PICKING UP THE PIECES

...And then, of course, came the ghastly Eagleton affair, which destroyed whatever chance there was for McGovern to widen his base of support...

...It was not reactionary in explicit intent, though open to reactionary manipulation...

...Conciliation and confrontation together: a powerful mixture...

...it was not reactionary in regard to economic issues, though likely in its objective consequences to help those who are reactionary in regard to economic issues...

...One detects a desire in certain intellectual or semiintellectual circles to be done with the nagging problems of the last decade---enough nail-biting over Mylai and the moral issues of the Vietnam war, enough worrying over such matters as amnesty and civil disobedience, let's get on with the business of preparing for 1976...

...In their concern with the personal qualities of a presidential candidate, the masses of voters are not being merely simple-minded...

...The urgent problems have to do with safety in the streets— any liberal or radical who by now denies the reality of this problem is simply deluding himself (or staying off the streets...

...As for ourselves: we remain democratic radicals...

...If that were to happen, it would be a tragedy...

...The Soviet bloc (toward which McGovern was supposed to be too "soft") played a large if unmeasured role in helping Nixon...

...Within the steel union there were considerable currents of opposition to Abel's "neutrality...

...These limited but significant victories presage the kind of cooperation that should be sustained and extended...

...McGovern never really responded to or seized upon this matter...

...So let me move very quickly past the obvious causes of the McGovern defeat, then discuss some of its underlying implications, and finally come to some problems of the liberal-left in the coming years...

...I fear not...

...We believe that fundamentally capitalism, even with its desirable modulations, remains an unjust society...

...These are matters of some complexity, and we shall be returning to them in future issues of DISSENT...

...Why then, it may be asked, did not negative feelings about Nixon weigh as heavily...

...Now that the New Left bubble has burst, now that the conservative intellectuals have begun to rally, the serious debate can begin...

...That the author of From Hegel to Marx should have found it in his heart to vote for the president who had proposed sending Carswell and Haynsworth to the Supreme Court is his affair...

...And then there was the "Open Letter to George McGovern," in which Sidney Hook came out for "the lesser evil"—that is, for Nixon...

...b) large numbers of ordinary people in this country must have felt that Nixon had succeeded in pulling off a major gamble...

...And then there was the remarkable advertisement of the intellectuals who came out for Nixon in the name of "prudence," which I take to be a popular translation of "the limits of social policy" argument...

...clearly Nixon could exploit such sentiments far better than McGovern...

...10 Other tasks are intellectual-political...

...There remains another factor, one that people like ourselves are disinclined to stress but great masses of voters do...

...It's not anything one can yet prove or disprove, but it may serve as a useful takeoff point for the next few years...

...The New York Times/Yankelovich poll, which proved to be quite accurate, asked people: "Do you feel that minority groups are receiving too much, too little, or just about the right amount of attention...

...Equally troubling was the apparent indifference of large numbers of voters to the repeated ex posure of scandal and sleaziness in the Nixon administration—Watergate, ITT, etc...

...However hesitantly and clumsily, major social and economic issues were raised by McGovern and these are going to be with us in the coming decades...

...it is partly a domestic analogue to the ideology of Kissinger in foreign affairs...

...it was a mistake to suppose that a symmetrical populism was at work in both the Wallace and McGovern movements...

...That such impressions played a significant role can be seen in one simple fact: Nixon could not pull along many Republicans into congressional office, despite the magnitude of his victory...

...Why wasn't it possible for the unions that supported McGovern to prod him into articulating the fundamental economic issues more sharply and dramatically...

...Some vindication: they helped get themselves four more years of Nixon...

...But, of course, it would be naive to suppose that intellectual trends, either on the Right or the Left, take place apart from larger developments of the society...

...what most stirred Wallace supporters seems to have been an implicit racism and a general disgruntlement with social innovations...

...But might it not have been in better taste for Professor Hook—who surely knew how fiercely Norman Thomas opposed the Vietnam war and how desperately he gave the last years of his life to fighting it—to have spoken just for himself, Professor Hook, and left Norman Thomas alone...

...Nor was this inability confined to him...

...The general purport of the presidential vote was not for a turn to the Right (or, of course, the Left...

...some old-line politicians must secretly have preferred to see McGovern fall on his face...

...The expectation fondly nurtured among Democratic professionals and Meanyite labor people that these newly aroused professional and middle-class people will simply fade away, leaving the political arena to the old pros and their young employees, is almost certainly mistaken...

