HOW IT FEELS TO BE hIT BY A TRUCK
Plastrik, Peter & Brom-wich, David & Slater, Matthew & Lacefield, Patrick & Schwartz, Joseph & Howe, Irving & P., S. & Levinson, Mark
Nothing could be more foolish than to blink the extent of the defeat we have suffered in the recent election. By "we" I have in mind both the larger "labor-liberal" community and the smaller...
...Can we find programmatic bases for linking together domestic liberalism with a sober concern for national security...
...In determining eligibility and benefits, deductions from gross income were authorized so that participation would not be artifically restricted "when other important human social needs [such as medical and housing costs] made legitimate claims on the household budget...
...The reason is simple...
...It is as if the whole country were turned into a dismal article in Psychology Today...
...appeared in the late '60s...
...The Reagan victory demoralizes the liberal camp, leading to splits, recriminations, dropping out...
...A streak of bigotry and intolerance, a moral monolithism, is evident in these evangelical Moral Majorityites...
...Do nothing about national health insurance...
...If what Jerry Watts and other critics of the antidraft movement are saying is that the central question is how to achieve social justice at home and abroad then we have no quarrel with them...
...We must get beyond "skill thinking" and devise a true social policy that has set as its goal the development of self-sufficiency among the nation's poor...
...Workers in the field had discovered that the War on Poverty could do little to meet the immediate needs of poor people and so joined the poor in demands for direct and substantial government help...
...An overriding reason may have been that the economic issues, which cut deeply in Reagan's favor into many union households, had less impact when weighed by auto workers, many of whom are cushioned against inflation and unemployment by cost-of-living and supplementary unemployment benefit provisions in contracts...
...In the end FAP died because it satisfied neither liberals nor conservatives...
...The argument runs along the following lines: because the present volunteer force is disproportionately poor and nonwhite, opposition to the draft is objectively racist and inegalitarian...
...Did Reagan mean that if tomorrow, as is quite possible, the Ford Motor Company (as a result of corporate stupidity unmatched by any government bureaucrats) teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, a Reagan administration will refuse to help it in the name of the Friedman Commandments...
...We need not respect their results in order to acknowledge their effort...
...but let us also keep our eyes firmly on the mainstream of American political life and avoid repeating those tragic errors of sectarianism that have been our special curse...
...AND NOW...
...And by the way, don't those Jewish intellectuals and organizational leaders who slunk into Reagan's camp feel any discomfort about the company in which they find themselves...
...Department of Agriculture, forthcoming...
...A bit later in the same press conference (New York Times, 11 / 12/'80), Senator Moynihan complained that he could never get Jimmy Carter to consider a proposal that the federal government take over the burden of paying welfare costs from New York City and other large cities...
...14 Liberals and leftists often find themselves in the uncomfortable position of either defending welfare programs they know to be insufficient or running the risk of losing the modest benefits those programs provide...
...NOTES ] Quoted in "Food Stamp Bail-Out Near," Logan (W.Va...
...By "we" I have in mind both the larger "labor-liberal" community and the smaller "democratic left...
...In addition, each state could set its own criteria for Food Stamp eligibility...
...When reports reached them of poor Americans with "swollen bellies...
...plant equipment, etc...
...Under Carter the already frayed New Deal coalition disintegrated further...
...Now, where did we last hear that sort of language—wasn't it from an ex-actor who got himself elected president...
...Nor need our side be so lavish with institutes and centers...
...S. P old-style Tammany bosses...
...11 idiotic scorecards and rate the "performances...
...Television has, in effect, destroyed the political speech—one reason Ted Kennedy came across poorly on TV was that in his campaign he still used old-style oratory...
...Is there any reason to suppose that if the United States largely increases its stock of nuclear weapons (already enough to destroy the Soviet Union several times over), it will help it in dealing with the most likely points of crisis in the next few years—the Middle East and Latin America...
...WHAT IS TO BE DONE...
...Still, there was a kind of nasty crowing on the part of some independent spirits who tried to blink the magnitude of defeat by writing, as did Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...As Senator George McGovern (D-S.Dak...
...Reagan claims, for quasilibertarian reasons, to oppose a peacetime draft (we doubt, however, that he will end the current registration program...
...We have known defeats before, we will gain victories again...
...They will scrap SALT II and "negotiate" with the Russians so as, probably, to make difficult a genuine mutual disarmament—the result of which may well be a terrible nuclear arms race, dangerous enough even if it doesn't lead to war...
...Neither can you insure that the poor and the working class will not largely inhabit the infantry and other high casualty branches in disproportionate numbers...
...Or Lockheed...
...At least in this respect, we have something to learn from them...
...There are now in preparation constitutional amendments to make abortion a crime (the wives and daughters of the rich can always take trips abroad), to allow prayer in the schools, etc...
...And now, it might be added, by the counterattacks of some middle-class enrages in whom ideological venom is not always to be distinguished from racist contempt...
...Your man in the street might not put it this way, but that apparently is how he felt...
...And that the only serious issues are the extent to which that occurs, and more important, the social tilt and animating values with which it is managed...
...Watts's piece ignores the stark reality that even with the "egalitarian draft" 50 percent of the casualties in Vietnam were black or Hispanic though less than 20 percent of the armed forces at that time were nonwhite...
...At the same time, scientists were beginning to believe that maternal malnutrition during pregnancy as well as infant malnutrition might result in an infant's irreversible brain damage...
...Isn't there some ground for complaints about the bureaucracies of government...
...A good idea is a good idea, no matter where it comes from...
...When Nixon first proposed FAP, Food Stamps and other forms of welfare were to be eliminated in its favor...
...It destroys political thought...
...And probably there is validity to the claim of Robert Heilbroner that the only way some of our difficulties can/ will be managed is not through a return to a laissez-faire that never existed and never will, but to some version of national planning and greater economic controls...
...After President Carter's State of the Union message in January 1980 announcing draft registration, a mass movement arose opposing this step toward the eventual resumption of conscription and a further escalation of the new cold war...
...8Citizens' Board, Hunger, USA, p. 66...
...The contradiction between this desire and the responsiveness to "get the government off our backs" is something that requires close investigation...
...These people decided he was incompetent, untrustworthy, inconsistent...
...Part of this atmosphere is due to national frustrations, and some of this frustration is understandable...
...Some day a historian will have to put together the pieces—faced with the ungrateful task of proving that the McCarthy of 1980 was a natural outgrowth of the McCarthy of 1968...
...An intellectual, of all citizens, should know that there is no escape from politics...
...The air is full of attacks, mendacious from the right and feckless from the left, on the welfare state...
...When it was pointed out that many recipients of both Food Stamps and Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) would lose benefits if the two were replaced by FAP, Food Stamps were restored in their own right...
...So long as a major part of the world is under the rule of Communist dictatorships, there is a case to be made for a serious defense policy...
...A nutritional evaluation of the program is now getting under way...
