weren't true to their own tradition of Jefferson, Holmes and Brandeis. They didn't take any risks in defense of freedom and reason once the McCarthy juggernaut got rolling. They informed and compromised and voted freedoms away just like the moderates and the reaction-aries. And that's what all the jabber about "the end of ideology" and "new consensus" was really all about.

Something else, something much less obvious, also happened to liberalism during the Fifties. It wasn't just that the Big Ideas of the old liberalism were wrong. It wasn't just that the politicians flunked the test of McCarthyism and that the intellectuals fought the Cold War as mindlessly as the generals. But the Democratic Party, the essential instrument of liberalism, began to abandon the working masses and became suburban and elitist. And it did this during a time when the grinding cycle of poverty still persisted beneath the surface of affluence, during a time of a flagging economic growth and two mini-recessions.

The Populists had attacked the bankers and special interests with a holy passion. The Progressives had assailed the monopolies and the big trusts. F. D. R. had attacked the "economic royalists." Harry Truman had made the "plutocrats" a central issue in 1948. But Adlai Stevenson kept himself aloof from the issue and after him Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey bent over backward to show they weren't the slightest bit antagonistic to big business. And this trend away from the blue-collar worker, away from the people who worked with their hands, began in the early Fifties.

On the issues of the Cold War and civil liberties, Adlai Stevenson conducted himself better than most public figures of his time. He was an attractive man of personal taste and decency. His campaign speeches, often drafted by John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, danced with wit and elegant phrases. He was a magnificent Tory. But beginning with Stevenson's two Presidential campaigns, the Democrats began the slow process of disengaging from the needs and hopes of the white lower middle class. Part of it was Stevenson's patrician style, the impression he gave of not really liking people or politics. And part of it was programmatic. Stevenson didn't talk much about economic problems--what the pols like to call "bread-and-butter issues." He was very good defending the United Nations or proposing a nuclear-test-ban treaty; but one rereads his old speeches, looking in vain for sustained passion over raising the minimum wage, or attacking price-fixing by giant corporations, or building more low-income housing, or pushing tax reform to help families earning under $10,000 a year.

In 1954, Irving Howe wrote an excellent essay in Dissent that tried to deflate the Stevenson cult, then so powerful among literary and liberal intellectuals. "Stevenson," Howe wrote, "was the first of the liberal candidates in the post-Wilson era who made no effort to align himself with the plebeian tradition or plebeian sentiments .... Just as Stevenson bewitched the intellectuals by miming, from on high, their political impulses, so did he fail to attract very much enthusiasm among the workers. By and large, they voted for him, but with little of the fervor they felt for Roosevelt and Truman .... Truman was one of the plebes, and after his triumph over Dewey, there was a remarkable elation in the Detroit auto plants .... A striking characteristic of Stevenson's campaign, as distinct from Roosevelt's or Truman's, was that he did not speak in the name of the poor or the workers .... The conservative press was always delighted to praise him for not indulging in Truman's 'demagogy'; that is, for not employing Truman's 'anti-plutocrat' vocabulary."

Howe correctly pointed out that "Truman was, if anything, slightly to the left of Stevenson." But the intellectuals fell in love with Stevenson for reasons that I cannot fully understand even now. Part of it might have been Stevenson's world-weariness, his civilized stance of being above politics--beyond ideology--that the intellectuals identified with. Part of it was surely Stevenson's personality, a compelling mixture of reason and wit. What is so hard to understand is why the liberals and intellectuals didn't lavish their affection on Stevenson's great rival, Estes Kefauver, a better liberal and a better politician. Kefauver, who stood in the tradition of Southern Populism, did talk about the things the workers cared about, and if he had been nominated in 1952 or 1956, I think the Democratic Party might not have begun the process of alienating the white workers who now vote for Wallace and cheer for Agnew.

Kefauver, bereft of polish or style, or the tragic quality the intellectuals saw in Stevenson, fought hard for the people Dos Passos liked to call "the working stiffs." Kefauver led the fight to prevent the "private power crowd" from taking over the Tennessee Valley Authority. He attacked the steel industry and the auto industry for overpricing. He beat the giant drug lobby and made the big companies lower the prices of medicines for the sick and the aged. In 1950, Congress passed the Celler-Kefauver Act, an antitrust law, and, in 1962, Kefauver got Congress to tighten the pure-food-and-drug laws. In the Senate, he opposed the seniority system and, in what was perhaps his most famous crusade, he went after the Mafia in 1950, even though it embarrassed a lot of big-city Democrats and helped retire Mayor O'Dwyer of New York City.