...Above all, he's not clear-headed and decisive enough...

...Isn't it necessary to reconsider the convention rules McGovern persuaded the Democrats to accept, but to reconsider them in such a way that, while correcting the bias the nominating convention revealed, it will not return the conventions to the hands of the old pols...

...The grave problems that beset our society will persist...

...To some extent we were paying the price for the "confrontation politics" of the '60s, the "revolutionary" bluster of the Tom Haydens, the Kunstlers, the Eldridge Cleavers, the Stokely Carmichaels, the Rap Browns—all those who gained prominence on TV and in the press, only to collapse into the political impotence which had been the reality all along...

...And the rise of this new conservatism in the intellectual world was demonstrated by a series of public advertisements for Nixon bearing the names of a good many well-known and some distinguished people...

...The Democratic convention seems to have had negative repercussions to an extent that we did not, but should have, realized at the time: you aren't going to win elections in this country by staging conventions at which a good many delegates have gone to graduate school and where people like Bella Abzug are allowed to take the spotlight...

...But it would not be a tragedy if the McGovern people ceded some of their narrowly based power in the Democratic party, recognizing that a crushing defeat requires some concessions...

...What this signifies is that the unquestioned hegemony of the Meany leadership has at least been chipped away, and that in the future the labor movement may show itself open to the conflicting currents of opinion and attitude to which the rest of society is susceptible...

...The election shows that a Democratic victory is not yet possible if such people take control, but it also shows that victory is equally impossible if they are driven away or humiliated...

...One kind was represented by a peculiarly nasty attack that Lewis Feuer wrote on McGovern in the National Review—the kind of piece, filtering gossip from the Village Voice, that makes one feel that some people retain the psychology of fanaticism, regardless of which pole of the political spectrum they may occupy at a given moment...

...Fundamentally, I think, the vote for Nixon was an anti-turmoil, antiferment vote...

...The sense that many people seem to have had of McGovern might be put into these words: "He is a decent and honest fellow, probably more so than Nixon, but he has all those oddballs around him, people who if they COMMENTS AND OPINIONS gained power might keep the country in turmoil for four more years, and McGovern himself seems too fuzzy-minded, he's not tough and mean enough for the job...

...Even after four years of what black leaders have assailed as "benign neglect" of minority needs, four out of every ten voters answered, "too much attention...

...indeed, the replacement of this feeling by a mixture of fear and contempt, a tacit acceptance of some notion of innate in feriority that leads "them" to drugs, mugging, violence, family disintegration, etc...

...We believe that the kinds of changes that the McGovern campaign started to propose in 1972 must be fought for into and beyond 1976...

...And that is the personal assessment made of McGovern...

...Carswell, Mylai, Watergate, Haiphong, busing, all tokens of prudence...

...There will be dozens of other, related questions...

...There were other factors, all by now sufficiently rehearsed...

...Some signs of this are obvious enough: the growing influence of the Public Interest, which has become a center of sophisticated conservatism, and the spread of similar ideas into the pages of Commentary...

...And despite his crushing defeat, there were some strongly positive elements in the campaign...

...It did this not so much through statements of preference in Pravda, but still more through diplomatic arrangements worked out between Russian negotiators and Kissinger...

...seem disturbed, at least as long as American casualties decline...

...but what I, for one, found peculiarly irritating is that in doing so he deCOMMENTS AND OPINIONS scribed himself as a "comrade-in-arms" of Norman Thomas...

...Yet, in a sense, we should welcome their appearance...

...Nixon did not present himself as an innovator, Nixon did not raise anxieties concerning change, experiment, and risk...

...they will not be dissolved by Nixon's meeching rhetoric or by sophisticated intellectual apologia...

...Now, in his long career Norman Thomas had many "comrades-in-arms," including a good number who dropped his arms...

...I think that whatever Norman Thomas might have done had he lived to 1972 he would not have supported Nixon, but I cannot, in the nature of things, be sure of this...

...Race, it now seems, was the dirty little secret of the campaign—and those intellectuals who supported Nixon because, as they proclaimed, he had been "prudent" in his four years of office were right in a way that (one hopes) they did not quite grasp...

...Surely, that is a possibility of major significance...

...There was no intellectual profit to be had from that struggle, it was only a matter of survival and hygiene...

