BEYOND LIBERALISM: TOWARD A LIVING DEMOCRACY

...q Notes 'Goodwyn, Democratic Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. xiv...

...then the society is basically trading one master for another...

...And in the course of the growing youth movement, alongside the continuing civil-rights insurgency, the growing protest against the war, the emerging women's movement, the polarizations within liberalism became increasingly acute and explicit...

...Even those who felt greater unease with the world around them often saw little prospect for its betterment...

...Simultaneously, opposition to the waste, the social and community destruction, and human alienation attendant upon "normal patterns" of economic growth has mounted rapidly...

...The Gallup Poll, cited in Minneapolis Tribune, January 30, 1977, showed that 39 percent of the public continued to believe that big government represented the gravest threat to the nation's future, but the number believing big business held such a role has soared, from 14 percent in 1967 to 23 percent in '77...

...It suggests that a technocraticedged contempt for popular initiative and participation in decision-making has long been a dominant element in the Western notion of progress, and that it is such a feature that now redounds to the tradition's deep harm...

...Indeed, the widespread experience with unresponsive, incompetent, and undemocratic public institutions often furnishes understandable ground for the capitulation of genuinely decent liberals to the idea that "small government is beautiful" and that private institutions can often do the job better...

...Such technocratic perspectives came into their own in the construction of the economic apparatus of the New Deal...

...And similar views were expressed last fall by Carter's new CEA chief, Charles Schultze, who voiced the hope that "issues and alternatives [can come to be] debated along lines that are less ideological, more pragmatic...

...In our advanced industrial society, however, the growth imperative has been undermined both by external circumstances and by the inner decay of its justifications...

...This authoritarianism led to liberal support for increasing executive power, acquiescence in the profoundly anticivil-libertarian activities of police agencies, celebration of that "value-free" kind of social science so perceptively exposed by C. Wright Mills...

...4 The technocratic outlook spanned a wide range of liberal and reform opinion...

...274...

...Moreover, the revolts of that decade, including for a time that of the New Left, posed the issue of democracy in industrial society, and in so doing helped revivify the left heritage around the world...

...Paul Douglas, quoted in Howard Zinn, "Middle Class America Refurbished," in Allen Davis and Harold Woodman, eds., Conflict and Consensus in American History (Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath, 1972), p. 310...

...3Herbert Croley, quoted in James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. xi...

...The specifics of the corporate agenda have similarly been voiced again and again: cutbacks in "big government" (i.e., social-service spending...

...Those who had long been most perceptive in fathoming the limits of liberalism were often quick to point out the inadequacies of its youthful antithesis...

...Decisions have been taken out of the hands of the people," declared George Wallace's campaign platform in 1968...

...The difficulties in the path of revived, '60s-style expansion grow more and more evident...

...It is exactly the bureaucratic, authoritarian element of welfarestate politics that some European Socialist and Communist movements now have united to extirpate—concurring on the strategy of the democratic stage of transformation—to democratize both public and private institutions...

...we are likely to find the permanent benefits of Rooseveltian liberalism to be as illusory as were those of the Wilsonian era...

...In his view , "some of the recent upheavals have been led by people who increasingly will have no role to play in the new technetronic society," and in fact their protests could be seen as "merely the death rattle of the historical irrelevants...

...The fundamental problems of the industrial revolution have been solved," proclaimed Seymour Martin upset as the Eisenhower era came to a close...

...State-owned businesses under social democratic governments in Western European nations produced those same patterns of hierarchy, efficiency-minded management, and labor fragmentation that could be found in the most capitalist of American firms...

...Indeed, its failure has led Carter to make the effort to "reorganize" the federal bureaucracy a central theme of his administration...

...It could be argued that the American movements of the 1960s, charting new ground in protest regarding the discontents of modern industrial society, led other nations precisely because of the conceptual orthodoxies within which traditional Marxist politics still labored...

...In the present political climate, then, traditional mainstream reform provides no solutions...

...It is precisely the antistatist, antibureaucratic sentiment in the political culture that has made socialist gains difficult, and even progressives like Ralph Nader who now call for publicly owned economic institutions disavow the language of socialism on the grounds that "there never was sufficient recognition of the fact that if the government becomes a bureaucracy with its own momentum...

...The folklore of the business elite came by gradual transition to be the symbols of governmental reformers," concluded J. B. Shannon's careful study of municipal reform during the progressive period...

