Notes on the Elections

...Not so long ago, Walter Reuther said that "you cannot have Mr...

...If in the long run the tendency has been for the executive branch to extend its role and powers vis a vis the legislative authority, the immediate tendency of the Eisenhower administration has been to yield this extended power to shadowy cliques of faceless administrators who have no responsibility to anyone but "the Chief" and who thus come to constitute a kind of ruling regency...

...As Williams tells us, it went to the Democratic convention in a mood of compliance and therefore— rightly enough—it was treated with contempt...

...The very fact that it had tied itself so unconditionally to Stevenson gave the Southerners considerable room for maneuver...

...the most influential delegates showed none of the fighting spirit which was so evident in Kefauver's victory...

...Precisely because of the prevalence of the first, long-range tendency is this immediate development within the Eisenhower administration so important...

...If they do not have a vital quality to them, they shrivel up...

...but he had to court Senator Johnson and Senator Eastland...

...But never as much as in 1956...

...But this does not mean that political developments have ground to a halt in a kind of nightmare of comfort...

...For whatever importance it has, the question of voting in 1956 remains...

...But the Democrats evaded, not debated, the great questions...

...Some of us believe that, since the two parties remain committed to a society whose fundamental assump tions and values we reject and since the two parties have failed to take a forthright' stand on the one burning issue of national conscience (Negro rights), there is no reason to support either candidate...

...This on the admittedly limited and "private" grounds that it may affect the character of the new Congress...

...In the past, new parties were created in America after and during periods of painful transition: the pre-Jacksonian and the pre-Civil War periods are classic examples...

...But this is the great weakness of the Democrats...

...One word more...

...It is sometimes said that in this moment of soft prosperity there really are no issues and that it is therefore impossible for an opposition to arouse interest by trying to raise them...

...For all its demagogy and triviality, the Democratic talk about a "full time or part time president" does touch upon a significant issue that is related to the American governmental tradition: the role and functioning of the Presidency...

...Can the labor leadership keep buying political compromise when a victory for "their" party will not lead, according to their own expectations, to the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act...

...where the problem of education is a national scandal...

...But Stevenson's calculated opportunism in wooing the South on the matter of civil rights for Negroes, showed anything but greatness...

...These editors either will not vote or will vote for one of the minor party socialist candidates, not in the belief that the latter represents any significant "protest" but simply as a matter of individual sentiment and conscience...

...has said that Stevenson "has to tell the nation that peace and prosperity aren't enough, that the time calls for greatness...

...His very nomination, brought about by a tacit alliance between the Southern reactionaries and the Northern machines with the liberallabor bloc tagging behind, made this perfectly clear...

...No issues—in a country where 30 million people belong to families with incomes below $2,000 a year...

...And even if we examine the campaign issues as stated or hinted at by the two parties, there is more than meets the eye...

...Both foreign policy planks are a hopeless muddle, a willed failure to understand—let alone cope with—the nature of the modern world...

...Despite certain superficial appearances, and the vast literature of the new American celebration, our society has not achieved a state of equilibrium or stasis...

...The editors of DISSENT, while agreeing that in terms of radical politics this question is relatively unimportant, do not agree on the answer...

...to speak the blunt truth, as we see it, about issues and problems that are almost universally neglected and obscured...

...Given the absence of any significant radical movement in the United States, the problem of how to vote becomes, for radicals, a matter of personal decision...

...And yet, as we have said, the problems remain, the issues will survive November 6, the alignments of politics are not forever frozen, and for those who will be perceptive enough to see them and courageous enough to fight for them, new possibilities for creative—which is to say, in the most fundamental and least dogmatic sense, radical—politics will again arise...

...On top of this dull self-satisfied heap presides the Tranquillizer-in-Chief dispensing bromides and homilies like a country horse doctor...

...For Ike "is getting a bit fed up with businessmen as politicians...

...Above all, no conflict...

...In the first part of Michael Reagan's article which appears in this DISSENT (p...

...it means a failure to sense the terrible danger, as well as the opportunities, presented by the changes and crises in the Communist world...

...One of the most interesting political tendencies of the moment is the way in which the dominant leaderships of both parties keep moving closer toward one another...

...but enough...

...AT THIS POINT both parties appear bloated, utterly without principle...

