Is This Country Cracking Up?
Howe, Irving
The obvious answer is, No of course not. But there are signs and portents. It's a strange moment. There is a lot of social uproar in the country. With the possible exception of China, no...
...Seeing the more sensible protests against escalation of the Vietnam War go unheeded, the young radicals are overcome with frustration...
...They do not reflect upon the likelihood of a severe rightist reaction to the contemporary political mood, a reaction that would manifest itself in the vocabulary of moralism and a call for a return to traditional American verities...
...262 And that is why liberals and radicals must repeat, in confronting the President, what Cromwell once said to the Long Parliament: In the name of God, go...
...but their apprehension as to the sheer phoniness of much that is happening in this country seems to me beyond question...
...Conflict, change, motion everywhere...
...In their powerlessness they react through an escalation of vocabulary and gesture...
...When you come to think of it, the war itself seems more symptom than cause...
...it is the circumstances of the moment which seriously threaten it...
...Feelings of distrust cut across political identification in America today...
...Yet the structure of American government, with its concentration of enormous powers in the hands of the President, makes the scrutiny of such personal factors unavoidable...
...These bonds of tacit confidence and limited solidarity can exist even between political opponents...
...Not to share a portion of their feelings is to lapse into a kind of moral death...
...That we do not and cannot trust the President...
...But on a national scale, it is Vietnam which increasingly dominates our political and moral life...
...Is this, at the moment, a difficult perspective...
...Yet even as we do our best in arguing that the verbal irresponsibility of certain segments of the protest movement does harm to the cause of peace, we must try to keep our balance too...
...These "leftist" dabblers in apocalypse would do well to ponder a Yiddish proverb: Come for your inheritance and you may have to pay for the funeral...
...Or you can lose your balance in the opposite direction, so that the clamor of a few thousand people becomes identified with "America" or "the young" while the vast quiet majorities are ignored...
...Their political ideas may often strike one as half-baked and their tactics as ill-conceived...
...It is to be found in Washington...
...the result of moods of anger and depression...
...The Republicans seem mired in their customary irrelevance and opportunism: imagine political leaders who try to decide whether to be hawks or doves on the basis of whether it will help win an election...
...What these will come to in practice, remains to be seen...
...Is this mere subjectivism...
...And in fairness, one of the brighter sides of the picture is that thus far there have been few serious efforts to silence or punish critics of the war...
...We have equally good reason to be skeptical of the President's claim that he is really working toward immediate negotiations...
...but a dismissal of this sort is too easy, since it ignores the possibility that such people may be articulating sentiments which others keep repressed...
...they set the boundaries for conflict...
...Pretty much where we usually are: in trouble...
...What drives the Administration to its Vietnam policy would operate quite or nearly as much in respect to a country made up of white people...
...A few smallish signs of hope are visible...
...Meanwhile, we have to try to keep our bearings, both in opposition to the overwhelming deceit of the Administration and by contrast to the reactive fulminations on the "left...
...III Where then does this leave us, we few of the democratic Left...
...No wonder many of our idealistic young are profoundly disaffected from the society in which they live...
...The country does seem to be going through a deep crisis, in which the ties of common belief and mutual respect weaken...
...What then of the politics of coalition...
...Locally, every effort should still be made, and in some states the idea of coalition, as a strategy for coping with domestic needs, remains viable...
...Even if he were to negotiate a truce in the war, how could we have the slightest confidence—after the Dominican Republic and Vietnam— that he would not soon embroil this country in another disaster...
...No one has ever become a socialist (at least in this country) because he thought it meant an easy life...
...Part of the trouble in the United States has been the steady evisceration of liberalism, its uncritical adherence to the slogans of official "anti-Communism," its gradual loss of energy and spirit...
...The country is embarked on a wretched, inhumane and reactionary course in Vietnam...
...When moral cynicism and contempt for intelligence become widespread among those in power, the same blight tends to infect at least some of those who speak in opposition...
...You can say that the disturbance to which I am pointing is confined to a small segment of the intellectuals and the young...
...Experience has taught me never to say never, but I cannot now foresee circumstances in which I would vote for Lyndon Johnson...
...What else can they be...
...Yet what does seem to be taking place —the depth and extent of it I do not know how to measure—is a weakening of those social bonds which keep any society, but especially a democratic society, functioning...
...Undoubtedly, it is possible and necessary for the opponents of the war and certain supporters of the war to work together here and there for, say, a better minimum wage and more funds for the poverty program...
...I still believe that if significant progress is to be made in American political life, it will be largely through the formal or informal workings of such a coalition...
...I see no way, in the coming period, of avoiding recurrent friction with the people who represent that politics, at least for those of us who wish to build a peace movement that will gain wide support among the American people...
...we do not credit your claims to good will...
...Seldom has the moral stock of an American government been as low as it is today...
...they enable conflicts to he acted out and resolved without a total breakdown...
...It must...
...Confusing criticism with corrosion, and analysis with incantation, these people yield to the indulgence of verbal apocalypse...
...We know that if coalition politics are not going to work very well in the coming period, neither will any other...
...With the possible exception of China, no major power in the world is more restive internally than the United States...
...For we no longer believe what you say...
...For it is not merely that our kind of politics is thwarted by the malaise symbolized by Vietnam...
...Our job is to press our criticisms thoughtfully, with humaneness and a minimum of self-righteousness...
