DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER
Denitch, Bogdan & Kohák, Erazim & Wrong, Dennis H.
With the end of the Vietnam War, and the recent events in Portugal, it is only natural that many people should be discussing the prospects for democracy. We, too, are deeply involved in this...
...The United States built up Diem and, at the very least, acquiesced in his overthrow...
...Vietnam did not fall because its people overwhelmingly "chose Communism...
...The response of much of the Left to recent events has hardly been encouraging...
...Even the free exploration of socialist alternatives to capitalism is possible only behind America's protective shield...
...All of this may be very efficient, but it has little to do with any substance of democratic politics...
...The ideals of freedom and justice lived in the vain hope of the powerless, preserving hope and, at most, sparking an occasional uprising, doomed to failure in the face of power committed to autocracy and orthodoxy...
...Recent actions have been consistent with this rhetoric...
...In Vietnam...
...Nothing ventured, nothing lost: if the U.S...
...To set it going in our pages, three Dissent editors, each of whom has sharply defined and distinct opinions, write briefly on such matters as these: Does the survival of democracy in Europe and elsewhere depend on the continued exertion of American power...
...Defense Secretary Schlesinger's warning to North Korea and Ford's prompt resort to summitry in Europe fall intothe same pattern...
...I don't mean the sectarian remnants of the "old" New Left, but its more respectable and trendy heirs secure in the academy and the media...
...To put it more crudely, democracy worked the way it did in Western Europe because the political system had been "Americanized" to such an extent that the range of political realistic alternatives was limited and the societies consequently were depoliticized...
...But in fact, since World War II, it has been a sine qua non of any politics of radical reform in Western Europe and the Third World that a major obstacle would be a direct intervention by the United States, supported by its indirect dominance of the world market and the sources of economic and financial aid...
...power, therefore, we talk about this limited, bureaucratized, manipulated democracy...
...Examples abound...
...The question rather is, are regimes of the Left, including the Communists, likely to keep broad enough majorities, once they are in power, so as to provide enough stability for maintaining democratic institutions...
...On the American Left, it is fashionable to blame business interests and political conservatives for the paralyzing lack of vision...
...But these might-havebeens are worth considering even at this late date, because, whatever the dubious wisdom of the original commitment, the events of the past two years do not negate the possibility that 362 DENNIS H. WRONG a more representative and honorable government in Saigon might have successfully resisted the North Vietnamese...
...As far back as the early '50s, when the Eisenhower administration was in office, U.S...
...But peace may come: that combination is powerful, and there is no power willing to resist it...
...But there is no evidence that Communist regimes, even in the new variety they exhibit, have become more attractive to the peoples of the world...
...All the U.S...
...They fled and fought, in the vague hope of an alternative that, would permit them to live in peace and at least relative freedom, without the fanatic regimentation of Hanoi or the feudal oppression of Saigon...
...Far below the politics of detente, these realities remain unchanged...
...If it was lacking, it was because the Left did not provide it...
...This was clearly seen at the time by Graham Greene with its full potential for catastrophe in The Quiet American, not a great novel but a prophetic one...
...economic aid to a few left-wing governments such as Jagan's in Guyana...
...It also had a darker side in that, although promulgated most vigorously by critics of the Cold War, it influenced liberals in power and played a major part in contributing to the illusions that led to disaster in Indochina...
...No matter what one thinks about the sincerity of the CP leaderships, the Communist parties of Western Europe have operated as Left social democratic parties, more hostile to the U.S...
...The Left could have insisted that, as the price for military protection, Americans use their leverage in Vietnam to carry out a genuine and radical democratization of civil life and insist on respect for human rights and on at least a liberalization, if not a socialization, of the economy...
...And the exploitation of anti-Americanism, focusing on the alleged role of the CIA, will be less of a factor in the various coming conflicts...
...The Left and only the Left could provide the vision...
...Ford's and Kissinger's expressed alarm over the role of the Communist party in the new Portuguese regime also echoes the past...
...They are, after all, salaried workers who have little to fear from the socialization of the economy...
...Such fashionable folly and willed blindness are, to be sure, only an echo of those with which we have been familiar in the past, but they confirm that many affluent left-wing intellectuals are not so much "dupes" of totalitarianism as half-conscious admirers of its ruthlessness...
...The United States, like France in 1938 or AustroHungary at the turn of the century, does retain considerable economic, demographic, and perhaps even military potential...
...More often it translates into envy and resentment, the love-hate relationship of all have-nots to all haves...
...The end of the American Empire would have come, though less ignominiously, even without Vietnam...
...One of the boundaries of an industrial democracy lies in the area of workers' participation and control, as it was first pioneered in Yugoslavia...
...It had been so in the past—there were Wilson's 14 Points, the Atlantic Charter, the Marshall Plan, the democratic revolution in Japan...
...After World War II America was viewed, quite naively perhaps, as a liberal world power interested in protecting pluralistic political democracy and gradual economic reform and in preventing the spread of the totalitarian Soviet system...
...Then there is the British electorate, which voted overwhelmingly to stay in the Common Market with every major group—sex, age, class, region—rejecting the anti-European demagoguery of the Labour Left and the Tory Right...
...There is, for one, no longer much of a realistic fear of direct American intervention...
...Tyranny is nothing new: the novelty of its ideological smoke screen can impress only a handful of ambitious intellectuals...
...Even after it, they could have risen en masse, for instance during the 1968 Tet offensive, and handed Hanoi the victory...
...so we stuck with Thieu to the bitter end...
...At home, the swift turn of public opinion against Richard Nixon that ultimately drove him from office remains a happy recent memory and one notes also that Wallace's support has begun to drop in the opinion polls, despite the continuing disposition of some publicists and supposed political experts to make much of it...