...In 1968 he deferred his endorsement of Humphrey to the last possible moment, when Nixon had already clinched the election...
...13Nevin Scrimshaw, "Myths and Realities in International Health Planning," American Journal of Public Health, 64: 8, p. 793...
...Put yourself in the hands of the god who manifests himself as an "invisible hand" and then all will be good...
...Carter, by contrast, was too smart to mean it when he tentatively ventured into his versions of "get the government off our backs...
...promised that the bill authorizing supplemental appropriations would also include new antifraud measures...
...A more surprising argument, expressed in fashionably liberal columns on the Op Ed page of the New York Times and even in the Fall 1980 issue of Dissent by Jerry Watts, postulates that military conscription is in no way connected with an increased predilection toward ill-advised interventions overseas...
...McCarthy sees himself as an outsider to the noise and dirt of politics, a man of spirit, serenely above the battle, to whom the hectic rush of the present, into destruction or another day's uncertain calm, can be viewed as the goings-on of a distant galaxy...
...4 The only way to be sure that food assistance programs cure nutritional disease is for the government to tell recipients what foods they may eat and then force them to eat those foods—a level of government intervention in the life of the individual that no one would countenance...
...I assume that conservative thinkers drawn to theologies of Guilt can yield to the smaller experience of shame...
...But the problem of hunger per se has been oversold ever since 1968, particularly to conservative congressmen, who have been consistent supporters of food assistance for nutritional purposes but have resisted all changes or aspects of the programs that could be construed as having nonnutritional goals...
...But there are smarter chaps, like Felix Rohatyn and Irving Kristol, who must know better...
...There have been interruptions, of course...
...As a result, the possibility of fulfilling the immediate nutritional goals of the food assistance programs is almost nil...
...And if we're ever to rebuild a liberal-labor-left coalition in this country —one in which friends like Schlesinger surely belong—we'll have to abandon the righteous indifference to the realities of social and political life that his sentence, alas, seems to betray...
...Nothing could be gained by letting the program lapse and much lost...
...Who can take seriously Reagan's talk about getting private enterprise to invest in the South Bronx...
...Conservatives attempted to stall the appropriations or at least to reduce the amount requested by the Carter administration...
...Expenditures for such programs went from about $I billion in fiscal (FY) 1969 to over $8 billion in FY 1979, and in FY '80 expenditures for Food Stamps alone will top $8 billion...
...may function as a useful income supplement for some poor families, and they have certainly contributed to the adequacy of family diets, but they have largely failed in their stated mission, the prevention of individual cases of malnutrition...
...A direct food distribution program was begun in 1935...
...But there is something about the format that makes for superficiality, sloganeering, quick phrases...
...Suppose he just uses a scalpel...
...But it has, apparently, reached an impasse, creating, through both its successes and failures, a range of problems to which we have not, or not yet, worked out sufficient responses...
...crippled bodies [and] vacant stares of hopelessness and despair," 5 how could they resist the impulse to lend a helping hand...
...Between the ill-articulated confusions and retreats of Carter and the simplistic but emotionally powerful demagogy of Reagan, it was all but inevitable that the latter triumph...
...Such criticism is inevitable because, unfortunately, the rhetoric that made possible the political and substantive gains of food assistance has little to do with the reality of the programs...
...No wonder the new president is a former actor: acting turns out to be a central requirement for a successful candidate...
...Here, too, there are many reasons, but it is enough to cite only one...
...Conservatives voted against FAP because they thought that even the modest cost increases it entailed were too much along with the ever growing Food Stamp budget...
...Not, of course, in content, but in reach and claims to authority...
...In an essay I wrote for the New Republic two years ago I argued that The main thrust of American social and political thought since World War II has been toward the right...
...Now the central question remains whether the antidraft movement can become an antimilitarist movement, fighting for both a rational foreign policy abroad and social justice at home...
...do nothing to prevent corporations from devastating industrial communities through plant closings...
...Each of the debaters took an hour and a-half for initial presentations and a half hour for reply...
...surely it will push further the disgraceful policies of prohibiting Medicare funds for abortions...
...it also shows, I fear, some touches of symmetry with the political culture that characterized the more extreme aspects of the late '60s...
...I suspect that this must be one of the strong reasons for the shift of a portion of the blue-collar vote to Reagan, apart, that is, from the anger that laid-off workers rightly feel...
...For food assistance is not immediately seen as a form of redistribution...
...Never has that been a sufficient basis for an enthusiastic campaign...
...for our faltering response to the hostage crisis...
...The Congress's willingness to establish one type of program but not the other tells us a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of welfarism in the United States...
...I want to stress here the phrase, through both its successes and failures...
...In the perverse delight that Mayor Ed Koch takes in putting down minority voices and in the support he gets from Queens and Staten Island, one can locate our deeper atmosphere...
...First of all, many of the advantages of the volunteer forces—higher pay, better fringes, increased advancement opportunities— would be expendable to armed forces blessed with a surfeit of conscripts...
...Get the government off our backs—does that mean not having bailed out Penn Central...
...Government Printing Office, 1977), p. 7. 1albid., p. 7. "Matthew D. Slater, "Hunger in America—'Ten Years Later," undergraduate thesis, Harvard College (unpublished), 1979...
...It becomes vulnerable, not only to the demands of newly enfranchised or empowered groups, but also to the counterattacks of traditional ruling elites that turn against it as soon as they have been brought to a new confidence by its earlier ministrations...
...14Anonymous professor quoted in Kotz, Promises, p. 113...
...Food assistance programs do relieve some of the misery of poverty, but they cannot alter the situation that makes relief necessary: this society still is not structured to let millions of people feed themselves...
...The "technical know-how" was available, we had "the tools at hand, "s and, unlike poverty in general, hunger was "susceptible to rational solution...
...And the left...
...They may not have used such terms as "welfare state" or "late capitalism," but from their own point of view these were the phenomena they were dealing with...
...o And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...They used hunger as a metaphor for poverty, to express the outrage they felt at seeing the deprivation that as many as 15 million Americans were forced to endure...
...Are MX missiles needed or do they constitute an ill-considered and panicky sign of our inability to cope with difficult political problems...
...It has improved the lives of millions without endangering the liberty of anyone...
...but what emerged from their work was at least a recognizable, coherent world view, a principled opposition to the welfare state (which in practice they will not be able to sustain...
...Get the government off our back" and "make America strong again"—empty, sterile demagogy, enough not only to win the support of millions of Americans but of sophisticated intellectuals, too...
...WHY CARTER LOST, I think we know...
...THE FIRST FOOD ASSISTANCE program was begun during the Great Depression...
...Arms must be twisted, laws passed, people jailed: thus The Good will prevail...
...Some problems were clearly beyond Carter's control—the OPEC stranglehold, the irrationality of the Iranians, the wearing-out of U.S...
...The draft facilitated the expansion of the Vietnam War in a major way while middle-class casualties were only a minor factor in turning around public consciousness—and then only after a half-dozen tragic years...
