Prospects for the Seventies: A Strategy for Radical Liberals
Kaufman, Arnold S.
ONE OF JULES FEIFFER'S CARTOONS captures the mood of political hopelessness that pervades the American Left. A long-haired militant asks a shortcropped liberal whether he voted in the last...
...For example, direct primaries often harm the interests of urban minorities who, through strategic concentrations, have acquired a political leverage within nominating conventions that more majoritarian practices might dilute...
...A second alternative is to rely mainly on those who are most abused racially and economically— a constituency of the oppressed...
...Peace, civil liberties, and ecological groups play an indispensable role whose effectiveness tends to be blunted by their engagement in electoral politics...
...Many who might be attracted by a new coalition strategy that broadly gears itself to Democractic party activity will not be drawn to a new party...
...As they have only the support of a minority, candidates who run as radicals and liberals cannot normally hope to win...
...And the main barrier to joining it to a constituency of conscience is this sense of powerlessness often expressed in mistrust of those who are moved primarily by moral concern...
...At one time, the Supreme Court was a main bulwark...
...Relatively little education, growing security and comfort, constant concern with satisfying desires that press against income, the still frightening realities of an uncertain labor market— in combination these cause the near-poor and the affluent poor to draw back from genuinely radical commitment, even while remaining a generally progressive force for change...
...That Rustin regards his approach as conflictingwith a new coalition strategy indicates that he does This is a crucial point...
...The task is not more likely to be accomplished by bloody revolution, or the Great Refusal, or "socialism in the ghetto," or the politics of the shaman—to mention only a few of the more frivolous al ternatives that have been suggested.'$ Yet the keystone is useless without the other stones in the arch...
...any price to win demote even the gravest moral issues...
...I find that the currently fashionable works of countercultural theorists are naive and politically muddled...
...As to electoral strategy itself, the main problem is how to deploy most effectively a minority of substantial strength...
...For at the heart of this new politics is the effort to build a radical coalition that is cohesive without being monolithic, progressive in ways that do not weaken more basic commitment to radicalism, tactically bold yet mindful of political consequence...
...There is something in the air that stirs millions of Americans...
...We will not succeed if we role-play, if we act as if we were at the center of the system of pressures rather than as part of its source...
...Even those who are genuinely autonomous can rarely make themselves heard...
...Common Cause, for example, is a hopeful development, but hardly radical...
...As the radical coalition consists primarily of two groups—constituencies of the oppressed and of conscience—it is paramount to increase and fuse their respective strengths...
...The views just sketched contrast sharply with the rage for counter culture...
...Nonelectoral tactics will fail unless there is effective use of the ballot...
...The election victories of genuine radicals like Bella Abzug in New York, Ronald Dellums in California, the successful gubernatorial race of Pat Lucey in Wisconsin, Joseph Duffey's near-miss in Connecticut are among the gains I have in mind...
...The new coalition should ally itself with every effort to erode the unequal political power of the socially mighty...
...But the ameliorative, reformist programs such majorities are disposed to support are far from radical enough...
...Women were enfranchised only when enough elected public officials were willing to endorse a constitutional amendment...
...Suppose an easily identifiable group has, by and large, suffered the effects of original injustices from which another easily identifiable group has generally benefited...
...9 This perspective is, moreover, compatible with acknowledging that distinct groups—e.g., the poor—have equal or greater claims than black people as such...
...The new coalition seeks to exert a steady pressure on the Democratic party...
...When this task is competently fulfilled, the ideas and knowledge it opens to students 'affect them profoundly...
...ARNOLD S. KAUFMAN tick...
...There is even evidence that they have, on occasion, not been loath to encourage violence...
...The disabilities and advantages have been transmitted to the respective groups by social inheritance, much by deliberate design of unjust social institutions...
...Without doing so, it is unlikely that repression can be contained or the basis for a radical future laid...
...For consider the alternatives: • First, we might rely on a broadly based movement that has workers, especially trade unionists, the racially oppressed, and the very poor as its primary base...
...The veto is applicable at every level of the electoral process...
...12 Because majorities usually act against the victims of ex12 For example, a proposal for a direct presidential primary went down to defeat in a special 1969convention of the Michigan Democratic partypartly because so many black Democrats thought aconvention system gave them more political leverage...
...This is neither surprising nor unjustified...
...5 Young people, especially the more affluent ones, are less afflicted by economic fear and careerism than any generation of advantaged youth before them...
...Paradoxically, in some cases the vestiges of class rule have become important defenses for oppressed minorities...
...Cf., "From Protest to Politics," in The Radical Papers, Howe, ed...
...If these urgings are an outgrowth of middle-class attitudes, then all power to that aspect of bourgeois culture...
...When winning is the measure, the disheartening impact of losing is magnified...
