The New Shape of American Politics

...David Rockefeller candidly told Senator Ribicoff, big money is not interested in social problems on any other basis...

...By September, 1964, he writes, the Johnson camp knew that it could beat Goldwater running, as LaGuardia used to say, on a laundry ticket...

...But, and perhaps this is the most crucial criticism of this whole approach, all the Comsat talk evades a most basic issue...

...For the current Congress is, in part at least, a consequence of the exhaustion of the Kennedy-Johnson program (this happened, of course, when it was passed into law) and the absence of any real Johnson program...

...But how, then, do those groupings which differ on foreign policy relate to one another on domestic issues...

...And here again there is an obvious and wide-ranging agreement on this point on the democratic Left...

...But then, a turn to the Right in American politics began, not in November of 1966 but almost a year earlier...

...A. Philip Randolph's Freedom Budget is a clear alternative to Creative Federalism...

...White contends that the President took the 8 advice of both factions, that he developed his political ideas at the same time that he fashioned his stunning majority...

...The Leftist version of the thought went: only an opponent of the war can genuinely advocate social programs because there must be peace before anything can really be done to do away with poverty, the slums and all the rest of the domestic scandals...

...The Republican party is now going to adopt a program of "ream tionary Keynesianism," that is, of businessdirected and profit-producing state intervention into the economy...

...The harm that such a tactic could work in the coming period is incalculable...

...But U.S...

...For better or worse, it will probably continue as long as the war itself...

...But another group, White says, was in favor of reducing the margin of victory— of consciously sacrificing some votes—in order to give the Johnson mandate greater political content...

...The key ideas in this approach—contracting social problems out to the corporation, the Comsat organizational structure, artificial respiration for the anachronistic structures of state and local government—have all been taken from the Johnson consensus...

...and so on...

...Johnson in Vietnam is also opposed to cuts in the war on poverty, favors the Freedom Budget, and so on...

...In effect, all of the ideas that the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition had frustrated during the previous quarter of a century were approved...

...The power of the federal government is now desperately needed to help redesign the antiquated structures of state and municipal government...

...In part, the war in Vietnam made the political atmosphere of the nation more conservative than it had been a year earlier...

...But in addition, Johnson had not really made his mandate specific and precise in 1964...

...So the Republicans, and their Dixiecrat allies, were given a magnificent new chance and there are signs that they will take advantage of it with greater sophistication than in the past...

...It was this kind of thinking which led U.S...

...it needs programs that are much more specific than the rhetoric of the Great Society...

...The issue was how to win, and there was a split on the question among the President's staff people...

...One of the key notions in this approach centers around Comsat, the public-private corporation which re9 ceived a free and profitable gift of all the tax-supported space research...

...And those new houses will require strong public sector action and even, as John Kenneth Galbraith told the Urban America Conference last year, an attack on the very idea that the market mechanism is the best way to determine the social and aesthetic uses of land...

...then the outrages of Title I housing and Urban Renewal will simply be repeated on a much grander scale...

...And the most significant thing about this new program of theirs is that they are borrowing it from Johnson himself...

...Of course, war makes internal progress infinitely more difficult, and on a large scale, perhaps even improbable...

...It must come to reject conservatism in the guise of "Creative Federalist...

...he is to be shunned on domestic questions as well...

...Gypsum, to take one case recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, to start experimenting in the slum rehabilitation business...

...it faces up to the government's responsibility ($185 billion of it) ; and it stresses the need for an enormous expansion of new low-cost housing...

...in the same camp, because the Goldwater alternative on the Right was utterly intolerable...

...Walter Reuther and Robert Kennedy have both spoken of nonprofit corporations doing work in the slums...

...personal consumption spending will be in the range of $465 billion and private investment (domestic and foreign) in the range of $125 billion...

...Therefore, the supporter of the war is not to be opposed simply in the area of foreign policy...

...First, over and beyond Vietnam, inflation and all the rest, the recent election reflected a lack of Presidential leadership...

...Johnson's war and economic policies had vaguely disenchanted a significant portion of the electorate, yet there was no "Great Society" thrust to counterbalance this uneasiness...

...By and large the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition, the legislative majority party in the United States from 1938 to 1964, triumphed...

...There is, alas, no possibility of completely transcending the profit motive in the immediate future...

...In some of his philosophic speeches of two years ago, the President spoke of "creative federalism...