...By the same token, any strategy of alliances between socialists and the Communist parties in Western Europe had to deal not only with the problem of the relationship of the latter parties to the Soviet Union and their willingness to abide by democratic rules but also with the limits of tolerance that the U.S., directly or through NATO and the World Bank, would show toward such experiments...
...This does not mean the end of American power in the world, however wishfully some on the Left may think this so, and whatever the concern, real or pretended, over a new isolationism on the part of our leaders...
...3. Dennis H. Wrong The "lessons of Vietnam" are as diverse and numerous as the biases of those seeking to draw them, even though nearly everyone, including some who were militant supporters of the war as recently as the early '70s, greeted the final Communist victories with "philosophical" resignation...
...Italy has been seen as a "democracy" because of its party pluralism, despite the fact that any reforms of the antiquated civil service bureaucracy, which really rules Italy, and any reforms of the rapacious Italian economy have been blocked for decades...
...The Iberian peninsula would seem to be the part of the world where the United States should at the present time be most concerned with keeping, as they say, "a very low profile...
...The acceptance of the liberal paradigm involves in part a pessimistic view toward the very possibility of such participation in a modern industrial society...
...America fascinates and arouses hope by what it has—and creates resentment by what appears as an unwillingness to share it...
...A critical factor in discussing the prospects for democracy lies in our evaluation of the character of the Communist parties of Western Europe...
...This is an updated version of Marx's classic point that the working class cannot simply take over the administrative structure of the bourgeois state for its own purposes...
...The defeats in Southeast Asia, the growing challenge to the worldwide Pax Americana, the increasingly limp performance of the American economy, all add up to—in the eyes of most Americans— a crisis of the world order...
...The very fact that China and Yugoslavia challenged the Soviet Union's claims to hegemony facilitated the breaking loose of the Western Communist parties from Soviet tutelage...
...Therefore the prospects for radical ruptures with the existing order of things are now much better and will depend primarily on the domestic politics of a given country and only secondarily on the reaction of the two superpowers...
...AntiAmerican Schadenfreude has endowed many of them with a versatility in Orwellian doublethink as skilled as that exhibited by the fellowtravelers of the 1930s...
...Vietnam was -indeed originally a "liberals' war...
...For once the power of autocracy must confront a countervailing power, committed to the defense of freedom...
...Peace of itself is not necessarily a progressive slogan...
...The stability of the postwar settlement made unlikely any direct expansion of Soviet military and political power, and the CPs of Western Europe were consequently faced with the need to work out the problem of the road to power in a situation where Soviet aid was unlikely...
...Given the realities of American policy-making, the Left might not have prevailed— though with LBJ then in the White House, that is not at all obvious—but it could have saved its soul...
...It was just barely beginning to rediscover its soul in the civil rights movement when Vietnam erupted...
...If Left coalition governments move energetically to deal with the backlog of social and economic issues in their societies, they are likely to win increasing support, and increasingly firm support, of the broader strata that program would benefit...
...Part of the answer lies in the response of Europe's conservative forces, and the degree to which they are willing to abide by democratic norms in a period of social transformation...
...The two alternatives that dominate American thought today, tranquillity through repression and tranquillity through submission, McCarthyism I and McCarthyism II, are both profoundly conservative...
...If America chooses to use it in an attempt to prevent all change, as it did in Vietnam—or refuses to use it in the name of tranquillity—those rebellions will fall prey to the imperial ambitions of greater or lesser tyrants...
...could have insisted on a broadening of the Saigon government to include opposition groups and on the preservation of minimal civil liberties...
...The deepening American involvement made the "domino theory," supposedly the justification for becoming involved, self-fulfilling by giving the other side a monopoly of the symbols of nationalism and anti-imperialism...
...Its significance in world history is and can be that for once the contest is not one between powerless hope of freedom and powerful fact of autocracy...
...It thus can turn against sections of the bourgeoisie in order to preserve the social order itself...
...But hopeful rebels, as in Czechoslovakia or Portugal, are hopelessly weak and vulnerable...
...Neither the Diem nor the Ky-Thieu regimes entirely eliminated a free press or organized political opposition, but the very coexistence of democratic forms with rigged elections and the jailing of tens of thousands of non-Communist opponents served further to discredit them within South Vietnam and abroad...
...In short, the lesson of Vietnam seems to be that "you can't win them all" and that this fact should not deter us from sticking to established policies and reiterating the exhortations that got us into Southeast Asia in the first place...
...Recent and continuing changes in the European working class make the prospect for a democratic transformation of the European economy and societies more and not less likely than in the past...
...In its dealings with the desert extortionists, the United States has the potential to insist, as a minimum, on a preferential low price for oil sold to underdeveloped countries for manufacture of fertilizers...
...This view was reaffirmed and more fully developed with the growth of the bureaucratic collectivist state socialisms of Eastern Europe...
...351 • What are the likely consequences...
...They may well also be receiving covert support from the Italian, Spanish, and part of the French Communist parties, who do not want their own supporters alienated by the emergence of an East European type Communist regime in Portugal...
...Western democratic politics in the past three decades has become increasingly a matter of technocratic management and less a matter of genuine participation by the masses in decisionmaking...
...Thus, as the governments of Western Europe and the United States widen their jurisdiction and an increasing number of issues in the economic and social spheres are defined as technical, theorists of political democracy legitimate the process by redefining democracy as an idealized, abstract version of British parliamentarianism, with its courtesy, clubbiness, and decency, all of which are admirable qualities but have little to do with the political power of the working class or the masses of the populace...
...Throughout the '50s the rule of the parliamentary game was that Communist votes in Parliament not be counted in votes of confidence...
...For that matter, it just might have saved Vietnam as well...
...actions taken to prevent the Trujillo family from making a comeback in the Dominican Republic, and stronger and warmer support for democratic Israel than in the Eisenhower years— DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER 363 not to speak of Kennedy's reported privately expressed determination to withdraw from Vietnam once he had won reelection...