...Appropriate linkage of such groups with a radical coalition that is directly involved in electoral activities provides the best assurance that an obsessive desire to win elections will not undermine a politics of issues...
...The purpose is to limit the range of acceptable candidates...
...8A survey by the American Council on Education shows that the percentage of entering collegefreshmen who consider themselves far Left or "liberal" has risen to more than 36 percent whilethe percentage who consider themselves "far Right" or "conservative" has declined to 18.1 percent...
...As people who have been long deprived begin to consume more, their expectations not make the distinction between a radical and a progressive coalition...
...To permit this to happen will result in more than burning ghettos...
...Radical liberals who are carried away by majoritarian bias will ignore such practicalities at peril of frustrating their primary goal—to build the coalition...
...So radical liberals favor radical policies for eliminating poverty and racism, guaranteeing full employment, providing decent housing and medical care to everyone, drastically paring military appropriations, purifying and beautifying our common environment, reconstructing our prisons and mental institutions, implementing a universal right to higher education—to mention only a few minimal points...
...At times it is important to make the race for mainly educational reasons—though, unless this is done without illusion, the resulting loss will be demoralizing...
...I am liberal in believing that "a good society is one in which each person possesses the resources of materials, mind, and spirit, as well as the opportunities, to carve out a career in conformity to that person's own nature and reasoned choice...
...How will you feel about it a year from now...
...Electoral Politics: Keystone in the Arch THE VOTE IS THE KEYSTONE of a strategic arch that includes many other forms of political action...
...and to make sure that those who qualify and run conduct their campaigns in ways that most advance radical liberalism's long-term aims...
...It is not a matter of visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons, but of transferring undeserved benefits to those who suffer undeserved disabilities...
...Fourth, one aspect of the law-and-order issue is preeminently important to all oppressed groups, especially ghetto dwellers: the injustice of official lawlessness...
...But since we comprise a distinct minority both of the voting public and of the Democratic party—the major party with which we must identify—our strategic aims must be to build a radical majority in the long run and to deploy our minority strength effectively in the short run...
...Now they quickly, sometimes intolerantly, demand that material be presented in a manner that breathes life into study...
...The Poor Peoples' Campaign and the Welfare Rights Organization represent a new kind of radical assertiveness among the very poor...
...What are the prospects...
...Political education that goes on outside the electoral process as such is far more important and persuasive...
...At best, such a new party effort would be slightly more progressive and less corrupt than internal Democratic party politics...
...Besides more emphasis on liberal education, there is a need for more political education, more participation in decisions that affect one's life, more democratic control over the media of communication, more sympathy for liberation movements despite occasional rhetorical excess...
...In this instance the state's case was so flimsy, the number of eyewitnesses so great, that the judge terminated the proceedings before the defense had finished giving all its evidence, summarily declaring the defendant innocent without even retiring to his chambers...
...Through the period of Vietnam protest, insurgents frequently suffered leaders who treated the many movements and groups they helped to build like personal fiefdoms...
...None have a more natural interest in protecting the universities than those forces that are trying to build a new radical coalition...
...The basic aim is radical change...
...The time for a new party has not yet arrived...
...The same urgings are plain in the movement for women's liberation, among radical clergy, within segments of the industrial community...
...Above all, the coalition neither overestimates its present strength, nor underestimates its future potential...
...To accept the veto as basic to our electoral strategy does not preclude our running candidates who are genuinely committed radicals...
...Affluent people in growing numbers are trying to feel free, to live with dignity, without lying...
...a National Party Committee structure that magnifies the representation of minorities...
...They view lawless action, not only by police but by every segment of the legal system, as a plague that specially afflicts them...
...A long-haired militant asks a shortcropped liberal whether he voted in the last election...
...Unless this atavistic need to control is curbed, unless we become more capable of substituting the satisfactions of common effort for the satisfactions of egofulfillment, the new politics will in time become indistinguishable from the old...
...moving the whole center of gravity of American politics, eventually, toward an authentic liberalism...
...It is argued that we cannot organize a veto effectively enough to be credible...
...Nor do radical liberals have to restrict themselves to candidacies that have prospects for victory...
...Unless the qualities that constitute this new political persona become typical rather than exceptional, our radical minority cannot hope to be effective...
...The processes by which criteria are hammered out, limits of tolerability fixed, are crucial...
...I have already indicated what is important in shaping a growing constituency of conscience: protect and adequately fund a system of higher education committed to liberal education for everyone who wants to go to college...
...All I had for a party to start with were the Johnson remnants...
...3) The fact is that a free marketplace of ideas as John Stuart Mill proposed it does not exist...
...And demoralized former activists swell the ranks of the apathetic—not because they don't care, but because they can't hope...
