So Whom Are You Going to Vote for?
Dabei, J. Patrick & Watts, Jerry & Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs & Lekachman, Robert & Plastrik, Stanley & Walzer, Michael & Howe, Irving & Pachter, Henry & Hausknecht, Murray
We asked Dissent editors whom they, as individuals, were going to vote for. Some threw up their hands, some groaned, some wrote afew words. Here is a representative sample of those who wrote their...
...Ties" are men destined to lives of strain...
...some remain tied to their party affiliation (weaker each year...
...If so, whenever we hear, "register to vote—don't vote to register," let us realize that what they're saying is, "if, as a nation, we can afford to risk losing lives, why not risk the lives of those who produce nothing...
...but that's not the point here...
...I'm sitting at the typewriter wishing that the pressing of the keys will be the start of a Kennedy bandwagon (will wishing make it so...
...Nothing works the way it is supposed to work, good intentions lead invariably to disaster, governmental action makes everyone worse off...
...The old movements of the left incorporated the poor and the weak...
...To exercise power effectively the coterie would have to change and be more open and flexible...
...This entails a defense against a prime characteristic of modern consciousness: the sense of detachment, a distancing of oneself from traditional values that culminates in a fundamental ambivalence toward the past...
...Finally, the new corporate and older trade association Political Action Committees (PACs) have revolutionized campaign financing in a way that is ideally suited for the coterie...
...that is a missing part of their political education, and that's what makes them liberals...
...In a media-dominated electoral politics, political arrangements tend to be ad hoc and instrumental...
...But the latter can only be a temporary resolution, for the incongruities of the Iranian revolution suggest that it is a revolution made by individuals and groups who are in conflict not only with one another but also with themselves...
...But this kind of liberalism reached a dead end in the '70s when it became clear that what was required for the sake of a good society was not expansion but redistribution...
...can deploy is becoming less and less adequate to deal with the specific areas of trouble...
...People with autonomous policy commitments or independent power bases will normally be excluded, since their loyalty to the politician might be conditional...
...The U.S...
...Marching beneath Khomeini's picture expresses a commitment and desire to live by the embodied values...
...the economic power of the raw-material producing nations, and the nuclear potential of such countries as India...
...represent nothing but reaction...
...But only a fool would whet its appetite by yielding to pressure...
...Some sources of these discordant elements are not hard to find...
...The difference is not between near and far situations (we could not prevent Grenada from going the Castro way any more than Cambodia), nor is it between areas where we have "interests" and others (we are as powerless in Teheran as in Kabul...
...Coteries invite what the psychologist Irving Janis calls "group think, "2 when closed groups tend to unduly narrow options, misperceive information, and develop a siege mentality...
...One obvious source of coterie money is the drastic increase in independently wealthy candidates who enter the political arena from nowhere and proceed to buy an election...
...Coterie politics is a politics without program or platform...
...What matters at least as much is whether the shattered liberal-left coalition can find the energy and thoughtfulness to restructure itself for the battles of the 1980s—battles that will probably be directed, to one or another extent, against whichever party holds office...
...This last requirement may involve consequences that are difficult to swallow...
...Schmidt did so in order to negotiate an agreement that both sides drop these plans...
...Running for office became in the 1970s a distinctly private enterprise...
...Lyndon Johnson still was able to save Balaguer in Santo Domingo and get away with it...
...But we're in a period of considerable social retreat, and insofar as we're talking about the election, we can only choose among the possibilities...
...385 sinecures in business or foundations and freeing them for political work when needed...
...What they really mean is that a return to the draft would militarize middle-class American society...
...This has not been commented upon in the American press, but it is clear that intrigues for the succession of Brezhnev in the Kremlin were responsible for the fatal decisions that put Soviet policies at cross-purposes with themselves...
...Ties" are also distinguished from "turbans" by their place of residence...
...They also sought a high visibility on issues and a more activist approach to politics...
...Elsewhere in Saudi Arabia all nonMoslem sojourners are forced to live within walled compounds...
...All these would make the leader more effective but would also mean new members of the team and more enduring political commitments...
...q Michael Walzer In a Bad Time I can't recall a time when it was as easy as it is today to glance at the headlines of the morning paper and turn quickly to the sports pages...
...Coteries also specialize in disposable campaign organizations...
...at stake...
...This is an illusion...
...The sense of the future evoked by our best politicians, our most compassionate and benevolent politicians, is too radically dependent on the ideas of progress and affluence...
...The lower classes are already militarized...
...Barry Commoner is intelligent, enlightened, and very close to DSOC positions on such matters as income and wealth distribution, and democratic planning...
...In these circumstances, the poor and the weak are especially vulnerable—to inflation, to recession, to the slow erosion of the welfare state...
...This definition contained, among other things, all the above...
...Maybe even the rich (the modestly rich...
...but coteries are different...
...Iranian Students...
...Another occasion for public boldness...
...there may be others in the next one...
...that's where we are...
...Today we live in a different world...
...Little enduring trust, loyalty, or friendship connect politicians with other leaders and groups...
...Flagellants wearing black jackets and caps ritualistically hit their backs with small metal chains to the beat of a drum...
...But they also have to represent the triumphant values of the Islamic revolution, and to do this successfully they must be committed to some degree to the traditional values and perspectives of their native society...
...Still, these are major threads of cultural patterns that exert a strong influence over large segments of modern societies...
...Only a counter-vision of equality and community can serve us...
...This is why it is dangerous and misleading to apply the categories of a bygone period to the present state of affairs...
...the mood of participants seems more self-concern than solidarity...
...But on the left, everything that makes commitment exciting and worthwhile seems for the moment to be missing: a sense of possibility, collective esprit, programmatic vigor, and intelligence...
...The few patronage jobs available seldom touch the coterie's inner circle, as the structure of the Carter campaign reveals...
...Most all Americans, irrespective of their political philosophies, benefit from the existence of a strong United States military...
...Can it be maintained that it made no "difference" that Nixon was elected rather than Humphrey...
...it was selfliquidating because our margin of superiority had to become less and less formidable as the armament race escalated...
...Students oppose the draft registration proposal primarily because they cannot imagine themselves doing something as mundane as driving a jeep...
...Qum/ Teheran...
...The small-town American who is "afraid we are not going to do anything about" the hostages is expressing a recognition that "spontaneous" or "natural" reactions are no longer appropriate...
...their method changes, and so does ours...
...This is especially true of capital cities, where the stranger is officially welcomed, relationships with him are established, and the material goods of modern societies are most easily acquired...
...Among the few remaining activists, the only politics that has much appeal is one of negation and avoidance...
...A guarantee of the status quo automatically applies to the unpalatable governments in Teheran, Pankow, Pretoria, Pnomh Penh, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Seoul, and others...
...The election of Reagan and Bush would have many regrettable consequences, but none more dangerous than the prospect that the necessary debate on foreign policy will be conducted in terms of old "cold-war" alignments instead of a search for new alternatives...
...If we take these portraits to be iconic symbols, embodiments of underlying ideas and values, then the icons above the heads of a crowd are clues to the ideological terrain beneath them...
...In these encounters traditional ideologies and institutions are threatened by the attractions of modernity...
...Governor Brown of California practices a more sophisticated variant of the strategy...
...But the other America is still with us, and its members are still the most likely victims of whatever patchwork solutions the country finds for its more publicized difficulties...
...They do nothing to remedy widespread inequities...
...After the election, these unorganized citizens have no staying power and can be accommodated by constituent service as well as orchestrated use of the media...
...Here is a representative sample of those who wrote their personal opinions — Ems...
...On this 395 principle, the U.S...
...It is built into the revolution itself, and it produces discordancies and strains that will influence the subsequent course of the revolution...
