Official Liberalism And National Nervousness

...It is the recognition that this is our problem today which has already given the New Deal a dusty place on the history shelves...

...In short, what kind of society will it create for us and how adequate will it be in facing the real problem of today...

...Are there any forces at work in the visions of the Official Liberal to affect and counteract the present power facts of life...

...The other, produced for the incoming administration, is composed of "task force" reports prepared under the title New Frontiers for the Kennedy Administration...

...In the Kennedy task force reports, area redevelopment, social welfare, education, and cultural affairs are all conceived as involving not just government but government planning on a continuing basis...

...It is, however, a tamed and housebroken New Deal...

...Are we offered any ground for believing that future configurations of freedom will be different from what they are now...

...The idea of a different society which will expand freedom, make it more available to more people—this Official Liberalism cannot offer to us...

...Faced as we are with the possibility of what might be called a partial-utopia or pseudo-utopia under the direction of the planners of Official Liberalism, it must be stressed that this is no time for the easy romanticism which says that planning crushes the human spirit, etc...

...Would the present distribution of power and reward become more stabilized, more stratified and more dominant than it now is...

...Then John Gardner (President of Carnegie Corporation) , who shows few other signs of being radical, believes we should innovate in education, and the innovation will not come about unless governments on all levels plan what to do...

...Will Official Liberalism be able to face up to that possibility...

...Are the two ideas compatible...

...What is the nature of the Official Liberalism which is the dominant intellectual note of that administration...

...The Landis report on administrative agencies, the only one really to rise a above minutiae, is concerned not only to clean up the agencies in the sense of de-corrupting them and making it possible for them to get through their work, but also to make them into effective policy planning instruments...

...Are we to allow General Motors and all that crew of maniac materialists to decide what better things we need for better living...

...Catherine Bauer Wurster on urban living...

...The debate on national goals with which we are deluged today is interesting for many reasons, but not least for the light it throws on the need for some kind of directive about what America should do in the face of its multiple crises...

...The only people who would not find it better are the conservatives—for the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, the conservative ethos is going to take some hard knocks in such a society—or those eccentric radicals who would join hands with the conservatives in praise of dirt and individualism...

...Some, as published, are sketchy to the point of uselessness...

...The partial-utopia of the Official Liberal may have some amusing features, but they will be more tolerable than the not-very-amusing aspects of our present society...

...Since there obviously can be nothing wrong with our present social system in and of itself, what is required therefore is a re-thinking, a re-orientation of the system as it stands—if "stands" is the word...

...We are not ready yet, he thinks, for a Ministry of Transportation with cabinet rank but that should not and need not prevent the evolution of a "national transportation policy...

...For in fact, the future as postulated by Official Liberalism, for all its sanitary comforts, is exactly the present-day American society re-housed, re-distributed, re-organized, and re-administered, but with all the activity taking place within the same social framework, the same power structure, the same value system and all of it leaving freedom in its present position...

...it can help liberate the human spirit and the society described above is far better than that we have now, by any liberal/radical criteria...

...House-broken, the Official Liberal is all the more likely to enter into the drawing rooms of the Mighty...

...And with all this we will still be able to look back and say that these things were set forth in the Declaration of Independence...

...And since it is not, his planned society in and of itself and without some kind of value-ideological concept in support of it will not bring about the fundamental changes that are necessary...

...It may well be that it does...

...It also ends up in the hands of the expert who accepts the existing framework of pluralism and ignores all those doubts about democracy, equality, reason, science, pragmatism and mass persuasion which have bedevilled so many intellectuals today...

...In one sense, these problems are those raised by Mills' Power Elite, and whatever the virtues and faults of his particular analysis it is nevertheless true that the question we face today is how the present structure of power can preferably be destroyed and if not destroyed then at least modified...

...And both volumes enable us to ask two pertinent questions about the Kennedy administration...

...If the values of Official Liberalism—within their limits—are sound, they nevertheless contain some important lacunae...

...The hopes and assumptions of the experts revolve around various areas of American life which present unresolved questions and which seem to the Official Liberal to demand concrete, practical answers...

...Both the essay by Warren Weaver on science in Goals for Americans and the task force report (Jerome Wiesner, chairman) on space investigation in New Frontiers of the Kennedy Administration stress that science is a value in itself...

...II The Official Liberal approach to the problems of our society can be described as a point of view which looks to planning as the solvent of our discontents without any fundamental concern for the political or ideological source of those discontents...

...And, of course, his famous recommendation on strengthening the chairman of the agencies is part of his hope for making them effective policy-making bodies instead of Dickensian circumlocution offices...

...The degradation of science into a means to a better gadget or to prove the superiority of our leadership over that of the Russians is one of the great weaknesses of our present society...

