One Year On The New Frontier: The Devolution Of Demogracy
Goodman, Paul
Democratic power springs from an enlightened electorate. The neglect of this possibility in America, the failure to protect and advance it with new form and content during a century and a half...
...The difference under Roosevelt was that the Secretary would draw everybody together and inspire them with a pep talk...
...Naturally, being unpragmatic, they are continually projecting and finding scapegoats, rather than having real obstacles to overcome...
...Since slanteyed peasants are not really under one's control...
...But of course this comes to the same end result as Christiansen fears...
...It would also be dangerous...
...This was an invitation for demogogues and party-leaders to get power, and for lobbying interests, that could deliver votes and cash, to influence the politicians for their own power...
...We will have Bomb Shelters and defy them...
...2) The Pentagon, continuing, in which we must include the aristocrats of military science in Rand and Aerospace...
...They have a justified contempt for the 'fuzzy liberals' who spout generalities that have nothing to do with the concrete situations, but they don't understand that to get anywhere, you have to have an ideal, a pragmatic-end-in-view...
...The way they want to get something moving, you feel that they need to overcome something 'static' that is threatening to engulf them...
...Robert Engler has recently written a fine study of the cultural effects of the Cold War...
...Schlesinger...
...The denotation is that the activity is only practice, it is not the real thing, it is not for keeps...
...and although, politically, even the Cold Warriors rightly fear that these countries will be "lost...
...As one critic has observed, the Web of Tensions simply means that they are getting more tense...
...8) The President's entourage for special assignments, with Irish names that roll on the tongue...
...Oh, everything...
...Some in Washington say that the Education bill was beaten by a "tragic" combination of perplexities—Negro-white, parochial-public, poor states-rich states...
...That is, the program for a better quality of American life was fairly trivial to begin with (the liberals claimed that this moderation was necessary in order to win the election), but the will to achieve even this program has been lacking...
...E. g., "hard" and "soft" are applied to research, "hard" research contains numerals...
...It is estimated that three-quarters of the President's calendar is devoted to foreign and military matters, and certainly other matters are considered in this light, as fits the budget...
...One is struck by the pragmatism of such political thought, transforming the town-meeting into an experimental, self-improving unit with provision for expanding society...
...Let me illustrate the Higher Science from Aerospace, a wholly governmentsupported corporation...
...A curiosity that deserves special mention, however, is "exercise," as "A crude propaganda exercise," referring to a Soviet complaint about a Nazi in NATO...
...We put an ex-FBI man in charge of immigration...
...completely unpragmatic...
...an irrelevant activism, a "tough" "hard" "posture" (it is necessary to put every word in quotation marks), and an astounding timidity that results from trying to be different from their own class-strength and class-needs, although they have neither a new idea to give courage nor a revolutionary will to make a change...
...This is too shocking to believe...
...If the Public Sector means roads for General Motors or Urban Renewal for Webb and Knapp, it is attended to...
...it would be rich with ideas, as guaranteed by putting in or near power such notorious thinkers of new thoughts as academics from prestigious colleges...
...VII Eisenhower was unsatisfactory in many ways...
...There's loyalty...
...At present the admin istration of any sovereign State can make world-sense only by fitting into and furthering the inevitable development of the world community, and indeed by relaxing its own sovereignty...
...I am breathless with the thought that Walt Rostow etc., or even Arthur Schlesinger, imagine they can write more clearly than thinkers on the outside...
...We have seen that the Administration of active personalities is good...
...But here one doesn't know what has been decided, if anything...
...A necessity for maintaining the Roman or cool posture is to have the situation always under control and not to be embarrassed by a goof or booboo...
...I read in R. H. S. Grossman, "The aim of the exercise is clear," referring to a book he is reviewing...
...but I am indignant that such good talents should be misused for writing precis...
...This has an historical meaning...
...Thus, via Dr...
...Into what friendly countryside are the American guerrillas supposed to melt...
...people learn by deciding, including making mistakes...
...and instead, there sprang up a vast literature of criticism of the System en bloc, of the Cars, the Organization, the Suburbs, etc., etc...
...It is essential to consider the social psychology of the Cold War...
...I think that the need to produce at all costs was one reason for the Cuban goof...
...4) The true grandeur and security of the New Consensus come from these further gains: it is beginning to captivate the mass of lower-brow readers of the N. Y. Daily News and the educated suburbanites who read Luce magazines and egg on their sons to get good grades and make the prestige colleges...
...VI This brings me to the main theme of these reflections, the possible future of this character of Administration in our present democracy, the formation of what I shall call a New Consensus...