...By the end of the 1950s, it eventuated in a startling sense of completion among liberal intellectuals who should have known better...

...Populists dissented against the progressive society that was emerging in the 1890s because they thought that the mature corporate state would, unless restructured, erode the democratic promise of America...

...Indeed, the similarities between the internal structures of institutions in different political climates of the industrialized world have been remarkable...

...6Seymour Martin Lipset and Adlai Stevenson are quoted in William Leuchtenbury, A Troubled Feast (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp...

...On the one hand, the minority-democratic strand of the tradition sided forthrightly with the protesters...

...4, 11...

...The antipopular stance stemmed partly from reformers' acceptance of the corporate-dominated framework of policy, reinforced in turn by business-sponsored liberal policy institutions, reform groups, and political parties...

...5 Such authoritarianism did not merely inform the ideology of major craftsmen of the welfare state...

...More democratic, restless elements of the liberal tradition in America certainly furnished vital allies and aid for the black movement, the student movement, the antiwar and women's struggles...

...Such capitulation raises grave questions for reformers of a broad range of opinion...

...For example, Herbert Croley, an early editor of the New Republic, remarked that the liberal movement was "designed to serve as a counterpoise to the threat of working-class revolution...

...Why has the liberal tradition proven so vulnerable before the corporate crusade...

...In contrast to the authoritarian, technocratic side of liberalism, a new and effective politics of change must make the issue of genuine democracy the center of its language and program...

...13 A strategic move to lessen popular hostility toward government enterprise is suggested by the approach of the European left...

...In the wake of the growth imperative, technical values and efficiencyoriented criteria for change have triumphed over more democratic and cooperative objectives...

...The large contingent from the United Auto Workers in the 1963 civil-rights March on Washington was a visible sign of such aid, whose underside came in the form of financial help to such projects as SDS's community organizing efforts, which later student rebels would be loath to acknowledge...

...Yet, a substratum of popular resentment against welfare-state authoritarianism had been building up for decades, and waited to be tapped...

...Thus, mainstream liberalism prepared the way for its demise...

...The municipal reform study was by J. B. Shannon, quoted in Samuel Hays, "The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era," in Stanley Kutz and Stanley Kutler, eds,, New Perspectives on the American Past (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 146...

...Yet, on the whole, the movements of the '60s represented newly politicized and activated social forces in motion among blacks, the poor, young people, and women...

...A democratic tradition of liberalism has continued to exist as the partially submerged counterpoint to the more characteristic strain...

...new tax incentives and forms of subsidy for business...

...it also shaped the institutional structure of welfarestate reform in a variety of contexts...

...TO MOST AMERICANS, trapped in a world of deadend jobs, family responsibilities, and budgetbalancing, it often seemed that the frequently antiworking-class sentiments of middle-class radicals simply represented more of the same treatment they had come to expect from unresponsive elitists of all kinds...

...In such a setting, the capitalist attack on reform has dramatically widened the divisions within the liberal tradition...

...The right proved to be the force that first spoke to the subterranean discontent against mainstream liberalism...

...z Yet, the autocratic world view that progressives shared with the elite—fearful of discontent and disturbance "below," favoring only the most carefully controlled change, appeared in the ideology of those who did feel no love for the corporate giants...

...Finally, it suggests that effective strategy for social change in America must focus on efforts to democratize and open up both public and private American institutions...

...Arnold Toynbee, quoted in Galbraith, State, p. 109...

...Anthony Lewis, "A Most Ingenious Paradox," New York Times, February 20, 1977...

...Thus, the complacency of mainstream reform set the stage for the explosive confrontations of the 1960s...

...In the '50s, as committed a man as Gunnar Myrdal could argue that "increasing political harmony...

...Such a politics, identifying with and seeking to build popular organization and insurgent movement, led Paul Douglas, for example, to argue that without "the organization 270 of those who are at present weak and who need to acquire that which the world respects, namely power...

...A cluster of antidemocratic assumptions have run through American liberalism at least since the failure of populism and the emergence of "progressivism" in the early years of the 20th century...

...For the appeal to people's hostility toward big and impersonal government remains the fundamental weapon used by the corporate assault on reform...

...A poll of the American people in 1967 found almost half of those interviewed believing that big government represented the gravest threat to the country's future...

...Thus, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the society was in transition toward a "technetronic" future, which would see "technology, especially electronic communications and computers, promoting basic social change...

...4Thurman Arnold, quoted in Zinn, "Middle Class," p. 306...