...Of course, circumstances could arise in which all threats are void...
...For it is, or is close to being, a voting majority of the population...
...The new coalition should fight for that favorite ideal of conservatives, genuine rule of law...
...Apathy is not, however, the worst consequence of a mania for victory...
...But, as present majorities are not radical, the most urgent aim is to transform the center of American political life from moderation to radicalism, To do that we must build a radical coalition now, deploying its substantial but minority strength effectively on behalf of programs that are radical when possible, and at least progressive...
...Presenting these to all plausible candidates, we should warn each that unless he subscribes to these reasonable standards, we will work to defeat him in the general election should he be nominated...
...At its best and most politically relevant, the changing styles of American consciousness are efforts to redeem the pledge of liberty and justice for all...
...By gently reminding him of what many of us did in 1968, we can make it plain that this is not an empty threat...
...Granting that a new party would make political education easier, the critical test is whether such a shift would make application of a veto strategy more effective...
...a cabinet post that deals exclusively with minority interests...
...Iam not passing a general judgment on these works—only on those parts that have political relevance...
...The Tokenism of American Democracy A MAJOR OBSTACLE to significantly ameliorative social programs lies in a political system whose hallmark is tokenism—in the maintainance of social stability by means of payoffs to the victims of injustice—payoffs so small as to be mere tokens...
...ONE OF JULES FEIFFER'S CARTOONS captures the mood of political hopelessness that pervades the American Left...
...To cope with this assault, the universities' internal political resources are inadequate...
...ARNOLD S. KAUFMAN ise of American society...
...Yet, a coalition whose core consists of organized workers, though generally progressive, will not be radical...
...Although much that the chroniclers of the counter culture write is useful background to the serious business of building a decent society, it is dangerous to regard their prescriptions as an alternative to hard, sustained political effort...
...And while we should always support a lesser evil when evils are our only alternatives, the mistake is to suppose that support of marginally better candidates is always, in balance, the lesser evil...
...For not only the young seek to reedem the promise of their own lives and the prom 8 In Reich's New Yorker abridgment, September26, 1970, p. 111...
...People are capable of acting persistently and energetically out of primarily moral motives...
...2) by repression, crude and subtle...
...to destroy attitudes of slavishness and deference...
...Those black activists of the South who in the early days of the civil rights movement doubted that their affluent white helpmates could stay the course once the going got rough or, more likely, tiresome, showed good sense...
...that people within the coalition care...
...with gradual extension of the suffrage, devices like the congressional seniority system and the poll tax were introduced to take up the slack...
...In response to these currents the politics of the new coalition should, in part, be redemptive...
...Members of the new coalition should bring economic muscle to bear in communities that otherwise cannot be influenced by minority economic pressure...
...Electoral effort, precisely because it is so important, should be conducted with all the intelligence and determination needed to exert a maximum influence on the entire political process...
...And their needs fuel political interests in ways that erode constraints of self-interest...
...PROSPECTS FOR THE SEVENTIES Many think that only self-interest provides a reliable basis for building a coalition...
...Did your man win...
...To intone that merit alone should be decisive is morally evasive...
...By the same token, those who place exclusive emphasis on winning erode prospects for radical change...
...First, relatively affluent whites should respond affirmatively to claims for reparation...
...Barring economic catastrophe, in 20-30 years some of those who yesterday joined the Poor People's Campaign may be among the most consumptionoriented segments of our population...
...Radicals know that to achieve these goals vast corporate powers must be subordinated to wise and democratic governance: bureaucracies must be humanized, pursuit of private profit ethically subordinated...
...I offer a political strategy that is, I think, better than betrayal or ineffectiveness— at least for those who are radical and liberal...
...There must be division of labor within the radical movement...
...No doubt, this is the main political thought behind Nixon's conversion to a minimum income program...
...but there are many of us...
...our hopes for a liberal future will also go up in flames...
...How will you feel about him a year from now...
...Yes...
...Radical liberals must regard electoral politics as an essential part of the strategy for political change...
...There is no blueprint for what needs to be done...
...War, ecology, the debasement of our culture affect them, too, vitally...
...We have no alternative to going the veto route—except acquiescing in the kind of pseudo-realism PROSPECTS FOR THE SEVENTIES that permits fundamental evils of our society to fester while candidates continue merrily to appeal to majority prejudices at the center...
...Four general issues are crucial...
...Yes...
...Our ability to create a radical future depends on our ability to fuse a radical constituency of the oppressed with a radical constituency of conscience...
...Today the practices by which majorities are frustrated is vulnerable to political attack...
...A third alternative for building a new radical coalition is to appeal to the more affluent on the basis of their narrow interest...
...From the Re to This observation is, unhappily, partly based on personal experience...
...This is something Ralph Nader, to his credit, understands very well...