...In the next issue we shall speak of him more fully...
...The massive entry of the corporations into politics, and their shrewd recognition that intellectual 13 work is a useful political tool, has put the laborliberal forces at a serious disadvantage...
...that this has something to do with the previous support extended by us to the tyrannical Shah...
...That this is hollow criticism can best be seen in its most extreme expression...
...I find a grain of truth in this, but not two grains...
...The motto of the moment seems to be, "Screw you, Jack...
...In the early '60s the notion of a cycle of poverty became popular...
...The FSP and other food assistance programs have helped meet those needs...
...We need both to hold firm to our basic values—our vision of a human community marked by freedom, fraternity, participation, and egalitarianism—and to avoid the tendency to retreat into a kind of "fundamentalism...
...Or better yet, suppose he just does nothing to implement or improve existing social programs...
...to Promises, p. ix...
...The draft was yet another gesture designed to send a signal to the Soviets about Afghanistan—an irrelevant response to Soviet aggression...
...So here are a few preliminary reflections, put down hastily a few days after the election...
...At no point did Carter, or any other leading Democrat, challenge this mindless slogan...
...We have even had to witness the absurdity of a computation of smiles— how many times this candidate smiled, how many times the other...
...But there were also numerous failures of policy...
...It is a half-truth only to suggest that middleclass hegemony in the armed forces will make ill-fated interventions less likely, just as it is to suggest that minorities would benefit from a draft army...
...The draft registration program of the Carter administration was part and parcel of a new cold-war milieu that frightens our West European allies with its simplistic nature even as it scotches any substantive progress on the grave issues of arms control, of nuclear proliferation, and growing great power intervention in the Third World...
...It is not good enough, it needs ultimately to be "transcended," or modified, or improved...
...The national economic decline and a flood of imported cars had created insecurity, anger, and pessimism among the 1.5 million active and retired members...
...But to comfort oneself, if that's what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...The politics of the New Right seem largely to be motored, indeed, overwhelmed, by diffused and churning religiocultural sentiments...
...As one nutritionist put it, "`We are a nation of nutritional illiterates, yet we expect the poor to exercise some special discipline of nutrition knowledge that the rest of the country lacks...
...My own persuasion—in the nature of things, impossible to prove—is that Reagan's victory can be half-explained by the hypnagogic effects of this empty phrase, "get the government off our backs...
...By the end of the '60s, for the first time since World War II food assistance programs experienced substantial growth because of the needs of poor people rather than the vagaries of agricultural production...
...Perhaps the most damaging was Carter's steady drift to the right in economic policy, so that in effect his administration engineered a recession in order to cope with inflation...
...Do you suppose many of them will take this as an occasion for forthrightness, for creating a last-ditch defense in behalf of their principles?* THERE ARE DEEPER TRENDS...
...The United States has more than adequate forces, given upgrading in certain areas, to defend any legitimate interests without the draft...
...9 Periodic adjustments were mandated so that real benefits would not be reduced by inflation...
...The Reagan victory signals the few remaining liberals in Congress that prudence requires beating a retreat...
...Is there a way to reform these procedures without going back to Schadenfreude My German dictionary says that Schadenfreude is a feeling of malicious delight in the discomfort of others...
...The question of how to share a legitimate military burden in an inegalitarian society is a complex one...
...The Field Foundation sent a team of doctors in 1977 to repeat an investigation of poverty, health, and hunger conducted in 1967...
...They voted for Reagan because they felt, correctly, that he really means it...
...For it is not merely a question of what the new Administration may or may not do...
...they seem to lead to less rather than more participation...
...The men around Reagan are, in their own way, serious and they mean to carry through at least a portion of their stated program...
...For he had it in him to be, not a good poet, or even an intellectual above the common run of dry wits in his generation, but a liberal senator from Minnesota...
...is doing, with the notion that "it doesn't make much difference" seems politically obtuse...
...Everything becomes reduced to personality, style, manner...
...Who—except for the sincerely benighted dupes of rightist magical thinking—doesn't realize that, like it or not, the interpenetration of state and society, government and economy is inescapable in the era of "late capitalism...
...in 1972 he was on McGovern's side, but aloof from the contest...
...poverty is...
...Two dozen serious and qualified people should be put to work—and told not to be in too great a hurry...
...Their adult poverty would result in new generations perpetuating the same conditions in their children...
...17 successfully treated the lack of income while ostensibly treating hunger or the lack of food...
...The crux of both criticisms is the same: that the program does not solve the problem it is supposed to address...
...They will shift United States policy toward open and unambiguous support of reactionary dictators in Latin America—and thereby work to the ultimate advantage of Communist or Castroite forces...
...Carter merited severe criticism from the liberals and the left, some of that criticism appears in these pages...
...put it, hunger "exerts a special claim on the conscience of the American people...
...to be reduced to a set of technical problems that will be handled by instruments which are equipped to deal 15 with material obstacles but much less so to cope with social ones...
...But first of all, it needs to be protected...
...Ever since the summer of 1968, he has cared chiefly for an image of himself—an image that others helped him to invent— and to this he has sacrificed opportunity and principle alike...
...Democratic socialists, ourselves among them, have worked to turn that around...
...This notion is mistaken in the same way an alcoholic is when he cures a hangover with another drink...
...The conservative intellectuals, in opposition for some years, did take the trouble—enormously aided of course by corporate beneficence—to do programmatic work...
...to stiffen the folding backs of some of the congressional liberals...
...Responding as democratic socialists active within the antidraft movement, let us first take the question of interventionism and the draft...
...And that is why in a pamphlet written in January 1980 at the start of mass antidraft activity, to over 30,000 people nationwide, the Youth Section of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee wrote: Recognizing that unemployment rates of more than 40% among Black, Hispanic and working class youth lead to a cruel form of "economic conscription" into the volunteer forces, we call on anti-draft activists to make the demand for full employment an integral part of a broad anti-draft movement which organizes well beyond the campuses...
...These amendments set national standards for eligibility and increased federal participation in the program's administration and administrative costs...
...3Senator George McGovern's Introduction to Nick Kotz, Let Them Eat Promises (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1971), p. xiv...
...Nutritionist Nevin Scrimshaw wrote, "The commodity distribution and food stamp program...
...We need not romanticize the past, yet if one looks at some of the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson there was at least an effort at coherent presentation and sustained argument...
...Poverty emerged as a promising criterion because poverty was implicitly the way by which hunger was shown to be an extensive problem...
...Just as no one could feel about him that he acted out of attachment to principle, so, in some shapeless but also dangerous way, at least a portion of the electorate We are saddened by the death of our colleague Henry Pachter...
...There is a second discrepancy between the rhetoric and reality of food assistance...
...15 Robert Kennedy, quoted in Citizens' Board, Hunger, USA, p. 7. 18 In our previous issue we printed a comment by a student, Jerry Watts, regarding the draft and its critics...