...Better to vote for Anderson and live unashamed...
...This, in turn, gives the coterie maximum freedom for maneuver...
...Contemporary politicians, working with a small coterie of friends and hired p.r...
...Survival required votes on election day and the politicians needed parties, machines, local leaders of interest groups, money, and exposure to the voters...
...his image represents the values of Islam, and carrying his picture testifies to the primacy of Islam in one's life...
...Still, let us be fair to Carter: if his policy appeared to be "inconsistent," the reason was that Congress ands...
...But the parties are dying and the single-minded devotion of the coterie makes it a logical successor as a means of attaining power...
...We need to help wherever we can in building liberal and leftist coalitions and in prodding those politicians nearest to us toward programmatic commitment...
...One has no need to "coexist" with neighbors who behave decently of their own accord...
...4 The essential "linkage," 5 between the tactical measures of confrontation and the strategic goals of coexistence, or between things we have the power to grant or deny and things we would like to obtain, will be lost after that common front of rightists and leftists has done its work...
...Simultaneously anticorporatist and antistatist, it represents a new version of laissez faire...
...Without structured parties, machines, or coalitions, the voters have no way of getting accountability from the coterie...
...This did not work, not even in Korea, and it has become totally unrealistic in the meantime...
...Don't conscript us...
...383 • The first is a failure of policy...
...I think the time has come to move in and use force...
...For a spell, our Swedish friends enjoyed the services of Olaf Palme as their prime minister, an intellectual as unabashed as Commoner...
...Even a casual reader of the relevant literature must know that since the first disarmament conference in 1900 powers have debated on how to compare weapons systems of different quality and purpose...
...The immense personal economic power of the Rockefellers or Kennedys enables them to maintain a network of cronies by providing them with Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (New York: Viking, 1969), pp...
...Personally, I am angered at his weasel actions on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment (if our friends don't put their money where there mouths are, what can we expect from our enemies...
...Those beyond the range of the unmediated voice have greater difficulty in submerging themselves in the rhythm of the ritual...
...Almost six out of every ten persons in the volunteer army are categorized by the army as 3B, marginal in their mental capacity...
...Instead, everything is drift and flounder, when what we need—as the neoconservatives recognize readily enough when they address themselves to the private sphere—is a little public enterprise and daring...
...The methods by which the coterie wins elections are not related to those needed to educate the public or forge a working policy consensus between the executive and legislature...
...The sound of the bullhorn is the tribute modern technology exacts from the pieties of tradition...
...To oppose the draft is to support a status quo that fills the military with youth who only marginally share in the benefits of our society and who possess the least power to affect the direction of our foreign policy...
...In 1937, Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov submitted to the League of Nations a definition of "aggression" that would authorize collective action against the aggressor...
...These perceptions become the ground for the definition of "negotiations" as a "reasonable" response to problems...
...Why have these demonstrators waited until now to speak out against a military that has always been with us...
...Turbans" experience no stress...
...Even Ted Kennedy, who tried to run on a program, never made a serious effort to build an organization or develop a consistent ideological position...
...Irving Howe With no enthusiasm whatever, and with knowledge of all the legitimate criticisms that can be made of his presidency, I suppose I'll vote for Carter...
...In modern societies "being reasonable" means, among other things, the expectation of conflicting interests and a recognition that to resolve conflict will rarely mean total victory or total defeat...
...But it is hard to accept the possibility that the electorate has moved off its moderately progressive base so far to the right that it is ready to accept a Goldwaterish-ideological program built around demagogic single issues (Anti-ERA, Anti-Abortion), along with commitments tantamount to relaunching a general armaments race and starting to dismantle the welfare state...
...Today, however, most of the instruments that build machines, especially patronage, are gone...
...This almost inexhaustible source of funds is ideal for the coterie: the contributors are organizations and prefer impersonal businesslike arrangements, they do not need or seek access to the circle of advisers, and the issue commitments they seek are minimal...
...Under the threat of "instant massive retaliation" to any violation of borders, the Cold War guaranteed a cold peace...
...In domestic politics, he used the party and his experience and skill to gain a successful legislative program...
...Most coterie politicians project an image of the antiparty, independent sham Populist, an illusion tailored to the media with its susceptibility to the symbolic gesture or personality details...
...It is our worst politicians who are on the offensive now, with their own visions of individualism, competition, and self-reliance...
...We shall probably need to brace ourselves to endure four more years of Carter or, for better or worse, a spell of Reagan...
...382 WHY CARTER...
...As a result of their experience abroad they are aware of and perhaps share at least some Western orientations, and this, in part, qualifies them for positions in which they deal with the world beyond Iran...
...IN THIS NEW WORLD, political survival requires money...
...Coterie politics has been foreshadowed by previous United States experience with partyless politics...
...Perhaps the most extraordinary features of contemporary political culture is the collapse of the old American faith in problem-solving...
...Only if this is clearly understood can we avoid having periodical crises in Berlin, Korea, Cuba, Jerusalem, and a few other places...
...Frustrated as an effective domestic leader, the presidential coterie leader, at least, finds foreignpolicy grandstanding an easy way to gain visibility and success...
...then the money can be used on the media with no strings attached...
...It also means support of any government that will agree to help defend the status quo...
...Both strategies underline the coterie's reliance upon a plebiscite executive...
...Even in Qum there are limits to insulation...
...Yet, it has not bothered them greatly that other Americans are driving tanks and jeeps and are being trained to kill...
...Then there are those who recognize the importance of a strong military but feel that the personal costs for them to enter the service are too high...
...there is a loss of personal contact...
...But if the Iranian revolution is a revolt against modernity, it is equally true that Iran cannot escape modernity...
...Assembly...
...But if Anderson sounds good, and has the support of the high school and college youth I talk to, as well as some of my liberal colleagues, and he appears the unsullied, white-haired version of the Kennedy liberal package (though left-liberals grimace at an economic policy grounded in his Republican principles...
...Ens...
...THE QUESTION IS NOT whether the Soviet Union should be allowed to appropriate this or that piece of geography, but whether it is possible, in the long run, to live in a world-political environment where (a) a country may invade another country in order to impose its choice of government there...
...Certainly, they cannot imagine themselves killing anyone...
...to separate the necessary and spontaneous changes in the social, economic, and political structures of developing countries as much as possible from the world-political contest...
...is the stronger...
...But this is my fantasy option...
...To the extent that coterie politics possesses an ideological dimension, it hurts the liberal or Democratic party coalitions...
...They would know what to do...
...It is rapidly becoming the most effective means for gaining and keeping political power...
...While I am far from agreeing with Kissinger on either essentials or details, I don't think that in order to justify one's competence to speak out on matters of foreign policy, one must first denounce Kissinger...
...our political power, where it still exists, no longer translates into military power...
...The democratic politician must be able to fight, persuade and compromise with fellow politicians and constituencies, but never lose sight of the goals he or she seeks...
...In foreign policy, due largely to inex2 Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groups Think: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascos (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972...
...It is a symbiotic relation: the coterie members derive their power from access to the politician, while the politician depends on the coterie to provide the discretion, ideas, commitment, and energy necessary to gain power...
...I am afraid we are not going to do anything about it...
...These coteries ignore the party remnants and set up a personal campaign apparatus manned by ambitious people and recruits from the "bastard feudalism" system...
...Harvard Professors...
...he is an icon constructed out of his movie roles...
...The bullhorn's amplification of the voice of the leader increases his range of control...
...Instead, the possessor of the mailing list becomes a power broker, as Richard Viguerie has become in right-wing politics...
...Modernity means not only the experience of uncertainty but a tendency to embrace and assign positive value to it...