...Part of the price of success is that old intimacies must give way to the imperatives of a politics of impersonal, radical pressure...
...No component of the potential coalition of radical forces should be excluded...
...As they become more aware of the causes of their misery the poor increasingly seek radical perspectices...
...5 New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1970, p. 66...
...Buckley's success in New York, Byrd's in Virginia, and the general threat George Wallace poses, all indicate that a new party would likely be the weakest of the four...
...It is the process of seeking power, not the Democratic party, that co-opts...
...Foreign domination was lifted, slavery ended, the franchise extended to women, the trade unions were organized and the conditions of racial minorities generally improved by a complex set of events and political activities that included much essential disruption, disorder, and violence...
...The tension between short-term gains and long-term prospects should always be in the forefront...
...but it should do so with care...
...The institutional devices by which the interests of the mighty have almost always been protected at the expense of the weak are many, varied, and mutable...
...Many within the trade union movement are deeply committed radical liberals...
...Groups afflicted by scarcity cannot generally be made to skip this cultural stage —as the Communist states of Eastern Europe have discovered and China will discover...
...The basic approach should be clear...
...Why did you blow up a university...
...Each segment of the emerging conscience constituency must be convinced that its special interests are important...
...My aim is to dispel this sense of profound discouragement...
...It is a fact of American political life that whatever radicalism is found among workers, and trade unionists in particular, tends to diminish as their precarious hold on a marginally comfortable life grows firmer...
...And because a party is a less flexible instrument than the alternative I will propose, a new party effort is likely to play right into the hands of conservative and reactionary forces...
...Still, they comprise a small proportion of the total population, and even their absolute strength is likely to diminish over time...
...Whether organized on behalf of the grape or lettuce workers of California, or the black residents of Cairo, Illinois, or the white miners of Appalachia, successful boycott is effective power...
...Most important within the frame of broadly decent but quite flexible moral commitments, his decision-making mechanisms function so that he comes to perceive the world and to make judgments in ways that accommodate his political ambitions...
...Chapter 6 of The Radical Liberal, and "Black Reparations: Two Views" (an exchange with Michael Harrington), DISSENT, July-August 1969, pp...
...I am not saying that the working class is authoritarian, or the trade union movement conservative...
...By and large, the sporadic violence that has occurred has been manipulated by the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans for political advantage...
...Those who think otherwise fantasize...
...Or suppose the danger of another Vietnam, or of a great depression, is imminent...
...A program of progressive change that will achieve meaningful reform is a precondition for successful radicalism...
...An intelligently conceived, vigorously applied veto strategy can contribute to the moral education of men like Muskie...
...And the possibilities for progressive coalition between racial minorities and white workers, especially in the South, now is great and growing...
...Skill at using our minority strength most effectively in building toward future majorities is the keystone of the arch which has the veto at the center...
...PROSPECTS FOR THE SEVENTIES As the conventional American ideals are taken seriously and as students are confirmed in their suspicions that the rhetoric is remote from the reality, education comes to promote both the liberal ideal and a commitment to making it real...
...Not only would deployment of the veto be less effective, but a new party effort would make us look far weaker than we are...
...Fear that welfarism is co-optative is morally arrogant, and politically senseless from the point of view of genuine radicalism...
...They form an indispensable part of the new coalition...
...about a grand jury report that indicated "there was probably cause to believe that state policemen committed a criminal offense in a case in which they shot and killed two unarmed brothers in a stake-out and then planted a gun to cover themselves...
...educating candidates or at least forcing them to reassess their inclination to move to the soft side of every tough policy question...
...6 They feel, with some reason, that they will make it economically and professionally...
...And the little that has been done—reports by the McGovern and O'Hara commissions, proposals by a few reform commissions in such states as Michigan—is mostly a matter of blueprints awaiting implementing action...
...When he forms judgments that conf6ct with views held by people who can advance or impair his career, he displays a fine humility...
...The tendency to role-playing comes to the fore when successful candidates or officials emerge from our own ranks...
...What did you do...
...There is a compelling case for a transfer of resources from whites to blacks...
...American democracy's historic genius, throughout the era of industrial expansion, has enabled groups highest in the social hierarchy to protect what they have with minimum reliance on repressive force...
...Each involves dissolution of traditionally liberal hang-ups about mere forms of equality and lawfulness...
...In a just society, just men would seek social stability to protect those institutions that promote what they cherish most...
...But such understanding compassion should not prevent us from adding to the official's predicament...
...In other respects these authors have importantthings to say...
...The potential ranks of the conscience constituency will swell as long as increasing numbers of the young receive an honest liberal education...
...Those who favor this approach cling to a neo-Marxist faith in the radical potentialities of organized workers, 3 even though a plausible basis for their optimism has disappeared...