...Let us face the facts, bitter as their taste may be...
...in the New York Times of November 6, that for all the sound and fury of the electioneering there was, as John B. Anderson tried to demonstrate, little difference on some basic issues between the Democratic and Republican candidates...
...We do not wish to make a fetish out of our opposition to the draft...
...Between the preparatory work and the upsurge of industrial unionism in the CIO there was an important relation...
...Food assistance programs have succeeded as much as this kind of program can be expected to lo Our Contributors 0 When sending manuscripts, please make ;ure that you do not send your only copy...
...So they're trying Reagan's laetrile...
...6Quoted, ibid., p. 7. 7 Kotz, McGovern's Introd...
...there are only intervals of pretended indifference to it...
...Instead, there was early evidence that the UAW rank and file "came home" to the Roosevelt-Democratic coalition and, in the end, poked small holes in the GOP's postelection claim to the hearts and ballots of working-class Americans...
...nor was it this time...
...It's worth asking, for just a moment, to what extent Carter was responsible...
...Don't you see that this is already doing severe damage to whatever we have of a welfare state...
...The Reagan victory gives new strength and self-confidence—and why not?— to the most reactionary elements in the country: to the Moral Majority fanatics, to the Friedmanite ideologues, to the corporate interests, to the enemies of women's rights, to the Cold Warriors...
...Second, the draft as an institution has always and will in whatever future incarnation be a reflection of the class society in which we live...
...When it came right down to it, the Senate majority leader Robert Byrd admitted that registration would not significantly improve our mobilization time in case of war (as a report from the Selective Service confirmed—much to the Administration's chagrin...
...Obviously, one who chooses to oppose an inegalitarian draft must fight for greater civilian opportunities for those now subject to economic conscription...
...We shall be glad to continue this discussion with brief statements from other readers...
...Add to this political context a dash of election-year bravado by Carter, a feint to the right to outflank Reagan, and you have ample reason for all Americans—be they socialist or not—to withold the blank check of conscription until or unless vital needs involving our legitimate security interests dictate otherwise...
...I suspect that an awareness of how difficult, perhaps intractable, are some of our socioeconomic problems is one root of the Reagan flower (weed, if you prefer...
...Those facts alone should give rise to second thoughts on the part of those who accuse the antidraft movement of ignoring the "expressed needs" of minority Americans...
...However, there also was a strong positive factor at work...
...A compromise was struck on the appropriation, and the bill passed...
...NEVERTHELESS, SUPPORT FOR FOOD ASSISTANCE programs is declining because the programs are perceived as not meeting nutritional goals, not helping the truly needy, not working to the point of eliminating the need for their own existence, and not working quickly or inexpensively enough...
...The results of this election can only make a sensitive black person feel forlorn, abandoned...
...They will resurrect the language and symbols of chauvinism, which may bring some emotional comfort to portions of the population, as well as to Commentary contributors, but will solve no problems whatever...
...And he hastened the process, too...
...And now—this is new!— they have as their allies New York intellectuals, only yesterday the friends of Paul Goodman .. . This reaction not only constitutes a massive Two weeks before the election, I was surprised by a small story in the back pages of the New York Times...
...If Carter's defeat can be attributed in part to both his personality, at once pious and slippery, and the smarminess of his campaign, no such factors can explain the sweeping defeat of many liberal senators...
...As it finds that raising expenditures and cutting taxes is strictly Alice-inWonderland economics, it will be tempted, if only in frustration, to take a stab here, a cut there at various social programs...
...All right...
...D.C.: U.S...
...The American people were more concerned about the poor state of the economy than about the president's argument that Reagan would constitute a danger on foreign policy matters...
...By 1939 some 13 million people were receiving government commodities...
...We are, it seems, in the midst of a moral-cultural "counterrevolution" an angry—also, one suspects, scared—reaction to the proliferation of freedoms over the past several decades...
...12Nick Kotz, Hunger in America: The Federal Response (New York: The Field Foundation, 1979), p. 10...
...Surely it will try to fulfill some of its promises to its constituencies, at the moment both enraged and encouraged...
...Simply to blame him for everything is to yield to the equally dangerous notion that an American president is—or worse, should be—omnipotent and therefore able to "take care" of all difficulties...
...surely it will throw its corporate friends a tax benefit...
...Supporting attempts to end hunger was a way of saving face for people who opposed other antipoverty measures...
...From the moment he chose to set himself above mere politics, McCarthy was bound to 12 turn against the late'60s...
...There was no larger purpose until reports of widespread hunger in the U.S...
...they transform electoral campaigns into boring ordeals...
...His plans for increased military spending, reviving the B-1 bomber, building the MX missile, and achieving nuclear superiority ("achieving the unachievable") make it imperative that democratic socialists help build a responsible, mainstream antimilitarist movement...
...What can they expect from the Reagans, from the D'Amatos, from the nameless new senators (we shall learn their names soon enough) who have replaced the beaten Democratic, and some Republican, liberals...
...But whoever would abandon or destroy or starve out the welfare state is an enemy of progress...
...Since identifying nutritional deficiencies on a case-by-case basis would be a prohibitively costly way of determining program eligibility, nonnutritional criteria were set up to establish an individual's need for food assistance...
...The program had grown in participants and cost far beyond their expectations...
...2 But is there any reason beyond this to say that food assistance has failed, to discount the relief provided by the programs over the past 12 years...
...Neither would the draft particularly strengthen the U.S...
...He has publicly warned against the "danger" that the Democratic party will be taken over by the "left-wing" backers of Ted Kennedy...
...But sometimes where questions of war and militarism are concerned truth departs from the scene long before the first shot is fired...
...Washington...
...armed forces (already 3 million strong) since the real needs of the military lay in retention of noncommissioned officers, skilled technicicans, and better supply and maintenance...
...That they found this taste, this sense, this appearance in the threadbare maxims of Ronald Reagan—an amiable, simple fellow who makes Richard Nixon look like an intellectual giant—is a tragicomic sign of our plight...
...Isn't there any longer a conviction that parties and candidates stand not just for something but for somebodies...
...Still more important, to acknowledge the consequences of their effort...
...For six or seven years the New Left took center stage and conservative ideologues went into retreat, partly because some of them, headed by Irving Kristol, had imprudently endorsed Richard Nixon as the candidate of "prudence...
...The nutritional potential of the food programs had been overstated, and this indeed created a serious problem of discrepancy...
...for the weakened international authority of the United States...
...But, characteristically, he didn't engineer "enough" of a recession for that purpose, since he lacked the ruthless consistency of a Margaret Thatcher...
...One of the program's biggest problems was the extent of local discretion and variations...
...At least as destructive is the role of the "experts" who then immediately appear to provide their * A call for retreat has already been sounded by Senator Moynihan, the Democrat who worked for Nixon...