...From this glum proposition flows the implication that the sensible course for radicals is support for neither major party candidate and deliberate choice of the alternative contender who is most likely to shake up a manifestly decaying two-party system...
...The majority that is likely to cast their vote against Carter in November—inasmuch as foreign policy plays a role at all—is composed of people who mind his confrontationist zigs and others who mind his conciliatory zags...
...The political trials of President Carter's administration reflect the problems of an increasing number of mayors and governors who capture office with the help of a personal coterie...
...Kennedy had some major disabilities, ranging from his personal record to a blustery style, but he did speak for valued liberal positions...
...The situation is exacerbated under crisis when, as President Johnson did over Vietnam and President Nixon over Watergate, the executive and his coterie can retreat into splendid isolation and use media exposure to create the illusion of leadership...
...it is simply a choice among candidates available...
...Political staff and campaign staff merge, under both Carter and Nixon...
...Today's protests are really directed against the new threat of non-poor America...
...The only leader is Khomeini...
...Their media tactics rely upon personality projection, targeted voters, a few symbolic issues, and temporary mobilization of normally acquiescent citizens...
...Enter, therefore, John Anderson...
...Early in January it was reported that in Qum...
...I think Anderson stands for the forces of equality and justice...
...My "trickle up" theory...
...The dangers of isolation, closed decision-making procedures, and the resort to insubstantial demagoguery, all gravely undermine the political system% capacity for leadership and simply reinforce the public spiral of dissatisfaction, mistrust, anger, and apathy...
...In traditional societies, yesterday will be today and what was learned then can be used now...
...The picture of Wayne celebrates and honors the legendary world of the pioneer and frontiersman...
...is strong or weak, nor is it whether the U.S...
...The "change" that has come about in Iran is nothing to be welcomed, nor would the "change" that the P.L.O...
...They seem increasingly prevalent in the legislatures and executives across the country: e.g., Kennedy's "Irish Mafia," Nixon's "Berlin Wall," and Carter's "Georgia Mafia...
...Carter's 391 nonintervention in Angola, Nicaragua, and Cuba rested upon ideals stronger than simple fear of our own military ineptitude...
...q 384 J. Patrick Dobel Coterie Politics— Shape of Things Present There is a new political formation in the United States—let's call it the coterie...
...These are the central themes of neoconservative writing—as if our current difficulties were the result of radical experiments and political interventions and not of business as usual, corporate irresponsibility, and endless selfindulgence...
...The legislature magnifies the singular inappropriateness of coteries...
...It is also feared that a return to the draft will mark a return to an interventionist foreign policy— as if the volunteer army had inhibited our actions abroad...
...A tie in Teheran is emblematic of men bestriding two worlds...
...Then, as now, it was unrealistic to try to circumvent a war by denying the government the means of waging war, in this case depriving it of the necessary manpower...
...Presidents Nixon and Carter both exhausted this ploy...
...When it became clear that the Iranian authorities supported the militant students, a small-town Maryland resident was quoted as saying...
...Still, voting isn't a way of registering one's full ideological stance...
...When government officials travel from Teheran to Qum, the moral superiority of tradition is affirmed...
...When government officials need to consult with the Imam they travel to Qum...
...One cannot well fault Carter for judging that to propose gasoline rationing would have been political suicide, apart from being a futile gesture in the face of congressional hostility...
...to defuse nationalism, the deadly enemy of socialism—but certainly not to exacerbate ethnic, religious, economic, and social conflicts (most of which may not have any immediate resolution) by superimposing foreign power conflicts upon them...
...The problem is: whatever power the U.S...
...At this moment, I am letting myself be recruited for Anderson by my son...
...only that sometimes the simplest and most obvious proposition is the right one...
...So I'll vote for Carter, probably...
...Interestingly, the same liberal/left intellectuals who had often insisted on reading Carter's domestic pronouncements as more symbolic than substantive were now willing to take him at his word on this highly politicized issue...
...Among the consequences of the coterie are both the travail of the American presidency and the chaos of our legislative process...
...But I would suggest that our political depression also has more immediate causes...
...The inexperience and isolation of the coterie impel the coterie executive to "go to the people" to force recalcitrant legislatures and bureaucracies into line...
...Leave us alone...
...Rhetorical overkill and appeals to the people on such issues as the energy crisis are bound to fail...
...The structure of peace during that period was maintained by the fear of war...
...political domination because, unable and unwilling to maintain our former role of world policeman, we no longer offer client governments much they cannot get elsewhere without loss of dignity...
...COTERIE POLITICS divorces the methods of gaining power from those of governance...
...We lack a plausible and persuasive (let alone an interesting and imaginative) picture of the good society...
...By contrast, the new financing sources, singleissue groups, and disposable campaigning organizations involve limited commitment but high returns and demand little continuous activism—all far more congenial to the coterie...
...Turbans/ Ties...
...I'm not alright, Jack...
...5 Linkage is a tool of diplomacy, not a concept of philosophy...
...Classical machines, however, depended on alliances of independent groups and power brokers able to mobilize predictable resources...
...One need not maintain this is either a subtle or profound strategy...
...Thus the campaign can be run without disrupting the coterie...
...A very modest egalitarianism founded on the easy premise of continual material improvement for everyone: this was the liberalism of the '40s, '50s, and '60s...
...Those demands in face of pleas for "reason" were intertwined with notions about the importance of "doing one's own thing," "letting it all hang out," and, generally, celebrations of the spontaneous and the "natural...
...For a while it seemed to work, it did work, and it brought important social gains...
...In a sense, the distance at which the unmediated voice of the leader can be heard establishes the line that defines the boundaries of the community...
...Most other commitments involve technical points that are usually resolved in subcommittees...
...The Iranian students may not be very much different from the American students of the '60s who labeled as "hypocrisy" actions that recognized the complexity and problematic nature of the world...
...If Reagan chooses a secretary of state with any professional experience, he will astonish the world by his moderation and realism...
...But for whatever reasons they choose to reinstate the draft, it will have the unintended consequence of laying the groundwork for the establishment of a political coalition that could transcend class barriers...
...On the other hand, sometimes such an abyss opens beneath people of the same society...
...The third failure is a failure of vision...
...for antiFascism has been turned into anti-Communism and its obverse, anti-Americanism...
...I think that what is good for these groups will be good for the nation...
...On the right, there is some vitality and enthusiasm...
...Our economic power no longer translates into political power...
...c) a country may equip and train terrorists or guerrilla forces in order to change the balance of power in another part of the world...
...A leader who makes a revolution in the name of Islamic fundamentalism and resides in a "holy city" remains insulated from the daily confrontations of modernity...
...and to defend the status quo against any attempt to change it by the use of force...
...The most practical lean toward Carter because people cringe at "throwing" the election to Reagan by siphoning off Carter votes to Anderson...
...To maintain its influence in various parts of the planet, it is no longer sufficient for the U.S...
...men, search among these groups and individuals for a largely personal constituency— recruited one by one, as it were, through the mass media...
...But there are other new sources...
...Only in rare cases can those older-style factions or machines develop...
...But, of course, one persuades a bandit only if one can show him that crime does not pay...
...the irony there is that they can do so precisely because they feel safe under the umbrella of American nuclear power...
...It was not too long ago that Harvard professors and their colleagues elsewhere were confronted by students presenting them with "nonnegotiable demands," a phrase that finds its echoes in today's Teheran...
...Drum/ Bullhorn...
...And the coterie concerns itself perpetually with power maintenance, confusing the functions of politics with those of the campaign...
...q 4 It was Carter who put Andrew Young in a position that enabled him to enhance U.S...
