The Problem of American Power
H., I.
The uneven development of world economy has resulted in a disastrous split between the industrialized West • and primitive East; but it has also brought another split, at the moment quite as...
...The power potential of the country, its unprecedented emphasis on norms of accumulation and efficiency, its literal incapacity to understand and irritated refusal to sympathize with the patterns of thought which dominate Europe and Asia—these are factors, sometimes the result of bad will but more often of a multiplying cultural distance, which make America into a lonely power colossus, alternating between gestures of humiliating generosity and crude intimidation, sincerely convinced that only by the imposition of its will can the world be saved...
...This would not at all have meant to "trust" the Russians...
...But the French, who had collaborated with the Japanese and been restored to power by British bayonets, suddenly withdrew, later in the same year, their recognition from this government in the north...
...The middle class voter who put Eisenhower in office recognized in "Ikeism" the same benign indifference to the idea of Europe or the idea of Asia that he himself felt...
...Now it bursts out in one part of the world, now in another...
...That America has a high standard of living, a high level of productivity, may arouse feelings of envy among the politically articulate Asians...
...And is this merely the result of malicious anti-American propaganda...
...There is nothing inherent in capitalist society which requires the American Secretary of State to ask the European nations permission to search their ships for possible arms to Guatemala (shades of 1812) —a proposal which is not merely insanely stupid but reeks of the imperialist psychology...
...Instead of hinting darkly that Nehru is soft on communism or even something of a fellow-traveller, America might have responded immediately with a dramatic public gesture to allay the fears of the world and proclaim its eagerness to stop atomic war production...
...For it is not merely stupidity or cussedness that makes U. S. policy favor Syngman Rhee or Chiang Kai-shek—it is our basic inability, which would in large measure be shared by a liberal Democratic regime as well, to come to terms with the future of Asia...
...The second of these could perhaps be quickly improvised, but the first is not likely to be available for some time—hence, incidentally, McCarthy's shrewdness in concentrating on the Communist issue, which will be available for a long time...
...Panic released and allowed to luxuriate—that is the syndrome of McCarthyism...
...When America faced the Nazi threat, it could react to a new phenomenon with a certain shocked confidence...
...Signs of it, and very heavy signs, can already be seen in earlier years...
...Panic restrained or frozen under the mask of homely confidence—that is frequently the content of "Ikeism...
...And when the Asian press expressed its resentment, U. S. reaction was mainly that these Asians, unduly sensitive as Orientals are known to be, were making too much of a fuss...
...The second is even more complex, since it involves the consciousness of millions of people still on the edge of illiteracy, as well as the difficulty of accumulating in Asia a sufficient capital reserve without thereby becoming dependent on the West...
...Every political move of the French was incredibly stupid—but stupid not in an individual sense...
...If one can't figure one's way out of a labyrinth, one will try in final desperation to barge through it headfirst...
...1) The Anatomy of "Ikeism" A few years ago C. Wright Mills suggested a rough but usable distinction between sophisticated and practical conservatives...
...One may recognize that the basic struggle in the world is political and therefore try to undercut the hold of Stalinism by a genuine appeal of radical democracy...
...cautious not maniacal...
...Because of the legalistic-moralistic frame of Dulles' own mind, and more important, because of the heavy pressures of the McCarthyite wing of the Republican Party, which presses toward a war policy without being ready to face up to its consequences, the U. S. government is committed to skimping the usual diplomacy of bargaining which involves a simple recognition that other forms of national power, like them or not, do exist...
...but not admiration...
...Far more than good or bad will is at stake...
...3) The H Bomb as Politics In the H Bomb, the Eisenhower administration faced its greatest test...
...Thereby they drove many nationalist, nonCommunist Vietnamese into Ho's arms, and transformed what should have been a domestic political struggle between Vietnamese integrity and Stalinist intervention into a colonial war against a foreign imperialist power...
...Here we would suggest a simple but perhaps fundamental explanation for the power of McCarthyism: the deep-seated if frequently suppressed state of panic, itself the result of the split between American power and American inability to use its power, which has seized large sections of the American population...
...Even as it is inextricably drawn into the historical dilemmas of Europe and Asia, even as Europe and Asia become "Americanized," there has developed in this country such a concentration of wealth and power, with so many new attendant values, as to make America increasingly isolated from the rest of the world...
...A kind of symbiotic relationship can be traced: the decline of Europe has proceeded in direct ratio to the rise of America...
...it has been appropriated by the enemies of socialism...