...systematic and sustained effort by the Democratic party organization to bring minorities into positions of influence and power out of proportion to their numbers...
...The answer to that question is plainly negative, for a new party would organize a minority of an already distinct minority...
...Others displayed more integrity, but not less possessiveness...
...The radical Left has not been spared...
...There are two bases for a new majority coalition: self-interest and moral concern...
...For by splitting the vote that would normally go to progressive candidates, conservatives and reactionaries hope to gain by pluralities what majorities normally deny them...
...317-20...
...giving heart to those who despair by enabling them to count some losses as victories...
...Those who have in the face of growing repression made this limited progress are not about to yield it for the sake of party purity...
...But this in itself is not a valid alternative, for such a coalition would not be radical...
...A distinction must be drawn between progressive and radical majorities...
...Moreover, any new party would be the fourth, not the third...
...Lest I be misinterpreted in a climate of public opinion that is only a little less hysterical about violence than it was about Communism during the McCarthy period, I do not think violence is particularly useful at this time...
...4 2 Richard Stout, People (New York: Harper & Row, 1970...
...While this must be done, it is delusive to suppose that the affluent can be radicalized on the basis of selfinterest alone...
...But, though generally healthy, the main benefits of this development have gone to those who are conservative or reactionary, not to radical liberals...
...At one time, limitations on the franchise were 11 I have analyzed tokenism more fully in "Democracy and the Paradox of Want-Satisfaction," The Personalist, Spring 1970 issue...
...They demand representation...
...However, there are many ways in which mistrust can be reasonably allayed...
...Criticism that dwells primarily on political defect and rhetorical excess misses the most hopeful thing about these liberation movements...
...Despite the current fashions of counter culture, in political thought and feeling the great mass of the American people are too often manipulated "right down to their very instincts...
...Some wheeled and dealed, manipulated and lied, betrayed trusts...
...I can do no more here than suggest the range of possibilities...
...WHILE HIGHER EDUCATION is neither essential nor enough to produce liberals, every study reveals a significant correlation between the two...
...9 I have in mind especially writings by BayardRustin and Gus Tyler...
...Political activity must become a means of endowing with significance lives despoiled in other respects...
...The bulk of the racial minorities, the more radical trade unionists, all in the conscience constituency who have acquired significant leverage within the Democratic party are not about to abandon the organization they continue to view as their main vehicle for electoral effort...
...The role of secondary political groups that focus on a narrow range of issues needs to be stressed in this connection...
...To which the liberal responds, "I can get the same results a lot easier...
...Philip Slater, In Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon, 1970...
...Radical liberals should view organization of progressive voting majorities as a vital part of their strategy for change...
...To see how this approach might work, consider a concrete case...
...even the use of weighted votes when feasible...
...g., in the ADA, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the Young Peoples Socialist League...
...Ideologues of the counter culture do not appreciate the extent to which the young are moved, not by new ideals, but by the traditional values of American culture...
...Our numerically significant but distinctly minority status is the foundation on which any sensible political strategy must be built...
...Our federal system was designed to frustrate the will of urban majorities, something it has done remarkably well as the present madness of our system of agricultural subsidies attests...
...But American revolutionaries also used their votes to control colonial legislatures...
...Practitioners of the old politics who are disposed to pay 15 I have in mind such statements as Ronald Reagan's when he welcomed a bloodbath on the campuses, as well as hard evidence that President Nixon went out of his way to encourage rock throwing at San Jose, California, for the sake of its effect on the 1970 elections...
...And they take these ideals seriously...
...Data from the New York Times, December 20, 1970...
...So today's young people are uniquely predisposed to use education not only as a stepping stone to personal security but as a means of examining their lives and their society...
...Radicals who claim universities castrate their students intellectually find it impossible to explain why American students are taking an increasingly active role in attempting to redress the injustices of American society...
...He can be progressive, reasonable, and tolerant...
...Blew up a university," answers the militant...
...about a New York detective who was tried for conducting illegal checks of police records on behalf of a private business firm...
...Not for them the counter culture...
...But it is more absurd to urge them to forgo electoral activity...
...1) The entire social system is institutionally skewed in favor of the tiny minority at the top of the social hierarchy that has most power, wealth, and status...
...By contrast to other political systems, primary reliance on a token carrot instead of a big stick has enabled American democracy to promote social peace efficiently and with a minimum of jeopardy to structures of injustice...
...Whatever effort they can make on behalf of radical programs will depend on the depth of their moral commitment...
...Two broadly conflicting approaches to the problem of applying the veto vie for the favor of radical liberals: formation of a new political party on the one hand, retaining a loose affiliation with the Democratic party on the other...
...PROSPECTS FOR THE SEVENTIES effort that would have to be expended in the building...