...They take no notice of the real changes in the world but continue to play old records—"Western Interests," "hegemony," "American Imperialism"—whenever an attempt is made, ever so feebly, to stop the dangerous course of expansionism...
...As a historian, I am outraged by his denial to others of sources that he uses freely—certainly no way of convincing the world that he is always right...
...the activists are busy elsewhere...
...We need to defend the welfare state while at the same time thinking again about how its citizens can be mobilized and its burdens shared...
...A fine study of the 1968 presidential campaign, An American Melodrama,' characterized much of American politics as based on the principle of "bastard feudalism" traced in the historical work of K. B. McFarlane...
...q Cynthia Fuchs Epstein I want to vote for Ted Kennedy...
...is still ahead...
...was expected to act as though it had received a mandate to police the peace, and it expected other countries to follow its lead...
...Americans...
...Huge segments of American society were politicized as never before...
...Such a new arrangement obviously must be based on a status quo that takes account of some recent power shifts: the emergence of Europe, Japan, China, and the oil-rich Middle East as independently active factors...
...The truth is that the U.S...
...Matters only get difficult when constituents on both sides of an issue are organized, for then taking a position loses as well as gains votes...
...But we must coexist, and negotiations about SALT II and III must go on despite or rather because of Afghanistan...
...in short, modernity brings a problematic orientation to the world and one's relation to it...
...The people" have no enduring political clout and the executive has no links with coalitions that would apply continuous pressure upon the legislatures...
...We have enemies, to be sure, dangerous but not frightening...
...Should that be the case this debate is as irrelevant as the missiles we are going to buy...
...MY CONCLUSION is that the structure of peace must be sought in some new arrangement with the Soviet Union...
...Different views appeared in the previous two issues...
...And he has a bad record on issues that matter to labor...
...the truth is that for a decade now developing countries have been slipping away from U.S...
...On the cheerful assumption that we shall somehow survive the experience, I shall hope that Anderson makes a strong showing and that the consequences for 1984 will be benign...
...American hegemony is generally in no way preferable to the Russian kind," he writes, as though foreign policy were a beauty contest...
...Thereafter, the nuclear deterrent lost its credibility, or was just credible enough for a number of countries to strike out on their own under the umbrella of the big-power stalemate...
...It was Carter who proposed an energy policy, but Congress, the oil lobby, and the U.S...
...I don't like John Anderson...
...But beyond that, I fear it is a crisis of principle and a crisis of energy in the source of principle that brings us to leadership by the antidemocratic forces in our midsts...
...contemplates in Palestine be a change for the better...
...Nor is the difference between measures that are reasonable, commensurate with the problems and acceptable to our allies, and measures that are ill conceived, unacceptable, and indicative of coldwar attitudes...
...The problematic orientation is both cause and result of difficulties in seeing continuities between past and present...
...The coterie, however, is flawed as an agency for the exercise of power...
...387 perience and personal limits, he retreated to a small coterie and the results were disastrous...
...He probably won't be given a chance to work out the details, but I trust he would have done so in ways acceptable to liberal sentiment...
...My candidate has already lost—in the Democratic primaries...
...The tie represents the alien, bourgeois attire of Western civilization...
...The relations between these "bastard feudatories" and the candidates are conditioned on mutual benefit, but the inner members of the coterie have to prove their loyalty and commitment beyond simple self-interest...
...As always, it is the minority, whether blacks or Jews, who symbolizes the "natural world" in which aggression is an appropriate response to the hostile actions of others...
...to intimidate or restrain Soviet power...
...It is motivated by a desire to gain and 386 maintain power, not by a comprehensive view of political life...
...The day before, also in the Times, appeared a report from Teheran that quoted one of the student militants: "It is our religious duty to force America to give back the Shah...
...V. O. Key's famous study, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 1949), in chap...
...Instead of a structure of peace we shall soon have a free-for-all condition bordering on international chaos...
...Coteries contributed to dangerous decisions in the Bay or Pigs, Vietnam, and Watergate, and President Carter's more resounding failures in policy initiative can be traced to the same problem...
...Coterie leadership also distorts executive decision-making by concentrating it in a small group...
...Murray Hausknecht Reading a Revolution After catastrophies like floods or hurricanes we see strange sights—the cow on the barn roof, the bed floating down Main Street...
...On its own terms, however, this game was reckless...
...But if traditional lore and knowledge are suspect, this very suspicion underscores the discontinuities...
...some respond to careful constituent service...
...yet, it can be resurrected by the wand of media magic for the next campaign...
...A Reagan administration will be tempted to realize the confrontationist part of this program and to deemphasize the coexistence part of it, at least in its propaganda...
...If it is based on the considered judgment of those who ought to know best, the directive is an admission that the threat of a "firststrike" attack is the only means we have to prevent more Afghanistans...
...In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Kennedy already had to be content with a halfvictory...
...They float, so to speak, relatively unattached to existing social structures but still vulnerable to the strains of the clash between tradition and modernity...
...Far outdistancing labor's capacity for fund-raising, these organizations raised over 20 million dollars in 1977 and 1978...
...HERE A WORD of clarification...
...That these commitments are hidden helps some coteries maintain the mirage of being "Populist...
...The unmediated sounds are an auditory dimension of the "face-to-face" relationships in the community...
...The cold war is no longer a reality...
...Direct government financing of candidates bypasses the parties and encourages coteries because money can be gotten with only a minimal show of public interest, often a simple petition...
...By contrast, on the occasion of his visit in Moscow, Chancellor Schmidt once again proved that firmness pays: faced with his determined refusal to abandon his missile plan, the Russians agreed to negotiate about it without preconditions...
...The insistence on the primacy of traditional religious values is an attempt to maintain a continuity between present and past...
...Alliances would have to be made with external coalitions and legislative caucuses...
...By now it is obvious that Carter was more eager to change his "weakling" image on the domestic front than to engage in international combat...
...Even Archie Bunker may not think that by voting for Reagan he can advance by a single day the release of the hostages in Teheran or the withdrawal of the Russians from Kabul...
...These failures "belong" to liberals and leftists as much as to anyone else, and they invite remedial action...
...Except for slight shifts of emphasis, I do not expect notable changes in U.S...
...This is surely the critical fact of contemporary politics, and it is a revealing sign of our political condition that it is so often overlooked...
...and his move to register young men...
...I have interviewed associates and friends...
...We also observe an increasing reluctance, on the part of Western governments, to antagonize the Soviet Union, and an anxiety, on the part of left-wing critics, to avoid anything that might give the hawks in Moscow a boost...
...The consequences are most acute at the executive level...
...But don't the following matter...
...Most volunteers, especially activists, are galvanized by vital symbolic issues or the candidate's personality and settle for much smaller rewards than intimate access to their candidate...
...Within machines, independent groups bargain hard and arrive at a consensus with the politician and others...
...Writing this in midJuly, before either party convention—despite the poll predictions—I think the name most likely to emerge is Carter...
...Today foreign policy is completely divorced from ideology: Nixon went to Peking, and what the Vietnamese are doing in Cambodia or Cubans in the Ogaden is fascist oppression...
...And now the easeful and despairing notion has begun to circulate that our conservative enemies are really not so different from our liberal friends...
...His life has been lived in accordance with the precepts of Islam—it is an exemplary life...
...nobody's perfect), we are playing poor odds if we back an untrained Luke Skywalker against the Republican Darth Vader...
...The problem is not whether the U.S...
...Why bother, then, with everyday politics...
...Among lesserevils, he's one of the lesser...
...This means that both superpowers recognize the limitations of their hegemony, though it still leaves to them, together, the responsibility for a stable peace...
...The executive office, and especially the institutionalization of the presidency, tends to insulate the leader...
...With the increasing number of participants, the relationship among them also changes in the direction of greater psychic distance...