...They are also profoundly self-defeating, condemning America to frustrated or humiliating impotence...
...Joseph Kraft reported in a recent column that, in a speech to the Japan Society in New York, Kissinger said, "We have learned the important lessons from the tragedy of Vietnam," and proceeded to specify these lessons as that "outside effort can only supplement, but not create local efforts and local will to resist" and that "the essential underpinning" of resistance to subversion lies in "popular will and justice...
...Freedom, the security of human rights, the dignity of even very relative affluence, that would be something new and a clear reason for discontent with the ageless human lot...
...Had the Left spoken out in the name of freedom and justice, the American people might well have listened...
...Thus the CPs were seen as parties operating within the working class with programs that would signify the exclusion of the working class from economic and political power...
...If the problems of advanced industrial societies no longer can be managed through Keynesian welfare measures, the alternative will require the kind of radical rupture that involves risk-taking—and it is a risk to attempt to create in Europe Left majority coalitions that include socialists and Communists...
...Its moment of greatness was its pained recognition that America was not bringing freedom and justice to Vietnam...
...Kraft assured his readers that this speech was not merely rhetorical or tactical but that, in Kraft's words, "while trying to maintain the balance, the U.S...
...To begin with, democracy as used by most American journalists and political scientists—and unfortunately by many on the Left—has had a peculiar working definition, particularly since World War II...
...Shirley MacLaine, defending her movie celebrating China, equated, presumably with a straight face, the teaching of Christianity in American parochial schools with the compulsory indocrination of all Chinese schoolchildren in "the thoughts of Chairman Mao...
...The Italian CP would not be content with a 51 percent majority, which it rightly regards as inadequate for major social transformation...
...There are Lincoln, Wilson, Truman...
...In criticizing what she called the parliamentary cretinism of the German Social Democrats, she contrasted their—in her view hopeless—policy of seeking a majority for a revolutionary program rather than seeking to win majorities through a revolutionary program...
...I will concentrate on Western Europe, where a series of factors make the prospects of Left coalition governments in the southern-tier countries— Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece—promising...
...The Italian CP now proposes a coalition that goes beyond the traditional one with the socialists and attempts to create a bloc that would include the Left Christian Democrats...
...There the Socialists, with an overwhelming popular mandate, still disturb the peace by resisting the familiar combination of arms and ideology...
...These external restraints no longer operate or at the very least are no longer as effective as in the recent past...
...I am optimistic' about the prospects of Left governments in the Mediterranean countries because of the experience, capabilities, and seriousness of the Communist parties involved...
...The illusions about America are as fantastic as the price anything American, whether blue jeans, records, or chewing gum, will fetch on the black market in Moscow or Prague...
...In spite of the valiant, determined efforts of the Germans in the Soviet zone in 1953, of Poles and Magyars in 1956, of Czechs and Slovaks in 1968, of Poles, again, in 1970, the repressive tyranny of Soviet-sponsored regimes in their countries has grown more rigid and stultifying than ever...
...The people of Vietnam showed little enthusiasm for the incredibly corrupt feudal regime in Saigon, but they showed even less enthusiasm for substituting a Communist police state for it...
...2. Erazim Kohak To speak of American "power" in the wake of Vietnam seems rather inaccurate...
...In these cases, I would argue that being determines essence, and that whatever are the traditional attitudes in the minds of the older and dwindling portion of the membership that is still sentimentally attached to the Soviet Union, the practices of the parties are those of democratic workers' parties...
...I am therefore arguing for the prospect of a socialist-dominated Europe, where the Common Market becomes an organism not for mere stability but a loose framework for coordinating the economies and social policies of European states moving toward socialism...
...The flight of the peasants during the collapse of South Vietnam's armies reminds us that nowhere in the world are there, nor have there ever been, masses of people clamoring to get into rather than out of any Communist country anywhere...
...They could have done so, easily, long before the American intervention...
...it can also be the slogan of oppressors against the oppressed, of haves against the have-nots, of the beneficiaries of the status quo against those who pay the price and, as in the case of Vietnam, of aggressors against all who would resist them...
...The price was that attempts at radical reconstruction of the social order in the West were postponed indefinitely, and erstwhile radical critics became moderate social democratic reformers...
...The chief lesson of Vietnam is that it is futile and ultimately self-defeating to make a binding political-military commitment to corrupt governments that lack popular support and are able to stay in power only by persecuting their political opponents and exploiting their ties to foreign patrons...
...There is peace in Hungary, there is peace in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, there is peace in Czechoslovakia, there is peace in Poland, now there is peace in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Laos...
...While providing arms and men, America proved incapable of providing a vision...
...etc...
...The United States, as is now generally acknowledged, should never have given support to the French back in the 1950s...
...Vietnam made that point...
...For some parts of the world, that decision was fortunate: it enabled West Germany to build a democracy and other European countries to maintain theirs...
...The dividing line is the destruction of the American Left at the hands of the first of the two McCarthys...
...The enforced evacuation of the urban population of Cambodia did not faze a liberal columnist who wrote smugly that the reported shocked response of Ford and Kissinger simply showed that they were incapable of understanding the deep commitment of the Khmer Rouge to building "agrarian communism"— as if the driving of 3 million people, including the old and the sick, on foot into the countryside at the cost of many lives could be construed benignly by those with a bit of ideological sophistication...
...So "peace" it is, or, at least, tranquillity...
...In early June, Ford found time to visit Spain, confer privately with Franco, and join the aging dictator in a review of troops...
...The "democratic" regime of India has been all too ready to use martial law and other legislation to crack down on what it perceived as threats...
...For the past decade the Swedish party has supported, albeit critically, Olaf Palme's social democratic government, and it has been sharp in its criticisms of Soviet and East European practices...