...There is gloating that our "tough" "hard" "policy" has "won" in Berlin...
...I have gone into this subject frequently elsewhere—the exacerbation, in modern conditions, of masochistic violence, Enemy-projection, and paralysis—but let me here especially mention the public mood of powerlessness, powerlessness on the job, in the bureaucracy, before the TV screen, in politics, with the police...
...I cried, "and you killed a strong reform movement...
...Rostow more for power postures...
...The worst was the speech to the Latin Americans, peppered with Spanish quotations but nobody taught him how to pronounce the words...
...and on the contrary, a slippery idealism, in the style of Luce, makes a good hipster...
...Walt Rostow is training guerrillas, since Castro did so well with them...
...And it was going to "make America move...
...He cannot grow his myth but must finally manufacture it...
...But Bobby shut up the ones who apparently had more accurate information...
...They try to circumvent the preconceived obstacles by tricks...
...Yet one might have expected it: these people, professors of law and government and history, apparently do not have any notion of what the democratic idea is...
...The election was importantly decided by the contrast of personalities on a TV screen...
...These are, again, activist-violent in disposition...
...The official stamp on this policy was the remarkable statement of J. Edgar Hoover condemning the rabid as unwitting fomenters of Communism...
...Finally, I must call attention to words like "discipline" "sacrifice" "responsibility" and "challenge," which in Kennedy's mouth have a special stoical-Catholic tinkle...
...It has no other economic plan than a war economy, no foreign policy outside the CIA, and no domestic idea at all...
...Shop," as 'over in Charley Hitch's shop...
...But when used generally, as it is, it connotes that oneself is not yet altogether for real, one is waiting to graduate and get to work...
...Important is Joseph Alsop who is said to leak hard-to-get data in order to push his activist policies and interests, e. g., the National Estimate of missiles...
...People began to join SANE...
...If some Congressmen had monkey-glands—" "This Administration is peculiarly humorless, like phony actors...
...The important fact is that, since the Administration neither can nor is willing to make structural changes, these people would not recognize an idea if they saw it...
...He is astoundingly sensitive to criticism in the press...
...Such things jolt public identification...
...Here is a collection of comments: "Lot of activism: action for the sake of action...
...With the best efforts of Madison Avenue and the History Department, such prose will not turn to poetry...
...After a year, the conception of a government of active personalities and disorderly clash has crystallized into the doctrine of the "Web of Tensions," the use of internal conflict to generate ideas...
...you can get it in a pool-room...
...Surely he means commandos...
...He has lost the professors, scientists, etc., who protest the nuclear insanity...
...4) Nor is this difficulty helped if the tense thinkers are by disposition in-turned, unfriendly, and unpragmatic...
...tary self-confidence, the political unity of a true great power...
...E$ in Fairfax county across the Potomac, and Professors Walt and Arthur are going to give weekly lectures...
...But for this fantasy to thrive, there must be adequate Actors...
...it would be a "disorderly" Administration, in the sense that ideas and people could leap-frog the chain of command and clash and have it out...
...That is, after a year in "power" under the present conditions, the Administration has begun to rewrite American history and prove that democratic power is a myth...
...Unfortunately, this entails many contradictions...
...Given the rising protest of so many respected scientists and students and even children, and many mothers, pushing the Civil Defense might result in riots on the streets...
...for the college-bound, the professors are reassuring of tolerance, and their schools are among the most prestigious...
...Applied to industry, the unit is the soviet...
...The Wall Street stalwarts—Dillon, McCone, Foster, etc.—were brought back as they would have been if Nixon had won...
...Since the bomb shelters are scientifically fraudulent, they will not deceive the Russians...
...In my opinion, they do the same with the Russians...
...It is now only the young pacifists who are treated sharply as naive, misguided, and dangerous idealists...
...It is the cool and activist role-playing of vitality in a situation of impotence...
...These are mostly younger men—like the young instructors or assistant-professors at universities, who suggest curriculum changes...
...In 3 years Chile will be Communist even without Castro...
...g., a concrete plan to countervail the technologized FBI or the mass-media—at once one hears the most subtle niceties of definition and an amazing purity about constitutionality, possible corruption and abuse, the right of the public to "choose," etc., etc...
...This had to be dropped by Congress...
...nor, of course, do they want them...
...VIII A new Center is necessary...
...The next meaning—reinforced by the academic metaphor itself—is that all activity is merely academic, detached from any serious possibility of life...
...We cannot feed famine, though we have a surplus...