But Kefauver was poor, and his crusades antagonized all the powerful interests that share control of the Democratic Party. His crime-busting hearings upset the big-city machines. His maverick voting record frightened the party regulars. His folksy, coonskin-hat style turned off the intellectuals. So he was never nominated for President, even though in 1952 he went directly to the people and won 13 Primaries and lost one, and came to the convention with the largest bloc of delegates. He had run that spring in the New Hampshire primary and defeated President Truman, who had not yet announced his decision not to run. But at the convention, the big-city leaders, the unions and President Truman and the party establishment helped nominate the man who had not entered a single primary--Adlai Stevenson.

From 1960 to 1968, the liberal Democrats had a chance to govern again. But throughout that whole time, they were unable to think up a single large programmatic idea that ventured beyond the formulas of the New Deal. It required Richard Nixon to propose the Family Assistance Program. Liberalism became a set of bureaucratic routines to defend, rather than a new vision to fight for. In fact, the blue-suited army of liberal bureaucrats and technocrats found ways to make things even worse for the working stiffs.

They made things worse, first, by building up ghetto hopes with a symphony of speeches promising an end to poverty. But when the poverty program turned out to be just another patronage hustle (which is precisely what happened--the money went to bureaucrats, sociologists and contractors), the disappointed hopes fell back into rage and the aroused expectations of a better tomorrow exploded in the streets.

In August of 1970, Congresswoman Edith Green of Oregon finally blew the whistle on the poverty hucksters. She said that billions of dollars intended for the poor had been diverted into private research companies "more interested in profits than poverty." Much of the money, she said, went to $100-a-day consultants, "many of whom used to be high-level Government officials in Washington." She added: "Since 1965, OEO has spent over $500,000,000 on studies conducted by experts on research and evaluation of the poor. Most of the antipoverty money never gets in the hands of the poor."

The liberal Democrats also made things worse by ignoring the very real problems of the millions of white workers who earn between $5000 and $10,000 a year. These families are not part of the media's "affluent society." Although they see all the products of that abundance--cars, appliances, jet planes--each day on television, the only way for them to share the affluence is to go broke. The white lower class saw no new anti-poverty programs launched in their rundown neighborhoods. In New York City, John Lindsay set up neighborhood task forces for all the black and Puerto Rican communities in 1966, but he didn't start them in low-income white sections until after he began to run for re-election in 1969. What the liberals failed to do, while they had the chance to govern, was devise programs such as national health insurance, or a guaranteed annual wage, or air-pollution control, or free day-care centers, programs that helped blacks and poor whites alike. Instead, they pushed piecemeal programs for blacks (busing, for example)--programs that didn't work.

By promising and not delivering to the blacks and by forgetting the low-income whites, the liberal Democrats managed to anger and polarize both halves of the other America. Although in power for eight years, they failed to make any significant improvement in the day-to-day life of America's 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 poor. Blue-collar whites and slum blacks competed bitterly for the same scarce jobs and the same scarce admissions to colleges, while the aerospace corporations, the oil industry, the insurance companies, the defense contractors, the conglomerates and the large banks continued to make immense profits. And the Federal regulatory agencies--the ICC, FCC, FTC, FDA--continued to be dominated by the very industries and corporations they were supposed to be supervising in the name of the consumers. And all the while, the sullen resentment among the people we would come to call the Silent Majority began to rise and swell. They might not have gone to Harvard, but they could see what was going on.

They saw those liberal professors drafting plans that would make the sons of steelworkers and the daughters of secretaries bear the brunt of school integration, while the professors' own kids were going to exclusive private schools or all-white public schools in the suburbs. They saw the liberal bureaucrats construct all those anti-poverty programs for Watts and Harlem but none for the white sections of Akron or Utica or Gary. They heard the Kerner Commission tell them the number-one problem in America was "white racism," while their children couldn't get into college, and they owed money on the house, and there were layoffs at the plant. They saw the faddish media romanticize the Woodstock Nation while ignoring their own culture of bowling alleys, Merle Haggard and stock-car racing.