...Since the middle '50s this situation has changed...
...Utopia is relative...
...There quite simply is no ready answer...
...The most dangerous thing the parties of the Left could do would be to administer limping welfare states, thus losing their basis of support while antagonizing and frightening the middle class...
...Therefore, in addition to the economic competition that such a Europe would pose, it is likely to establish restrictions and control over American capital, including perhaps the nationalization of portions of certain multinational corporations...
...In South Korea and Taiwan, the United States does not have to choose between surrender or defense of local autocrats...
...The great drawing power of Communism is not that, with enough effort and sacrifice, a nation might end up with the same kind of regimented shabbiness the Russians have ended up with 50 years after the Bolshevik coup, but it is the hope that Communism might provide a shortcut to the dignity DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER 357 and security, the freedom and the affluence Americans take for granted...
...This is, in short, a democracy of the welfare state bureaucrats...
...It was not freedom and justice that the United States asked the Vietnamese to defend but an archaic autocracy compounded of the worst of native feudalism and French colonialism— no more desirable but far less viable than the disciplined autocracy to the north...
...The irony and tragedy of Vietnam is that the Americans exported only their arms...
...Another reason for my belief that Left coalition governments can maximize the possibilities for democracy, both in the pluralist sense and in my own definition—the rule of the masses—is that I believe they alone are capable of asserting the minimal, necessary social discipline upon a trade union movement trained to seek ever-expanding wage packets...
...It was less fortunate for Spain or Portugal: there the status quo meant Franco and Salazar, in whose departure post-McCarthy America lost all interest...
...In Eastern Europe, however, this process was facilitated by two factors: the presence of Russian and Warsaw Pact forces, and the absence of major working classes with independent institutions...
...Most of all, of course, in Portugal, where the people gave nearly two-thirds of their votes to the parties of the democratic Left, thoroughly repudiating both the Communists and the military government's campaign for blank ballots...
...Recent empirical studies of European administrative elites by John Armstrong and of the French higher civil servants by Ezra Suleiman underline my point: parliamentarianism has increasingly turned into a facade where little of importance is decided, while the basic decisions are managed by professional civil servants...
...With the Left eliminated as a significant force in American policy, America committed its power to the defense of the status quo...
...Not only would be, but is...
...Should America become powerless, as some spokesmen on the Left, repelled by the very real misuses of American power, seem to want, or should America yield to the temptation of exchanging the ideals of freedom and justice for a "realistic" power policy, humankind would revert to the ageless confrontation of realistic power and powerless hope...
...They openly equate "defense of freedom" with the preservation of the status quo...
...The Portuguese Communists and, more important, their supporters in the military government can only gain if greater plausibility is lent to the belief that the United States, CIA and all, is prepared to take any action against the new regime after having lived comfortably for so long with the right-wing dictatorship that preceded it...
...The Italian party, for all practical purposes, has become the focus of a loose coalition of West European CPs and is explicitly committed to the maintenance of democratic norms and a parliamentary system in case it comes to power...
...It was caught confused, unprepared, and vulnerable to Stalinist manipulations...
...What does all of this have to do with the prospects of democracy...
...The notion that we were somehow debarred from "interfering" in the "internal affairs" of an ally was absurd when our military effort was devastating much of the country...
...After all, Communist bureaucrats in Eastern Europe do not use repression by choice...
...The disintegration of the Saigon regime during the offensive proved the need for an alternative while the failure of the Vietnamese to rise in support of the Cong proved its feasibility—and the mass graves outside Hue its urgency...
...Freedom, in the sense of reasonably ,secure exercise of human rights, has been an exception rather than a rule in human history...
...Yet, it's an open question whether democratic norms can long survive under conditions of major wage inflation and industrial strife...
...they only survive and suffer...
...Were the Americans willing to export their freedom and affluence half as vigorously as the Soviets export their own grotesque nightmare, the striking difference in accomplishment would be decisive...
...I remember arguing in the late 1940s with a Henry Wallace supporter that there was not necessarily anything morally compromising in dealing with Spain for bases that might be necessary for the defense of Europe, since the Franco dictatorship was a fossilized survivor of the worldwide defeat of fascism and offered no conceivable threat or appeal to anyone outside its borders...
...The majority of the members of the West European CPs were socialized politically after the process of polycentrism began...
...they also fought, often bravely and well...
...They could have carried out a radical land reform and provided loans for small enterprise at a fraction of the cost of defending the indefensible status quo...
...After the two McCarthys, that sounds like a radical proposal...
...The West Europeans are not likely to be willing to see access to the energy resources of the Middle East dependent on the vagaries of U.S...
...Nor do political conservatives pretend to be apostles of liberation, human rights, or social justice...
...For radical intellectuals it is obviously a more tolerable social order to live in than any of the existing alternatives, but it is not a democracy in any of the classic meanings of the word...
...That is something few people are eager to admit...
...In spite of the outward stability of the past 20 years, a generation has passed...
...Even under Thieu, South Vietnam held out for two years after the Paris agreements, much longer than had been expected...
...Suffering becomes unbearable only when the victims become convinced that it is unnecessary, that things could be better...
...Perhaps General Park's truculent defense of his suspension of civil liberties and jailing of his elected critics in South Korea was a response to more than a few New York Times editorials...
...the judicial practices of Italy and West Germany with prolonged detention would shock the ACLU...
...To ask them to practice restraint while major pockets of privilege and wealth exist, as the...
...Yet, from Senator (Eugene) McCarthy onward, "peace" was the only slogan the Left could offer...
...Foreign policy does not have to be based on obstinacy or surrender: it can be based on a commitment to freedom and justice...
...American power—America's economic, demographic, and military potential, used with determination and vision in defense of freedom and justice against both archaic feudalism and the modern police state--is the only force capable of assuring the survival of democracy in our time...