...if it means community experiments, work camps for youth, public defenders, or even primary education, it is nicely scrutinized...
...Gordon Christiansen, the chemist, argues that the newer tactics of the Cold War are solely for home consumption...
...But most important, his regime was universally regarded as dangerously boring...
...Addressed to an inferior in a bureaucracy it can be crushingly one-up, for it means that there are grown-ups who do real things...
...but in terms reminiscent of the White Man's burden, Walt Rostow mentions the responsibility of the "North" for developing the "South...
...2) If anyone in the debate does disagree in a way awkward for the Cold War policy—and especially if his predictions prove correct—he is dropped...
...Of course, in an enterprise this big there's bound to be confusion and bad communications...
...But the chief outlet for frustrated action is, of course, armaments and threatening postures...
...It comes to the same thing...
...he has even written for Liberation about civil disobedience...
...But secondly, and most important, the adequate administrative inactivism of Eisenhower was symbolically quite inadequate for the affluent rigors of the Cold War...
...On the other hand, to alibi, to be touchy to criticism, apprehensive of being misunderstood fearful of future criticism, timid of commitment, forced to be consistent —these postures are also glaringly "weak...
...it therefore had—especially in the retrospect of having survived it—a certain solid impressiveness...
...Naturally I do not know the tone in the middle of the Web of Tensions...
...The strengthening of the FBI suits both the righteousness of the stupider and the conformism of the brighter...
...e. g., to provide primary education, Jefferson suggested the militiacompany or hundred...
...I don't think so...
...What the activity and thought were to be toward, what the purpose was, was not clear—there were no issues in the campaign, no effort to enlighten the electorate— but it was called the New Frontier...
...In the centralized power-complex that these people are committed to, and with the baroque conception of national sovereignty that t hey represent in a world that has come to have a different nature, it is probably impossible to govern...
...As might be expected, the glossary and style has strains of (1) Madison Avenue...
...The field of action has been international affairs...
...and tabulating the points" (Prof...
...As McGeorge Bundy put it on December 6, "It would be better if Western Europe were one great power with the economic strength, the mili...
...3) Armed services: "tough" and other terms of panic about masculinity...
...unlike with Eisenhower, the Game Theorists now seem at home...
...Thus, if I were asked how to save us from Russian bombs, the first step would be to free the TV channels, for real controversy and true reporting on international affairs, for criticism and programming in our municipal and vocational lives, so that people would have to face the things that matter...
...How much obstruction can you put up with...
...they always figure it out by Analysis and guessing...
...The picture on the box was the same as the contents...
...X The New Consensus is an ignoble prospect...
...V As apparent from all the foregoing, the demography of the Administration consists of the Status Quo, the Coalition on which it was elected, and its own characteristic groups, viz.: (1) Wall Street Republicans, continuing...
...Perpetuation of errors...
...These latter, since more mentally busy, are more bellicose than professional generals whose aims, on retirement, seem to be intensely economic and therefore they have an incentive to retire alive...
...They talk about the dilemmas inherited from Eisenhower...
...Omit Kennedy and ask about the professors...
...Even Latin America is increasingly frustrating...
...On the other hand, stalwart party liberals like Gov...
...Culturally, he was out of place as the head of a Great Power...
...But such persons could commit suicide...
...I think they were badly stung by that remark last spring that they were great dribblers but never made a basket...
...Even the coalition that put Kennedy in office is too variegated to be maintained, and I shall try to show that he is re-forming that coalition to be a better Cold War "leader...
...the sense that "nothing can be done...
...You say that the Americans in general have a neurotic feeling of powerlessness, but you don't realize that those in power are equally frustrated...
...7) A number of genuine intellectuals, interested in prudent and ideal action...
...Finally, on December 10, 1961, we have the answer in the Washington Post: Scholars in government "are good for ungarbling what thinkers on the outside have written...
...A philosopher close to the President now explains to me that the best to be hoped from government is to "mitigate the evils of modern life...
...By the way, what will prevent French rights and German skill and money from becoming a third nuclear giant...
...The FBI is more lower-class, the CIA more middle-class...
...the President asked even...
...These are the solid centers of Cold War fervor and Cold War mentality...
...This Niebuhrian political theory is not very wise, for if the aim is merely to mitigate, and not attack the structure and causes of the evils, one will not even mitigate, for the structure aggrandizes itself and produces new evils...
...we cannot give help to peoples except through our "friends," their rulers who rob them...
...Wofford is an excellent and thoughtful man...
...Presumably it is a government of men, and not an automatic machine, or what is the professor doing there...