...but that it is also entirely understandable I think we must insist...
...Yet, impatient as we may be with melodramatic declarations and angered as we may rightly be when attacked as "sellouts" simply because we persevere in our own strategic outlook, we must also remember just where the fundamental source of the current malaise is to be found...
...That Negro leaders feel obliged to defend Powell against the House is understandable...
...How widespread this mood may be, I do not know...
...If we have an ounce of brains, we cannot look with anything but contempt upon the rationale for the steady escalation of the Vietnam War...
...but need Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick be quite so cavalier about his record...
...Our job is to speak out, again and again, for a politics that blends fundamental criticism of American society with unshakable devotion to the values and procedures of democracy...
...What about the hope we have tried to nurture for an alliance of the unions, the Negro movements, the churches, the intellectuals, all working together toward an extension and improvement of the welfare state...
...We sense that we are being manipulated and lied to, sometimes even in behalf of ends we might abstractly accept...
...Yet a heavy malaise hangs over the scene, a little but not really much like that of the early fifties...
...IV The horizon is bleak...
...One of the virtues of democracy is that it may enable a quicker recovery from disastrous policies than can occur under any other kind of government...
...Perhaps so...
...a politics that avoids both "crackpot realism" and nihilist "alienation...
...Through a journalistic coup, we learn about the infiltration and corruption of domestic institutions by the CIA...
...The most obvious cause for this malaise is the Vietnam War, but the roots of the trouble must go deeper...
...The Johnson Administration has forfeited its credit...
...But it is inane to talk as if we were living in Nazi Germany: if we were, we could not talk...
...There is distrust, anger, frustration—and for good reasons...
...a politics of criticism, fraternity, and hope...
...That this is self-defeating I am inclined to suppose...
...We are chilled by the hypocrisy of the House of Representatives in expelling Adam Clayton Powell for kinds of misconduct which are known to have been practiced by at least a few other congressmen whose skins happen, however, not to be black...
...but if such moods are shared by enough people, they become an objective political fact...
...it is that any half-way desirable politics is also thwarted...
...we do not trust you...
...Nothing it seems likely to do—short of a radical reversal of its Vietnam policy—can restore it morally in the eyes of serious people...
...But, paradox or no, it remains a democratic society in which intellectuals have as a prime responsibility the defense of democratic values, even as we chafe at our weakness and protest against the men in power...
...Of course...
...And when George Meany simply denies that the AFL-CIO has ever received money from the CIA, does he really suppose that the whole country can be treated as if it were a cowed local of the painters' union...
...It is not I who forego this perspective...
...that we prefer not even to consider the sickly spectacle of the Vice President...
...Let us distinguish between using one's mind and thumbing one's nose, between the devastating attack a Theodore Draper Iaunches against the Vietnam War and the puerile talk of those who celebrate MacBird...
...When one considers the people of the authoritarian Left who are likely to control such a venture, I for one have no confidence at all...
...Has Meany ever tried to give a frank and serious answer concerning the charges that his right-hand man, Jay Lovestone, has systematically cooperated abroad with the CIA, regardless of whether money actually passed from one hand to another...
...There are, of course, the apostles of nose-to-nose "polarization," the secret sharers of Ronald Reagan...
...Those with a Marxist background tend to suspect political judgments which stress personal factors...
...we are inclined by habit to think that the invocation of impersonal forces is inherently more profound as a mode of analysis...
...There are apparently some stirrings of self-criticism in the ADA, and there is clearly a determination in the UAW to strike out upon a new course...
...It is entirely right and indeed essen tial for the more serious Negro leaders, like Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to keep fighting for policies which will prevent the government from, in effect, putting the socioeconomic burden of the Vietnam War mainly on the Negro people...
...limited victories, and not from the kind of atmosphere which prevailed in the Germany of the twenties...
...All the more reason, then, to press it with energy and force...
...And one can only conclude that this man, Lyndon B. Johnson, is not fit for the responsibility of making decisions that can crucially affect the survival of humanity...
...To describe the Vietnam War, as did the call for the April 15 Mobilization, as "a war against a colored people" seems to me tactically obtuse and intellectually feckless...
...that the Secretary of State seems little more than a fanatic ideologue—all this seems to me more important than whether one agrees or disagrees with a particular aspect of the government's policy...
...What characterizes American life, at least important parts of it, is a mounting loss of social confidence and solidarity...
...seldom has a significant minority of the population—a minority including a notable share of intelligent and conscientious citizens —been so skeptical of the claims which come from Washington...
...We remain dubious about the Warren Commission...
...But at least on a national scale, and for as long as the war in Vietnam continues, the prospects that such a coalition will in fact be formed or re-formed seem dim...
...We must recognize the authenticity of the moral outrage and even the moral despair which leads to the politics of alienation...
...And as for the thirdparty venture which seems a possibility, there is little reason for confidence...
...They revel in the signs of disintegration, failing to recognize that all of modern history teaches us that successful struggle arises from confidence, solidarity...
...But so long as this wretched war continues there will probably not be a serious coalition on a national scale such as we have envisaged and such as, at various particular moments (e.g., the March on Washington in 1963), has existed...
...But nationally, how can there be a coalition of progressive forces in the coming period, at least as long as major segments of such a proposed coalition support the war and other, crucial segments oppose it...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