...Yet Vietnam was an opportunity as well as a challenge...
...The prophets of "humanistic" or "liberal" Communism invariably end on the gallows, in jail, or in exile in America...
...In order to preserve democratic values, socialists will have to start taking chances and actively attempt to transform the existing societies, not just incrementally but basically...
...But, bereft of the guidelines for change that the vision of freedom and justice could provide, America chose to avoid all change...
...But this sad record long antedates Kissinger, of course...
...Perhaps that is why, even after Vietnam, after the oil embargo, after Czechoslovakia, and after all the successive demonstrations of America's paralysis, there are still people who profess to see the greatest threat to peace in American "power...
...Finally, the Communist parties of Italy, France, and Spain are no longer perceived as, and I believe no longer are, primarily allies of the Soviet Union but are parties primarily concerned with coming to power and carrying out their programs within their own countries...
...Or, to put it differently, the end of the economic miracle turns Europe back to the unsolved class conflicts, which in turn means that the parties of the Left can no longer afford to limit themselves to the gradual reforms characteristic of the postwar decades...
...It would accelerate the tendencies in Eastern Europe toward increased independence within the limits of the Warsaw Pact and of increased assertiveness by the East European working classes...
...This is the lesson I read in the catastrophe of Chile...
...The preconditions for workers' control, however, are infinitely superior in Western Europe, and it is there that this idea might be fleshed out and become a focus for a challenge to the rulers of both the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Depressing as this is, it probably has little long-run historical significance...
...In Spain, Franco is going to die soon, the struggle for succession is underway, and the Spanish Communists, far less Moscow-oriented and more like the Italian than the Portuguese CP, will be a major contender...
...The optimism that pervaded the European social and economic scene for the last few decades has pretty much come to an end...
...Perhaps in Portugal...
...Yet given the deployment of American potential, Americans could have proceeded as they did in Japan after 1945...
...Not only that...
...And, of course, the Lon Nol government in Cambodia was never anything but a flimsy American puppet state...
...But it is a necessary condition...
...For all its faults, America is the clearest, most successful embodiment of that experiment...
...But in the modern managed welfare economies, the bureaucracy comes to be less the servant and more the coordinator of the dominant class interests...
...its blindness was its 358 ERAZIM KOHAK tacit acceptance of the Stalinist premise that America could not do so—and its moral collapse was its willingness to soothe its conscience with the isolationist placebo that America had no need to do so, since the Cong would to it in its stead...
...The bankruptcy of the policy of maintaining the status quo has become increasingly evident, in spite of Mr...
...than others, but certainly independent and quite often at odds with the Russian party over program and policy...
...The defeat of the offensive created a breathing space: the Vietcong virtually ceased to exist as an effective force, leaving the bulk of the fighting to North Vietnamese Army units whose defection rate for a time topped even that of Saigon's weary forces...
...This would exacerbate relations with the U.S...
...in a number of important respects: it too is capable of producing the high technologies the Soviets want to import, and it needs access to the raw materials and energy resources the U.S.S.R...
...In America alone can they proclaim the ideals of such humanistic Communism freely...
...It can do so in Latin America as well...
...It was tragic for Eastern Europe: there the status quo meant stabilization of Soviet imperialism...
...If anything, even more so: what was a reformist program in Arkansas would have been revolutionary in Indochina...
...This admiration, to be sure, does not necessarily translate into love and affection...
...The purpose—the will and the 356 ERAZIM KOHAK vision—was missing...
...The political democracy that characterized Western Europe in the past three decades—the civil dialogue of pluralist liberal parliamentary regimes—worked, as Seymour Martin Lipset has put it, because the temperature of political discourse was kept low and most participants agreed on a set of limits upon what could be done in politics, economy, and society...
...It is an idea that the byzantine shabbiness of the Soviet police state cannot offer...
...Tragically, when the Left did speak out, it had little to say about freedom and justice...
...America can use its potential in support of that aspiration...
...East Germany still needs the Berlin Wall...
...For a few generations, Greece and Rome provided them, but at most times DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER 359 and in most places, autocracy and orthodoxy have been the rule...
...I have never believed that the United States favored rightist dictatorships as a matter of principle, although American leftliberals have repeatedly accused it of doing so since the very beginnings of the Cold War...
...In Europe, it can press for genuine detente, based on a buffer of autonomous states between the superpowers...
...The immediate response of the Ford administration has been to urge us to "look to the future and put Vietnam behind us," "avoid recriminations," "restore national unity," and "reaffirm our commitments...
...The Left had been effectively decimated in the McCarthy years...
...The relationship between democracy and American power is quite simple...
...Even if the American political system is not applicable to countries just emerging from feudalism, human rights, freedom and justice are...
...Humans do not revolt because things are bad...
...The aftermath of Tet '68 was one of them...
...foreign policy...
...America's betrayal of Vietnam does not lie in its final withdrawal but in its failure to offer such an alternative after arousing hope by intervening...
...Nor are they all illusions...
...Wherever it was absent, the hope of freedom and justice proved unavailing...
...they prefer to DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER 353 manage through political socialization, indirect pressures, and cooptation...
...That is precisely what America represents...
...and friendlier to the U.S.S.R...
...Now, however, we no longer have a monolithic Communist bloc counterposed to basically decent and stable -welfare states in the West, with expanding economies and underpinned by American power...
...Why make a free gift of the CIA card as a rhetorical weapon to the most intransigent and authoritarian forces on the Left...
...If America chooses to use its potential in support of their aspirations, those rebellions can lead to a freer, more just world...
...It happened in Cuba...
...It is a democracy that has been permissive toward its intellectuals and has been able to extend the boundaries of a consumer society to strata that have never before participated in it...
...In the end conventional armed forces invading from the North rather than internal subversion overwhelmed South Vietnam...
...Ens...
