America "Uncertain as to Answers"

...It assumes that, in the American context, there is strong and sufficient reason to prefer a liberal, even with his weaknesses, to a conservative, despite his possible strengths...

...We touch here upon a very tangled complex of feelings, and I want to return to them an issue or two hence...

...Who are these 25 percent of registered voters that Yankelovich is talking about...

...But what this 25 percent does seem to want is some serious recognition of its troubles...

...Liberal Democrats, for the most part, areeven less responsive to the feelings of the moderates...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS the good sense to ignore the Bobby Scales and Rap Browns who tell them it makes no difference who gets elected...

...Here R. W. Apple, reporting from New York to the New Statesman (11/6/70) seems quite right: The result in New York will be interpreted as a sign that [it] has turned conservative, but that is nonsense—just as it was nonsense to suggest that Lindsay's victory last year . . meant that liberalism was still flourishing in New York...

...Granted that our society and our culture are in a very bad way...

...uncertain as to who has the answers or what the answers are...

...But if one believes that politics matters, if one wishes to affect the here-and-now of who makes decisions in Washington, there is no other choice...

...that they no longer have much political muscle, that many of their members are drifting toward Agnewism or worse, and that any serious effort for defeating Nixon in 1972 is possible without the crucial participation of the unions...

...By contrast, the blacks came out in large numbers...

...For just about everyone else, of whatever persuasion, there can be no question that the electoral fight looming in America is highly significant...

...This rhetoric appeals to one part of the Silent Majority—its pro-Agnew faction...

...In the heavily black Fifth District there are over 70,000 registered black voters...

...The social issues, meaning law and order and safety on the streets and campus violence, also trouble us, and there we lean a little toward the Republicans...

...The economic issue, meaning mostly unemployment, troubles us, and there we lean toward the Democrats...

...There were of course disappointments, not only in the defeat of certain candidates like Gore, Lowenstein, and Duffey, but in the extent and nature of student participation...

...It is a group of voters that cuts through a cross section of socioeconomic groups...

...Most Republican candidates have not preempted the moderate, middle ground...

...But as Roy Wilkins has cogently argued, the problem in Atlanta was actually a different one...

...True, such a social democratic proposal may be "boring" to people who do not have to experience the painful effects of Nixon economics, people who have tenure and therefore are freed of the anxiety of survival...

...Granted that we need new visions of human community, new possibilities of personal existence, new styles of work and leisure, new relationships between the sexes...

...A bit to the Right, a bit to the Left, with the main pull in the Center but the Center itself far from resting at a fixed point...

...They need only turn to Mayor Lindsay for lessons on how to do this...

...That the 25 percent of the electorate we are here discussing is ready to declare itself anti-Agnew suggests that it would respond to such an approach...

...Even when they acknowledge the legitimacy of the law and order issue, they are likelyto dismiss it with a sentence or two...

...Some intellectuals assume all but automatically that anyone who talks about mugging and violence on the streets is really indulging in racism...

...The Vice President speaks of drawing the line...

...Emerging as a major national issue is thearousal of a deep political instinct on the partof people to protect their own...

...Once again the bulk of the black voters showed * In some academic-left and black "militant" circles the defeat of Andrew Young, the SCLC leader, in his Congressional campaign in Atlanta was interpreted as evidence that alliances with whites do not pay off...

...Almost 60 percent of them are enrolled Democrats, which comes to 11 or 12 percent more than in the population as a whole...

...But there is another possibility...

...but all of them are careful about letting their kids go out on those streets...

...Such people, teaching the virtues of imaginative sympathy in their classrooms, might show a little for masses of their fellow citizens by being ready to join with them in behalf of partial solutions and partial strategies...

...And it further assumes that various notions now being toyed with in academic-left circles—ranging from the liebackand-tickle-your-stomach outlook which asks that the country "green" itself to various notions about revolutionary strategy—are at once elitist and irrelevant...

...the limited expectations one can have from a liberal Democratic regime aren't likely to remove such problems from view...

...b) placed heavy stress on domestic economic issues, along the lines of greater federal expenditure in behalf of jobs, housing, education, anti-pollution and smaller expenditure on the military...

...The December 25, 1970 massive "turnout of a generation," expected last spring, simply failed to occur...

