A Memo to the Ripon Society

...If an American was unconvinced that Liberal interventionism was indeed good for him, Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman - - at least in foreign affairs - - rammed the point home in his own earthy style...

...Some leading Liberals of the KennedyJohnson years began to adopt positions traditionally held by conservatives...

...Daniel Moynihart denouced Liberalism before a meetLag of the A.D.A...

...6 The Alternative April 1972...

...The Liberalism that grew up in American soil, that Liberalism which I have described as being alien to our culture, was a corrupted Liberalism that owed much more to our native self-righteousness than to the political philosophy P e t e r P. W i t o n s k i advanced by the lgth-century Classicists...

...When Senator Goldwater ventured to differ with this school of thought in 1964, he was quickly disposed of, and declared to be a dangerous fanatic, reeking of the 18th century...

...The argument was simple, and, up to a point, very cogent and very plausible: Communism was a genuine threat to the survival of the Christian West...

...Tom Milstein What follows is the final essay in our symposium: Socialism vs...

...The term conservative became such a bad one during the New Deal that many genuine conservatives, like Robert Taft, refused to accept it as being descriptive of their position, and called themselves "true Liberals...

...Now the discussion of puny nothing hess constitutes the literary regimen of journals like Ramparts and the gazettes from the louse underground...

...He intervened in the economy of the nation, and brilliantly succeeded in creatin~ the impression that he was successfully fighting the Great Depression that had brought him to power in the first place...

...In a very real sense it was Franklin Roosevelt who did the most to firmly establish Liberalism as our dominent ideology, although, as Sigmund Freud has reminded us in a remarkable study of an American Liberal politician, adumbrations of this Liberalism could be observed in the pathological behavior of Woodrow Wilson during and after World War I. The rise of American Liberalism had as much to do with the circumstances Roosevelt encountered upon becoming President - - circumstances which led him to reject the platform of his own party - - as it did with the break-up of the great Republican coalition forged by President William McKinley and Mark Hanna in the 1890s...

...Taftism ceased to personify Republican conservatism, and was succeeded by an outlook not very different from Liberalism...

...At the time of our initial involvement in Korea many conservative Republicans held their ground and followed the lead of Senator Taft in condemning the war as unconstitutional...

...we Americans were God's Elect...

...We are, in short, the embodiment of the Weberian Protestant Ethic and all that it has come to stand for...

...This amazing postulate was applied with equal vigor both domestically and internationally, and well sums up the interventionist mode of political behavior that has marked our politics until the present day...

...The important thing was that Roosevelt succeeded in convincing millions of Americans that he had in fact done something to end the Depression, and by so doing he not only established Liberalism as our reigning ideology, he also established the Democratic Party as our dominant political party...

...It was Roosevelt who introduced into our politics the dictum, "Where there is an American governmental will, there must be an American governmental way...

...So when Liberalism came to America, it wa.s quickly Calvinized, and the resulting ideology had very little in common with, say, John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith...

...The point of all this is simple...

...But when this classical Liberalism was exported to America it became something quite different from the ideology articulated by its progenitors: it became American Liberalism...

...The ashes of the great wave of New Frontier and Great Society social legislation could be seen smouldering in the riot-torn streets of Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark...

...therefore it was our duty to stop, or at least to contain, Communism...

...In foreign affairs, Roosevelt led us to victory against fascism in World War II - - once again, to make the world safe for Democracy...

...One recalls, somewhat sadly, the visceral reaction in the early 1950s to Senator Robert Taft's incisive critique of our Korean involvement as being somehow typical of the treatment conservative critics of American Liberalism received in those now distant days...

...Our native brand of Liberalism seemed to many (including many Republicans) to be invincible...

...One thinks of Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern...

...Our foreign policy was well-intentioned, and full of Liberal idealism, and such programs as the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Berlin airlift (to name but a few), all served to enhance the standing of interventionism on a grand scale as practiced by Liberal planners in Washington...

...Strange things began to happen...

...What Is Socialism and Will It Work...

...One thinks of Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Moynihan...

...It is not surprising therefore that for many years a majority of Americans viewed Liberalism as being good and conservatism, the ideology of the Republican Party, as being bad...