...The moral case for doing so is strong...
...Unless we maintain continuous effective political awareness and action on every front, minds will ultimately be destroyed not liberated...
...In those rare instances where assessment yields a rational prospect of winning, the fight should certainly be made...
...Charles Reich does, 8 that successful cultural revolution is inevitable...
...10 These four issues have great symbolic and policy significance...
...Under the present conditions, the latter is more rational...
...Their position is widely heldwithin liberal and democratic socialist circlese...
...Suppose an Agnew is nominated...
...Tokenism has three main causes...
...ARNOLD S. KAUFMAN counterproductive...
...Principally, I had in mind neither violence nor any other form of social disorder when I used the metaphor of the arch...
...the strategic case, decisive...
...That is to say, we would support a man who, if he wins, will at least be pledged to defend us against repressive force, will generally encourage the dem i8 "The American people don't like extremists or extreme positions...
...Minorities must be accorded representation at every level of American power...
...Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970...
...If I'm pushed to try to please the Left, I lose some Democratic votes and the independent and Republican votes I've always needed and gotten in Maine...
...And it is inevitable that, faced with less catastrophic options, the affluent will not usually be willing to absorb comparable personal costs for the sake of social justice...
...Building the New Coalition To CRITICIZE A NEW COALITION STRATEGY on grounds that it would not build winning majorities in the immediate future would miss my central point...
...With these thoughts in mind, we should formulate a set of minimal but definite criteria of acceptability...
...But barring such unfortunate contingencies, we should make the veto threat, and carry it out if it becomes necessary...
...The conscience constituency should become the lens through which the power of poor and racial minorities is effectively magnified in communities where the oppressed are politically insignificant...
...Betrayed," the liberal answers...
...For majorities are not more inclined to govern justly than ruling elites...
...Progress is being made, but the omens are, at best, problematic...
...A new party that really tries to win elections would not be sufficiently better than the Democratic party to justify the enormous 16 New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1969, p. 26...
...The serious danger of politicization emanates not from the bulk of the students or faculty but from those who accurately perceive the long-range political threat implicit in the very idea of a liberal education—a danger they try to counter in three ways: (1) by forcing curricular changes that divert educational resources from liberal education...
...Those who want to protect the integrity of liberal education need political allies, and there are no more reliable allies than those who have a natural political interest in preventing interference with the campuses doing well what they are supposed to do...
...Then why did you vote...
...If my analysis is correct, education will in tensify these trends...
...To be effective...
...16 Radical liberals who cannot normally win elections are yet sufficiently numerous to veto the election of candidates who desperately want simply to win—especially the ones who have tended to take for granted our willingness to march lock-step in the cadres of the lesser evil...
...But, taken together, they are only one aspect of the general political effort to empower the oppressed...
...Moreover, like Lincoln, he is very ambitious—a man who seeks and enjoys the exercise of power...
...In order to do so most effectively, we must understand what makes very good politicians 17 In his general defense of a new party effort in "A Third Party May Be a Real Force in 1972," New York Times Magazine, June 7, 1970...
...Clearly such a man will be affected by credible pressure from radical liberals...
...14 New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1969...
...It is morally wrong and politically opportunistic to urge radicals to pledge unconditional nonviolence...
...3) Manipulation and co-optation are so common that most Americans, especially those at the bottom, are too often inculcated with political attitudes that frustrate basic interests...
...Doing so would produce a dramatically favorable response among those who primarily suffer the harm of official lawlessness...
...The basic mission of our universities is to provide what has traditionally been called, not without reason, a liberal education...
...In each case we should assess our strength, assess the alternative to the lesser-evil Democrat and, where the alternatives are tolerable, apply the veto...
...1) Social stability is important to anyone who has something he wants to protect against society's boat-rockers...
...Reform of the Democratic party, state by state and at the national level, indeed is urgently needed...
...To be effective...
...The alternative is loose affiliations with the Democratic party, primarily by successfully deploying our power to veto...
...Ineffective...
...The opposite is often true...
...Each has symbolic importance that sometimes transcends its importance to peoples' lives...
...That is partly why so many of them are inclined to "speak" disruptively...
...And those who look to liberal Republicans for radical leadership, who try to induce men like John Lindsay and John Gardner to join a new genuinely radi cal party, pursue a will'o the wisp...
...I'm one of the few politicians who can still talk to the hard-hats and the blacks...
...And the prospect of organizing a conscience constituency that will in time be sufficiently numerous rests in turn on what is happening to our young people, primarily the more affluent young on the nation's campuses...
...He reminds many of Lincoln...
...A New Political Persona THE NEW POLITICS sketched in what has gone before needs a new political persona, able to handle baffling tensions without losing either moral elan or political effectiveness...
