Strategies for a New Politics: New Party or New Coalition?
Kaufman, Arnold S.
COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Two STRATEGIES for radical change compete for the favor of those on the Left who are not willing to abandon electoral activity as the principal focus of their political...
...And Democratic insurgents have already provided the Democratic party with a more exciting image than it had during the Johnson Administration...
...And only if he actually cares, will he be perceived as caring...
...But the point I am making—that Raskin and his friends delude themselves if they think the presence of large numbers of in COMMENTS AND OPINIONS dependent voters makes their New party effort viable—is not affected even if the new Democratic insurgency fails to have a significant impact on Democratic party programs...
...These groups have interests that transcend geographic divisions...
...But corrupt people cannot effect morally urgent radical change...
...And take a sharp, objective look at what is happening within SDS...
...But this argument begs the very point at issue...
...t to work within The System fail...
...The principle of participation based on balanced involvement in leadership must therefore be guaranteed...
...The other reminds us that there exists a future moral prospect whose achievement depends on assaulting basic institutional structures, that if we focus too completely on the here and now we may squander the chances for a qualitatively better tomorrow...
...11 LET ME REMIND the reader of what I emphasized at the beginning...
...This last may not mean much in policy terms...
...The danger, and I really do not regard it as a significant one, is that a New party will drain away so many good and resourceful people that its prediction that the NDC must fail will be selffulfilling...
...These dominantly white people are in favor of open housing, in favor of accommodation with the Communist nations and for compromise in Vietnam, and are highly tolerant of student, hippie, and antiwar demonstrators, as well as boys with long hair and girls with short skirts...
...Arnold S. Kaufman is a member of the National Steering Committee of the New Democratic Coalition...
...In some cases, as recently in my own community of Ann Arbor, it can put someone on the ballot when the major parties utterly fail to provide a reasonable choice of candidates...
...Young, intelligent, morally committed leaders emerged from the struggle: Julian Bond, Channing Phillips, Al Lowenstein, Don Peterson, Dave Hoeh, John Cashin, Paul Schrade, Jack Gore, Rudy Ortiz, and Adam Walinsky, to mention only a few...
...Most of these Americans, and millions of others as well, are indifferent to politics or turned off by the major parties...
...A politically organized electoral pressure has constrained further escalation of the war...
...Raskin does not say how successful these state organizations have been, or how large they are...
...There is a tension between the demands typically made, the vision typically expressed by black people and by militant students...
...Its commitments are to values and issues...
...Working within the Democratic party is the principal part, but only a part, of a total strategy for radical change...
...In political life, when support for a lesser evil is based on reason and morality, it is also support for the best available alternative...
...He derives this remarkable conclusion from his assumption that liberalism's core values are "self-reliance, sexual self-discipline, ambition, acquisition, and accomplishment," which, he believes, "have come to be embodied in a social order resting on imperialism, elitism, racism, and inhuman acts of technological destruction...
...But two groups are particularly important components of the New Coalition: black Americans and college students...
...It would help keep many who will otherwise drop out relevant to the political process...
...State organizations now exist in 19 states...
...Keeping this in mind, what is the New Coalition's optimal course...
...The Old Coalition failed, and must fail, because it is unresponsive to emerging interests and concerns, and because the more powerful segments of the Old Coalition (especially the unions) have traditionally tended to use the electoral power of black Americans, Spanish-speaking Americans, poor whites, and other politically disabled groups rather than involving them as full partners and promoting their claims for justice...
...they are not radical enough...
...No judgment could be less discriminating...
...They seek to live an authentic life...
...These representatives are to be chosen, whenever feasible, by the groups themselves...
...At the first meeting of the Steering Committee, this approach was underlined by a resolution to guarantee that additional members will be designated from state organizations as they develop in a balanced way, and from national constitu not fact...
...Some favor building a new party...
...Under Nixon, the Republican party is almost certain to tend a bit leftward...
...Part of the explanation for this is the tendency of New party supporters to identify American liberalism with the Old Coalition that kept the Democratic party in power for some 35 years...
...For one thing, many unions were shaken by the amount of Wallace support within their membership...
...For from the legitimate claim that the Old Politics cannot succeed, it does not follow that a New Politics requires a New Party...