...since from the beginning one is operating by a preconceived scheme, there are bound to be blunders and the threatening posture renders them more disastrous and more embarrassing...
...but otherwise the "public sector," that Ken Gal braith was vocal about, is not further nourished...
...We cannot educate without prop agandizing...
...Washington Star, Dec...
...In this context, "challenge" is the kind of strenuous excitement possible to persons who, having given up their internal spontaneity, rally to an external demand...
...This powerlessness projects itself in the fantasy of the Big News on the Front Page, the terrific Drama of We and They mutually frowning for absolute stakes...
...111 This is not a happy spectacle...
...An egghead is one who, seduced by intellect and truth, might by chance say something inexpedient or something poetical that illumines the scene...
...Of course I am judging by a high standard, but otherwise why bother...
...expenditures for highways, in 00,000,000 are rarely questioned for eight or nine figures...
...Most often, the style is that of a frustrated juvenile delinquent who fears he might be judged inactive and probably powerless...
...They are apprehensive of obstacles that don't even exist, for example, opposition in the Appropriations Committee on issues where there is no opposition...
...In the present Administration we have a remarkable and organic amalgam of the heirs and co-workers of America First and McCarthy and the heirs of Democratic Liberalism...
...The amalgam of Murrow and Luce in Information has been masterly...
...Oren Harris of Arkansas...
...Inevitably the subordinates of the agencies would be unchanged, but in a large number of cases the same types were returned to make policy, or obstruct "policy...
...That, on the domestic scene, there is no such new idea nor will to useful change, you can observe by looking out the window or thumbing through Life...
...These are characteristic and fall into various types: e. g., Schlesinger, Wofford, or Galbraith more for thought and speeches...
...You get a memorandum an hour before the meeting, so there's no time to research it and back up your opposition...
...What is puzzling, however, is that the Administration is continually plaintively asking for ideas...
...Eisenhower's last...
...we cannot even talk to theChinese...
...For the News readers, there is an advantage in the friendly ambience of Catholic humanismplus-discipline, quite oblivious of any notion of civil liberties or social change...
...others, however, say that Dillon could afford it, that it was legislatively han dled precisely in order to lose, and what evidence is there that Kennedy cares anything about Education...
...We play the game of Chicken...
...Aren't these people shameless...
...Well, in my agency the chief complaint is that there isn't any contact with the bright young men who have access to the White House...
...but of course the son of Joseph Kennedy had no such foolish idea...
...5) Last but not least, the inventive out-going moment of the Tension, the reason for it altogether, is horribly inhibited by the fact that the thinkers don't have any power anyway...
...Presumably this is for the utility of power rather than the vanity of power...
...Reuther, of the (JAW, is said to be a useful friend...
...If he had a policy, why didn't he fire them, all and put in his own people to pursue his policy...
...Nixon plugged as hard as he could his ad hominem clash with Khrushchev, and indeed thereby almost won the election...
...Why should these people seek office unless they had a useful idea and felt indispensable to execute it...
...Unlike Roosevelt who got mad and told them off...
...Needless to say, however, when Cultural Freedom and the Encounter of ideas are instruments of the CIA, means have been readily found to subsidize intellectual groups, even though nothing could be more treasonable to cultural freedom and the encounter of ideas...
...he said that the vast majority of his people never heard of America...
...and anyway, as the clincher, Congress will never appropriate money for such a purpose...
...Now in this essay I want to show that this image of a government, of active persons with no idea, indeed fits the real situation better than its only rival did, and the voters were esthetically wise to choose it—by a squeak...
...As a critic has observed, "The wisdom of a policy is measured by the opinion of Mr...
...His jaw is commensurate with General MacArthur's.* (Russian generals scowl...
...His first official act was to continue the existing FBI and CIA, and that was already the end of working toward a new America or a new world...
...Kennedy seems to me to be simple...
...The war-budget is at least 25 per cent more than Mr...
...In this grave period, labor must discipline itself—" "The press must discipline itself and assume responsibility—") This is not the Catholicism that was touchy during the campaign, the prospect of Pope John in the White House (oh, to have had that fat man instead of Kennedy or Nixon...
...There is then nothing for it but to strengthen reprisals and enlarge the arsenal...
...For a rough analogy, consider the Roman "Republic" and its senators and consuls during the early Empire...
...It is not possible to relent, atone, make amends, for these postures are "weak...
...As a matter of fact, there is a lot of loose power around, in Congress for instance, but he doesn't wield it...
...This isn't helped by an Intelligence that feeds them false facts...