...Yes, yo u heard me correctly: the death oS American Liberalism...

...With the defeat of Goldwater, the way was cleared for the hideous conflict in Vietnam...

...From the very beginning this unique American Liberalism carried within itself the seeds of its ultimate destruction...

...Campus unrest, political division and an incipient breakdown in public morals began to lead many Americans, including Liberal Americans, to question the very premises of American Liberalism...

...and a kind of watered-down social democratic economics...

...What developed in its place was an illconsidered amalgam of Goodman Brown-like Protestantism, old-fashioned imperialism (always put in its best light: i.e., the White Man's burden, et.al...

...But many more Republicans, under mounting pressure from their constituencies and from the Liberal-dominated press, began to move closer to the interventionist views of the Liberals...

...others began to move away from the old Liberalism, but in the direction of a kind of deideologized radicalism, repeating in a watered-down form, many of the cliches of the New Left...

...Anyone bold enough to venture even a mild critique was consigned to Coventry with the greatest possible dispatch, as Barry Goldwater discovered in 1964...

...Future historians, no doubt, will say that the Vietnam War was inspired by the good intentions of two exceedingly Liberal Presidents who really wanted to make the world safe for democracy...

...and, notwithstanding the ingenious efforts of the Ripon Society, it has never succeeded in gaining a foothold on the Republican Party, where the appellation "LiberalRepublican" has always been considered, in William Buckley's now famous ban mot, to be "oxymoronic...

...To be sure, there were those, during the period of the Liberal ascendency, with more critical dispositions, who dissented from the prevailing trend, who objected to Wilson's sanctimoniousness and Roosevelt's grand design...

...The Republicans, he suggested, can be better Liberals than the Democrats simply because they are, by nature, better managers...

...who maintained, in short, that there were limits to intervention...

...By the time President John F. Kennedy vowed to liberate the world in his messianic inaugural address, his wildly interventionist views had become the views of just about every major American political figure, from Hubert Humphrey to Barry Goldwater...

...Better things are expected of this distinguished intellectual digest...

...The passing of American Liberalism has evoked no mourriing among its former disciples, no eloquent panegyrics, not even a doleful obituary in the New York Times...

...In terms of domestic policy this argument was well stated by Senator Brooke, when he maintained that his particular brand of Liberal Republicanism would differ from the Liberalism of the Democratic Party not in outlook or in the ends which it served, but only in the means to which it realized those ends...

...If the Republican Party looks to its past, to its own traditions, it will not only be able to regain the power and influence it held in the days of McKinley, but it will be able to guide America to a happy and constructive future, devoid of the kind of adventurism and domestic and international meddling that marked the years following the New Deal...

...The war was supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and this too helped Roosevelt's cause, since the war was also fought in the name of Liberalism...

...The Korean intervention was a watershed for American Liberalism...

...With the passing of Taft and his followers from the political scene, the conversion became almost complete, and some Republicans went so far as to try to out-Lib the Liberals--again, mainly in the area of foreign policy...

...and so we devoted our last number to this matter of political economy, featuring essays on the free market, contemporary capitalism and socialism...

...But since most of these critics were conservative Republicans in the tradition of Henry Cabot Lodge the Eider, they often failed to attract the kind of attention they deserved...

...President Nixon, I believe, is doing a good job both for the nation and the party...

...Their intellectually desolate pages abound with anguished revelations about various daydreams and favored spooks...

...and a new Left that held no respect for our traditional values began to emerge...

...America emerged from World Warr II as the most powerful nation in the history of mankind, and The Alternative April 1972 5 we were thus in a position to do just about as we pleased, which, in fact, we proceeded to do with some success...

...As Russell Kirk put it in the early fifties, the conservatives had been routed by the Liberals, and many of them were forced to adopt aspects of Liberal policy for reasons of survival...

...As a people we have always viewed ourselves and our political system as being about as perfect as anything on God's Earth...

...but as long as it gave the impression that it was doing a good job (something which it succeeded in doing for many years), there was nothing that could stand in its way, however preposterous its claims and promises...

...There were no limits to intervention, and FDR intervened with greater zeal than any previous American President...