The elitism of the liberal intellectuals reached its apotheosis with Eugene McCarthy's campaign in the spring of 1968. Not since the first campaign of Adlai Stevenson did the liberal eggheads so adore a living politician. Everyone, it seemed, from George Kennan and Murray Kempton to Simon & Garfunkel, was on the hustings stumping for Clean Gene.

I campaigned hard for Robert Kennedy that spring for several reasons, the most important being that he understood that poverty was the heart of the matter. He communicated his passion to the white working masses, and this made it possible to forge a new majority of the victimized. Kennedy, like Kefauver, offered liberalism a second chance to stand again with Roosevelt's "one third of a nation," ironworkers as well as Indians, cops as well as chicanos. McCarthy, on the other hand, wasn't comfortable in the company of the poor--black or white. He twice told audiences in Oregon that "the educated people vote for me, and the less educated people vote for my opponent, and I think you ought to bear that in mind as you go to the polls here on Tuesday."

Shortly after Robert Kennedy was murdered. Paul Cowan wrote a piece for The Village Voice describing George Wallace campaigning in the small textile towns around Boston. He quoted several of the Irish Catholic workers who had come to cheer Wallace as saying that they had originally preferred Robert Kennedy. He quoted one Wallace enthusiast as saying of Kennedy, "He wasn't like the other politicians. I had the feeling he really cared about people like us." Cowan, who had not supported Kennedy, concluded by writing, "I realized for the first time how important Robert Kennedy's candidacy had been. He was the last liberal politician who could communicate with white working-class America."

The conventional wisdom, from The New Republic to the National Review, now has it that the ethnic workers have moved to the right in backlash against student demonstrators, hippies and blacks. Although that, of course, has been a factor, I don't believe it's been the major factor. The workers have gone to the right because the old liberalism has made their life worse--worse with inflation, worse with bureaucracy, worse with Vietnam, worse by ignoring them and making promises to the blacks. And quietly laughing at their life style ("greasers, hicks, Philistines") all the while.

Yet the record shows that when newstyle Populists have attempted to talk directly to the blue-coliar class, they've been remarkably successful. The white workers are open to a fresh alternative to Wallace, but old-fashioned liberals can't provide that alternative because their past record of mistakes robs them of credibility.

In 1968, I watched Robert Kennedy win the Indiana and Nebraska primaries. These are not liberal states. He won by standing up and shouting in places such as New Albany and South Bend. Indiana, standing up in the town squares with his shirttail hanging out and his hair flopping into his eyes and shouting about taxes and war and priorities and local control. And he won every backlash county in Indiana that had gone for George Wallace in 1964.

In 1969, 44-year-old Pete Flaherty was elected the new mayor of Pittsburgh, a tough steel town that is not known as a bastion of reform. He won in a campaign that forged a coalition of blacks, students and low-income whites behind his attacks on the "Mellons and Carnegies," the "union bosses" and the "corrupt political machine." The day after Flaherty was elected, with 59 percent of the vote, The Pittsburgh Press carried this description of his headquarters: "At one stage in the night, the oldest person to be found in a Flaherty votecounting room was 19 years old. Typical of the youthful Flaherty followers was Barbara Lembersky, 19, a Pitt student from Squirrel Hill. She had been typing, stuffing envelopes and talking up her man for months. 'I like the way he responds to people' was the reason she gave for her loyalty. And then there was the 55-year-old man who voted for Wallace for President, and then threw his support to Pete for mayor. 'I just wanted to rock the boat,' he explained."

In November of 1970, despite all the predictions of a national right-wing trend, economic liberals William Proxmire and Philip Hart were returned to the Senate and John Gilligan was elected governor of Ohio. Bella Abzug, Father Robert Drinan and Ron Dellums were elected to the House. Those candidates who sounded most like they were running for sheriff of Tombstone--California's George Murphy and Illinois' Ralph Tyler Smith, for example--were soundly defeated.