...In that framework, Western bourgeois democracy was much the lesser evil...
...And this development may, in turn, tilt the whole of European politics to the Left...
...This optimism was based on the real and substantial increases in living standards and in the modernization of the West European economies, which relegated the question of economic redistribution to the background since most social classes were benefiting from increases in their living standards...
...I cannot DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER 361 see that this trip was wise or necessary...
...But the debacle of Vietnam leaves no room for illusions...
...The Spanish CP has excluded the proRussian wing from its leadership and is in a coalition with socialists, Left demo-Christians, and the younger military...
...There is a bitter irony in this...
...Is American power a barrier to the growth and extension of democracy...
...That is, should the opportunity offer itself, would they try for a complete takeover...
...But potential is not power...
...In that sense, there is a truth—a partial truth—in the theory of the "convergence" of advanced industrial societies, and it may well be that the pluralist political democracy as we have known it is simply a more civilized and humane way' of social decision-making without permitting any effective challenges to the economic and social system...
...in their experience the CPs have been primarily parties of the working class, with independent political programs...
...Those civilians who fled southward by the hundreds of thousands after the breakthrough in the north were not, I believe, fleeing in irrational panic but were seeking to escape from Communist rule for they knew its realities well enough to wish to avoid them...
...We have in effect used primarily the Anglo-Saxon liberal model, which emphasized procedures making any but the most gradual 352 BOGDAN DENITCH social change difficult, if not impossible...
...American power, to be sure, is not a sufficient condition of freedom...
...The hope of democracy depends on the existence of a power committed to defend freedom and justice...
...Sometimes, as in the case of the East European young, it does...
...And any socialist strategy in Western Europe would require a systematic attempt to deal with the multinationals, and specifically those dominated by American capital...
...would not uncritically embrace the dictatorial regime of President Park of South Korea—or even the corrupt governments of President Marcos in the Philippines and General Suharto in Indonesia...
...There are better models than Metternich and Daladier...
...Those are not "American" alone—they are universally human, embodied in a Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...But once committed, the U.S...
...Trade unions, it seems, might exercise restraint voluntarily only under conditions where major moves toward egalitarianism are under way...
...The traditional view of democratic socialists, since the '30s, has been that the Communist parties are not merely parties of the Left with a wrong program...
...We have permitted ourselves this mental flabbiness because radicals of my generation have developed politically through polemics with defenders of Stalinism and other totalitarian systems...
...The decibel levels have subsided...
...Further, a growing awareness of the realities of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union made it necessary for the West European Communist 354 BOGDAN DENITCH parties to differentiate more and more the socialism they sought from the Soviet and East European models...
...Only with the rise of the modern West, since the Renaissance, has humankind revived the audacious idea that freedom and justice might become the principles of statehood...
...The threat of the possible establishment of a Communist regime has deterred Portuguese immigrant workers in Western Europe from going home...
...A crude analogy of what I am talking about can be seen in Sweden, where the social norms established by the Swedish Social Democratic party are no longer challenged even by the conservative opposition, which is reduced merely to claiming that it can administer the welfare state more efficiently...
...Rather, we have felt that what was unique about the Communist parties was that, though their base was the working class, they subordinated the struggles of that class, both to the interests of the Soviet Union and to the rule of a Communist bureaucracy that itself would evolve into a new exploitative class...
...support for Franco's chosen heirs easily lends itself to being interpreted as intervention in this struggle...
...Vietnam fell not because the Vietnamese were unwilling to defend a free and just alternative to Communism but because they never had such an alternative to defend...
...The mass of educated white-collar workers and technicians has been radicalized and also appears to be throwing in its lot, at least in France, Italy, and Spain, with the parties of the Left...
...It takes vision and determination to transform potential into power and, since the decimation of American progressive thought at the hands of Senator (Joseph) McCarthy, America has shown little of either...
...British Labour government is discovering, is a hopeless task...
...America and the West protected by the American shield are the one image of the Promised Land, the one place where human life appears genuinely different, worth living and capable of being lived, secure from fear and want...
...q DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER 365...
...Nor is there any excuse for pretending that freedom and justice can be simply a domestic matter and that the fate of the Cambodians, of Magyars, of Vietnamese, of Czechs, Slovaks, Israelis is a matter of indifference...
...the support of the Greek colonels...
...the undermining of Allende's government in Chile and the ready acceptance of the junta that overthrew it and ended Chilean democracy...
...A powerless America does not serve the cause of freedom...
...The evolution of polycentrism has increasingly led to a differentiation among the Communist parties themselves and to alternate foci of power within the Communist world...
...The regime they supported was one they would not tolerate for a moment for themselves, with nothing to recommend it except that it was there...
...America can make that declaration the basis of its foreign policy...
...missions in Saigon were manned by well-educated and idealistic young men who believed that the United States could create a "Third Force" opposed both to colonialism and Communism...
...In spite of America's many sins against human rights, there alone can those sins be condemned—and compensated...
...The intent of that change is democratic, toward greater freedom and justice...
...This was accepted by liberal democrats because the Communist parties at that point were defined as parties unwilling to play by the rules of the democratic process...
...They could have insisted on at least a minimum of what they take for granted at home, on scrupulous respect for human rights, on fair labor practices, on democratic limitations of power...
...Outrageous though the methods may have been, there was also the complicity in Diem's overthrow and the assassination of Trujillo— engineered by the CIA or not, it can at least be said of the latter that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving fellow...
...But the problem is not American power, only the use to which America's potential is put...
...Such a development would have a number of side consequences...
...The appearance of U.S...
...The problem is really a different one: it is not whether the CPs of Western Europe prefer democracy but whether democratic norms and values are held by them with sufficient firmness, so that they would resist temptations to "go for broke" in a stress-filled period of transformation...