...Their ire tends to focus on whatever frustrates their effort to consume, not on the forces that hold them down...
...Tension and disharmony can never be completely eliminated from a coalition that is primarily a fusion of these two constituencies...
...Each of these alternatives is an important part of any effort to forge a new radical majority, but separately they are doomed to failure...
...asks the militant...
...Radical strategy cannot rid us of tokenism until radical majorities can act within a genuinely majoritarian system...
...And beneath the surface of reported events is greater abuse of official power that is never publicly aired...
...Second, the issue of minority representation is crucial...
...But if radicals learn to find their gratifications through communal accomplishment within a strategic frame set by long-range moral perspectives, then the present mood of cynicism and despair may lift...
...The tensions are many...
...It is, and not surprisingly, a special vice of our politics...
...Last year the New York Times (November 31, 1970) carried stories about the determination of black policemen in Hartford, Connecticut, to protect members of minority communities who are physically interfered with by "white bigoted police officers...
...But it has been done, notably in 1968, and should be done much more explicitly...
...Immunity results not from new organizational forms, but from rationality and morally authentic commitment—another reason why a new political coalition based solely on self-interest would merely initiate new political horrors...
...Abraham Lincoln had to be elected before he emancipated the slaves...
...GardenCity, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1965...
...For there is a good conservative sense in trying to buy social stability by using a portion of America's prodigious wealth to provide them with modest increments in income...
...New Deal legislation promoted and consolidated trade union organization...
...PROSPECTS FOR THE SEVENTIES treme poverty and racial discrimination, the new coalition should deliberately try to modify adherence to the principle of majority rule...
...I am radical because the United States is so far from being a good society that institutional arrangements must be thoroughly transformed before it can become one...
...This group must be an important part of any new radical coalition...
...Yet well-justified scepticism about party-reform efforts is a sandy foundation on which to build fourth-party effort and a very weak basis for a new coalition strategy...
...Barring economic catastrophe, there is only one way in which the trend can be impeded or reversed—through politicization of the university...
...ARNOLD S. KAUFMAN public's beginnings, this system of token payoffs has worked remarkably well...
...The new political man will view all political leaders, especially candidates and officials, as neither devils nor saints, but as fallible creatures too often caught in a web of conflicting pressures to which they respond out of a variety of motives...
...Senator Edmund Muskie, for example, is a man who possesses integrity, intelligence, moral sensibility, and enough amour propre to project great dignity...
...Examining the available evidence, Kenneth Keniston and Michael Lerner declare that The most decisive refutation of the leftist charge that the universities are centers for reactionary indoctrination is the growing liberalism of college students...
...For what is a moral matter to the conscientious may, for the oppressed, be a condition of survival...
...They bring to these tasks commitment to the ideals of American culture—belief in liberty and justice, in the efficacy of reason, etc...
...For the American electorate increasingly supports efforts to translate theoretical majoritarianism into institutional practice— a development reinforced by the Supreme Court's one-man one-vote decision...
...The system has worked primarily because those who have least have traditionally accepted least in return for their compliance with established forms of law and order...
...1 This simple expression of basic social faith will have to serve for present purposes...
...But these problems are so basic and so deep that any remedies proposed in this brief space would be too superficial to be helpful...
...ographic trends on which we found our hope for future majorities, will energetically try to advance the welfare state, will enable us to be heard by keeping channels of governmental and party power open, will treat with reasonable sympathy programs we favor, the moral aspirations we voice...
...Beyond this, the conscience constituency must be organized wherever the potential exists—in unions, churches, businesses, towns, city neighborhoods, suburbs, and so on...
...They demand relevance, though they are often too impatient and therefore self-defeating...
...Autonomy is a word more honored ceremonially than in practical political ways...
...For them life usually is too comfortable, and the cost of activism too great...
...ARNOLD S. KAUFMAN rise and they tend to become more overtly frustrated and angry...
...Third, economic boycott is an important weapon for poor minorities...
...effective...
...Publicly, he becomes silent or vague about important issues...
...Yet each must be brought into the coalition not merely on the basis of interest, but on the basis of moral concern...
...In fact every aspect of American political life—party organization, electoral practices, municipal governance, legislative redistricting, governance of the mass media—betrays an institutional skew that favors the upper classes...
...In an unjust society, powerful men do the same...
...Clarion Books, 1970), p. 6. sense of radical I intend is a matter of what political programs one embraces, not of the political tactics favored...
...As a group, minority representatives will tend to make greater personal sacrifices for the sake of important policy goals than comparable alternatives...
...2) As majorities are not presently radical, even the majoritarian aspects of the system tend to promote tokenism, especially in relation to poverty and racism...
...By exercising an electoral veto we can, in those instances where the opposite is true, exert maximum pressure on the entire political process—educating the center when we defend our use of the veto...