...The very virtue of Official Liberalism—its ability to cut through the haverings of intellectual self-doubt—plays it false when it is faced with the problem of democracy...

...The Official Liberal is marvelously adept at making blueprints for all of us, but when it comes to questions of the nature of parties, the power of private groups, the problems of participation, the role of government, and other such questions, he mainly falls back on a simple pluralism which, with luck he hopes will solve all of those questions...

...Granted that things—literally, things—would be better and better organized under the Official Liberals, would the same power structure, the same class structure, which we now possess remain in the new world...

...One was produced by an outgoing administration—a fine time, one might think for an administration to think about goals, but typical of that administration...

...They will also shrink because we will be eating more...

...Professor Samuelson for President Kennedy and two experts from the Committee for Economic Development for the Goals Commission are in fundamental agreement that government planning for growth is both necessary and feasible...

...Who would really run this new society...

...For if the expert did not ignore such questions there would be little basis for his survival as an expert...

...Does Official Liberalism have any solutions to the problems of wealth and power our society poses today...

...For one cannot help wonder how different a clean, well-lighted-place would be in terms of power, or more precisely, in terms of democracy, than our present dirty, slovenly and exploitative place...

...Finally, the economy, needless to say, will provide abundant leisure and affluence for the most wayward of individuals...

...To what extent will such an approach—it can hardly be called a philosophydeaI with the need to re-distribute power as it is found within the present pluralistic system...

...It is on such unexamined concepts that he literally depends for his professional life...

...Thus it is necessary to ask whether the commitment of the Official Liberal to planning necessarily assumes, in the America of today and the future, not a technocracy or even a managerial elite—bad enough though they are—but the present bourgeois society with its exploitation or whether it will lead to fundamental changes in the nature of our society...

...The Kennedy reports, on the other hand, have the flurried appearance which the Kennedy administration is adopting from its master...

...The mass entertainment industry will continue to ruin • With apologies to Kathleen Nott, who has recently used that phrase as the title of her new book on Sweden...

...Maybe what is "wrong with America" today is the system of exploitation which has fastened itself on us as the leech it is...

...What sense of future freedom does Official Liberalism offer those who look to it...

...Man should use whatever means are at hand to solve his problems—the idea of problem-solving is basic to this neo-New Dealism—and in practice the means at hand usually end up as the federal government...

...Certainly one would expect a few words on this subject in the two works discussed above...

...Is the problem one of economics...

...It was written by The President's Commission on National Goals and is called Goals for Americans...

...Hence, too, the peculiar fact that his planning instead of having that dynamic quality usually ascribed to it, is static in its approach to the basic realities of a society...

...But the case is seldom examined by the Official Liberal...

...It does nothing of the kind...

...Is the problem one of urban disorganization...

...The word "planning" must have a modifier...

...One of the virtues of such a society and of Official Liberalism itself can be seen in the emphasis it places on science not as an operational technique to achieve "Better Things for Better Living" but as a value in and of itself...

...It is undoubtedly better to be pushed around in a clean city than a dirty city, but one is still being pushed around and after a while it becomes exasperating...

...Ill Yet questions must be put to Official Liberalism...

...Democratic beliefs today are widespread and the Official Liberal is their prime carrier...

...The New Deal has returned...

...Because Official Liberalism has not examined the power realities of American society it cannot give adequate guidance to the problems and possibilities of freedom in today's American society...

...Indeed, just to get our cities painted and the, streets washed would be a major achievement...

...Taken as a whole it was a Big Operation, and one may assume that it was intended to produce something rather definitive...

...For, as a result of that failure, it has been unable to develop any concepts of change or political reality, to develop any image, theory or vision of an on-going, developing society in which new forms of freedom grow out of old...

...Plus what...

...Such extrapolations, though accurate in fact, are unfair in tone for it must be remembered that a clean, well-lighted place is far better than a dirty, ugly, and violent place...

...All of which is to mount the accusation against Official Liberalism that its commitment to democracy, which is indeed fundamental to its being, is nevertheless more abstract than real...

...there are certain important possibilities in planning, for example, as far as equality is concerned...

...fourteen experts were asked to write essays for the Commission—which evidently could not write its own essays—and the Commission itself numbered eleven...

...His figures show that only onefifth of the total expenditure for research and development is spent on both basic and applied research, and only 7-8% of the total spent in 1957 was for basic research, i.e., only $700 to $800 million...

...Now pluralism is a grand old doctrine and one would not give it up for the world, but unless it is defined with some precision as it would operate in this particular society of today and that particular society to come it is a way of avoiding problems...

...others are of some limited importance and one is a minor masterpiece —Dean Landis' report on the administrative agencies...