...Hence, college students must become an essential component of the NDC, not only because their relative degree of moral freedom is needed to keep us all honest, but also for the COMMENTS AND OPINIONS political reasons that they are large in numbers, energy, and potential resources...
...Almost every important black leader endorsed, even if often with reluctance, the Democratic Presidential candidate...
...So, if the choice between a New party and the Old Politics exhausts the possibilities, then those who are unwilling to lapse into political quiescence would have no choice but to try to build a New party whatever the odds...
...New party advocates believe that those who think otherwise delude themselves...
...In this essay I have two aims: to defend this preference, and to describe a larger design by means of which those who share this preference can, over time, transform The System by working within it...
...Or more precisely, they abandon a radicalism of aims for the sake of a radicalism of militancy— a self-indulgence that those suffering the chronic evils of American life can ill afford...
...Only the affluent can think and act exclusively in such terms...
...Quite independently ofthe morality of such a strategy, it is based on wish, shown that in comparison with the NDC, the New party suffers enormous electoral disabilities...
...The New party is not now able to point to any significant national leaders, with the exception of Dr...
...The NDC means to be done with the kind of politics that makes loyalty to a candidate or a party take precedence over loyalty to moral commitments...
...But his criticism succeeds only by ignoring what those who identify themselves as radical liberals are saying and doing...
...After all, the gloriously new Labor party of Keir Hardie and Beatrice Webb soon became the party of Ramsay McDonald and later Harold Wilson...
...Suffering the consequences now of a fantastically unjust distribution of resources, they cannot afford a politics of pure conscience and futuristic goals...
...In brief, a conscience constituency based on the college educated will soon become a numerically potent segment of the voting public...
...and another 8 or 9 are being formed...
...It needs to be a truly national organization...
...For reasons I will develop in a moment, it would be unfortunate if NDC were to become a federation of principalities...
...It will take many years, probably generations, of hard and diligent work...
...Therefore, only those committed to build ing a New party have any prospect of achieving success...
...And if that happens, the darker forces of American life, not the New party, are bound to be the chief beneficiaries...
...Just as it is quite predictable that most people will not go the New party route, so it is certain that many will...
...The political effort made within the Democratic party, in the primaries and in national, state, and local conventions, has meanwhile achieved some significant results...
...Senators McCarthy, McGovern, and Kennedy are friendly...
...This is true...
...I mention a few admittedly modest successes to indicate that NDC is past the drawing-board stage...
...One way of winning the trusting allegiance of the poor, the alienated, the racial minorities is by supporting and engaging in meaningful community action...
...Others believe the main attempt must be made within the Democratic party...
...And if one acknowledges, as both Lasch and Raskin do, that revolutionary effort must fail...
...A New party that lacks the preponderant support of black Americans is politically absurd...
...They include Spanishspeaking Americans, members of the peace movement, clergymen who think that religion has more than a passing moral interest in chronic social ills, women who refuse to send their boys to fight in unjust wars, and so on...
...This certainly indicates some lack of enthusiasm for the Democratic party...
...It appears that something more than original virtue is needed to build an organization that is proof against acquired vice...
...Finally, let me review the relationship between the NDC and the New party...
...Few ballots were cast for Dick Gregory and Eldridge Cleaver...
...But their answer as to why they think the New-party road has fewer pitfalls is left clouded in mystery...
...In order to make radical institutional change we shall have to master corporate behemoths like General Motors, AT&T, Boeing, the U.S...
...But that is not what I have to show...
...We must be with those who compose our coalition in body as well as spirit...
...A SALIENT FACT in this discussion is that in those states where a deep wedge has already been driven into the base of established party power, Democratic insurgents will simply refuse a call to a New party...
...Sam Brown, leader of McCarthy's youth cadres, and David Borden, a co-leader of the Kennedy youth movement, are aboard...
...Now how is one to bring these vast concentrations of corporate power under some kind of humane control...
...We should learn from them...
...whether there is a viable, intermediate alternative...
...Consider the issue concretely...
...One of NDC's co-chairmen, Paul Schrade, is an elected regional director for the UAW...
...That is why there is little reasonable basis for expecting them to act otherwise in the future...