...Like Toryism, Monarchism, Fascism and Utopian Socialism, Liberalism belongs to the ideological history of Europe, and hence, in its pristine form, it can never be American, and can only do intellectual damage to our political system, as students of politics have begun to notice in recent years...

...It paved the way for the apotheosis of American Liberalism-- the "crusade for freedom" in Vietnam...

...RET S OCIALISM IS a move, ment based on the working classes of capitalist societies, which aims to abolish human exploitation through the creation of a classless society...

...journals such as Commentary began to echo the views of National Review...

...American Liberalism is not Liberal," declared a leading French political journalist...

...To wit, the death of American Liberalism...

...They will also add that it was a war that transformed America and led to the Death of American Liberalism...

...Conservatives, you must remember, did not have a good press...

...This is most apparent in foreign policy, but it is also obvious, as followers of the Ripon Society know too well, in the area of domestic policy...

...who argued with Truman that our unique political system could not easily be translated into different cultures...

...it is simply to emphasize that it has played no such role in America...

...As one Eastern Republican put it: "Who can argue with an ideology that has vowed to make the world safe for Democracy, to end poverty and racialism at home and abroad, and to spread the AmeriCan way of life as far as it can be extended...

...That he failed to end the Depression, as Milton Friedman has reminded us in his essay "The Great Contraction," is now universally accepted by historians and economists - - but that was not very important at the time...

...I would suggest that Liberalism is not the future of the Republican Party, both because it is alien to our party, and because it is politically moribund...

...As our casualties mounted, and as dissent escalated at home, many Americans, for the first time, began to doubt that our will was still strong enough to get us our way...

...Not only has nobody bothered to write about this important event, nobody really seems to care very much...

...The reasons for this conservative conversion, I think are quite simple...

...and it is this intellectual hodge-podge that we Americans have called Liberalism...

...It is not even imperialistic, it is CocaColaist," he concluded, somewhat flippantly...

...He deserves the support, not only of the Ripon Society, but of the American conservative establishment...

...What moved us to such an elaborate exploration of economic systems was the conviction that, when the nation's ab%ndant and magniloquent dissent movements are denatured of their )ibberish, what remains is either a puny lump of nothing or, in the cases of those few movements based on palpable issues, a question of political economy or the organization of resources...

...In the post-war world there were few who could muster the strength to argue with that presumption...

...As of this present writing there are only two disciples of the old American Liberalism with any importance in the Democratic Party, and they are not very important...

...Capitalism, Which Way Progress...

...All this may have something to do with the nature of the Liberal beast...

...It became clear, by the time of the 1968 .election that interventionist Liberalism had had its day...

...Indeed, the very self-righteousness of our entire Liberal policy began to fall into doubt...

...Where there was an American governmental will, there was an American governmental way...

...Burke's words about the passing of Whiggery come to mind, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue...

...Lest the reader accuse me of antiLiberalism, I will note that I have the greatest possible respect for the Liberal tradition, at least in its European manifestation, which, I believe, has produced a brilliant and often persuasive body of thought...

...The answer to this question is simple: Conservatism, as exemplified by the present Administration, and by the overwhelming conservative prejudice of the American people...

...Indeed, we have depicted ourselves, and our country, as God's Elect...

...What then is our Party's future...

...A Memo to the Ripon Society on the Death of American Liberalism W HAT FOLLOWS are some short and hastily contrived thoughts on an event of great significance for what used to be called the "Liberal Wing" of the Republican Party...

...This is not to say that Liberalism has not played a constructive role in the political history of other nations, such as Great Britain...

...What we Americans considered to be good and altruistic, the rest of the world considered to be, again in the w()rds of a French writer, "the American Challenge...

...an event which, I hasten to add, has been assiduously ignored by the daily press, which has had more importtant things to concern itself with...

...Ideologically speaking, Liberalism - - despite its long hegemony in the Democratic Party - - h a s always been alien to our political tradition...

...and it is not surprising that Republicans of that old dispensation found it difficult to get reelected...

...We now conclude this symposium with the case for democratic socialism, by Tom Milstein, a member of the Young People's Socialist League...