...Only 40,000 of them voted...

...But one need only ask: in which kind of political context would it be better to have to face such problems, the context of Nixon-Agnew or that of liberal Democrats who might defeat them...

...They split their vote about evenly between Rockefeller and Goldberg, and in the senatorial campaign 30 percent of them voted for Ottinger, 37 percent for Goodell, and 21 percent for Buckley...

...Perhaps because many candidates did not arouse strong feelings (working up enthusiasm for Arthur Goldberg had to be hard at any age...

...Slightly more than onethird of this stratum describe themselves as "liberals," which again is a significantly higher percentage than those-22 percent—so describing themselves in the population of New York as a whole...

...Imaginative liberal candidates like Joseph Duffey have been able to gain the support of large numbers of young people while also winning to their side the bulk of the labor movement...

...Indeed, blacks are among those who feel most strongly about crime, drugs, and law and order because they are its chief victims...

...A liberal campaign in 1972 which (a) came out for a rapid liquidation of what would then remain of the Vietnam war...

...quite the contrary...

...in fact, I was recently told by a good friend, whose devotion to liberal principles is beyond question, that social democratic politics are "boring...

...Obviously, as socialists and even some nonsocialists recognize, such a policy cannot solve the fundamental problems of our society...

...But I don't think that is true...

...Gov ernor Wallace of Alabama was probably correct in his election statement that he was the first national figure to articulate the law and order issue to the American public...

...The results show the country...

...Had the Young campaign managed to get 20,000 out of the 32,000 non-voters to come to the polls, the result of the election would have been different...

...Yankelovich writes: On the national scene, the most striking impli cation . . . is that neither party has as yet preempted the real law and order issue...

...Anyone who lives in New York City, especially on the West Side which shelters (if that's the word) many liberals and intellectuals, must know from his own experience that it's a gen uine concern...

...that some of what ails us probably can't be alleviated through politics at all, let alone the relatively modest (though, God knows, sufficiently painful and hazardous) kind of politics suggested here...

...If liberal candidates, following the line of almost all New Left and some New Politics people, identify concern with law and order as a code word for racism, they will help drive this crucial 25 percent of the electorate into the hands of Nixon...

...And 38 percent of this group of voters—that is, of the 25 percent who are both worried about law and order and against Agnew—consider themselves to be "moderates...

...Perhaps because student activists had allowed themselves to be infected with moods of apocalypse, which by their nature don't lead to the kind of work required in electoral campaigns...

...The concern with law and order can be recognized as an authentic one, while at the same time demagogic and reactionary proposals for curtailing liberties in the name of fighting crime are steadfastly opposed...

...According to his polls, there is in New York State a large segment of voters, approximately 25 percent of those registered, who "are deeply disturbed about law and order and also believe that Vice President Agnew is hurting the country...

...One of the best analyses comes from Daniel Yankelovich, the pollster and analyst...

...And would full employment, an adequate housing program, a guaranteed annual wage be so "small...

...Their vote in Memphis for Gore was a record high...

...c) spoke in a language that would connect with the feelings and troubles of mainstream segments of the population, which includes preeminently the 25 percent we have here been focusing upon...

...But even as we try to develop all of these, are we to become so calloused to the burning needs of our fellow men that we will simply dismiss as inconsequential their efforts to achieve even "small" or "partial" solutions...

...We will be told that such a policy may not engage the emotions of dissident youth...

...And perhaps because students always tend to be volatile and ephemeral in their political responses—and, in the overall structure of American politics, a good deal less important than they or some of their professors suppose...

...no simple correlations of class are possible...

...The Republican party then seized upon law and order but con tinued to stress its Southern conservative ori gins...

...In crucial districts and states, COPE again showed that it runs the most efficient agency in the country for prodding large numbers of voters to go to the polls...

...and (d) avoided like the plague the effort of Jerry Agnew and Spiro Rubin to plunge this country into a Kulturkampf over "permissiveness," drugs, hair, and other middle-class hangups— such a campaign would have a considerable chance of success...

...Most Republican and Democratic candidatesappear to have misinterpreted the law and order issue—and for the same reason...

...Both see its pro-Agnew face...

...But Spiro Agnew, though some of what he says may appeal to us, isn't our man...