...The result must be to transform property relationships, forms of industrial control, and basic conditions of work The pursuit of private profit could not remain the controlling consideration which, despite all public-relations chatter to the contrary, it continues to be within American industrial life— as Michael Harrington, a member of the National Steering Committee of the NDC, skilfully explains in Toward a Democratic Left...
...Most of the independents are not radical...
...The first and most important task is to build an organized, new coalition of forces within the Democratic party...
...Those of us committed to working in the Democratic party find the major premise understandably selfrighteous...
...Lyndon Johnson was forced to commit self-regicide...
...Of very great importance is the NDC's relationship to the trade union movement...
...New party supporters do well to remind those of us committed to the other alternative that the effort will not be easy, and will not be completed in a day or a year...
...Basic as local organization is, the country needs urgently a potent national group dedicated to radical institutional change...
...The syllogism is, alas, unsound...
...Marcus Raskin and others began their efforts to build a New party some months be COMMENTS AND OPINIONS fore the Democrats convened in Chicago...
...For the will to believe we can succeed is itself one of the important conditions of success...
...It certainly will not mean much if genuine radicals disdain Democratic party activity...
...Hundreds of delegates at the Democratic national convention forced meaningful concessions and gave the nation a sense of liberal ferment...
...In California, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Washington, and Alabama, radical insurgents will not willingly squander what they have gained in recent months and years...
...It will provide an additional and salutary pressure from the Left...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Two STRATEGIES for radical change compete for the favor of those on the Left who are not willing to abandon electoral activity as the principal focus of their political efforts...
...For even if people who originally join the New party possess a moral fervor making them impregnably virtuous, the first glimpse of success will bring many others, less endowed with iron moral constitutions, flocking to the new center of power...
...Basing his assessment on polling data, Harris claims, The mark of this affluent group is that it is committed to change...
...No social movement that fails to grapple with the tension embodied in these two forces can hope to retain both integrity and effectiveness...
...See chapters VII and VIII of his Toward a Democratic Left...
...For example, efforts to mobilize support for the grape boycott, to develop informed opposition to the continuation of the arms race, to build grassroots organizations that serve the needs of poor people—all are generally accepted by both groups...
...But we also find it difficult to understand how working within a new party will immunize one against such mortal political sins as co-optation and opportunism...
...Most are likely to be satisfied by rejuvenated Republican or Democratic parties...
...From this perspective, the NDC should regard a relatively small New party—one that does not constitute an undue drain on potential membership and resources—as a potential ally when matters of common concern arise...
...The resulting disorder, they reason, will make it possible to mount an effectiverevolutionary movement...
...Moreover, the NDC is better able than the New party to attract those independents who are potentially militant...
...More than 50 million qualified voters failed to go to the polls in November...
...that to propose it now is a fraud or delusion, then there exists only one route to federal power: electoral activity.* Now I hope I have *There are those who, like Stokely Carmichaeland John Gerassi, wait for the oppressed in theThird World to throw off the shackles of economic imperialism, thereby plunging the American economy into collapse...
...Quite the reverse...
...This is so because great concentrations of corporate power absolutely bar the way to radical change...
...There is then little reason for going the New party route...
...I favor working within the Democratic party by helping to build the New Democratic Coalition...
...They argue that the Democratic party can never become sufficiently radical to cope with society's urgent needs...
...According to Lou Harris, this year the college educated account for 28 per cent of the electorate...
...Benjamin Spock...
...By contrast student militants are often the materially secure offspring of prosperous parents...
...Sloganizing about revolution, guerrilla assaults, participatory democracy, or even "autonomous enclaves of socialism in the ghettos and elsewhere" (Lasch) will not do it...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ency groups like students, farmers, poor whites, and so on...
...The Coalition must be organized at every relevant political level: municipal, state, and national...
...But the main goal, nomination of a suitable Presidential candidate, was lost...
...Too many radicals are prepared to write the unions off as bastions of conservatism and reaction...
...I direct my argument toward those now involved in the New party led by Marcus Raskin, but of course the argument applies to other such efforts as well...
...In Minneapolis in October, about 250 leaders of the Democratic insurgency from more than 40 states met and chose a temporary steering committee—almost half of whose members are from the minority and youth communities...
