A Traditional Class Issue
Howe, Irving
Let me add a word to Mike Harrington's valuable comment. It has become clear that—in the long run—the established interest groups and power blocs in American society seem to be weakening,...
...We need to explain how this war poisons the whole social atmosphere of the country and serves as an impediment to further advances in domestic life...
...And even some of the more progressive or worried mayors, like Lindsay of New York and Cavanaugh of Detroit, have begun crying out against "short-changing the cities," which is to say, against projected budget cuts in the inadequate present levels of federal aid for housing, education, and other programs to help the declining cities...
...The peace movement should be mature enough so that, while maintaining its full independent voice on the Vietnam War, it will be ready to join such an alliance in behalf of a budget which does not penalize the poor...
...Now, the people like ourselves who remain opposed to the Vietnam War have every obligation to keep pressing for steps that will bring peace...
...Perhaps they will discover that a struggle for increased social outlays, even if conducted with segments of the populaiton not yet fully enlightened on every 14 thing, may prove to be more fruitful than "nose to nose" confrontations with Ronald Reagan...
...The issue also vitally affects the Negro movement, all wings of it...
...But it would be disastrous if—in our revulsion from the human and social waste that this war entails—we were to accept the reactionary argument that the country must choose between guns and butter...
...And most important, there seems to be a growing section of the population, especially among the young, who respond to politics in terms not of interest groups but of political "styles" and moral or pseudo-moral appeals...
...In the last election it became clear, for example, that labor could not necessarily deliver the votes assumed to be at its disposal...
...Simply put, the issue is: Who will pay for the Vietnam War...
...This is a fact that those of us committed to the strategy of "coalition politics" will have to consider very seriously...
...It does confront "alienation...
...Also, there are major counter-pressures (e.g., "white backlash") which can lure people into voting against their own interests...
...We will have to come back to this theme...
...That argument was open to attack even during the Second World War, when it was used to justify profiteering on top and constrictions upon labor below...
...How curious that opponents of "welfarism," like the tumid William Buckley, fail to muster indignation in regard to these hand-outs...
...And finally, in case of a tax increase, there will be the urgent problem of who gets taxed most: those who have or those who haven't...
...More urgently put: Will we be conned into the outrage of having the war used as a pretext for the reduction 13 of social needs and the dismantling of the already inadequate poverty program...
...As I say, the issue is decidedly oldfashioned, a clear-cut division of class interests...
...And the problem will also be confronting the "New Left" students, those who have been properly eloquent about participation of their poor in the antipoverty program but were not overwhelmingly visible during last year's campaign to raise minimum wages...
...But right now the country faces a political-social issue which largely, as it happens, takes on the traditional character of a struggle between class interests...
...In the New York Times (December 7, 1966) James Reston lists a number of "fat cat subsidies" which could be cut from the federal budget —these range from $160 million a year to provide services for private aircraft run by corporations, to over $100 million a year in services to large factory farms, to more than $500 million a year in subsidies to the merchant marine...
...The issue is of a kind on which the trade unions, whatever their faults, can effectively pressure—it lies within their realm of experience...
...There are non-military items in the federal budget, such as the $70 billion five-year space program (announced as projects "beyond the moon") and the plans for supersonic airliners, which remain untouched in President Johnson's budget projections...
...It may not bring "meaning in depth" to the bored and the empty...
...These "prestige" items are, in the present political climate, less vulnerable to attack than is help to the run-down cities and the rotting ghettos...
...it certainly has no merit now...
...It cannot cope with psychic malaise...
...What is obviously required here— and in their testimony before Congress, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin have given a lead—is to reactivate the kind of limited-issue coalition which led in the past to the passage of the education bill and the Civil Rights Act...
...It has become clear that—in the long run—the established interest groups and power blocs in American society seem to be weakening, perhaps disintegrating...
...But it does vitally and immediately affect the lives of millions of human beings—and that is partly what being a radical means: to care about the immediate condition, as well as the longrange fate, of those millions of human beings...
...The coming months may prove a test...
...It will not clear up the Oswald case...
...Pretext is exactly the word...
Vol. 14 • January 1967 • No. 1