...As the Vietnam War again illustrates, the burden of stopping an undeclared war through congressional action is exceptionally difficult, no matter how wrong the war, and the burden is rightfully and constitutionally placed on the President to demonstrate to Congress the need for a draft at time of war...
...It was decided that Food Stamp eligibility and allotments, and eligibility for other food assistance programs, should be determined according to income level...
...I am saying that there was a tacit link between the two, since in modern politics some effort at intellectual rationale seems necessary...
...When people talk about the "malaise" of this moment, there really is something to it—the problem is to know what...
...It was left up to the discretion of the states and counties to decide whether to distribute Food Stamps within their jurisdiction...
...Much anecdotal evidence of nutritional success has accumulated since WIC began in 1972...
...The "warmonger" issue, graphically depicted in Solidarity, the UAW in-house newspaper, may have made a deeper impression on auto workers than on voters in general...
...4 "Skill thinking" disposed of hunger easily...
...The brief but unambiguous dispatch told how McCarthy had met with Reagan, and offered to do "anything Reagan forces ask to aid the campaign...
...I think our mistake about Eugene McCarthy has always been to suppose that someone so plainly not an opportunist must be an idealist...
...A real cure requires overcoming our "great tradition of optimistically viewing most obstacles to social progress as external to the structure of society itself...
...The sad news reaches us as we are going to press...
...Others will continue the discussion in future issues...
...Well, by all means, let us sing...
...But that is where we are...
...Trade unionists, blacks, women, Jews, liberal intellectuals —these traditional components of the "liberal coalition" voted for him, insofar as they did, mainly because they feared Reagan...
...The WIC is the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children, administered by the Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of Agriculture...
...between 1961 and 1975...
...Reagan may be...
...Liberals thought that, even with Food Stamps, too many people would lose benefits and that a higher income should be guaranteed...
...Surely this is a matter worth careful study...
...If you don't know what to do or say, you sing "Solidarity Forever...
...Instead of a hand dipping into the citizens' own pockets, it appears to them as the sharing out of some vaguely imagined agricultural surplus in which they have no financial or personal interest...
...The willing of simplicity that results in slogans like "Get the government off our backs" finds a moralistic equivalent in a snarling intolerance of cultural and social difference...
...Was a single segment of his supporters in the 1980 election really enthusiastic...
...No political leader has ever deserved more completely to drop into oblivion than poor Jimmy...
...It is not enough, this welfare state...
...Is it possible to protect the personal freedoms of women, gays, lesbians, without inflaming the prejudices of vast numbers of middle-class persons...
...This will require overcoming such barriers to self-sufficiency as racial and economic discrimination, functional illiteracy, and political structures in which the poor have no voice...
...It also included a strong denunciation of the Soviet aggressison in Afghanistan...
...Political issues," Hoffmann writes, "tend...
...SOME OF THE MORE SIMPLE-MINDED ideologues around Reagan, like, say William Simon, really think that "getting the government off our back" will bring back, as if by magic, the paradise of an earlier America, a country of rugged individualism unspoiled by strong unions, assertive feminists, restless blacks, and nasty youth...
...do nothing to help the inner cities...
...he cannot, even if he wished to, block the long-range trends toward "corporate statism...
...It was a pleasant charade but, now that the mask is off, we can see that no happy end was ever in store for him...
...Notice the weaselworded "some"—human rights, Salt II, judicial appointments, women's rights, social programs...
...that in some of its aspects it is irksome—of course...
...If one goes further back, to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the contrast with the present is still more striking...
...In part, this was for lack of support...
...At least a year ago a large segment of the American people turned its back on him...
...Or why every single black and Hispanic member of Congress voted against draft registration on Capitol Hill...
...If literal hunger has been oversold since 1968, it was just as eagerly overbought...
...for the corporate elite, which has regained confidence through the first aid administered by the welfare state over the past few decades, it is a medicine they want not to take at all...
...To oppose the draft, according to Jerry Watts, is to be guilty of "bourgeois anti militarism...
...It surely cannot be called a failing to add to the income of poor families—for if people are poor and are not hungry, it is almost certain that they have inadequate clothing, or inadequate shelter, or inadequate medical care...
...Still, in supporting Reagan he was consenting to Reagan's platform...
...While the draft was not a precondition for U.S...
...Defeat is not the best culture in which to nurture keen thought, good feeling, high energy...
...Democratic socialists played a central role in the broad coalition that organized last March's massive antidraft demonstration in Washington...
...My own research, measuring the impact of a variety of factors on infant mortality, shows that Food Stamps and the Food Distribution program have been more effectively tied to need than has AFDC, if one accepts high infant mortality rates as an indicator of need...
...The element of Schadenfreude was especially strong in the recent sad election, especially among some of our liberal friends...
...The Yahoos are up in arms again...
...But there are also choices...
...but some of the people near him, and many of those supporting him, are not...
...The UAW leadership undertook a "political education" program: anti-Reagan, anti-Anderson, pro-Carter...
...13 But this assessment can only be sustained by the most literal reading of the concept of food assistance...
...Now, this isn't entirely true...
...Giving food to mothers and children in those critical years seemed a logical way of breaking that cycle of poverty...
...These problems would not exist had food assistance been promoted as a way to ease the deprivations of poverty...
...Some of what are glibly called the "tired old answers" are still pretty good...
...And let us not, in the present atmosphere, allow ourselves to be deflected from recognizing that it is a great achievement...
...To ask the questions I have italicized above is surely to answer them...
...But if Reaganism, the conservatism of the Simple Simons, proves a chimera, that doesn't mean, of course, that a more sophisticated, corporate conservatism won't be edging into greater power—with its own kinds of government controls and interventions...
...The military draft in the hands of an interventionistminded administration—one with its sights set on the halcyon days of the 1950s rather than the global complexities of the 1980s—constitutes a blank check on American youth to be drawn whenever and wherever our leaders see fit...
...Children whose mental development is impaired by malnutrition would never be able to reach their full potential and thus never be able to support themselves...
...Between the First World War and the New Deal there were years of reaction in the United States, but also years in which liberal and left intellectuals were doing the work of programmatic preparation that enabled the advances of the '30s...
...In its sophisticated form it consists of jeremiads about the dangers of the Soviet Union taking over the world...
...THERE ARE DETERMINED ideologues around Reagan, and they know precisely what they want...
...As Michael Harrington remarks, Reagan is "a utopian with his eyes firmly fixed upon a past that never was as a model for a future that cannot be...
...And if the conventional military forces of the United States are in poor shape, isn't that partly the result of a policy that lets affluent white youth off the hook while inducing poor black youth to put itself on it...
...In the short run, then, Reaganism may be the last hurrah of the more primitive versions of American conservatism, a last ecstatic facing backward to a fancied past...
...Hunger was isolated from poverty and presented as a distinct political issue, even though there was little evidence that hunger existed independently of poverty...
...Doesn't anyone in this country talk any longer about social groups, political publics, and (say it not too loud) economic classes...