...The liberals, with their inability to keep people from being beaten on the head night after night on the sidewalks, have alienated their Irish and Italian constituents, and even many of their Jewish ones...

...What we have then is something of potentially great political significance: a large minority of voters who had often supported liberal candidates in the past and might well do so again in the future, but whose concern with law and order may be—indeed, probably is— weakening their traditional ties to the Democratic party and thereby makes them an especially attractive target for a Nixon...

...Anyone on the Left who wants to maintain a clear distinction between fact, attractive or not, and fantasy, desired or not, must recognize that it is sheer nonsense to keep saying (as it has been fashionable to say in certain left-intellectual circles) that the unions are mere "paper shells" (check with General Motors...

...Why they didn't vote, we can't say at a distance...

...Yet, COMMENTS AND OPINIONS if New York State is at all typical, this group is a minority of the electorate...

...What conclusions can we draw...

...IT'S AS IF the American people (assuming for the moment so large an abstraction) had said: We trust neither party completely, we are nervous and dismayed about the state of the country, we are not inclined, certainly not yet, to venture into extremism at either pole...

...Intelligent radicals, sensitive radicals, but, above all, humane radicals will do what they can to affect its outcome...

...But it can bring, as it has brought, significant incremental changes...

...To some extent, that is true...

...The country oscillates uneasily...

...Nor does advocating or participating in such a politics signify an abandonment of deep-going socialist criticism of the society in which we live...

...Nor do the New York results, painful as it is to have a Buckley representing the most liberal state in the union, seriously challenge what Senator Muskie said...

...Young lost by some 20,000 votes...

...Senator Muskie said something similar when he remarked that the election result was "not a victory for the President, but it is not a defeat either...

...III THIS ASSUMES that elections matter...

...But here let me say this: if the dissident youth can't sympathize sufficiently with the plight of millions of ordinary people, men who work in factories and offices and now sometimes find themselves out of work, then something is sadly wrong with dissident youth...

...and the triumph of the black educator Wilson Riles over Max Rafferty in California seems cause for rejoicing...

...And let us be honest: it is a genuine concern...

...Just as the Nixon-Agnew strategy of trying to win the South largely failed, so their effort to break into the blue-collar ranks through the issue of law and order has also failed...

...At least so far...

...sweeping the garbage out of American society...

...How shameful it would be if American intellectuals, in the name of ultimate visions, were to end up with immediate blindness...

...It dominates the political sensibilities of millions ofpeople of good will...

...I1 WHAT does all this mean for the next few years in American politics...

...they helped defeat the racist Albert Watson in South Carolina...

...What I am talking about is a recreation of the liberal-labor-black coalition which alone can continue to extend and improve the welfare state...

...Both miss the other part of the Silent Majority—the people who have a genuine concern with crime and drugs and violence independently of any feelings they have about students and blacks and the poor...

...Yankelovich provides some further information about this 25 percent of the registered New York voters...

...The unions also came off rather well, with a higher percentage of COPE-supported candidates winning in 1970 than in 1968...

...Precisely who is, we don't yet know...

...It is a striking sign of the privileged position in which students, intellectuals, and academics find themselves that they are perhaps the only groups in our society for whom the question of whether to be concerned with politics in the ordinary, pragmatic sense is a real one...

...I think it reasonable to suppose that at least a large portion of this 25 percent recognizes the impossibility of immediately stamping out violence by any means whatever—perhaps that is why Reagan's winning margin was cut in half, since, despite his rhetoric, he had been no more successful in coping with this problem than anyone else...

...but this breakdown of the vote hardly demonstrates the futility of making alliances across the color line...

...And, except in certain sections of New York, there were no large defections of blue-collar workers to the Republicans...

...Clearly we are not dealing here with any simplistic version of backlash, but with political possibilities that can be pressed in several directions...

...We will be told that such a policy, even if it resulted in the defeat of Nixon two years from now, is not deeply related to some of the issues now agitating thoughtful people—alienation, military-industrial complex, environment, etc...

...they increased the number of black representatives in the House, mostly by forming local alliances with unions and white liberals...

...These people do not use law and order as a code word for coming on strong against blacks, Puerto Ricans, poor whites, welfare recipients, and students, but as the expression of a genuine concern...

...that could be repeated and enlarged...