...As revelations of the nature of Official Liberalism today, they are a useful insight into the mind of the Planner at work...

...Nor is there much consideration of these questions elsewhere in Official Liberalism...

...Education will be widespread and get better in quality...

...But democratic concepts are in disarray, they are more disheveled, more disorganized than they have ever been...

...He mentions transportation, communications and energy as areas in which coordination is essential...

...He would do more, for not only must the agencies take on responsibilities for planning, but various agencies must be grouped into integrated wholes to meet the demands of more general planning than any one agency can cope with...

...Is the problem education...

...the "Report" of the Goals Commission contains this odd sentence: "improvement of nutritional levels for many Americans would not only increase the work efficiency of our population but also reduce the farm surpluses...

...One of the gravest weaknesses of Official Liberalism, for all its considerable virtues, is its failure to face the question posed by planning: does the planning in question affect in any significant way the power of some men over other men...

...Are the two ideas feasible in this particular huge society...

...It is, after all, possible to consider that bourgeois democracy has certain virtues without succumbing to its fundamental assumptions concerning class and power...

...Above all else, a society under the stimulus of Official Liberalism will be a Clean, Well-lighted Place.* It will be as neat and orderly as American life will allow...

...Catherine Bauer Wurster's excellent study on a "Framework for an Urban Society" in Goals for Americans proposes to seize the crisis of Urban disorganization in order to plan the kind of urban area in which we wish to live...

...Are we to allow the television networks to continue their daily insults to the American people...

...Weaver's essay especially stresses the importance of investigation as such and also points out that for all the money the United States is supposed to spend for science it actually spends very little...

...But its refusal to tamper with the basic facts of power in its time helped to confirm the past and present distribution of power, and raises questions as to how meaningful democracy can be in clean, well-lighted places...

...There is also one minor masterpiece in the Goals for Americans publication, too, the essay by Mrs...

...More generally and exactly, will we change America into a democracy or will we allow it to remain the quasi-democracy it now is...

...And it is necessary to understand that such dependence is not a question of financial self-interest but of his fundamental project to be an expert—to do...

...There was a staff of five and the job was administered by the American Assembly of Columbia University...

...Planning would provide the solutions to the specific malfunctioning from which America suffers today, for once our diseases are identified the planner would get to work and eradicate them through human action and intelligence...

...What does Official Liberalism signify for the problems of power and democracy in our society...

...indeed, economics in their hands becomes simply a technical matter and ceases to be one of controversy over ends...

...But what is democratic planning...

...Health, it need hardly be said, will be as perfect as our climate permits...

...No doubt the New Deal helped us to get to a cleaner and better-lighted place than we were in during the 1930's...

...The executive branch of the government will become a super-planning agency having to do battle with Congress no doubt, but still getting its way on all the big decisions...

...No, it may be possible, it may be true, that the clean, well-lighted place will offer us more freedom, but it is hardly possible to be assured by the ideas of Official Liberalism...

...In preparing Goals for Americans over 100 experts were used as consultants...

...some Official Liberals at least see that the importance of science is to be found in the excitement of investigation...

...it must be democratic planning or it is of small interest, neat and tidy though it may be...

...No, romanticism will not help us now...

...no Official Liberal now speaks about "Economic Royalists"—though we have, in fact, more economic royalists than ever before...

...our dispositions, but there will be increasing opportunities for what are euphemistically called "minority interests...

...Farm surpluses will pile up but better uses will be made of them and eventually—sometime in the next century—they may even begin to shrink slightly through strict government control over the half-dozen farmers who will remain to feed the rest of us...

...In this case we are far removed indeed from the neatness and organization of a clean, well-lighted society...

...In order to help solve the problem two recent works have attempted to scrutinize America and decide on its goals...

...Plus all the awful joys of American free enterprise capitalism, which however, will be allowed to go so far and no further...

...No one, except perhaps some millions of Negroes, Puerto Ricans and other miscellaneous types, will be allowed to escape affluence...

...It will be the welfare state plus...

...She is the most radical of the experts, for she points out that it will be necessary to take some basic decisions about the way we really want to live and that it will be necessary to use big government and not the broken-down units we now have if we are to rebuild our cities...

...Culture too will come under the aegis of planning, for August Hecksher in Goals for Americans, who quite correctly has no truck with the idea that art is a matter for amateurs, would see the government create a home for art and would have both private and public funds used to establish repertory theatres, etc...

...but other than some brief remarks of Dean Landis about the difficulty of those appointed to administrative agencies in keeping the public interest to the forefront of their consciousness, there is no consideration of the question...

...For the question of democracy, like that of freedom and because it is basic to freedom, has to be re-opened again and examined all over again...