...The already closed nature of the coterie when taking office reinforces rather than works against the well-documented pressures to close off and isolate the leader...
...And we need a vision larger than welfarism, one that is capable of evoking the spiritedness and devotion so obviously missing from public life today...
...A modern temperament confronts the world with a question while the traditionalist remains secure in certainties...
...The administrations of Kennedy, Nixon, and now Carter all suffered from limited access and closed decisions...
...lead: the Olympic boycott was a flop, and instead of supporting our limitation on high-technology exports, our friends not only offer their wares to the Soviet union, they even open new credit lines to finance that export...
...public diluted and perverted it beyond recognition...
...But the man who knots his tie each morning binds himself to a burden of clashing orientations...
...Through favors and patronage, people are bound to a politician's faction by a combination of self-interest and loyalty...
...Unlike the random consequences of natural forces, however, such scenes may conceal latent meanings...
...while a man with a white bullhorn led them in the chant: "The only party is the party of God...
...I want Kennedy because he offers programs that will serve women, blacks, the poor, labor, and the cities...
...I don't like his upper-middle-class stance of being "above" bread-and-butter class issues, his seeming claim that just because he can speak a complete sentence that qualifies him for the presidency...
...Though some nations have ideologies— even rather aggressive ones—they are all nationalistic and there is no international code that guides the behavior of nations...
...If in coming years we are to sustain and develop the welfare state, it will be necessary to allocate costs as well as benefits, to think about power relations, to deal with real conflicts...
...Modern societies change rapidly, and the wisdom of the fathers is not always appropriate to the needs of the children...
...The socialist interest, of course, is to strengthen the chances of coexistence and detente...
...Israelis lend themselves to this stereotype as a result of the Entebbe raid and their image as desert pioneers: the Israeli becomes the last John Wayne character...
...but they earn membership in the coterie because of their direct personal loyalty...
...Taxi drivers like Reagan and taxi drivers are supposed to be the political weather vanes of New Yorkers...
...210-14...
...Congressional Quarterly, April 28, 1979.] —all redound to the benefit of the coterie...
...The man who wraps the turban about his head in the morning knows little of the experience of discordant values and perspectives...
...That the next president is likely to appoint three or four Supreme Court justices and the thought of whom Reagan might select gives one the chills...
...During the Vietnam War, only one soldier out of ten fell into this category...
...The question is not how much we have, nor whether we have more than the Russians, but whether our power can be brought to bear at specific points where we feel that our interests are I Since Bogdan Denitch has written that the stationing of U.S...
...Liberals are incapable of empathizing with poor people in order to see how this issue looks to them...
...Most socialists would, I think, admit that part of our long-range vision for change in America relies on the willingness of some to defend it, even unchanged...
...And though it facilitated our continued involvement in that unjust war, the presence of white, middle-class Americans in the army undoubtedly catalyzed the antiwar movement at home...
...In such a milieu, coteries thrive...
...Coterie politics profoundly separates the means of gaining and maintaining power from the means of governing...
...Wayne represents the American Spirit at a remove...
...The militant students, like their Western counterparts, experience a weakening of ties to their families and communities of origin without at the same time assuming the responsibilities and constraints of adult occupational and familial roles...
...The presidential campaign is only the most obvious reason for a general depression about political life...
...THESE FAILURES of the '70s suggest the work we have to do in the 80s...
...the incongruities and seeming absurdities may represent a coherent order...
...0 Robert Lekach man If Carter squeaks through it will be on the basis of policies, foreign and domestic, scarcely distinguishable from those of Ronald Reagan...
...Although the values of the pioneer and the frontiersman are continually invoked in the ceremonials of American political life there is, at one level of consciousness or other, a pervasive sense of their inappropriateness to the society America has become and the world in which it 388 exists...
...And for this our best politicians have little stomach...
...Ambitious or idealistic "young men on the make" attach themselves to the entourage of "councillors, retainers, and servants, tailing off into those believed to be well-wishers...
...The bullhorn and microphone initiate the possibility of transforming the traditional ceremonials into mass rallies...
...Our politics is marked by the isolation of interest groups and then by a fearful individualism...
...and, without firm social anchors, there are no countervailing forces to the seemingly clear-cut directives of "religious duty...
...The possibility of using force, a spontaneous and "natural" reaction to the frustrations of international politics, is projected onto Israelis—"They would know what to do...
...WHAT OF THE BRINKMANSHIP nature of calling for draft registration at a time of international tensions...
...American superiority in strategic missiles not only "contained" direct Soviet moves to change the map but also discouraged anti-Western movements in other parts of the world, where Soviet support might have tipped the scale...
...TO WHOM are the people of the liberal/ left speaking when they argue that registration and the draft would militarize American society...
...An emergent machine might be built on the basis of modified patronage fueled by massive federal funding and an alliance with remaining stable coalitions, as Coleman Young is attempting to do in Detroit...
...it was on the defensive...
...The relationship between leader and followers changes...
...Whatever the longterm processes within which we are caught, it is the failures of the last decade that determine the shape of our politics right now...
...Israelis...
...There are resources for such a counter-vision in the democratic and socialist traditions, but no one has yet put them to use...
...I didn't convince my father in 1948 to turn from Harry Truman, the "practical" vote against Dewey, and cast one for sentiment and principle and Henry Wallace...
...Such thinking is fallacious...
...Deep in his heart" he knows that the recent reverses of U.S...
...He articulates no issues, he represents no constituency...
...lost its position of leadership not because poor Jimmy Carter failed to impress the imperious Helmut Schmidt, but now 35 years after the last war Europe finally feels strong enough to do without U.S...
...In the past these groups had a stable presence in the political order, preferring a more personal style and demanding a greater degree of access to the politician as well as loyalty to the coalition's aims— all anathema to the coterie...
...and in questions of religious duty there is no place for negotiations...
...From this Bogdan Denitch concludes: "We as socialists do not and cannot support that Western interest...
...I have less understanding for those social democrats who have suspended their socialism, their commitment to equality for blacks and poor whites, in order to pursue a bourgeois antimilitarism...
...All this is made to order for political coteries...
...Now there is a prevailing attitude among liberal and left-wing intellectuals that anything that aids in the demilitarization of society should be encouraged...
...government has supported democratic, social democratic, conservative, reactionary, semifascist and even communist governments, without discrimination, provided they were anti-Russian...
...This tension is appropriately symbolized by the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran: a Sorbonne-educated economist whose father was an ayatollah...
...Thus they consider President Carter's recent, successful attempt to initiate a predraft registration involving youth from all sectors of American life as a dangerous attempt to fuel our country's militarism...
...Mitchell and Erlichman enjoyed membership in Nixon's coterie while Magruder and Dean were no more than "bastard feudatories...
...I don't suppose Kennedy will be on the ballot, so my real choice is to vote for Anderson or Carter...
...The other side of this coin is, at minimum, the beginning of a recognition of the legitimacy of the others' interests...
...The familiar reasons for the decline of political parties— a decline in patronage, an increase in primaries (reducing the party role in the nominating process), an increased use of television by candidates (minimizing the need for party volunteers), and passage of the federal election campaign law (which restricted party giving to federal candidates and heightened the impact of political action committees and single-issue groups...
...The rage with which Stanley Hoffmann and others have assailed Kissinger for using this tool and for expounding its use in his book shows both the theoretical confusion and the dogmatism of his critics...
...But when Gromyko came to Bonn in November 1979, to all appearances in order to open these negotiations, he was recalled abruptly—apparently in connection with the Afghan affair...
...Shortly after the occupation of the American Embassy some patriotic demonstrators in Texas and California carried pictures of John Wayne...