...This is not said critically, but in an effort to assess the prospects for radical liberalism...
...Possessive individualism—the need to appropriate and control all things, people, or ganizations as one would a toothbrush—is the scourge of our culture...
...The 1 Arnold S. Kaufman, The Radical Liberal (New York: Atherton, 1968...
...When Hubert Humphrey proclaimed that "liberalism and violence are deadly enemies," 14 he betrayed devastating historical ignorance about how almost every radical program of liberal change has been achieved in this society...
...He is, and perceives himself as, a bridge across troubled waters.ls In brief, Muskie's instinctual tendencies move him toward the center of any system of political pressures that is relevant to his electoral success...
...But its primary aim must be to radicalize and politicize what is too often merely redemptive...
...gerrymandering electoral districts to guarantee minority representation...
...It is true, as Senator McCarthy has emphasized,17 that habits of major-party loyalty have been eroding...
...In the process it would fragment our strength in those other ways that anyone who has ever been involved in internecine political conflict knows too well...
...It is dangerous to suppose, as 7 See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969...
...And they know that anxieties of budget-cutting conservatives bear no plausible relationship to what this society can do to end human misery...
...15 My point is not to defend violence, but to liberate the tactical imagination...
...today it is a less reliable tool of the powerful...
...The central difficulty in building the constituency of the oppressed is their sense of powerlessness resulting from political isolation...
...3) by cutting college budgets enough to insure that standards of educational competence will erode...
...My remarks no more than scratch the surface of the topic...
...It is then that the dangers of harmful identification, of false loyalty and misplaced gratitude are greatest...
...I testified in the case of a UCLA professor who was assaulted by police men, then charged with felonious assault...
...He cannot be radical and win...
...For our basic task is to generate pressures that by influencing judgment and action serve our ultimate aims...
...PROSPECTS FOR THE SEVENTIES that the election of a black representative has political significance for black constituents everywhere...
...The sooner everyone has access to a decent share of affluence, the sooner will a subsequent generation know in their gut that achievement of material well-being is only a way-station to a truly satisfying existence...
...The liberal then asks the militant whether he voted...
...In California, Democratic legislators have gerrymandered Chicano candidates out of contention so often that many key Mexican-American leaders are no longer willing to play the Democratic electoral game...
...to engender self-respect and autonomy...
...Such a view goes too far in the basically healthy effort to debunk the moralism that has plagued American politics...
...Such a coalition would not have to wait for some distant future to effect radical change...
...2) Our short-term coalition aim should not be majoritarian democracy, rather, what we should seek is a democratic order that most effectively promotes social justice...
...Only a complex strategy that promotes flexibility about tactics can do the job...
...The following specific measures may prove useful: community control that increases the power of oppressed minorities over municipal decisions affecting their lives...
...All forms of disorder tend to be 13 By Tom Hayden, Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Lasch, and Theodore Roszak, respectively...
...But we cannot even navigate the intervening waters unless there is at least mitigation of the evil...
...Radical liberals are not and for the foreseeable future will not be a majority of the population or the voting public...
...Whether X, who is white, will make a better congressman than Y, who is black, is often less important than the fact 9I have discussed the moral and political case for reparations more fully elsewhere...
...2 If we are to build a radical majority, there is no realistic alternative to relying on what has been called a constituency of conscience...
...We might have to swallow our convictions and our threats, support a nominee who does not satisfy even our minimal criteria...
...Liberals want the Democrats to nominate a presidential candidate in 1972 who can win without betraying certain critically important, minimal commitments and values...
...For example, the vast concentrations of corporate power cannot be democratically and wisely mastered without vigorous use of voting power...
...To some extent people find a new party attractive because they despair of reforming the Democratic party in even its procedural aspects...
...The same process, with appropriate variations, should be adopted whenever we are in a minority so definite that candidates of our own cannot win...
...By 1967 Hubert Humphrey was already convinced that the war in Southeast Asia was wrong and had to be ended...
...Asked why he did not say so at the 1968 Democratic National Convention he explained that President Johnson "was absolutely paranoid about the war," and that, after all, "there I was, supposed to be running for President of the United States...
...Richard L. Stout provides evidence for this claim in a book that describes the significance of the effort thousands of morally concerned people made during the McCarthy campaign...
...And right now legislative willingness is essential if the lives of racial minorities are to be steadily improved...
...The Black Power movement was first and foremost an effort to transform the consciousness of black Americans...
...This is the situation of most black people in relation to most whites in our society...
...To complete the work of the welfare state is the surest route to a radical future...
...But this must be done in a rational, credible fashion...
...New York Times Magazine, November 22, 1970, p. 130...
Vol. 18 • August 1971 • No. 4