...The true issues in contemporary society are not the disputes between people like ourselves and the Jerry Rubins or even the Herbert Marcuses...

...There are more fundamental tasks...

...A third of the Democrats polled said they would defect to Nixon, and of this group over half said blacks have been getting "too much attention...

...and the McGovern people, out of ideological zeal and naive arrogance, made disastrous errors (like barring the Daley delegates from the Democratic convention...

...The growing influence of writers like Irving Kristol and Robert Nisbet, Edward Shils and Daniel Moynihan has some relation to the political success of Nixonism...

...But then, once he took a tough line on Vietnam, starting to mine the Haiphong harbor and to bomb North Vietnam at a fearful rate, the response of the Communist powers was so ineffectual, so merely pro forma, that (a) sophisticated observers could speculate it was all done by prearrangement and the Russians and Chinese had in effect decided to give Nixon a free hand in Vietnam...

...he did show poor judgment in regard to some advisers...

...The reasons for this I tried to suggest in the last DISSENT: that in this stage of the development of the welfare state we do not have as clearly formulated an idea of immediate socioeconomic proposals as labor and liberal people had, say, just before the New Deal...

...Whole new strata of the population became involved in politics—thousands of young people, students, professionals...

...but it would be unfortunate, indeed inconceivable, that in our intellectual life we should simply dismiss, say, the whole problem of Vietnam out of psychic weariness or pragmatic calculation...

...George Wallace's enforced withdrawal from the campaign meant that a majority of his supporters shifted to Nixon...

...Perhaps it would have been better to have had another candidate, but he turned out to be McGovern...

...We are dealing here with talented people who have developed a rationale for, in effect, stopping short at the point that the welfare state has reached: the "limits of social policy" are argued, often with some pertinence, as a reason for hesitating before or opposing further largescale programs of change...

...Behind the mass of electoral sentiment there are, at one end, urgent problems and, at the other, a growth of what I'd call social callousness, perhaps social meanness...

...the true choices in modern society are between the tories and the social democrats, between what the Public Interest represents and what the liberal-left represents...

...Let's turn to a few that are more elusive and thereby perhaps more fundamental...

...They will be the kinds of issues that a Kennedy-style candidate will have to raise in 1976, and the job of doing that will have been made just a little easier by the fact that McGovern had already begun to raise them in 1972...

...In THE IMMEDIATE TASK for the democratic and liberal-left is the binding of wounds, the defense of morale, and the sober consideration of past mistakes and future possibilities...

...And by the time you reach these lines you will probably be sick of explanations, theories, impressions...

...he did fail to handle the Eagleton affair with sufficient firmness and dispatch...

...Nixon gained the advantage, first of all, of being able to appear as a statesman of peace and conciliation...

...And most troubling of all has been the almost complete evaporation of the widespread good feeling toward blacks that one could detect only a decade ago...

...Still another positive factor: there were congressional districts and senatorial races in which the McGovernite "kids" worked harmoniously with progressive trade unionists, stressing the hard economic issues that make sense to blueCOMMENTS AND OPINIONS 9 collar voters, and thereby helping elect men to Congress like Studds in Massachusetts, Mezvinsky in Iowa, Clark in Iowa, Haskell in Colorado, and Abourezk in South Dakota...

...NEVERTHELESS, McGovern was the candidate expressing the progressive sentiments and impulses of the country...

...The official AFL–CIO stand of "neutrality" (in practice often an embittered assault on "the kids" and "the kooks") also hurt...

...Now there may be some situations in which such stances are required, as a need of practical politics...

...About a third of the unions—the UAW, the Amalgamated, the AFSCM, the ILGWU, the machinists— took an independent initiative and supported McGovern...

...That mistakes were made is clear enough...

...Evidently, there was little affection for Nixon in the electorate, but he did convey to it some sense of assurance as to what he would (and more important, would not) do...

...For one major reason, I would say...

...There was another positive factor in the campaign...

...Likable and decent as McGovern obviously showed himself to be (I am certain that most voters would have approved his return to the Senate), there was obviously some truth to the criticisms...

...Compared with recent elections, there were twice as many Democratic defectors as usual and the defectors are twice as likely to resent minoritygroup gains...

...Thereby he was enabled to adopt the two-sided stance of being both a man of conciliation and a man able to stare down the Communists in a confrontation...