...One of the problems of democratic socialists is that in response to the various quasi-participatory and plebiscitory regimes that have dispensed even with the sham of liberal democracy, we have often defensively clung to the flawed existing model and refused to speculate or take chances on the possibility of advancing the boundaries of democratic participation...
...These articles were written before August 15...
...But all these halting steps toward a more enlightened policy came to nothing when Johnson, who had hailed Diem as "The Churchill of Asia," became president and the indefensible intervention in the Dominican Republic and the escalation of the Vietnam War shortly followed...
...American progressives could have extended the ideals of freedom and justice they were rediscovering in the civil rights movement to foreign policy...
...There is an increasingly welleducated working class, pressing demands not only for a larger share of social goods but also for participation in the economy...
...Maintaining the status quo is no option, but neither is a policy of tranquillity through surrender...
...Rosa Luxemburg first outlined the second answer in her essay on the Bolshevik Revolution...
...But now in an economic situation fraught with uncertainties, scarcity of raw materials, and instability of the international monetary market, the traditional class issues of economic redistribution again come to the forefront...
...Two insecure presidents, preoccupied with domestic and world opinion and only fleetingly attentive to the actual situation in Vietnam, were not up to doing this...
...It is also a democracy that could only exist given a continued domestication of the working class and its unions...
...In fact both Italy and France were seen as democracies when their working system explicitly excluded from participation the quarter, and sometimes third, of the electorate that voted Communist...
...There were a few signs that the Kennedy administration was beginning to recognize the costs of a Realpolitik that cast the United States in the role of a counterrevolutionary and antidemocratic force in the world: the Alliance for Progress...
...No amount of mystified demagoguery can change that fact...
...Humankind, after all, does not aspire to more efficient repression, whatever the claims of petty tyrants and their apologists...
...I would add that under conditions of stress there are precious few political movements and parties in which one can have total confidence...
...Second, Russia is now perceived not as a power necessarily interested in direct expansion of its sphere of dominance but as a fundamentally conservative power desiring to maintain a world status quo through detente with the United States...
...Actually, Nixon's exploitation of the war for domestic political purposes went in its cynical manipulativeness far beyond the mere fear that getting out would cost him votes...
...had walked away in time as in China in the 1940s and at the time of Dien Bien Phu, it would not have been discredited by going down to defeat in association with the Thieus and the Lon Nols after waging an ugly and brutal war in an area where no vital American interests were at stake...
...The potential was there, all that was lacking was the vision, the clarity of purpose and commitment, which transforms potential into power...
...The belief that the United States might become an active supporter of democratic revolutions around the world, long held by much of the liberal-left community, was never a very realistic one...
...The world is changing, and the need for change is accumulating...
...They, at least, do not behave as if they thought that freedom and democracy were obsolete...
...There is still a weekly trickle of people from Mainland China into Hong Kong...
...This trend is most evident in the Italian, Spanish, and Swedish parties...
...They could have offered freedom, dignity and security as a model for radical social change...
...We have seldom used the classic model of democracy—the rule of the demos...
...There were opportunities, not only speculative ones, such as early and vigorous aid to Ho Chi Minh in the '40s, but clear and present ones...
...However, when the United States in the name of containing Communism expanded its commitments beyond Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, what had once been an exception became the rule: the most faithful American clients turned out to be rightist military cliques and elderly princelings with little popular support, eager to hang on to power by exploiting the American connection, and pliant to our wishes in everything but their unreadiness to democratize their governments and carry out social reforms that would reduce their own privileges...
...No matter how reactionary its policy, America's freedom and affluence, disseminated throughout the world in a grotesque Hollywood caricature, is the one genuinely revolutionary factor of our time...
...How do internal political developments in Europe, such as the electoral blocs in Italy and France between Communist and Socialist parties, affect the prospects for democracy...
...democracy even more so...
...The United States became involved in Vietnam, deepened the involvement, and perpetuated it for so long out of a double obsession with preserving the "credibility" of American power in the world and avoiding the feared electoral consequences of withdrawal and the appearance of defeat at home...
...Thus a limit on the changes that could be made by the socialist parties of Western Europe, as well as by reformist regimes in the Third World, was seen as an external one...
...One may modestly hope that the sheer number of these critical and possibly unpleasant developments over which the United States has no control 364 DENNIS H. WRONG will have a chastening effect on our leaders...
...Kissinger's use of great power collusion in place of John Foster Dulles's great power confrontation...
...A display of American influence in this situation can only reduce the effectiveness of these restraints on the Lisbon government...
...The affluent youngsters who paraded on campuses with their Vietcong flags might have had illusions about the Cong, but the same cannot be said for those of their adult mentors who harrangued them about "fascist Amerika" and the "people's struggle...
...can provide...
...To be sure, conservatives contributed to the failure of the Left...
...Let there be no mistake about that...
...Not only the Army, which could be accused of fighting for a share of the spoils, but also the Regional and Popular Forces, who knew the risks they were taking...
...Even if Kissinger has truly seen the light, I am doubtful that the joy with which we are enjoined to greet prodigal sons should extend to applauding his continued tenure as secretary of state and chief architect of American foreign policy...
...The Portuguese Socialists, having received the largest vote in the recent election, have sought and obtained the support of West European socialists in checking the influence of the Communists and the authoritarian tendencies of the military regime...
...I am postulating a sharp shift to the Left in European politics within the next decade, with Left coalition governments including the Communists in the Mediterranean countries, and with social democratic majorities in most of the rest of Europe...
...When we talk of the crisis of democracy in an era of declining U.S...
...I have never believed that vox populi amounts to vox dei, but one of the few hopeful things in the world in the past year or so has been the response of voters in a number of countries...
...The tragedy of the past generation, illustrated anew in Vietnam, is that this is not how American power had been committed...
...The panic is perhaps exaggerated, or at least as exaggerated as the previous view, informed by liberal optimism, that America could redo the world in its image...