Let me try to be more concrete about what I mean by a new Populist program. The enormous wealth of America is unequally distributed among its citizens: Twenty percent of American families earn between $1000 and $4000 a year, and 75 percent of these families are white. Our laws and institutions--from expense accounts to bail and the cost of lawyers and doctors to the influence of lobbyists to the tax structure--all favor the rich. We have an economic system that housing expert Charles Abrams has described as "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor." This is how Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas put it in his book Points of Rebellion: "The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people. Percentage depletion for oil interests is, of course, the most notorious.... When we get deeply into the subject we learn that the cost of public housing for the poorest 20 percent of the people is picayune compared to the Federal subsidy of the housing costs of the wealthiest 20 percent.... The 1968 Report of the National Commission on Civil Disorders tells us that during a 30-year period when the Federal Government was subsidizing 650,000 units of low-income housing, it provided invisible supports, such as cheap credit and tax deductions, for the construction of more than 10,000,000 units of middle- and upper-class housing. ... Like examples are numerous in our tax laws, each marking a victory for some powerful lobby. The upside-down welfare state helps the rich get richer and the poor, poorer."

The litany of tax injustices is endless. As we know, there are millionaires who pay no taxes at all, while poor people sometimes go into debt to pay their taxes. Yet this tax system grew more unequal when liberal Democrats such as Kennedy and Johnson were in power. It would seem to me that the first plank in a new Populist platform would be a radical restructuring of our tax laws; an end to Government subsidies for giant corporations and industries; an increase in corporate, real-estate, inheritance, stock-transfer and bank-assets taxes; and the reduction of taxes for all families earning less than $10,000 a year. The beneficiaries of such reforms would be mostly blue-collar families, whose lives now can be wrecked by sudden illness, death, unemployment or divorce. Recently, such families have voted their fears because so few politicians have offered the countervailing incentive of a larger share of America's affluence. The only possible way to compete with a Nixon or a Wallace, who appeals to their racism and paranoia, is to appeal directly to their pocketbooks, to their self-interest.

In this bewildering time of simultaneous inflation and recession, I find it incomprehensible that no Democratic Presidential candidate has mounted a campaign to raise the national minimum wage to $2.75 or $3.00 an hour. (The Louis Harris public-opinion survey of August 27, 1970, showed that "21 percent of the nation's households have experienced a layoff, or a cut in overtime, or a reduction of the regular work week. Coupled with rises in the cost of living, this cut in take-home pay has led 30 percent of the American people to conclude that their standard of living today is lower than it was a year ago.... Young people in the $5000 to $10,000 income bracket report having been hardest hit.")

Let me suggest two more forgotten areas where a Populist movement might do some good. One is the alphabet soup of Federal regulatory agencies. Many of them were started during the New Deal to protect the ordinary consumer from price fixing, inferior products, misleading advertising and other corporate abuses. Ralph Nader and his Raiders have now published three books on these agencies and they contain all the evidence--hard, cold facts--anyone needs to prove that these bureaucracies have all been failures.

A book on the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), by Robert Fellmeth, documents how the ICC has become "an elephant's graveyard for political hacks," how the public is excluded from the decision-making process, how important studies of transportation problems have been suppressed, how railroad mergers are rubber-stamped, how conglomerates cheat the consumer, how truck-driving safety regulations go unenforced, how rate bureaus encourage monopolistic price fixing. A report by Nader Raiders Fellmeth, Edward Cox and John Schulz asserted, "There is little doubt that tooth pastes, mouthwashes, deodorants, cleansers, soaps and so on are priced between five and twenty times their cost of production. The American people must eventually grow tired of paying one dollar for a tube of tooth paste that costs no more than 15 cents to make."

Nader's associate John Esposito has revealed that Consolidated Edison of New York pays its board chairman more in salary in a single year than it spent on pollution-control research in the past five years; and another associate, James Turner, has claimed that Caltec Citrus paid a fine of $6000 when it was charged with adulterating and watering its orange juice. Estimated company profits as a result of this practice were $1,000,000.

The point seems clear. Many huge corporations are cheating consumers, mostly low-income people, and the Federal regulatory agencies aren't doing much about it, though such protection is supposed to be their only function. If some ballsy liberal politician, armed with these facts, would go to the white workers in Gary, Indiana, or Muskegon, Michigan, I think he would find a receptive audience. But instead, most liberals repeat the stale slogans of the New Frontier and the New Deal, and pander to the backlash by promising to "stop coddling criminals." Meanwhile, they coddle the corporations, which are stealing much more--and getting away with it.

Another problem area the unions and the traditional politicians have ignored is industrial safety. According to the Department of Labor, 2,000,000 injuries and 14,000 deaths occur every year in the workplace. And according to Nader, who is preparing a book on the subject, many companies suppress or underestimate their accident statistics. Nader says, for example, that a large beryllium producer warned a company doctor that he would be fired if he published a report on beryllium poisoning among employees of the factory.