...One thing that struck me in the capaign was the inability of McGovern to put forward a clear and simple series of planks for socioeconomic change...

...The trade unions did not just meekly follow George Meany's directive...

...The electorate was not very eager, as a whole, for social change, but it was determined not to go along with social change as proposed by a man in whose capacities and strength it had little faith...

...The hopes, the energies, the needs of this country still point toward large-scale social change, social innovation, social reform...

...And the responses are illuminating...

...after all, our presidential system gives enormous power to a single individual and it therefore makes sense to ask what kind of person will be employing that power...

...The split in the Democratic party was never healed...

...The task of moral examination, which is something different from striking moralistic poses, has to continue...

...Yet steps in this direction have to be taken...

...his high moralistic stance seemed too distant for millions of whites who may not think of themselves as prejudiced but who nevertheless look over their shoulders when they notice a group of black youngsters behind them...

...none of the other proposed Democratic candidates could do any better when it came to specific proposals...

...We have nothing in common with those editorial and academic pseudoproletarians who snarl at the "New Class" as if its concern with such issues as Vietnam and ecology were a plot to take the bread out of the mouths of union members...

...As for social callousness, there is first the fact that our B-52s have kept raining vast quantities of bombs on Vietnam while not many people in the U.S...

...Is this all mere impressionism, a concession to brainwashed moods...

...but clearly the abiding question is how to reestablish some relations, if not of cordiality, then at least of cooperation with people who accepted the socioeconomic attack on Nixonism yet refused to support McGovern...

...He did tend to substitute moralism for politics...

...he did seem badly ill-informed on some issues...

...Such issues will not die, nor will four more years of Nixonism dissolve them...

...We have a mounting awareness of the problems, how to analyze and describe them, but not yet those crystallized proposals—if you will, the slogans—that politics requires...

...SOME REASONS are clear to everyone...

...Through a series of code words that his audiences immediately grasped, Nixon masterfully exploited the desires of middleclass, blue-collar, and white ethnic groups for assurances of stability...

...I have no illusion that this is going to be easy—and it won't be made easier by the probable inclination of the volunteer and paid spokesmen for George Meany to see 1972 as a total vindication of their position...

...For the struggle we had to wage in the late '60s against the miasmic fantasies of the New Left were really diversionary, an unavoidable waste of time...

...Prudence indeed...

...This new attitude toward the blacks is a terrifying phenomenon, not least of all because it subsists on a vicious circle of hostility...

...And we propose to contribute whatever little we can toward that end...

...McGovern failed to establish a parallel confidence...

...One hopes that in the coming months unionists, intellectuals, political activists, leaders of minority groups will get together in the various cities, quietly consider their position, and see if plans for political recovery can't be effected...

...The idea of tax reform, the idea of welfare reform, the idea of a redistribution of income—these are urgent matters...

...Perhaps the most deeply felt though seldom articulated impulses driving large numbers of voters, many of them traditionally Democratic, toward Nixon was a complex concerning race, violence in the streets, law & order, campus upheaval, drugs, and busing—in short, "the so cial issues...

...Anyone observing intellectual life in America with an eye that could penetrate the inanities of the mass media should have noticed that slowly the conservatives have been gaining in confidence and support...

...This seems a job that groups like ADA could undertake...

...And of these, almost 80 percent said they would vote for Nixon...

...Iv I HAVE BEEN toying with the idea that the basic direction of American intellectual life since World War II has been toward conservatism and that the recent upsurge of New Left sentiment—now almost invisible—will prove COMMENTS AND OPINIONS to be a mere interruption of this basic direction...

...We fought against the New Left not because it was radical but because it was stupidly or self-defeatingly or undemocratically "radical...

...it was primarily a vote of no-confidence in McGovern...

...What a paltry, small-spirited politics is being nurtured by the Party of Prudence, the camp of the Benign Neglectors...

...It is better to speak for oneself and not invoke the names of those whom death has rendered defenseless...

...They can best be taken, however, if the unionists who supported McGovern hold together in a loose sort of alliance, thereby providing the basis for negotiation, bargaining, discussion...

...There were many different levels of response...

...For those of us in the intellectual world, there remains the task of criticism, both popular and serious criticism of the new trend toward conservatism which the Administration embodies, which the election can be seen as in part sustaining, and which is now gaining a certain amount of intellectual respectability...

...Answers to this question are more likely to yield authentic responses than answers to formal questions about civil rights...