...Political survival has always required a small group of loyal supporters, but in the past politicians needed much more...
...Today, by surprising agreement between Denitch and Kissinger, the United States is "a stand-pat power, generally opposed to change...
...But there is a difference between the two icons...
...But not all cities are cultural crossroads...
...Freed from political obligations, except to interest groups, and granted institutional independence by the new congressional rules on subcommittee chairmanships and staff allowances, the last three Congresses have been immune to traditional incentives that political leaders have used to garner agreement upon law and policy...
...Only during the cold-war period did a direct comparison of missile strengths make any sense...
...The Soviet Union will not agree to any code of behavior as long as it has not been persuaded that it could not gain more by following its expansionist instincts uninhibited by international compacts...
...In cities of the contemporary world tradition runs headlong into modernity...
...The second failure is a failure of cohesion and political organization...
...foreign policy were not caused by Jimmy Carter's faint-heartedness or Zbig's lack of subtlety, but by a fundamental change in the rules of the diplomatic game that has made all "cold-war" attitudes, whether pro or con, equally irrelevant...
...Since President Johnson's Great Society collapsed amidst the debris of the Vietnam War, there have been no significant political initiatives in American life, no major legislative programs, no systematic efforts to foresee or cope with social and economic problems...
...If Khomeini is Islam, Wayne is the more secular American Spirit: the strength, aggressiveness, capacity for direct action, and the fearlessness that overcame the terrors of the wilderness and the frontier...
...Kitchen cabinets" and "brain trusts" are traditional in our politics...
...This is another remnant of cold-war thinking or, more precisely, another instance where opponents of the cold war have adopted the presuppositions of its proponents...
...Infuriated by the Republican platform directives to kill the Equal Rights Amendment and legal abortion, I was prepared to go into the voting booth and press the Carter lever and not tell anybody about it...
...Cities like Qum, then, tend to be only minimally affected by alien influences...
...Both as a practitioner of diplomacy and as a teacher of the art he stands head and shoulders above his critics—which is not the same as saying that he is a likable man...
...the United States is not the only nation capable of aggressive action...
...While over 83 percent of American youth now graduate from high school, only 42 percent of the volunteer army has a high-school diploma...
...A further question is what these interests are...
...The other side of the coin is an effort to insulate the society from the effects of modernity by asserting the dominance of tradition...
...At the election's end, the grass-roots "organization" fades into an insubstantial shadow and presents no enduring organized pressure that would make the politician accountable...
...This new U.S...
...In the ceremonies of traditional communities the 389 voice of a leader-priest, the beat of a musical instrument, the sounds of the group's chanting establish a rhythm that envelops all in a single fellowship...
...The man himself is marginally preferable to Reagan or Carter, but the point of a vote for him is, I believe, not so much his individual merit as the opportunity, as George Wallace was wont to say, to send a message to both Democrats and Republicans and in particular the first-named...
...This strategy deliberately undermines the party loyalties that are important to the Democrats and liberals...
...It was Carter who wanted to give aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, but Congress forbade it...
...The volunteer army is a symbol of the coercive nature of the capitalist marketplace, being the repository of thousands of young men who are dissatisfied with employment opportunities and the future...
...a religious chant—"There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet"—is adapted to political ends—"The only party is the party of God...
...our military power no longer translates into economic power...
...This fits the closed decision-making nature of the coterie and captures media attention...
...And so, naturally, they resist it...
...thousands of the faithful paraded past Ayatollah Khomeini's house in a fervent display of loyalty...
...That, even if we acknowledge the sobering effect the office has, it makes no "difference" if Reagan becomes president...
...But as of today we have developed nothing to replace collective security...
...The voice is now mechanically mediated, disembodied...
...they don't inspire us either...
...the "holy city" of Mecca, for example, is forbidden to non-Moslems...
...Besides being the beneficiary of American social injustice, the volunteer army is a flagrantly unequal way of distributing the burden of national security...
...Politicians can also gain sizable funds through the use of mailing lists...
...One set of constructions depicts Iran as a society attempting to reorder itself in terms of religious tradition—not simply a "republic" but an Islamic republic...
...The great accomplishment of political parties, when they worked, was to unite the process of election with the creation of a consensus and a capacity to govern...
...It is a good time to plan a research project, cultivate the garden...
...Although a Harvard professor is hardly a conventional symbol of America, in this instance he is an appropriate one...
...q Henry Pachter After Afghanistan —Round Three Here is another piece continuing the informal discussion among Dissent editors on foreign policy issues after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...381 The practical are uncomfortable because they don't like Carter's ineptitude over inflation, energy, and foreign policy any better than do the taxi drivers...
...q Stanley Plastrik About half an hour after the California polls close on Tuesday, November 4, Walter Cronkite will put some numbers into his network's monster computer, press a button, and come up with the projected winner of America's dreariest and most frustrating electoral campaign...
...It is no longer assumed that defense arrangements are all-inclusive and sufficient to safeguard a country's interests, or that they commit the members of the alliance to political, economic and ideological, as well as military, solidarity...
...Instead, Kennedy enlisted the clan and threw the dice, hoping to exploit discontent rather than to mobilize the discontented...
...If any strong measure, or a strong word that may have been uttered in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is dubbed "cold war," we have no conception of world politics...
...Learned through experience, these skills are seldom found in either the coterie or its leader, since the skills are seldom needed to get elected...
...But where modernity has a tenuous foothold, "being reasonable" may have different meanings—"reason" may demand, for example, the subordination of all other ends to one overriding moral goal...
...A country in as deep economic and social trouble as the United States cannot longer endure the dubious luxury of two conservative parties and no credible representative of the interests of the country's working majority...
...Where did the belief originate that the existence of a draft makes us more willing to engage in warfare...
...Now, these people are largely unspoken for...
...clients of the Soviet Union stand for "progressive" causes, whereas the friends and proteges of the U.S...
...foreign policy...
...Politicians can no longer rely on clear and predictable voter ties either to parties or stable coalitions...
...Don't contaminate us...
...Under the cold-war assumptions, this mandate of collective security rested on Acheson's Categorical Imperative of foreign policy: act in such a way that the maxim of your actions can serve as a model for all peace-loving states...
...Things fall apart, old coalitions break up, the bonds of party fray and loosen, ethnic pluralism slides into mutual hostility...
...Whereas the Vietnam-era army read on the 11thgrade level, today's typical volunteer reads on a 5th-grade level...
...On the other hand, the Soviet leadership is facing enough difficulties at home and in its own empire to justify the hope that they, too, will see their advantage in the establishment of an international order...
...The latter and the foreign ministers were all educated outside Iran, and one of the former ministers is also a naturalized American who once lived in Houston...
...They are generally in a "least / worst" frame of mind...
...To be an American is to experience the stress of living with the constraints of the modern world while longing for a glorious past when "natural impulses" could be freely expressed...
...Alliances are unstable and involve impersonal exchange relations on single-issue votes or money contributions...
...The political system, however, tends to sidetrack decisive political issues and such proposals as a constitutional amendment on abortion may never reach a full vote...
...The only legder is Khomeini...
...If Vietnam indeed is to be our model, then we see that the infusion of middleclass youth into the military is an efficacious check on an expansionist foreign policy...
...These coalitions depended upon unions, machines, effective state parties, and racial or ethnic blocks...
...Coteries thrive in media-dominated elections that demand large sums of money and little political commitment...
...The coterie would need to add `old pros" and "insiders" who knew the ropes and possessed independent connections in the political world...
...The way people use the term "cold war" is apt to confuse the debate...
...One can imagine a campaign very different from his, carefully negotiated in advance, drawing interest groups together, aiming at a partisan and not a personal politics...