Many of the deaths and diseases that strike industrial workers are caused by the environment they work in. Steelworkers get silicosis, a condition that causes paroxysms of coughing. More than 100,000 of the country's 1,000,000 textile workers have contracted byssinosis, or brown lung disease, caused by inhaling cotton dust. And many thousands of coal miners suffer from pneumoconiosis, or black lung.

Unions such as the United Mine Workers (U. M. W.) have been as much accessories to this slow murder as the mine-owners and the politicians. According to the August 17. 1970, Newsweek, "The generally unimpressive industrial record in the U. S. has a good many causes, none of them reflecting much credit on those responsible. Union leaders too often are willing to barter safety for a wage hike. Employers tend to try to coax a little more life from worn-out and unsafe machinery. State safety standards are too often antiquated and ineffective, and there aren't enough inspectors to enforce the ones on the books."

A tax system that favors the rich and punishes the poor. Federal regulatory agencies dominated by rich corporations, and factories and mines that killed more Americans in 1969 than the war in Vietnam: These are a sorry bunch of monuments to be left by the liberal Democrats, who have governed us for so much of the past 40 years.

The remedies are as obvious as they are radical. In Galbraith's concise and precise words, the cures lie in "taxing the rich, regulating private enterprise and redeeming power and policy from military and civilian bureaucracy."

Amen.

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I'd like to conclude with a few personal notes. I used to be a liberal antiCommunist myself. My first vote, at the age of 22, went to John Kennedy in 1960, and my first enrollment was in New York's Liberal Party. But I quickly began to learn the limits of that school of politics. Liberal pundits have often attributed the alienation of my generation to a variety of causes, from the bomb to the murder of John Kennedy. But, in fact, it was Kennedy's policies that began to make me a radical.

On the mild April night on which Cuba was invaded in 1961, I was a copy boy on the late New York Daily Mirror. I was in the wire room when the first bulletins about the landing at the Bay of Pigs arrived, heralded by jingling bells on the A. P. machine. I couldn't believe it. Fidel was a hero to me. How could J. F. K. do it? I felt so enraged, so betrayed, that I burned the first five takes of copy, and was, of course, fired on the spot. The next few days, I stayed home and watched Adlai Stevenson, then--U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, lie his head off about America's role in the invasion. And so I began to learn what liberalism was all about.

In the next year, I heard Bob Dylan sing at Folk City in the Village. Then I met Tom Hayden and became a charter member of SDS. I began to read the books and pamphlets of C. Wright Mills. I met Bob Moses and Chuck McDew and the rest of the first generation of SNCC organizers. And I got the flash that there was something out there, beyond the frontiers of the New Frontier, that was more humane, more gutsy and more creative.

I spent the rest of the Sixties getting disappointed by established liberals. When we officially launched SDS in June of 1962, Michael Harrington and the oldtime socialists in the League for Industrial Democracy Red-baited us, changed the lock on our offices on East 19th Street and prohibited us from distributing our founding manifesto, the "Port Huron Statement." We were hardly much more than militant liberals then, and the Port Huron document didn't even mention socialism, or imperialism, or violence. But anti-Communist paranoia strikes deep in the Old Left. We called only for "nonviolence" and the "realignment of the political parties" and "participatory democracy," and echoed Mills's idea of the university as the new catalyst of social change. But the oldtime socialists on the L. I. D. board treated us the way the sweatshop owners treated union organizers in the Twenties--they locked us out and called us Reds.

In August of 1964, I stood on the honky-tonk boardwalk at At'antic City in a vigil for the domestics and poor farmers of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (M. F. D. P.), who asked to be seated instead of the racist regulars, who were really for Barry Goldwater anyway, at the Democratic National Convention. We held up pictures of the martyred Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, and sang freedom songs all day and all night. For a few heady hours, it seemed that the M. F. D. P. had enough votes inside the credentials committee to force an open floor fight in front of the television cameras. But then the liberals were informed by L. B. J. that Humphrey might not get the nomination for Vice-President if they didn't quell the M. F. D.P. rebellion.