...They include the black and white poor, the Negroes generally, both unorganized and organized wage workers, people who live in cities, liberals, radicals, etc...

...It is reliably reported that the phrase was invented by Richard Goodwin but, more to the point, it was picked up by Max Ways in a very important article in Fortune last year...

...In 1964 a basically conservative version of Keynesianism could rally Henry Ford and Walter Reuther, Senator Long and Martin Luther King Jr...

...In the debates within the Kennedy Administration, Heller had stood for a tax cut and against direct social investments as proposed, for example, by Galbraith...

...10 The only hope of developing regional planning authorities and forcing the suburban middle class into a modicum of responsibility (to match their maximum of federal subsidies) is by having Washington specify that its mighty resources are Only available on the condition that the localities and states change their ancient ways...

...But the conservative, Creative Federalist line takes the communication satellite give-away as its model and not, say, TVA or the cooperative movement...

...For this nation does have the resources to build in Harlem and Watts and Appalachia even as it destroys in Vietnam...

...There are no more class and ideological conflicts, Ways argued, for we now confront problems rather, than fight over issues...

...As a participant (mainly through SANE) in the movement to end the war, I do not want to say to slum dwellers and migrant farm workers, "You must wait for your houses and your food and your dignity until my friends and I succeed in forcing the President to make peace...

...Moreover, as the U.S...

...Rehabilitation" is the key word these days and it suggests a utopia in which the crisis of the cities will be solved with a little paint, pre-fab kitchens, and rat poison...

...And his tax rebate proposal, at least in the form in which the Republicans are picking it up, once again charts a conservative and businessoriented course...

...There are, to be sure, liberal versions of this scheme which might offer hopeful points of departure for social change...

...the personal vigor and attractiveness of many of the Republican candidates...

...This tactic, according to the Republican philosophers, will revitalize local democracy in the United States...

...The American economy . . . is a lavish consumers' and investors' economy, where the President even chose to spend nearly $6 billion, in the single fiscal year just closed, for the bauble of space exploration...

...This country cannot continue to live off the accomplishments of the last generation's lib• eralism...

...Or let me put it another way...

...They wanted, in short, program and content, not just consensus...

...If this happens, the worst of all worlds will be assured...

...One group simply called for the largest possible vote, a massive, irrefutable consensus against Goldwaterism...

...And these programmatic comings and goings obviously have a profound relevance to the way in which the democratic Left is going to regroup its scattered forces and prepare for the two gloomy years that lie ahead...

...these, most notably, are the bulk of the labor movement...

...The most intransigeant trade unionist supporter of Mr...

...is unlikely that it will be passed into law...

...Johnson's own program...

...Moreover, there is now, for the first time in decades, the possibility of a realistic, coherent but reactionary alternative to the moderately liberal welfare statism which has dominated American life since the days of Franklin Roosevelt...

...Now the Creative Federalists are calling for Comsats to rebuild the cities, to end poverty, etc...

...Only a convergence of imbecilities brings the light-minded Left to concur with the hard-faced Right in asserting that the Vietnam War imposes [that is, requires— M. H.] neglect of the poor...

...And, on the other hand, a majority of the middle-class liberals and radicals plus some of the most militant Negroes are deeply opposed to the military commitment in Southeast Asia...

...a natural swing of the pendulum after the Democratic landslide of two years ago...

...The former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers is generally credited with originating the idea of returning a specified percentage of federal tax revenues back to states and municipalities...

...Yet in this analysis of what the new Congress will mean, I propose to stay away from most of these familiar points and concentrate instead on supposedly un-American considerations of political program...

...But if the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition adopts a version of "Creative Federalism" they will have come up with a workable and reactionary alternative to social progress...

...ghetto riots...

...With his lopsided majorities in the House and Senate, Johnson was able to pass into law just about the entire old domestic program of Amercian liberalism...

...So the executives are to be made city planners—if the price is right...

...Such stern necessities, however, are not talked about in the new anti-slum idyll of the corporate theorists...

...For important elements on the Left have apparently adopted the reactionary notion that the nation now faces a choice of guns or butter...

...And for all the gloom in the present situation, the task of the democratic Left is quite clear...

...Many of the reasons for this disaster have already been copiously annotated in the daily and weekly press: a general feeling of unrest symbolized by the issues of Vietnam and inflation...