...For once, considerations of morality and realism come very close to one another...
...And in foreign policy the Eisenhower administration charted a dizzying compromise...
...It is here that the liberals, who also recognize the need for massive aid to Asia, fail to think through the implications of their ideas...
...Consider the taxation, upon the population at large or the corporate interests or both, that would be necessary for such a program...
...It is hopeless to speak of American good will or democracy, to scatter bits of Point Four money here and there, when in the eyes of millions of people we are the nation of the Bomb...
...At the very least, America might have considered with a certain seriousness and courtesy Nehru's proposal for an international conference designed to institute a ban upon further use and manufacture of the Bomb...
...But the social energy behind that revolutionary impulse remains...
...It is sometimes said that McCarthyism has no foreign policy of its own, but that is not, strictly speaking, true: McCarthyism combines the gesture of extreme war-hawk provocation with the underlying impulses of isolationism...
...Let us remember which nation was the first, and thus far the only, one to use atomic weapons...
...yet America, the greatest power on earth, could only repeat at this moment of severe moral-political crisis, the empty catchword, Massive Retaliation...
...War—a full, terrible, releasing war—might be a way out, but our very progress in atomic weapons makes it risky...
...And the result, among many Americans, is frustration, bewilderment, impotence and occasional bursts of anger...
...It is not to be supposed that this disintegration begins only with the day Eisenhower takes office...
...If the West does not intervene militarily, the Viet Minh is almost certain to take complete control of the country...
...With the equalization of atomic power, there may be a possibility of reaching highly limited arrangements of the sort that were reached with regard to poison gas—and which were observed by the totalitarian powers during the Second World War for reasons, of course, not founded in humanitarian sentiments...
...And that, we would suggest, is the socio-psychological material from which McCarthyism is made...
...Everywhere except in the United States, millions of human beings, certainly the majority of those with any degree of political articulateness, live for some kind of social change...
...Now the world's greatest power, the United States and its administration are perplexed by the problem of power...
...So runs a dominant thread of American feeling...
...Today McCarthyism functions on several levels: as the personal voice or charisma of the creature himself...
...All true...
...But if the political struggle is discarded and if war seems too risky, what then remains...
...America speaks today as if it wants to sell the Asians the final product of a long history of social and economic development...
...The most important fact about the Eisenhower administration is the 212 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 climate it has established: fear, cowardice, suspicion, anti-intellectualism, swagger, distrust, denunciation...
...4) Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolution It now seems highly probable that Stalinism has achieved a major victory in Indochina...
...Consider how different the whole politicalsocial atmosphere in this country would have to be before such a proposal could even be seriously discussed...
...These are the dominant energies of our time and whoever gains control of them, whether in legitimate or distorted forms, will triumph...
...Implicit in the decision to explode the Bomb in the Pacific is the traditional contempt of the white man for the colored peoples...
...For the American government to act upon what is peculiar to Stalinism—for the American government to treat it as a blend of reactionary and pseudo-revolutionary appeals, as a movement both anti-capitalist and anti-socialist, as a movement that thrives upon the vacuum created by the collapse of capitalism as a world economy—all this would require a political openness inconceivable in the present atmosphere, a willingness to recognize its own social obsolescence, and a readiness to support anti-Stalinist movements in Asia and Europe which, to be politically effective, must also be anti-capitalist in one or another way...
...Nor are we saying that "only" a socialist America could help solve the problems of Asia, for that, while perhaps ultimately true, does not impinge upon any immediate possibilities...
...that is all very well for Whittaker Chambers, but not of conspicuous help in the rice paddies of Indochina...
...Once the Eisenhower administration took office, the two mentalities worked with surprising smoothness...
...The sophisticated conservatives understood that victory was possible for the Republican Party only by appealing to the images of the practical conservatives, which embodied the ostrich yearnings of the American middle class...
...But between the proclaimed extremes of Massive Retaliation and unilateral atomic disarmament lies the real problem: political struggle against Stalinism...
...Mao Tse-tung has shrewdly remarked that China is too backward a nation to be overly worried by atomic weapons, while Secretary of War Wilson, back from a trip to the Far East, reports that the war in Asia is today "90 per cent political...
...The first might be represented by the editorial position of Fortune, the second by a small town Republican paper...
...To rely on the H Bomb as the power behind our policy can lead only to the disaster of the cobalt bomb...
...Here too, however, the Dulles policy proves impossible...
...We have no illusions whatever about the possibilities of reaching permanent agreements with the Russians...