...Or perhaps the resentment at seeing America "kicked around" and the anger at losing jobs came together in a reaction against Carter...
...Our people ran a good 10 percent (for Carter) above other union groups," said Sam Fishman, executive director of the UAW-Michigan Community Action Program...
...He does not go so far as to name any of them...
...Some of these problems were solved administratively in 1969, but changes in the program's structure were not added to the law until January 1971...
...No cases of malnutrition would be specifically treated by them (except in the WIC program), because nutritional status is not the criterion for assistance...
...Or Chrysler...
...It never developed into a guiding principle, because it was not evident where the cycles began or ended or where intervention would be helpful or even possible...
...While the role played by the FSP in the demise of FAP may displease some people, one of its positive aspects is that it surely has made evident that hunger indeed is an issue in our country...
...WIC recipients are pregnant women, women nursing infants up to six months, and children up to five years old...
...no doubt there was a lot of gas, but to compare the intellectual level of these debates with anything one can hear these days is depressing...
...McCarthy tried to stretch these into a way of life, and a way of life in politics...
...Distorted religiocultural emotions and yearnings are strongly at work—enraged demands that what Beckett in Happy Days calls "the old style" be enforced by the police...
...The programs have done that...
...The welfare state in both Europe and America has achieved some remarkable successes in humanizing capitalist society and cushioning the blows that society periodically delivers to people spread across the lower levels of the income scale...
...Nevertheless, there is deceit and there is failure in food assistance...
...A second program using stamps to distribute food-buying power was begun in 1939, but, as World War II helped decrease unemployment and food surpluses, the Food Stamp program was deemed unnecessary and eliminated in 1943...
...This pose he learned from Robert Lowell, and their friendship was the worst thing that ever happened to McCarthy...
...The dominance of television in the election has profoundly skewed the political process...
...I House Agriculture Committee Chairman Thomas Foley (D-Wash...
...The call to that rally condemned the poverty draft resulting from the lack of job and educational opportunities in the civilian sector and emphasized the need for full employment...
...Banner, May 15, 1980...
...By its very nature the welfare state cannot long maintain an equilibrium...
...That there should be a reaction against it...
...but he was also too "smart," in a disastrous sense, to speak out clearly and say it was nonsense...
...but it is not...
...to hold together the remains of the liberal-labor coalition...
...These reports were in part a response to disillusionment with the status of poverty policies at the time...
...Many people stretch out their hands and yield their hearts to this cry of nostalgia, this hunger for simplicity...
...in war, the Greek historian Herodotus once explained, truth is the first casualty...
...8 And, finally, the allotment of Food Stamps per household was not sufficient to buy an adequately nutritious diet...
...Its evaluation is representative 16 of the findings of other research regarding the impact of food programs...
...The present primary procedures allow small and militant minorities often to impose their will on shapeless majorities...
...We will not gain a draft bereft of advantages and escape clauses for the upper classes...
...In fairness, however, I would add that even the wildest apostles of the '60s counterculture didn't propose to legislate against people whose ways of life they disliked...
...Simply to deny that he was is to surrender political life to notions of historical automatism...
...To be sure, the "debate" between Carter and Reagan showed that they barely had enough to say to fill up two minutes—though again, to be fair, this was certainly more true for Reagan than Carter...
...The Carter administration's rationale for the draft was shaky...
...Given the current political climate, so critical of social spending, it helps to make clear what food assistance programs have done and can do, what they cannot do, and what role the left can take in their defense...
...Then, too, the few programs aimed at alleviating hunger that existed prior to the '60s used income as the principal determinant of eligibility...
...The claim of conservatives that we are being cheated by food assistance, because it is not doing what they thought it would or should do, is a phony one...
...In Michigan, a poll one week before the election found that 86 percent of the UAW members believed their finances had worsened or not improved in the past year...
...But the failure even to attempt it ensured his victory...
...Some have to do with technological transformations, e.g., television, which—it is no exaggeration to say—endanger the health of democracy...
...Politically shrewd, he betrayed a final incoherence...
...They will stop talking about human rights, even in the partial, inconsistent, but still—let us be fair!—valuable way that Carter did...
...Is that not already a disastrous consequence...
...As socialists we should demand no less and no more...
...What we have, instead, is a "debate" in which grown-up people are supposed to answer in two minutes enormously complicated and difficult questions...
...2Anthony Downs, "Up and Down with Ecology—the 'Issue-Attention Cycle," Public Interest, Summer 1972...
...One cannot examine the draft in a political vacuum...
...EDS...
...And—for the first time—trade unions were brought into the antidraft movement in that action on March 22 with endorsements, support, and turnout from various internationals, regions, and locals of the UAW, the Machinists, AFSCME, District 1199 Hospital Workers, the AFGE, and others...
...There is a shared sense among almost everyone except the true believers of Milton Friedman and V. I. Lenin that problems are, at least for the moment, out of control...
...They are given foods that will meet their exceptional needs, and WIC also provides nutrition education...
...So, too, are the socioeconomic problems regarding the welfare state...
...Technical programs such as food assistance make most sense, then, when implemented as part of a more comprehensive social policy aimed at the underlying causes of the need for assistance...
...However, the food benefits were mostly an afterthought to the primary goal of the program—to boost farm income and halt the flood of farm closings...
...The revival of cold-war politics, which began with President Carter's proposal to renew draft registration, has led us to the brink of a renewed arms race that could threaten our very existence...
...This may seem like an excessively intellectualistic approach...
...hunger was the issue they found...
...Reagan may, if he presses, cripple minimum wage laws...
...Such criticism is possible because underlying the food assistance programs is the mistaken notion that society can somehow eliminate poverty by treating its effects...
...Little by little he gave up on that, while his public character turned into the volatile compound of petulance and spleen proper to a modern intellectual...
...But the benefits to millions of people receiving stamps, he argued, far outweighed the program's problems...
...Ironically, then, the programs are in jeopardy and risk being called failures, because they have This is a time of life with exceptional nutritional demands, and program participants are persons suffering of nutritional deficiencies or at risk of developing such deficiencies...
...Amiable (or perhaps just lazy...
...that feeding people will end their poverty...
...All too often it has been perceived as a movement primarily dedicated to saving white middle-class college students from a de jure conscription while neglecting the de facto economic conscription of poor, working-class, and minority youth...
...McCarthy Is Said to Back Reagan"—that was the headline...
...Outside plant gates, millions of leaflets were distributed, stressing 30 different themes, incl uding: retiree concerns, civil rights, women's rights, unemployment and, several days before the election, reprints of newspaper stories alleging that Reagan foreign policy adviser Richard Allen had ties to the Japanese auto industry...
...The impact of this growth can be assessed from the changes that have taken place since 1968 in the Food Stamp program (FS P...
...In the campaign cry, "help the forgotten middle class," raised by the new senator from New York, D'Amato, one can hear code words for something uglier...
...The likely consequence is that the "mild" recession will not cut inflation very much...