...346), enough issues are sketched out to keep anyone genuinely interested in them busy for a very long time...

...We are sometimes taxed with being mere critical bystanders unable to influence the course of American politics...

...And, let it be remembered, the majority plank—which Roy Wilkins of the NAACP rightly described as "totally meaningless" and Joe Rauh of the ADA called "a step backward" —came into being as a result of the collaboration between the pro- and the anti-Stevenson forces: it won the approval of Stevenson's spokesmen, it won the approval of Truman, it won the approval of Mrs...

...THE DEMOCRATS contain within themselves some of the groups that can act with decision and boldness to break up the log-jam of compromise and evasiveness which afflicts American politics...

...A square peg in a round hole...

...A time for greatness, indeed...

...an utter refusal to see the great gaping holes in the fabric of that prosperity...

...Ike is both the product and shaper of American society today...

...Undeniably, both parties are thoroughly outmoded and incapable of facing up to the tasks of American life...

...and that Stevenson might be more apt to behave intelligently in making decisions concerning foreign policy...

...is a dishonest conglomeration of irrelevancies and inaccuracies which no administration could live by in the hydrogen age...

...In the imperiled and revolutionary world of the mid-twentieth century, "moderation" is a state of political paralysis induced by a bad case of compromise and aggravated by creeping cant...

...What better place to call for greatness than at the convention of his own party and in regard to the most burning domestic issue of the day, the one issue that poses an unambiguous challenge to human conscience...

...Can the bloc of regional, political, social and class groups which makes up the Democratic party survive what seems likely to be another defeat...

...Its leaders [i.e., of the labor-liberal bloc] were locked out of the Committee sessions, and they did not sit on the floor of the Convention as delegates...

...Very well...

...As the New Republic, perhaps the last liberal journal in the country not to suffer disenchantment with Stevenson, has put it: "the [Democratic] foreign affairs plank...

...Ikeism represents a sublime faith in the powers of drift...

...That is why all of us are convinced that the most important task in politics today is to analyze what is happening about us in terms of a radical perspective...

...Whether under the name of liberal conservatism, conservative liberalism, neoliberalism or any other such hodgepodge, Ikeism is the very color of the nation's political soul, and almost as much so of the opposition as of the party in power...

...but if anything the Democratic plank, because it revives the half-forgotten Dulles demagogy of the Republicans four years ago, is a shade the worse...

...The New Republic's T.R.B...

...And the result, predictably, was that, even by contrast with 1952, the liberallabor bloc collapsed...

...And it is an issue that has not even begun to be explored...

...Estes preparing to shake several million hands...

...With a few honorable exceptions...

...Eastland and have us at the same time...

...As if on this issue a man of honor could be anything but "un reasonable...

...a belief that our prosperity is eternal and ordained...

...Perhaps the best word about him, at least as an individual political figure, has been said by Charlie Hennessey in The Last Hurrah who, watching him on TV, shouts back at the screen: No capacity...

...Consider the matter of foreign policy...

...Well, Stevenson has them both, and on terms that hardly do credit to the fighting spirit of anyone but Eastland...

...It is all beginning again...

...Mother of God, save us all from Fort Riley, Kansas...

...STEVENSON has said that he will go to the people with the issues...

...A platform made up of splinters and fragments, each directed at a group or a region on the lowest political level...

...Socialists have concerned themselves very little with the exact functioning and mechanisms of government, to the present regret of at least some of us...

...And what is Adlaism fast becoming but Ikeism with a touch of literacy and intelligence...

...Desegregation, civil liberties, foreign policies, economic problems— all were shunted aside...

...The civil rights fight (a more accurate word would be, retreat) "had to be waged," writes Williams, "from the wings of the Convention...

...a profound unwillingness of the nation to face the bitter realities of its international position...

...The New Republic's Washington correspondent, T.R.B., reports that Ike plans to "re-form" his cabinet after the election, dropping Charlie Wilson and Sinclair Weeks, replacing Herbert Hoover Jr., generally taking a more "progressive" posture...

...where civil liberties...

...He feels that he will not be so dependent on the Old Guard in his second term...

...There is a sense of course in which this is true...

...he cannot be charged with pretending to be anything but what he is...