...It is a growing, partially-organized seg ment of that national constituency to which the Democratic party must appeal if it is again to win electoral victories in major states and at the national level...
...While not clearly identified with the New party, Christopher Lasch has expressed an essential part of this analysis when he proclaimed that "as a social philosophy, liberalism is dead...
...At the Minneapolis NDC meeting a plan of organization was accepted that gave minority caucuses the right to designate representatives of their own choice, and in what they acknowledged were adequate numbers, to the National Steering Committee...
...But it is important to emphasize that the NDC is no man's political property...
...Some have achieved national stature...
...He as well as hundreds of other trade-union leaders sympathize with our cause...
...If the NDC can articulate the discontents of the "affluent poor," can develop programs of amelioration, can convince them that they are not the forgotten men of American political life, it can earn the support of many union members...
...These men are all members of the National Steering Committee of the New Democratic Coalition—a coalition of forces founded during the waning hours of the Chicago debacle...
...In 1972 they will come to over 35 per cent, and by 1976 they will make up over 40 per cent of all voters...
...Now Lasch, Raskin, and others are absolutely right when they claim that an Old Politics based on the Old Coalition has no chance of assaulting basic corporate power effectively...
...And only if one acts at some cost or risk to self when there is tactical justification for doing so, can one be sure that he really cares...
...Whether this judgment is morally right or wrong, it does have adverse political effects...
...Against this background of accomplishment, consider the obstacles the New party must surmount before it can build a base of power in order to have a hope of carrying out its program of radical change...
...This is a lesson militant students have been learning...
...Here we come to what many within the New party regard precisely their decisive claim...
...An authentic radicalism does not dismiss unpleasant institutional facts by wishing them away...
...New party supporters hoped to induce Senator McCarthy to lead their national ticket once his inability to capture the Democratic nomination became clear...
...Nor should they abandon gains agonizingly wrung from prevailing centers of power unless there is an absolutely decisive case in favor of doing so...
...Having thus defined liberalism in terms of a certain kind of bourgeois culture, Lasch has little difficulty showing that liberalism, so defined, is incompetent to provide a philosophical COMMENTS AND OPINIONS basis for reconstructing that society...
...In many states groups loosely affiliated with NDC have made substantial inroads into established Party power...
...That is why black Americans voted by overwhelming majorities for Humphrey, despite profound reservations and distrust...
...They range from liberal academicians who are sick of the ways in which our cultural and moral life are corrupted, to American Indians who eke out livings on reservations...
...This means for the NDC not only programs and lobbying, not only electoral activity for candidates who care, but also direct action on picket lines, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations...
...It is vital that any national effort be based solidly on grass-roots work in towns, cities, counties, Congressional districts, and states...
...Their faith seems often based on the following syllogism: Those who work within a corrupt Demo cratic party, the Party of Daley, Johnson, and Eastland, are themselves bound to be or become corrupt...
...Besides Phillips, Bond, and Cashin, Congressman John Conyers and Tom Bradley of Los Angeles have accepted invitations to join the National Steering Committee...
...They con -stantly remind us how often material prosperity and social success can contaminate man's pow -ers of critical thought...
...By contrast, in addition to those already mentioned, the NDC has a host of young, vital, nationally prominent leaders, as well as many well-known within constituent state and national groups...
...The evidence that black Americans, despite their distrust, still identify with the Democratic party is overwhelming...
...and it is impossible to transform the existing system, within which the Democratic party is an integral component, in ways essential to mounting an effective assault on those centers of corporate power...
...Black Americans make up the largest oppressed segment of American society...
...Principally because it will use, without self-consciousness, the moral rhetoric of liberalism—a rhetoric that still evokes an affirmative response among most of those to whom an appeal must be made...
...Beyond the concern for involving militant students is the fact that 55 per cent of all high school graduates are going to college now...
...They know in their gut the spiritual impoverishment that certain forms of affluence breed...
...armed forces, and so on...
...For the NDC views itself as a custodian of authentic liberal values...
...Albert Pena of Texas and Bert Corona of California are among its Spanishspeaking representatives...
...But we must not permit knowledge of the difficulties to breed despair that cuts the nerve of our effort...