The choice was clear--stand with the poor, semiliterate blacks of rural Mississippi or stand by Hubert Horatio Humphrey. The liberals chose Humphrey. One by one, they came before the M. F. D. P. caucus in an old church, urging the delegation to accept a symbolic compromise of two voting seats at the convention. Bayard Rustin, Walter Reuther, Roy Wilkins, Wayne Morse, Joe Rauh, they all made this spineless pitch. There was no floor fight. The 11 votes on the credentials committee melted away under the pressure. And Fannie Lou Hamer went home to Ruleville, Mississippi.

Then came the invasion of the Dominican Republic, black power, student power, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, finally, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Hubert Humphrey and George Meany always seemed to be playing tackle for the other side. The 1968 convention was the clearest example of the corruption of the old liberalism. There was Hubert, finally being nominated for President on the votes of union delegates, and on a pro-war platform. There was Hubert, being advised by Bayard Rustin, and being courted for the Vice-Presidential nomination by Muskie, Fred Harris and Shriver. And there were the police, beating up kids, medics, reporters, anything that moved, on the streets. There was Hubert, making a florid acceptance speech that didn't even mention the Chicago police, making it behind weapons carriers and barbed wire; and a few hours later, there were the police, beating up Eugene McCarthy's staff inside their hotel rooms. It was like a phony apocalyptic ending to a bad bigbudget movie.

But there was to be a crazy coda--the Chicago conspiracy trial. In February of 1970, five of the Chicago Eight, later called Seven, were convicted in a "compromise verdict," and all eight were put in jail by Judge Julius Hoffman on contempt charges. We didn't know then if they would be released on bail. Along with my friends Paul Cowan and Paul Gorman, I dropped everything I was working on and began to visit and telephone any liberal I knew who had some influence, in an effort to organize public pressure for the defendants' release. Of the eight, I regarded only Hayden as a close friend, while of the others, I considered Jerry Rubin, for example, personally and politically obnoxious. But I thought it was a question of civil liberties, and that influential liberals would respond on that basis.

I phoned Ted Kennedy twice, but I couldn't interest him in making any kind of statement, even the most moderate one on the narrow issue of bail. Gorman got the brush-off from Eugene McCarthy, for whom he wrote speeches during the 1968 campaign. Cowan called columnist James Wechsler and was given a lecture on how the defendants and their lawyers had behaved so miserably, how they "wanted to lose," how "their antics were disgusting."

It was like watching an instant replay of the Fifties, when the collapse of the vital center made McCarthyism possible. Now the liberal center was caving in again, as soon as things began to get a bit rough.

In the months immediately after the conspiracy trial, the middle continued to disintegrate under the energetic attack of the right. The television networks were intimidated by Agnew's speeches into defensive banality. Commentary published an article by Walter Goodman implying that Agnew's demagoguery in the 1970 campaign marked the harmless outer limit of Nixonian repression. Tom Wolfe published an influential article that, in Pete Hamill's apt words, "made it fashionable to sneer at the oppressed." And Hubert Humphrey repudiated his former support for gun-control legislation.

When black and chicano and Indian militants get jailed and shot, it's an invisible event, and the center doesn't even feel obliged to organize a defense committee anymore. Can anyone remember the names of the two blacks killed at Jackson State? Or even the white student killed by police at Santa Barbara?

I am not an ideologue. There is no single system of thought that seems nearly adequate to me. I'm much more comfortable dealing with the concrete than with the abstract. I can define myself only as a radical and as a democrat, as an activist and a skeptic. I have tried to argue here that the old orthodoxy of Cold War Liberalism is used up, that it is a dying hand on the present. I have also suggested that we need to rediscover a usable past within America to help chart a radical future.

If I have learned anything these years since the night I burned the first news of the Bay of Pigs, it is that movements make history; movements with ordinary citizens, and not organizations or personalities. People in motion generating energy move time forward. There are a variety of such mass movements in the American experience that we might identify with and learn from: The American Revolution itself, with its models of Tom Paine and Sam Adams. The abolitionists, the Populists and the socialism of Eugene Debs. Susan Anthony and the feminist movement that won the vote. The black radicalism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The literary radicalism of Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens and Heywood Broun. And an older liberalism, symbolized by Fiorello LaGuardia and Louis Brandeis, committed to liberty and equality, before it became spoiled by McCarthyism and the petty compromises of power. And a tradition not recently much in fashion--the wobblies of Joe Hill. Perhaps we should confront Nixon and his band of Babbitts from behind the banner the I. W. W. displayed during the triumphant textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912: "Bread and Roses Too."