...Not only would intervention abroad be less likely, since middle-class kids and parents would have a stake in a draft army, but the poor and minorities would be far better off...
...Still, it is necessary to remember that a majority of Americans, despite the Reagan victory, want many of the social measures, like national health insurance, that we identify with the welfare state...
...That's just the sort of thing that could lead someone to suppose Pat Moynihan wants the government to be strong, etc...
...Other programs to minimize farm surpluses were started thereafter, including a new Food Stamp program in 1961...
...This was the situation last spring when the Food Stamp program neared bankruptcy and supplemental appropriations were sought in Congress...
...Advocates of direct aid had to find some way to regain the political initiative...
...I find myself in unexpected agreement with the aide in the Reagan campaign who suggested that in place of these inane "debates" each candidate be allotted half an hour a week on prime television time for six weeks before the election to explain his views on crucial issues...
...succeed...
...Yet his administration poses a serious threat to world peace...
...The failure is not that food assistance programs have not ended hunger and eliminated the need for assistance...
...All of us, of course, have to engage in this work of reflection, calmly and self-critically, even as public events and governmental decisions may rouse us to indignation and protest...
...For all the fashionable talk about how much "fairer" and "beneficial" a draft would be for minorities, can someone please explain why no national black or Hispanic organization supported draft registration...
...They held him responsible for inflation and unemployment...
...As the congressional black caucus, the first group of elected officials to oppose reinstitution of the draft, wrote on June 14, 1979: Equally as troubling is the extent to which the draft facilitates involvement in foreign conflicts...
...The problem was basically technical in nature: solving it required nothing more than getting food to people...
...It amounted to a confession that the liberal principles that McCarthy had once espoused, and of which the Republican platform of 1980 was the simple negation, had become to him a hollow thing...
...For many Americans this is bitter medicine...
...In the decade from 1968 to 1978 the number of food assistance programs doubled...
...A summary of the statistical results will appear in Slater, "Food Assistance Has Helped," National Food Review, U.S...
...The Reagan victory tells women to get back to the kitchen and shut up...
...WIC projects are usually located at health centers, so that other health problems may be identified and treated...
...The failure, rather, lies in the very idea, espoused by conservative critics, that such technical programs as food assistance can solve social problems...
...5The Citizens' Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States, Hunger, USA (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 10...
...It's when policies don't work that people remember principles...
...do nothing to plug up tax inequities...
...The ratio may have been better for Carter, according to UAW spokesman Don Stillman, in New England states—New York (85,000) and Connecticut (35,000)—and a little worse in Republican Indiana and Sunbelt states Texas, California, and Missouri...
...What has been happening is, I think, a slow, belated tide of reaction against the counterculture and New Left manifestations of the late '60s, both against what was attractive in them and what was excessive...
...Food assistance then was sold to the public on a nutritional basis—hunger would be relieved, malnutrition cured...
...Who can fail to take seriously his distaste for the minimum wage...
...It surely is not a failing to add to the adequacy of the diets of recipients even if specific nutritional diseases are not cured...
...Here is another comment, in part a reply to Watts, from a different point of view...
...If the United States is humiliated, as it has been, by the new Iranian rulers, might there not be some point in publicly discussing the possibility * We are back to the world view Dickens attacked so memorably in Hard Times, the sterile form of "utilitarianism" he immortalized in the characters of Gradgrind and Bounderby...
...That this hasn't worked in the past keeps no one who desperately yearns for that past from trying to repeat it...
...Now, in the 1970s many of the themes first announced in the 1950s by rightward-moving publicists are being rehearsed again, though usually at a lower intellectual level...
...It was strictly a one-man, one-shot affair, an example of the "clique politics" that J. Patrick Dobel analyzed in the last Dissent...
...No equivalent efforts, despite the valuable work of such individuals as Michael Harrington, Gus Tyler, and Robert Heilbroner, was made on the other side...
...What could be done other than agree with Foley...
...And so far as I can see, it can be only the unions, or the more responsive among them, that will trouble to provide the support for such an effort...
...Don't they see that these Moral Majority fanatics are enemies of that separation of church and state to which American Jews have traditionally been committed...
...This is particularly true, so the argument continues, given the predominantly white middle-class composition of the antidraft movement...
...Our effort worked," said Stillman, but "considering the Reagan landslide, that's small consolation...
...Hunger elicits an emotional response and suggests a more urgent problem than some amorphous "poverty...
...We can have no assurance that an effort honestly to explain to the American people the complexities, contradictions, limitations of the role of this country in world affairs would have enabled the defeat of Reagan...
...4Stanley Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles, or the Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 148...
...There is a kind of wisdom that says, once in office Reagan will shift to the center, as every president does, he will discover the limits of the possible, it won't be such a great catastrophe...
...Beneficial as these programs were for recipients, they remained a by-product of agricultural policy...
...The union's "secondary leadership," local officials who form the vital communications link between Solidarity House and rankandfile members, was overwhelmingly proCarter...
...We have been quite generous," said Senator Henry Bellmon (R-Okla...
...Even though they have not yet brought aid to all eligible recipients, they do give the most assistance to those with the greatest need (lowest income...
...There are deeper trends...
...There is, however, no prospect that the return on greater food assistance to the poor will be more than a halt in the growth of welfare rolls and greater economic output...
...While this has not yet been proven, in the late '60s it suggested a new and workable cycle-of-poverty theory...
...The hunger/poverty distinction was found to be untenable in practice even though it remained part of the public justification for the programs...
...that treating the symptoms of a problem will eliminate its causes...
...And almost all of it at the expense of poor Jimmy Carter...
...The effort began in September with a severe negative factor to overcome...
...and it is time to impose "discipline" on the Department of Agriculture...
...To an extreme cynic, of course, this need not have come as a shock...
...There is a lot of bad feeling in the country, a lot of social nastiness, a lot 8 of mean-spirited selfishness.* (You don't have to be a woman to be like Ayn Rand...
...Who in his right mind believes this...
...that we have entered a new historical era of limits and retreats...
...involvement in Indochina, it enabled the Pentagon to call on a huge manpower pool to help sustain that mistake, a mistake that could well be replicated by a Reagan administration...
...This meant that "those counties which traditionally had been least responsive to the needs of the poor and hungry were given veto power to prevent the program from reaching its intended beneficiaries...
...9The Congressional Budget Office, The Food Stamp Program: Income or Food Supplement...
...that no one has very good answers...
...It is always subject to serious inner conflicts...
...This new cycle-of-poverty theory has invited arguments about the long-term yields that investment in food assistance would bring: decreased welfare dependence and increased economic prosperity...
...just feeding people does not produce the jobs necessary to allow them to support and feed themselves...
...And that, by the way, is one reason I had no sympathy for the Anderson campaign: it rested on no plebeian or liberal community, it had no ties with blacks or unions or women's movements...
...I I The programs are effective...