...The necessity for maneuver and some sort of breathing spell...
...The revolutionary impulse has been contaminated, corrupted, debased, demoralied...
...McCarthyism and "Ikeism" are of course very different, but they are also symmetrical: both are symptoms not merely of the inability of the Republican Party to rule, but more fundamentally of a loss of social confidence and cohesion in American life...
...Those theoreticians of liberalism who advance claims for American uniqueness generally do so in a spirit of eulogy, but if they were to stand back a little from the problem and see it in some historical perspective, they might make a genuine contribution...
...To become that it would have to have at its disposal a chronic economic crisis and a coherent mass movement...
...calculating not irrational...
...2) McCarthyism as Malaise Various theories have been suggested to explain the social roots of McCarthyism in America, and we hope to return to them in a later DISSENT...
...It is all too easy to blame McCarthy for the social and political ills which are the responsibility of his betters...
...And whatever its inadequacies, this view of Nazism did have a genuine relation to reality...
...It cannot be understood merely as totalitarianism, for the problem is to make the proper discriminations as to what kind of totalitarian movement it is...
...On the other hand, much could yet be done, in terms of concrete short-range measures, to undercut the roots of Stalinism in Asia...
...that the sum of these constitutes a policy...
...When it announced its ability to wipe out cities with one bomb, a shiver of foreboding ran through the world...
...As yet, McCarthyism is not a full-fledged fascist movement...
...As Walter Lippman has put it with classical brevity: "The French lost the war in Indochina, not because they were not brave, but because they failed to win the confidence and support of the Vietnamese nation...
...To suppose that an antedeluvian pro-consul like General Templer, until recently British chief in Malaya, can defeat, let alone understand, Stalinism, is to suppose we are still living in the age of Kipling...
...His political appeal had been shrewdly designed to elicit the vision of a pulling-back from the bewilderments of that highly complex world with which the Truman administration had, willySummer 1954 • DISSENT • 211 nilly, established occasional commerce...
...But the over-all tendency toward a garrison state—a tendency, happily, that is still far from having reached its goal—has little to do with McCarthyism, for it was already present under Truman...
...Their behavior is frequently based on other assumptions, neither more nor less "idealistic" —simply different...
...Today things are almost hopeless in Indochina, but the lessons of Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 217 Indochina need to be drastically applied to Malaya and Indonesia, where crises of a parallel kind are rapidly maturing...
...America may speak in the name of the American revolution, but the policies it proposes and the images it advances are those of an American restoration...
...Let us 218 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 assume—though we doubt that, in the absence of a large-scale political activization in Asia, even this would be sufficient—that a tremendous aid program of $30 to $40 billions from the West could raise the economic and cultural level of Asia to a significant degree...
...216 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 Marshall Islanders can be shunted from one place to another...
...as his secret apparatus of informers and tipsters who constitute a kind of "parallel center" or "dual power" within and against the legal government...
...And most important of all, it constitutes a paralyzing veto upon American foreign policy, any American foreign policy: on the one hand, it is prepared to sabotage as "treason" any policy which takes into account the realities of Stalinist power by making temporary arrangements with it, and on the other hand, it pushes for a policy that can only have meaning in or lead to a major war but without being willing to take responsibility for that war...
...If a prerequisite for fascism is the crumbling of social cohesion, then McCarthy is doing that work, and doing it with the help of the major, respectable forces of the country...
...Stalinism is cold not hot...
...Anyone who compares Eisenhower's cowardice toward McCarthy with Hindenburg's toward Hitler is likely to know some chilling moments...
...but it also points back to the Truman policy of promiscuous "loyalty" regulations and promiscuous "subversive lists" which provided a quasi-juridical base for what has happened during the past two years...
...220 • DISSENT • Summer 1954...
...For the sake of simplification, let us say that the two major social problems facing humanity are: the obsolescence of the European nation-state with its equally obsolescent economy, and the extreme unevenness of world economy, which dooms Asia, Africa and South America to poverty and backwardness...
...as a political mood which cuts through all layers of American society...
...Ikeism" too expresses the same fustration, but expresses it through an effort to deny its reality...
...a few Japanese fishermen may get burned...
...And the practical conservatives knew they couldn't win without the high-powered manipulations of the sophisticated...
...They fail to see that the battle for the mind of Asia can be successful only if and when Asia is presented with an image of a radically different America, and an image based on reality, not a press agent's phrases...
...if the West does intervene, there follows the likelihood, not of wresting the country from the Stalinists, but of a long bleeding war...