...As early as 1905, according to Robert Wiebe, a political schism was evident in middle-class progressivism between efficiency-oriented reformers, tied to corporate occupations, and service-oriented liberals, who staffed the growing social work and government institutions...

...Indeed, federal agencies, from Hopkins's Works Project Administration and Tugwell's Resettlement Administration through Sam Brown's ACTION of today have at times reflected such a brand of liberalism...

...The Public Interest article [writes Lewis] is a start at what ought to be a fresh way of looking at the old argument about public and private enterprise...

...The writer has faith...

...They had so well learned that physical and sociological research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as the simple truth...

...Yet, its core impulse was authentic, a legitimate anger toward a reform tradition that had long shown contempt for ordinary people's intelligence, imagination, and creative ability to make key decisions about their own lives...

...Everywhere man turns," wrote Tom Wicker, "from the classroom to the supermarket to Mission Control, he is being dwarfed by his own handiwork—hapless and driven in his zip-code world...

...Yet, those "pragmatists of reform" who long had the upper hand in defining the shape of liberalism remained unimpressed, and indeed reasserted the technocratic faith only the more strongly...

...There often is truth in such arguments—though private corporations are unresponsive in ways government agencies are not...

...avowed Thurman Arnold, Roosevelt's chief of the antitrust division, "the fanatical alignments between opposing political principles may disappear, and a competent, practical, opportunistic governing class may rise to power...

...Tom Wicker, quoted in Leuchtenburg, Feast, p. 186...

...10 And, in 1972, Richard Nixon gave far more subtle and effective voice to such themes in his cynical rantings against "government control" and "impersonal bureaucracies...

...Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in Joe Stork, "Enter Brzezinski," In These Times, January 12, 1977...

...Its paradoxical-sounding argument should provoke political thinkers in both the United States and those Western countries with more socialist economies [by suggesting] nationalization may be inconsistent with effective regulation...

...George Wallace, quoted in Leuchtenburg, Feast, p.211 12See Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 176...

...3 THE AUTHORITARIAN TRAITS of liberalism have been a consistent theme through most of the century, above all the preference for "value-free" technique applied to political and social questions and for leaving decision-making to experts and administrators...

...Lawrence Goodwyn's sweeping new reinterpretation of American populism, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in American History, argues that the failure of the populist insurgency in 1896 ended the only authentically mainstream challenge to corporate control over the nation's politics...

...13 Ralph Nader, quoted in Joe Klein, "Ralph Nader," Rolling Stone, November 20, 1975...

...But reorganization in itself can easily lead to more centralization of authority, with the criterion of "efficiency" even more dominant as the only operative principle— and cosmetic talk shows with the people or casual fireside chats in sweaters are not likely to long provide substitutes for effective popular democracy...

...5 Gunnar Myrdal, quoted in Jeffrey Galper, The Politics of Social Services (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1975), p. 113...

...Finally, experiments with "human-scale," intermediate 273 technologies and workers' control suggest that older, centralized, and hierarchical forms of economic enterprise are no longer either most effective or most rational as means of achieving abundance...

...12 But such divisions were superseded by the overriding drive for economic expansion, which has in fact held sway in widely varying political systems around the world throughout the century...

...In our society, the concept of a "democratic stage"—in which it is the primary task of socialists and authentic reformers to build a mature movement for expanded democracy in all arenas— seems if anything more apt and necessary than in Europe...

...During the 1976 presidential campaign the Democratic Forum commissioned Gar Alperowitz and Jerry Faux to present their proposals for decentralized, cooperative institutions to the Democratic party...

...An explosion of neighborhood organization in the last several years is paralleled by the slow rebirth of labor's social activist heritage and such new, large-scale anticorporate coalitions as the Americans for a Working Economy...

...easing of environmental and consumer controls on corporate behavior...

...Indeed, the authoritarian presuppositions of progressivism came to full expression in the outlook of that new, technocratic middle class whose rise has been so brilliantly chronicled by anticapitalist apologists for its role, from Veblen to Galbraith...

...The point, however, is that the reigns of true power in the reform heritage have been held by the Arnolds, Schultzes, and Brzezinskis, who have in turn crafted the basic features of welfare-state institutions...

...and toleration for relatively high levels of unemployment...

...that study described a pattern evident in other arenas as well, from labor relations to resource management...