...The Editors December 10, 1980 7 wanted the taste, the sense, the appearance of principle...
...Four years ago during his primary campaign, we said in Dissent that in the root sense he was an opportunist...
...that it should have thrown up unforeseen difficulties...
...That is why he was elected...
...A last word, now, to ourselves, socialists of the democratic left...
...7 Since hunger was viewed in this technical fashion, social questions could be ignored and the politically sensitive issue of income redistribution avoided...
...Additional important changes in the law were made in 1973 and 1977, but the 1971 amendments were critical because they made the Food Stamps program "the first universal, national welfare program with national eligibility standards based on need and not on particular household characteristics...
...That, by DETROIT — The nation's auto workers did not rush to join the 1980 blue-collar "revolt" against Democrat Jimmy Carter...
...Conversely, there is a very real prospect that, even with extensive food assistance programs, welfare rolls will continue to grow...
...Any program designed to supplant food assistance would have to meet the standards set by FS P. Hunger now had been shown to exist as a national problem and the needs of hungry people had been quantified, so to speak, by the distribution of Food Stamps...
...The pattern was probably repeated in Illinois (125,000 UAW members), Ohio (200,000) and Pennsylvania (65,000...
...12 My research suggests that food assistance has contributed to the decline in infant mortality rates in the U.S...
...3 Moreover, hunger was a problem that could be solved or so it was said, and this appealed to an American cultural tendency that Stanley Hoffmann calls "skill thinking...
...You can say that what they came up with was pretty shoddy—Kemp-Roth tax cuts, the Laffer curve, Friedman economics, etc...
...We need specialists in the political process, for example, to reexamine the primary regulations, some of them put into effect through liberal enthusiasm but with unforeseen disastrous consequences...
...The Reagan victory tells blacks to take their welfare checks and stay in their slums...
...Today Gradgrind writes for the American Spectator and Bounderby is being considered for assistant secretary of commerce...
...But more, we need some sustained thought, some sustained intellectual work...
...To try, of course, to resist the assaults likely to come from the right...
...I wish him luck...
...Conservatives chose, however, to call the problem they were willing to solve "hunger" rather than admit that this hunger was just another side of the same poverty they had always ignored and for which they denied any responsibility...
...I will not repeat here the reasons given in that article for the long-range rightward trend of American thought—if you're interested, you can find the piece reprinted in Dissent Pamphlet #1...
...Suppose, indeed, that Reagan doesn't go at the welfare state with a meat cleaver...
...What many people seem to have felt about Carter was that he lacked a clear outlook, that he started from no discernable principles, liberal, conservative, or any other...
...In its popular feeling it takes the form of resentment at seeing America "kicked around...
...The programs, in fact, were not set up to do that...
...That such methods are themselves a denial of moral good is an argument that, right now, in certain parts of the country, will get you nowhere...
...the way, is a major difference between the Reagan and Eisenhower styles of conservatism: Reagan has behind him, as Eisenhower did not, an active, frothing movement that is going to demand payoffs and won't hesitate to raise hell if it fails to get them...
...I am not saying that the votes of the Moral Majorityites were cast out of enthusiasm for the papers of the American Enterprise Institute...
...But he says they are people committed to "doctrinal purity" who hold to "the premise that government should be powerful and America should be weak...
...And if we are rightly suspicious of the blather about liberal programs being "tired," must we not recognize that the prevalence of this blather requires us to reexamine our premises...
...It has been a long time since McCarthy worked seriously against a Republican candidate for president...
...The doctors again fastened onto food aid as the one concrete area in which they believe there has been significant progress...
...But by 1967 political enthusiasm for helping the poor had eroded considerably...
...And a word must be said here about the blacks...
...So it is with the national debate over draft registration and the possible return of military conscription...
...the right questions whether there can be any governmental solution...
...To achieve social progress we must stop avoiding the complex causes of poverty and such troubling questions as income redistribution...
...But anyone who takes comfort from such reassurances isn't thinking hard enough...
...Meanwhile, blue-collar voters nationally divided almost evenly between Carter and Reagan and less than half of all union-household voters backed Carter, a sharp decline from 62 percent in 1976, according to polls...
...10 Nine days before the 1971 Food Stamp amendments were signed into law, the Senate rejected President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which would have provided the first set of national standards and benefits for cash welfare...
...do nothing to cope with unemployment among black youth—and you have already done sufficient damage to the welfare state, even without dismantling Social Security...
...National health insurance, for instance, is still something to be desired and fought for, even though I suspect that a segment of the liberal leadership, quick to retreat, may start doubting that...
...In Michigan, where 600,000 active and retired auto workers and their families make up about 20 percent of the electorate, the UAW delivered about 60 percent of its voting members to Carter, according to election-day exit polling...
...Here, some sorting-out ought to be done, and insofar as either liberalism or the democratic left allows itself to be tagged as indifferent or hostile to the idea of a legitimate national defense it plays directly into the hands of its enemies...
...Of course, he won't proceed systematically to dismantle the welfare state, such as it is...
...Nevertheless, the truth is the truth: what we are experiencing is the partial impasse, or breakdown, of the welfare state, a historical improvisation that has been a boon to millions, a great achievement of the social democracy in Europe and liberalism in the United States...
...The conservatives understood, or sensed, the need for combining their version of intellectual work with hard organizational work...
...Of course, Reagan doesn't want to start a world war...
...But of course the Reagan administration will do some things, or try to...
...For the time being, the betrayal may seem a little less staggering when we recall that even then, McCarthy could not help giving the impression that he had better things to do than deliver'speeches, run for office, and improve the lot of the poor and the helpless...
...The left argues that this particular program is not able to solve the problem...
...Surely a Reagan administration will try to thwart ERA...
...It is similarly simplistic to argue that minorities will gain a better deal in a conscript army...
...He is, on the contrary, a creature of self-will...
...The thoughtful people, the specialists who remained committed to liberal and democratic radical values need to sit down—not for one of those dubious rah-rah conferences on how to put our Humpty Dumpty together again—but for a few years of sustained programmatic work...
...One can detect, then and now, in the fringe extremisms an unwillingness to accept the limits of politics, an insistance that personal morality and public policy must be intertwined...
...19 The antidraft movement is in truth a whole mishmash of elements ranging from the libertarians on the right to Marxist Leninists on the left...
...There are deeper trends...
...But the temptation was to scoff at Food Stamps as a "band-aid measure," much as conservatives are tempted to cite it as another example of "throwing money at problems...
...We have to recognize that apart from short-range factors in Reagan's victory, we are dealing here with a long-range, though not of course smoothly upward, trend...
...It is also a question of who finds encouragement and energy as a result of the election, who sinks into apathy or turns tail...
...They won't be able to do it all, thank heaven, but they'll do enough...
...But not a fatal disadvantage...
...in 1976 he ran as an independent, and with a few thousand well-placed votes nearly robbed Carter of the presidency...
Vol. 28 • January 1981 • No. 1