...it cannot, even if it would, surrender its own modes of response...
...When 214 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 America lost China, the process of panic began...
...What was involved was a class stupidity, the rigid stiffened reaction of a class losing control...
...The secret of McCarthy's power is to be found in the pervasive and undifferentiated frustration which millions of Americans, and particularly those who bear the burdens of power, feel with regard to the international Communist movement...
...Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 215 A foreign policy geared to nuclear weapons is realistically a disaster and morally a scandal...
...Where Stalinism pretends to be the fulfillment of Western humanism, Nazism frankly proclaimed itself the enemy of humanism, which has made the Stalinists harder to cope with...
...Then, we might have had a little more or less of scandal than under Harding, a little more or less of social mediocrity than under Grant...
...This, however, is what the politics of panic which characterizes the Eisenhower administration is least calculated to give us...
...Can we seriously suppose, however, that such a program will or is likely —or can—be instituted by any status quo government in the United States, be it conservative or liberal...
...but it has also brought another split, at the moment quite as important, between the United States and its own allies...
...For if we cannot hope for a fundamental solution to the problem of Stalinism from the bourgeois world, we can at least hope for temporary balances of power which will allow us more time to live, to grope for solutions...
...Except for a reliance upon its material strength, the U. S. has today no foreign policy: neither political nor diplomatic nor adventurist...
...But American foreign policy is enacted in ignorance or contempt of this central fact...
...It may well be, as many people argue, that unilateral atomic disarmament is at present too great a risk...
...And for such mistakes we shall pay...
...If the Bomb seems to remove global atomic war from the realm in which any political objectives can be achieved by either combatant, it makes all the more plausible those small localized wars the Stalinists promote...
...Stalinism won the largest country of Asia...
...The men who rule in Washington sincerely believe that material strength, wealth, money, technology, know-how will vanquish all obstacles...
...We are not trying to suggest a "program" here...
...The image of America as the country of the Bomb throws large sections of the world into political torpor, which in turn makes them easy prey for the Stalinists and the Stalinist-controlled sections of neutralism...
...The first of these problems might be solved, at least in part, by the creation of a United States of Europe able to achieve a measure of independence from the two great power blocs...
...Talking loudly while carrying a small stick, it turned a face of political schizophrenia to the outer world: now it purred like a slick machiavellian, now it snarled like a frightened small-town politician...
...The Oppenheimer scandal points to McCarthyism, to be sure...
...It cannot be understood as the emanation of pure evil...
...Ikeism" represented a wish to return to the era BC—Before Complexity...
...The workers of Europe are consciously anti-capitalist, the populations of Asia and South America anti-imperialist...
...We are paying for decades of imperialist cupidity and obtuseness...
...For there is a sense in which America is becoming unique...
...Far more important is an understanding of the root situation...
...Eisenhower's victory rested upon an appeal to the imagination of the middle class...
...Political measures can defeat Communist guerrillas in Asia, but they have to be taken in time...
...Nothing seems to work, nothing seems able to stop them...
...Precisely, that is, where the West is least prepared...
...The whole tragi-comedy of "Ikeism" is that it represents the hunger for normalcy at a time when normalcy is utterly impossible...
...they knew the formula by which an excuse for the exceptional becomes a justification for establishing it as the routine...
...There is no reason to trust the Russians, but there is every reason to speak to the world...
...Once it realized that Nazism went beyond the bounds of conventional immorality, that Nazism contained an impulse to make terror into the norm of life, the American mind could use this analysis to meet the Nazi danger...
...Something uncanny, something magical seems to attach itself to the Stalinist victories, in a way that did not seem true for the Nazis...
...The men in Washington know that they are extremely powerful, but the possession of power does not solve the problem of how to use it...
...But the world resists this will...
...And besides, the Stalinists seem entirely satisfied with a series of small bleeding wars rather than one grand apocalyptic blowout...
...The coarse psychology of the practicals dominated domestic policy: tideland oil, tax "relief" for corporate business, plundering of national resources, acceptance of a reserve army of four to five million unemployed...
...The sophisticated believed in a measure of Welfare economics while the practical liked to think he didn't...
...They demonstrate, thereby, an inadequate sense of reality...
...The uneven development of world economy has resulted in a disastrous split between the industrialized West • and primitive East...
...Or one may believe that the political appeal is either useless or unavailable and that only war can end the Communist danger...
...the United States "discovered" that the Communist Party was plotting and put Eugene Dennis in jail...