...Because now, for the first time in recent memory, the GOP is beginning to come up with a conservative alternative that amounts to something more than a litany of negatives addressed to the modern world...

...It stresses direct social investment...

...And he did not really have a program that he had presented to the people...

...Given the mathematics of representation, it lion...

...Oscar Gass, Commentary, November 1966...

...It can only be dealt with on the basis of regional and national planning...

...In The Making of a President 1964 Thedore White relates a revealing little anecdote...

...Johnson's opponents may be about to steal a large chunk of Mr...

...The most fascinating demonstration of this point has come from the Republican party...

...but it is a fact...

...11 Iv The problems arise, however, when one turns from program to strategy...

...The government is to underwrite a guaranteed money-making scheme in which business men would design a better urban environment and, presumably, social order...

...The poor have problems enough without having their fate made dependent on the effectiveness of the current campaign for a negotiated peace in Vietnam.* * "In economic measure, the war is small...

...In point of fact, the Johnson legislative program which won the President such praise for his mastery of the 1965 Congress was, by far and large, the work of John F. Kennedy and, in the notable case of Medicare, of Harry S. Truman...

...The third basic idea of Creative Federalism has been taken from Walter Heller...

...But, in reality, that was not the case...

...in part, some people had been convinced that the passage of inadequate solutions to problems that had been ignored for a generation constituted excessive political action...

...There is no possibility that this divergence can, at this moment, be resolved by discussion and debate...

...Practically no one mentions that the rehabilitation strategy will only work if three-quarters of the people now living in the tenements are evacuated to new housing, for the old units can only be made liveable if their density is drastically reduced before they are spruced up...

...In the name of "radicalism" some on the anti-war wing of the democratic Left (and on the Vietnam issue, that is where I take my own stand) have settled this complexity by the simple expedient of agreeing with the Rightists thesis that as long as the Vietnam war continues, just so long is it necessary to postpone social programs...

...In this situation, the programmatic imperatives of the democratic Left are clear enough—and tactics are all in a muddle...

...But these old horrors are, precisely, the "Creative Federalist" vision of the future...

...For the very same Congress which had said yes to all the KennedyJohnson items defeated the Johnson proposals on civil rights and 14B, attacked the poverty program, cut back on the enforcement of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, and almost defeated the Demonstration Cities bill...

...The single virtue of Goldwaterism was that it was impossible, a fantastic mood rather than a program...

...He had renewed an old consensus but he had neglected, for all the wheeling and dealing, to shape a new consensus...

...But the democratic Left should be united at least to the extent of saying that if the war is going to go on, then the black and white poor should not be made to pay for it...

...There are forces which are essential to any new liberal-Left majority in the United States but which also support the President's Vietnam policy...

...And it also lays a major stress on promoting profits for, as Mr...

...Its cost for 1966 may run about $12 bil12 There is a clear democratic Left program for the coming Congress...

...But in 1966 the Republicans by far and large returned to a moderate position and there was nothing to frighten the people into the Democratic column...

...In addition to these points, there is now a new relevance to the question of the role of private profit in social change...

...But there is going to be a very serious debate over whether it is necessary to guarantee the corporations a tax-paid bonanza in order to get Americans decently housed...

...Megalopolis does not obey the jurisdictions created in the Northeast by the politics of the late eighteenth century...

...Why...

...For that would have required conflict...

...He had contented himself with (often excellent) sweeping phrases...

...For, as the Journal explained, federal legislation may now make it possible to make an 8 to 10 per cent profit in such do-gooding...

...Johnson's lead and contract with the government to solve the various problems of the nation...

...And therefore businessmen should follow Mr...

...The fact may be seen as ironic, or even tragic...

...Given the backlash, the disarray within the civil rights movement, and the legislative reconstitution of the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition, the unions, the Negro movement, the churches, and the liberals must not allow differences with regard to Vietnam to shatter their essential agreement on immediate domestic problems...

...And yet it is imperative that a struggle begin, for new ideas such as those expressed in the Freedom Budget, even though they will not immediately prevail...

...Conference of Mayors itself observed this year, there must be an end to the scandal of awarding huge grants so that suburbs can create middle-class enclaves with lilywhite schools, federalized expressways and comfortable, segregated houses built with credit supplied by Washington...

...For if these various new proposals for social renewal are left to the tender mercies of those currently in charge of the "grass roots" power structures (real estate men, bankers, department stores, rich farmers, etc...