...Yet, the capitulation of mainstream politics to the corporate assault cannot simply be explained away through conspiracy theories or reference to an all-powerful ruling class—the business community in the '30s was nearly as unanimous as that of today in its savage opposition to major reform...

...John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: Signet, 1967), p. 326...

...Divisions within liberalism ever since the turn of the century foreshadowed the current polarizations within American reform movements...

...And with the rebellions in Eastern Europe, the Stalin revelations, and the publication of such scathing works as Milovan Djilas's The New Class, only the most die-hard of the faithful could any longer suppose the Soviet bloc nations to be models of "workers' democracy...

...This widening schism in American reform, moreover, offers new space for an indigenous socialist movement, if American socialists can overcome older divisions and build new forms of alliance around a vision of authentic democracy...

...Galbraith articulated the elite view clearly in 1967, as he contrasted capitalist irrationality with the need for long-range public rationality and planning: "It is the essence of planning that public behavior be made predictable—that it be subject to control...

...Such leaders as Barbara Mikulski, Ralph Nader, and John Conyers talk of a new people's movement to resist the corporate agenda...

...From 271 the standpoint of the employee," remarked Arnold Toynbee a generation ago, "it is coming to make less and less practical difference to him what his country's official ideology is and whether he happens to be employed by a government or commerical corporation...

...Paul Goodman, quoted in Leuchtenbury, Feast, p. 199...

...By fusing popular frustration and anxieties about the protests of those "below" in the social order—blacks, the poor— with longstanding hostility toward the "pointyheaded bureaucrats" who "look down their noses 272 at the average man," modern demagogues found a mass audience among white working-class people...

...The internal political debate in those countries is becoming increasingly technical in character...

...Yet, what is most disturbing about the conclusions drawn from these arguments is the terrible, reactionary pessimism that underlines the liberal retreat from any hope of authentic democracy...

...Over the last year, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, for example, has reported on a number of arguments made by men like Charles Schultze and given elaborate form in an article by James Wilson and Patricia Rachel in the winter issue of the Public Interest that government agencies are more inefficient, incompetent, tyrannical, and unresponsive to the public...

...Somehow all functions could be reduced to interpersonal relations and power...

...Suddenly I realized that they [the young] did not really believe that there was a nature of things," explained Paul Goodman...

...is emerging] between all the citizens in the advanced welfare state...

...In the end, the revolt of the New Left proved to be laced with a naivety, arrogance, and unreason, which doomed its efforts...

...As for socialists, why, in a period marked by greatly increasing questioning about corporate behavior, do we still see socialist organizations without the first signs of a genuinely popular base among the people...

...Now it is necessary to understand the origins of the popular resentment toward liberalism...

...From the early '70s onward, such corporate-connected strategists as John Connolly, William Simon, David Rockefeller, and even Charles Schultze have argued, in effect, a simple position: wealth should be redistributed upward...

...Progressive society" was elitedominated...

...Leading figures in the Roosevelt administration could sometimes express their views with breathtaking candor...

...The humanist strands of liberalism show growing support for grass-roots and radical democratic initiatives and organizing efforts, and programs...

...Charles Schultze, with Henry Owen, in the "Introduction," Owen and Schultze, eds., The Next Years (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1976), p. 14...

...It came to infuse the liberal approach to labor relations, education, welfare programs, and health care...

...For the first time in history the engine of social progress has run out of the fuel of discontent," remarked Adlai Stevenson at the decade's end .6 The authoritarian streak in liberalism can be noted in both American politics and in the politics of European social democracies...

...Efficiency, system, orderliness, budget economy, saving, all were injected into the efforts of reformers who sought to remodel municipal government in terms of the great impersonality of corporate enterprise...

...This article will examine the Achilles heel of the reform tradition in its liberal American and European guise...

...While such politicians as Hugh Carey, Jerry Brown, and Jimmy Carter have acquiesced in much of the corporate agenda, they have nonetheless also retained considerable popularity in their political retreat...

...Indeed, the radical democratic impulse came from among those middle-class young people who seemed the apparent heirs of technocracy yet felt themselves to be its victims...

...Popular resentment against bureaucrats, "experts," "social engineers" and other "technocrats" always contained a complex of emotions: prejudice, fear of change, and loyalty to traditional conservative social values...

...The large corporations have sought—in the astonishingly candid language of a Business Week editorial of October 12, 1974—to "sell" the public, through a wide-ranging advertising blitz, on the "idea of doing with less so that big business can have more...