...Writers for Ramparts and the Village Voice, for example, have joyously proclaimed that the whole world outside the United States is "going socialist," one of them from Lisbon where he exulted in the exciting revolutionary atmosphere some weeks after the elections that had been followed by the suppression of the one newspaper supporting the Socialists, who had received the largest vote...
...had to do was to be prepared to pick up its marbles and go home unless its conditions for a representative coalition government were met...
...Possibly, they preferred, however inarticulately, the freedom to risk starvation in the muddle and corruption of the South to a regimented security under Hanoi...
...Western Europe is, after all, a more natural trading partner for the Soviet Union than the U.S...
...We, too, are deeply involved in this discussion...
...The potential is real enough, but American "power," as Vietnam has shown yet once more, is a very paper tiger...
...Instead, they fled in their thousands and continued to flee as long as there was somewhere to flee to, in the end wading out into the sea in the hope of being picked up by an American ship...
...Fifty years after Kronstadt, after three generations of assorted Stalins, after Hungary, after Tibet, after Czechoslovakia, after two rounds of Moscow trials there simply is no excuse for illusions about Communism...
...Today that answer applies to both the Communists and the socialists...
...There the United States deployed its potential on a lavish scale, squandering lives, arms, and fortune, literally to no purpose...
...Though the Americans, with a legacy of maximalist expectations, may be skeptical, compared to the weary repression with which petty tyrants and marginal economies constrain human life even in a relatively well developed country like Czechoslovakia, the degree of freedom, dignity, and affluence that even the most disaffected Americans take for granted do make America appear as the Promised Land...
...The Truman Doctrine and the defense of Korea still represented a purposeful commitment of American power in the defense of freedom— though the subsequent policy in Greece and Korea no longer did...
...At the same time, American public opinion shifted away from an unquestioning support of the war...
...But business never claimed to be concerned with freedom and dignity...
...It aspires to freedom, dignity, and justice...
...One hopes that Kraft is right to take this speech seriously, although there is little in the American post-Vietnam record to suggest that he is...
...But while both beliefs are unreal, they are also reflections of a more modest reality, i.e., the fact that in the period after World War lithe United States was easily the preeminent world power and that now this dominance has been seriously shaken...
...This limit was at least as much a problem as the conquest of sufficiently broad internal majorities...
...and the persisting friendly relations with other right-wing dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil...
...In spite of its failures, the huddled and the revolting masses of the world still see America as bigger than life...
...He has just too much to live down: the "tilt" to Pakistan, then engaged in the most genocidal action committed by any nation since the death of Stalin...
...Where will peace come next...
...American "power" is too useful a bogey and too precious a hope to be relinquished easily...
...What does all this amount to...
...The demand for human rights was as relevant in Vietnam as in Little Rock...
...Though its long-term impact is far more revolutionary than the rhetoric of Third World demagogues, its policies are inevitably conservative...
...It can use its enormous leverage to 360 ERAZIM KOHAK press for a free and just society...
...The unnecessary, mismanaged, and overpublicized use of force against Cambodia in the Mayaguez episode and the later gleeful attributions of Ford's gains in the Gallup poll to the affair are painfully reminiscent of the behavior that kept us in Vietnam so interminably...
...Then there are those who are able only to vote with their feet, as the saying goes...
...There was the perspective of a continually expanding economic pie...
...1. Bogdan Den itch Americans share a degree of ethnocentrism scarcely matched anywhere else...
...It would further isolate the United States as a world power and force it to take into account not merely its favorite sparring partner, the Soviet Union, but a Europe whose economic interests would often set it at odds with the United States...
...The United States remains, of course, a major factor in the Middle East, but the lack of an active American "presence" influencing the events that will shape the immediate future elsewhere in the world is notable: Portugal, the coming succession struggles in China, Spain, and Yugoslavia, the crisis in India, and the course of Soviet-Chinese relations...
...Hanoi's writ runs unchallenged: those who fled from it and fought against it for 20 years no longer have the means of disturbing the peace by defending themselves...
...The future of American power-and the future of freedom with it—depends on a rediscovery of a genuinely progressive alternative, of a policy of peace through freedom and justice...
...Instead, it revived Chamberlain's and Daladier's old slogan and spoke of "peace," even though "peace" meant surrender to Hanoi...
...It is an unavoidable risk if the whole political terrain of the Left is not to be abandoned, and it is a risk our socialist cothinkers in France, Spain, and Italy are well aware of even as they propose to take it...
...This is acceptable provided one does not believe that there is a need for fundamental social change, which by definition is outside the rules...
...Suleiman adds that in France precisely the higher civil servants are political, consciously and systematically developing into France's ruling political party, and are increasingly recruited in ways that exclude the parties of the Left from access to decision-making...
...The corrupt and unsteady authoritarianism of these regimes, headed so often by those who formerly collaborated with the French, was never a match for the disciplined totalitarianism of North Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge...
...They did not do so, even though the Saigon government provided them with arms, opportunities, and reasons...
...There will be that kind of peace in our time when there is no longer any power capable of resisting the arbitrary will of power-hungry demagogues and petty tyrants, and there are people who want that kind of peace...
...They are unlikely to enter into ruling DEMOCRACY AND AMERICAN POWER 355 coalitions unless they have a prospect of carrying out substantial parts of their programs, and if they do carry out their programs, they will permanently tilt the political and social scene to the Left, so that the new consensuses and debates will occur on a different political terrain...
...Will Portugal be next...
...Whether events in Indochina are seen as the irreversible decline of American power almost everywhere or as a temporary setback likely to encourage a bracing new realism, they will loom in the background of all future foreign policy initiatives for many years to come...
...Anti-Communism is not enough"—that is certainly the major lesson of Vietnam...
Vol. 22 • September 1975 • No. 4