...Bottle them up in Berlin, and they break loose in Guatemala...
...The greater American bewilderment and irritation in failing to stop Stalinism internationally, the greater the success of McCarthyism...
...Add these facts together and you see that the idea of Massive Retaliation is both hollow and disastrous...
...There is nothing inherent in capitalist society which produces the extreme inanity of the Dulles policy: something must be left to accident...
...Between America and the remainder of the world communication becomes increasingly uncertain, sporadic, bitter...
...but certainly temporary agreements might be possible in order to give Asia, and the whole human race, a little more time...
...By an old twist of history, the very madness of the armament race now makes it likely that we will not have a global war in the near future and that consequently the decisive struggle with Stalinism will be fought in the arena of politics...
...The very locale of the H bomb experiments tells us something about American mentality...
...Contain the Stalinists in Europe, and they thrive in Asia...
...Meanwhile, the tragedy of American power becomes more terrible and terrifying each day...
...Now, one way of looking at the Eisenhower victory is as the fruit of a union between these two conservative impulses...
...American power multiplies—but the power to dispose of it creatively, with human warmth and intelligence, has never seemed smaller than today...
...Not only is the Bomb as Foreign Policy a moral horror, it also makes the task of breaking millions of Europeans and Asians from the Stalinist orbit infinitely more difficult...
...America now has several possible courses...
...Whether such an America could be created short of socialism is perhaps an academic question—we doubt that it could be created very short of socialism...
...The very resources that could lift mankind to new levels of well-being serve only to increase the distance between America and the rest of the world...
...The central fact is that we continue to live in a revolutionary age...
...They refuse, or are unable, to weigh the inescapable consequences of such a proposal: namely, serious political and social struggle at home...
...If America, at the very least, were to present itself not as a "savior" of Asia, but simply as a power that will do all it can to allow the Asian peoples to work out their own destinies, that too would be helpful...
...Consider the competitive dangers a vigorous industrialized Asia might then present to American capitalist economy...
...Eisenhower was popular because he was a certain kind of general : unspectacular, old-fashioned, sound...
...Nor can it be understood as the legitimate Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 213 heir of Marxism—though official American ideology, wilfully eager to discredit radicalism by identifying it with totalitarianism, does treat the Stalinist movement in these terms...
...In 1946, when a coalition Vietnamese regime was established in the north of the country under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh but not yet under the domination of the Stalinists, political measures of a bold and imaginative kind might have saved the country...
...They struck upon a convenient formula: each acquiesced in the worst features of the other...
...He was popular not merely because he was a general...
...Consider, in short, the serious political struggles that would inevitably occur in America consequent upon such a program...
...The Oppenheimer case represents "Ikeism" at the low political and moral point where it touches upon McCarthyism...
...it seems likely that a swashbuckling military man would not have won the election...
...As a consequence, the Stalinists were helped into power, the anti-Stalinists demoralized and atomized...
...This means, and so large sections of the world took it to mean, that the H Bomb is the core of American foreign policy...
...The very magnitude of the new atomic weapons encourages the Stalinists into the not unwarranted belief that they may still be able to chew off a bit here and there...
...Had there been any possibility for the realization of this wish, all might have gone well...
...The sophisticated recognized the need for "internationalism," while the practical resisted his recognition of the same need...
...But no one, except obsolete moralists, would have cared...
...The sophisticated conservatives provided the cynical rationale for a continued whittling away at civil liberties, the infamous persecution of scientists, the imprisonment of Communists, etc...
...The very resources that should help in the triumph of democracy seem, by an almost devilish process of bewilderment, to work in behalf of relatively impoverished totalitarian nations...
...Immediately, the H Bomb made things harder, not easier, for American foreign policy...
...So long as America remains on the defensive internationally, so long as we continue to have Indochinas and Guatemalas, trying to stop Communist mass movements with inane "Emperors" and Latin dictators, McCarthyism will survive, ebbing now but rising later...
...We are merely trying to suggest the direction, the trend in which America would have to go—toward a radical democracy, toward a profound and humble effort to grasp the outlook of peoples different from itself, toward a willingSummer 1954 • DISSENT • 219 tress to share its unprecedented wealth in order to revive the health of the whole world, toward a sense of community and equality...
...but it does not do anything to let them first engage in those revolutionary and liberating movements through which we have ourselves entered modern history...
...It cannot be suppressed entirely...
...McCarthy may suffer defeats, but the political mood he personifies will not disappear...
Vol. 1 • July 1954 • No. 3