...to be at the fringes of the audience where one can barely hear the leader is not to be a full participant in the ceremony...
...Apparently the Citizens' party is going nowhere this year...
...The inner circle would have to be opened up to leaders of various power groupings, and the politician would personally have to work with peers and power brokers...
...At the same time, there is some validity to the claim that the present army is militarily unsound...
...the attire of the mullah signals no discontinuity, either to himself or to others, between his status and that of his predecessors...
...Embracing "religious duty" dissolves the looming ambiguities...
...CARTER is an opportunist, a man without deep convictions, and a character who casts over himself a smarmy aura of piety...
...Though the expansionist phase of Soviet imperialism is not exhausted, experience has shown that it can be contained by determination...
...As this is written in the spring of 1980, the Americans are still hostages and the tensions among the leading Iranian actors in this scene of the Iranian drama remain unresolved...
...The turban is a traditional headgear of the Middle East and an essential part of the religious dress...
...The principal "ties" of the Iranian revolution have been two prime ministers, neither closely identified with Khomeini, successive foreign ministers, and the president...
...Nor has our ascendency over the Third World weakened because we did or did not build certain weapons...
...Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise that the American people have recently forgotten their crusading spirit...
...When the "reason" of a modern society confronts the "reason" of a traditional one, two world views are attempting to communicate across a chasm...
...power is much shorter than most Americans like to think, and the policy choices are fewer than electoral rhetoric would have us believe...
...Or so it was...
...For years now, our government in fact has been weak, and its intention uncertain...
...Although it may be said that the present volunteer army provides jobs for a segment of society that would probably otherwise be unemployed, do we really want to legitimate military service as a cure for unemployment...
...14, characterizes the personalized and partyless politics of the Old South as an unstable "catch-ascatchcan politics," which was unaccountable, rife with favoritism and interest-group influence, biased against the unorganized have-nots, fraught with legislative paralysis, and vulnerable to demagogues...
...signal" that created "unease" among European socialists, it should be stated that Social Democratic Chancellor Schmidt requested the decision to station such missiles in answer to the upgrading of the Soviet missile deployment in Eastern Europe...
...carrying Wayne's picture is an affirmation of the traditional values but an affirmation shadowed by the disenchanted knowledge that something more is required in the modern world...
...Not long after the hostages were taken, a Harvard law professor, a teacher of "courses in negotiations and international conflict," pointed out in an article in the New York Times, "that true power comes not from B-52s but from understanding the legitimate interests of others and then insisting upon adherence to principles that serve their interests as well as ours...
...Vietnam, Three Mile Island, Love Canal: these are the landmarks of contemporary political militancy...
...I can name quite a number of countries in Asia and Africa whose status quo—even under "American hegemony"—is infinitely preferable to the kind of "change" that some misguided socialists, hopelessly mired in the anti-cold-war verbiage of their past, think desirable...
...Reagan is talking as though an increase in defense expenditures could improve our ability to influence events in Teheran, Kabul, or Riyadh...
...A related instance of cold-war thinking—always drawing up balances between the two superpowersoccurs in H. Brand's contribution to this discussion (Dissent, Spring 1980...
...392 Unless the antidraft registration movement incorporates a platform to better the lives of lowerclass Americans, it will remain a self-interested bourgeois movement...
...From that perspective to heed a call for "reason" was to acquiesce in the betrayal of a moral undertaking...
...Today some voters cluster around such high-intensity single issues as abortion or nuclear power...
...The traditional "patriotic" response is only possible when there is certainty that one's own society is incapable of doing evil...
...They symbolize what corporations and governments do to people, and the call of the activists is simply that they stop doing it...
...Ayatollah/Astor Demonstrators in the streets of Teheran routinely carry pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini...
...Coterie members perform most of the footwork in political campaigns and take a disproportionate role in the decisions of their leader once he is elected...
...Issues crest in waves waiting to be ridden by a coterie, or by an issue group (often itself a small coterie that has briefly become a media presence) that can form temporary alliances with a political coterie...
...That the Republicans have taken a formal stand in favor of a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion...
...Lyndon Johnson presents a study in contrast...
...Bullhorn and microphone allow greater numbers of individuals to be caught up in the ceremony, but this extension of range involves a change in the nature and quality of the ceremony...
...public opinion did not permit otherwise...
...No one has recently suggested that they might...
...There is an assumption that the contest in world politics is really a sort of international class war, in which the allies and 3 Incidentally, since that embarrassing sentence was written, thousands of Cubans "voted with their feet" to disagree...
...2 Finland did not even dare to vote on the Afghan affair in the U.N...
...q Jerry Watts The Draft and the Poor We have received the following comment from a reader, a graduate student in political science at Yale University...
...The milieu of "ties" is Teheran while Khomeini and his circle of leaders live in the "holy city" of Qum except when illness forces them into the profane precincts of a Teheran hospital...
...Politicians can appease the singleissue groups without ever paying the full price with a public vote and seldom need to consult the group after the elections...
...There is no reason to think that the government is advocating draft registration in the name of equality...
...People may be motivated to work for a politician by ambition, affection, or commitment to policies...
...Khomeini, on the other hand, has a direct, vital connection to Islamic values...
...Bush's previous identification with the CIA and Reagan's predilection for strong gestures and large defense budgets will obfuscate the issues, mislead the public as well as foreign observers, and induce the opposition to persist in obsolete attitudes that simply negate the official rhetoric while reflecting the concepts on which that rhetoric is based...
...One consequence of this modern perspective is a sense of "constraint" in responding to the world...
...I hope he keeps on, after the election...
...Historians such as Louis Halle define the Cold War as a period (roughly 1948-65) in international relations, characterized by a bipolar structure, with the Soviet Union and the United States exercising hegemonial powers, each within its own sphere...
...Single-issue groups can be accommodated by the coterie without much trouble...
...For, after all, the arm of U.S...
...But liberalism today depends upon mobilization, and that means upon program, party, loyalty, and leadership...
...The coterie should be distinguished from mere political retainers recruited for campaigns...
...but most are not affiliated with political organizations and can only be touched through advertising or canvasing...
...For the modern person, past and present are separate worlds and one has little of value for the other...
...There are very few spots in the world over which the American people would allow its government to go to war today...
...b) a country may send soldiers across the ocean to tip the scales in an ongoing civil war and to install in another country a new dictatorship...
...strategy for "limited nuclear war" actually wipes out any difference that might have existed between the Democratic and Republican defense postures...
...A military filled with black youth fleeing an unemployment rate of 40 percent in the ghettos would only create an army of mercenaries...
...It must be able to bring pressure to bear in many areas independently, as well 'as on the Soviet Union...
...The Shah of Iran, supposedly then our political creature, was the leader of the price-raising OPEC insurgency, and our hold on the Iranian military was unable to save his regime...
...Brown rides the crest of whatever issue wave is sweeping the people...
...Their aim remains the same...
...they followed a hundred thousand Soviet Jews and a million East Germans...
...THIS ARTICLE was written before President Carter issued the new directive on nuclear warfare...
...Even on the innocuous measures acceptable to as dedicated a cold-war critic as Michael Harrington (Dissent, Spring 1980), our allies no longer follow the U.S...
...We ought to turn the job over to the Israelis...
...If funds were funneled through the party, politicians would have to maintain some clear contacts with party workers, preferences, and issues, thereby giving campaigns more coherence and accountability...
...Even the energy crisis produced only rhetorical boldness, while in practice the style of our leaders has been timid, indecisive, lazy...
...I agree with Dennis Wrong and Michael Harrington that it would be a step toward realism if ideology could be taken out of foreign policy altogether...