...What the editors with this point of view would stress, however, is not so much the actual vote but the need for closely observing and, if possible, intervening in the struggles that will continue to take place within the make-shift structure of American politics...

...where the farm problem has become chronic and deep-rooted...

...and Dick, that Devil's darling of the liberals, has turned tame, his gift for nastiness suppressed in preparation for a "high level" campaign...

...that Nixonism represents a genuine menace...

...Clashes continue to take place, issues to intrude themselves...

...IRVING HOWE STANLEY PLASTRIK...

...This was the plank which Murray Kempton so bitterly and accurately described as "a fix," which Walter Reuther described as "a broad sociological observation robbing America of the credentials it needs to lead in the free world...

...Our cult of personality, the amorphous social and ideological composition of the parties, the burden of regional and state traditions, the built-in expectation that campaigns consist mainly of nonsense, and (more recently) the tendency to transform the more or less spontaneous bunkum of American politics into a carefully manipulated and pre-tested branch of advertising—such factors have frequently buried issues amid a clatter of confusion and noise...

...It is a commonplace that American elections often tend to conceal and blur issues...

...However, this criticism obscures the profounder truth that the fundamental way to "influence" American politics in a sense meaningful for us is by working toward a radical reconstruction of American life...

...The model of a "mass society" is extremely valuble, but one must remember that any model, by its very nature, tends to create a static picture of what is actually a process of constant movement and change...

...No capacity whatso ever...

...it lacked any long-range perspective, any short-range militancy, anything but an unconditioned desire to have Stevenson as its nominee...

...The issues facing the country have been obliterated by 1) techniques of diversion that stress irrelevancies and trivia (a president "who's always on the job") or 2) occasionally deliberate and occasionally unconscious blunting of all political edges, so that the real differences of interest and opinion that cut so deeply through our society get lost amid compromise and rhetoric...

...Where the labor-liberal bloc within the Democratic party had put up a certain ruckus in 1952, its representatives, writes ADA leader David Williams in the New Leader, "went so far as to offer to drop the floor fight [at the Democratic convention] if the pledge of Federal legislation was added to the plank (thus bringing it back to the 1952 level) and were willing not to insist on the pledge to carry out the Supreme Court decisions...

...Consider just a few of the explosive possibilities: Can the Negroes moderate their drive for equality and recognition...

...But to dismiss the nature of the Presidency as a mere cliche of political science textbooks or as a problem internal to capitalism and hence of no interest to us, seems unwise at a time when so much rests upon the way this executive power is handled...

...where more and more "pockets" of economic sickness plague the life of no one knows how many people...

...to bring to bear upon American life the criticism that follows from democratic and socialist values...

...In terms of any socialist perspective or politics, a victory for either party's candidates would signify no real or significant gain...

...The tragedy is that the labor liberal bloc has not shown any political forthrightness or courage in the summer of 1956...

...Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the surface of "moderation" which covers American political life is all that matters, or even the most important thing to consider...

...Roosevelt, who also contributed her bit of cant when she urged upon the Negroes "the wisdom of leadership for the whole country, and not for any particular group alone...

...for whatever illusions the liberals have about Stevenson are of their own making...

...Oh, pitiful, pitiful...

...It is possible that we are now going through the beginnings of similar developments, and that what seems like an unparalleled agreement in national life is but the preparation for new struggles and new alignments...

...For a time at least, a good many of the underlying social and political struggles that continue to take place within American life will find their most dramatic, though hardly most principled, reflection within the Democratic party...

...If liberal conservatism is to be the keynote, say the more intelligent Republicans, particularly the bright young Undersecretary of Labor Larson, why not Ike's moderation...

...in the night of "moderation" all cats are grey...

...Precisely at a time when national life seems stalled, issues must be related to fundamentals, to basic premises...

...While Ike prepares to put a bit more stress on the liberal in his liberal conservatism, Adlai has begun to put a great deal more stress on the conservative in his conservative liberalism...

...They were, says Williams, "reasonable men...

...It may interest our readers if we briefly sketch the two opinions...

...A few other editors believe that, without illusion or enthusiasm, a vote for Stevenson is at least conceivable...

...Great on a parade ground: hup, two three fourl Oh, marvelous) But in the White House...

...where the cost of living is again rising and economists begin to express renewed fears of inflation...

...Stevenson could count on Walter Reuther...