...Only if one is perceived as caring will he be trusted...
...And they are also correct in claiming that unless corporate power is successfully challenged, radical change cannot be fashioned...
...Again, a balance was struck among those who supported different candidates in the various primary campaigns, and who represent various constituency components of the New Coalition...
...I want, however, to emphasize that, taken seriously, liberal ideals can have an explosive impact on policy...
...It is true that outside those areas in which registration has sharply risen in recent years, the black vote fell far below what it had been in 1964...
...And it must work vigorously to develop relations of trust and commitment among those who are only loosely, and suspiciously, tied to its organization and program...
...There is a need to gain control of the only concentration of corporate power that is greater and more legitimate than the ones inimical to liberal values: the federal government...
...Just suppose due process of law, democracy, fundamental human rights, and more generally the conditions of a dignified human existence were seriously instituted within American industry...
...Yet those who did go to the polls voted for Humphrey by huge majorities...
...Since then the New party has developed to the point, according to Raskin, where it has new groups in 39 states...
...And it can, merely by existing and functioning, provide a fall-back position should the NDC's effo...
...The National Steering Committee has established a National Priorities Committee charged with developing program, priorities, and research necessary to develop our case with reason and effectiveness...
...It will be enough to establish that, however difficult traveling the Democratic party route may be, it is more likely to succeed than building a new party...
...Both groups think of electoral politics as the key part—but only a part—of a more general strategy that includes community action and political education...
...Though the tide was reversed, in large part because of unstinting trade-union efforts, they recognize that there is a vast third of the nation who are not poor yet have legitimate grievances that too few seem to care about...
...A national organization will provide the appropriate frame of organization for national constituency groups that have traditionally been denied effective power and participation in the Democratic party...
...Political education should be an important part of everything we do...
...Those who choose that road are generally good and dedicated people...
...In this connection Michael Harringtonagain offers a devastating critique...
...State leaders like Zolton Ferency of Michigan, Daniel Gaby of New Jersey, George Brown and Donald Edwards of California, and George Williams of Colorado identify with the NDC...
...But Raskin deludes himself when he claims that they are ripe for involvement in the New party...
...Can the New Democratic Coalition succeed...
...If the Senate race in California can be taken as an indication, then Paul Jacobs' one per cent of the vote cannot be considered an optimistic omen...
...I MODEST OPTIMISM about the prospects for transforming the Democratic party into an instrument of radical change seems justified...
...In defending his idea of a New party, Raskin makes much of the fact that there has been a vast increase in the number of political independents...
...Potentially it has a vast human resource at its disposal: intellectuals and writers, but also the resources of sympathetic peace, civil liberties, and civil rights groups...
...It is not that New party people are too radical...
...The impact they had on the November elections was almost nil...
...A New party as a minor element in a broad strategy for change can serve positive functions...
...It is a healthy tension, one that is essential for the New Coalition...
...But its prospects depend on its remaining in touch with, servicing, and helping to organize at grass-root levels...
...And there is no evidence that this organization can induce the enormous majority of black citizens to identify with it...
...By contrast, a large part of the New party's claim to newness is based precisely on its rejection of the language and tradition of American liberalism...
...During this fight a wedge of insurgency was driven deep into established party power in well over half the states...
...lack ing inhibiting investment in family and career, they are prepared to act on behalf of great moral issues without the barrier of prudent selfinterest...
...and it will actively work only for those who firmly support core commitments...
...To expand its national constituency, the New Coalition must maintain openings to Right and Left...
...The one reminds us that there is suffering here and now, that every sacrifice made for the sake of millenial aspirations is a sacrifice of somebody...
...Those who want a New party seem to suppose that they need only to show that enormous obstacles must be surmounted by others who favor reconstituting the Democratic party...
...There are two intermeshing ways by which best to accomplish this task: community organization and political education...
...Students, more than any others, can save us all from unwarranted accommodation for the sake of comfort and career...
...A wildcat strike sparked by inhuman conditions of work, a grape boycott, or a Poor Peoples' campaign are all actions that result quite naturally from conditions of oppression...
...It seems clear that, like it or not, black Americans voted and will continue to vote for "lesser evils" nominated by the Democratic party...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