...We need to think through in programmatic detail our own ways of coping with the immediate problems of inflation, unemployment, energy, and welfare...
...But it is equally irrelevant to assert in rebuttal that the Russians have no intention of attacking Western Europe (Bogdan Denitch in Dissent, Summer 1980...
...Let someone else serve," they say, alluding to that class of Americans whose "careers" won't be interrupted...
...Some of President Carter's awkward attempts to employ political pressure have foundered both on the limits of his coterie style and the strength of other coteries in Congress...
...A FAIRLY COHERENT PICTURE emerges from this reading of the Iranian crisis: two contrasting societies each incorporating features of the other so that there is both divergence and overlap...
...I want to support the first commitment to ideology I hear from his generation...
...Entering the political arena with little experience, coterie politicians often have difficulties adjusting to the daily work of politics...
...The draft did not cause us to enter the Vietnam conflict...
...An armed force composed of draftees would provide the basis for a multiclass, multiethnic civilian constituency intent upon keeping an eye on expansionist foreign-policy initiatives...
...The casual observation that most higher political office-holders have had previous experience misses this point: for many coteries bent on higher office, there is no incentive to develop political skills...
...There are still political commitments and loyalties beyond the politician, welded together within the machine structure...
...Of course, at that time, the Soviet Union belonged to the nations that stood for preservation of the status quo...
...We support an army capable of strong defense in a world not yet known for its benevolence...
...But while suited to win elections, they are not suited to govern...
...Precisely the election strategy of the coteries frustrates their later desperate attempts to overcome their inherent limits...
...The newest political issues—energy, pollution, safety—are consumer issues, and consumers are private men and women above all...
...By the time this is read the hostages may have been freed and these particular tensions resolved...
...The basic assumptions of the cold-war game— bipolarity and deterrence, hegemony and automatic alignments—are no longer valid...
...Khomeini is a sacred figure...
...They try to arouse the public to pressure the legislature, but the ad hoc and impersonal media election strategy creates no enduring citizen presence...
...Journalists in Teheran talked among themselves of the "turbans" and the "ties" when distinguishing between the clerics of the Revolutionary Council and the nominal government officials...
...The economy of an oil-producing nation caught up in a complex international market—"a world system"—requires some reliance on Western-educated technicians whose perspective cannot be fully congruent with those of clerical revolutionaries...
...We will be glad to print other opinions, briefly stated, on this subject—ens...
...But this dangerously distorts political perceptions and leads to a slow loss of touch with political realities...
...The archetype was John Kennedy's 1960 campaign, further perfected by Jimmy Carter in 1976...
...In a less conservative time and place, he would be a strong contender for the presidency...
...But that throws us back upon the seas of self-interest—a most uncertain element...
...Why does the enormous power of the U.S.economic, military, and political—have so little effect...
...This is both a lamentation for by-gone times and an acknowledgment that actions possible then are impossible now...
...A tight group, it binds its members through strict loyalties and offers them the rewards—sometimes substantial—of close, usually exclusive access to a political leader...
...tutelage and to conduct a foreign policy of its own...
...electoral success increasingly correlates with who spends the most money and gets the most media exposure...
...Coteries arise when parties and the old coalitions decay...
...To carry a picture of Wayne suggests a self-consciousness, a sense of detachment or distance from the traditional values that is not apparent among the crowds in Iran...
...It would be a coalition of people intent on keeping their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, and friends alive...
...We have witnessed, in the last decade or so, a most ominous phenomenon of de-coupling...
...It is equally irrelevant to counter the prodefense lobby by counting missiles, submarines, airplanes, and what not, to assert that the U.S...
...That labor people in Washington say they at least have some entry with the Carter administration even though they deplore most of its domestic policies...
...Because it does make a difference, and at times (most times) there is no alternative to the policy of "lesser-evilism...
...Its relation to such groups normally involves merely a pledge on a particular issue such as gun control...
...on the contrary, if they are intelligent and keep their military pretenders out of foreign affairs,' they should be able to loosen up NATO and perhaps to Finlandize all of Europe, 2 working "detente" for all it's worth...
...stature in Africa, but the Jewish establishment caused his fall...
...In exchange for vague ideological assurances and unredeemable pledges, candidates raise considerable funds involving no direct or continuous contact with donors...
...The cynical humor of Murphy's law—whatever can go wrong, will—has been transformed into grim conviction...
...medium-range missiles in Europe was a U.S...
...It is further assumed that the domestic policies in various countries reflect their respective positions in the cold war...
...There is an echo here of European Jewish history: the tendency, after emancipation, for the sons of rabbinic families to turn to secular professions...
...Invariably, they are poor and nonwhite...
...And can we truly say that the demoralized, confused Democratic party is the "same" as the arrogant, puffed-up Republican party...
...This fundamental flaw frustrates accountable democratic government...
...for the secular officials, whose ties proclaim them tainted by alien ways, the trips to Qum are the institutionalization of the journey to Canossa...
...This may be wishful fantasy on my part, an unwillingness to face the prospect of a Reagan victory...
...FOR ALL THIS there are, as there always are, largescale explanations that suggest the inexorability of historical process: advanced capitalism, new technology, the fiscal crisis of the welfare state...
...In the 1976 House elections the winners outspent the losers $42 million to $23 million...
...3 Is there no difference between the violent subjection of one country by another and the hegemony of a big country trading with its smaller neighbors...
...Those who argue that the new antidraft movement Is but the initial step in a movement to eliminate military service altogether for the rich and poor alike are kidding themselves in order to hide their often selfish motivations...
...Obviously, this is too stark a statement: detachment, ambivalence, and problematic orientation are not allpervasive in the modern world...
...Though antagonistic, the powers refrained from the use of military force, and the relationship between the blocs was governed by "coexistence"— that is, mutual respect for the status quo, first tacitly, then explicitly: the Helsinki Agreements recognized the Soviet conquests in World War II as perilnanent, put the quietus on national liberation movements in Europe, but liberated Soviet energies to foment national liberation movements elsewhere...
...True, they expect a tacit commitment not to support basic change in the economic order—a promise not hard to make for most American politicians...
...Reagan may cut off funds to 393 Nicaragua, but he is likely to look on when the next Caribbean domino falls...
...No cohesive popular movements, nothing like the labor and civil rights movements, loom behind the scattered protests of the last few years...
...The purpose of the strategy of "lesser-evilism" is two-fold: to avoid the worst possibility (Reagan)—and to place oneself in the best possible position to exert influence on proposals and events (Carter...
...The dominant tone (of the antidraft demonstrations, for example) is more libertarian than socialist...
...or the U.S.S.R...
...At first glance, all this might seem to be no more than the development of new machines...
...I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that we would be better off than we are today had any energy policy, right or wrong, good or bad, been adopted and energetically pursued...
...The liberal-left lives off past hopes, cant phrases, promises that no one believes anymore...
...We could not prevent Schmidt's and Giscard's independent overtures to the Soviet Union...
...they don't readily organize themselves or publish manifestos...
...I am hoping that by writing this statement [written before the Democratic convention] I will be creating a bandwagon effect and that others will follow suit...
...After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, we lost two valuable years during which we refused to negotiate about an arms pact with the power that had violated the code of international order...
...So we live without a future, day by day, defensively, too quick, I think, to anticipate frustration and defeat...
...Revolutions, too, cast up strange sights that upset our expectations about the rightful order of things: religious leaders, messianic figures to their followers, who spread their calls for a return to tradition by tape cassettes and latter-day flagellants who march to the rhythm of a leader chanting into a bullhorn...
...But words occasionally translate into gestures and deeds, and we may end up with the kind of fractured foreign policy that so exasperated our allies under the Carter administration: one day confrontationism, the next day retreat...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