...But what was tragic was that grass-roots politics, like the agrarian and labor movements, also followed the centralized bureaucratic style...
...There is already agitation for peace throughout the world, sporadically, with increasing frequency, and by increasing numbers...
...the scene is, as might be feared, the same, only a year more so...
...With the stepped-up production of military hardware, there ought to be no increase in unemployment, even a decrease...
...We saw that it is in the nature of the Cold War, where there is aggressive activism without pragmatic power, that there must be blunders, embarrassing at home and abroad, and even economically injurious and so leading to panic among American businessmen who are notoriously unable to take the long view...
...That is, we are the Jester...
...He sounded like the anti-anti-Communists of 1953...
...The Kennedy Administration came in—one speaks as if it were there a thousand years...
...2) Rand Corporation: "escalate," "hardware," "parameters"—"what are the parameters of the problem...
...and then (as Murray Kempton judges) Kennedy is animated, genuine, physically courageous, and even unselfconsciously humorous...
...Lehman and Mrs...
...We cannot strengthen the parliament of nations lest it evade our grip...
...Let me revert to my opening sentence, the failure of democracy by neglecting to improve the electorate...
...Kennedy believes that there is a terrific force of reaction, that mustn't be confronted too fast, and one mustn't go too far...
...4) FBI and CIA, continuing...
...In my opinion this allied policy is better than Barry Goldwater's isolated fortress of America, but it will not exactly kindle the enthusiasm of the nations toward the peace and unity of the world...
...In the welfare state, there is a nice discrimination between expenditures that subsidize large enterprises and those that are worthless or peanuts...
...Or maybe doubtful he should be there at all...
...A gentleman high in the Administration has said that "Youth is not a class...
...exclaimed the Professor...
...Niebuhr, the sage of The New Leader, we get the astoundingly un-Pr'otestant rapprochement of Harvard and the neo-Jesuitsl Washington at present has a pleasantly free atmosphere of discussion...
...A powerful national government can act in them only by contributing to them, perhaps leading...
...2) With the Jacksonian revolution, as de Tocqueville was quick to see, the democratic idea was already abandoned, for the power now resided in the majority of people as they were, with their passions and prejudices uneducated by the responsible give-and-take in a face-to-face meeting that had to make practical decisions and use tax-money...
...Take the private-shelter story in Life: a press-officer gave it out and there was a howl afterwards...
...Unfortunately, the end is not yet...
...It is as with civil liberties: if one merely protects them, without increasing the opportunities of freedom, one loses them...
...he missed its meaning because he is (transiently, I hope) a chump...
...The address to the Manufacturers strongly makes this point: when business is good, we look good in the world...
...Rather, just the tightening of the existing suburban conformism, grade-seeking education, FBI protection, and mass-media, with a little addition of "discipline," "responsibility," and "sacrifice...
...11 To get a better view of Washington after a year, let us turn from these Top philosophers to those who are not in the Web of Tensions, though not a thousand miles away...
...In the present ground-rules of the White House, however, it works out as follows: (1) There is a careful preselection of the combatants, so that no too obstreperous voice will disturb the proceedings, or laugh...
...The breakdown of common sense and morals in the continuing Cold War make it more and more indifferent who will be "guilty...
...I don't want to be unfair, though it is hard not to be sarcastic...
...since often one's bestconsidered efforts, as in Venezuela, work out opposite to what one planned...
...If there were then a major reverse— supposing Brazil, Chile, Venezuela would follow Castro—the United States would be a police-state...
...The call-to-glory is warmer and more personal, but it is juvenile...
...The later years of Eisenhower were marked by a resurgence of Youth, acting now in parapolitical movements, Birchite or Beatnik or Pacifist...
...This is strictly the Cold VJar situation...
...The chief current idea seems to be the perfecting of the arrangements, begun by Truman and continued by Eisenhower, with the big new power associated with the Common Market...
...How can a figure-of-history be spiritually inhibited...
...That is, the outlet for frustrated activity is a scene where activity is frustrated...
...and, as poor people know, expenditures in 00 or even 0.00 require a means test and a quiz on morals...
...Let me point out, however, that it pretty accurately describes the behavior of a crew of hipsters, as Mailer called them in 1960, not foreseeing the consequences...
...They don't know the difference between real power and the juvenile trappings of power...
...Also, the present Administration came in not only with a tenuous majority but also by a coalition—e...
...In all these respects Kennedy's Administration is a find...
...it's like the waste of skills in the Army...
...What...
...He championed decentralization, for people can reasonably decide only what they know about intimately...
...But even Harriman would be called a liberal...
...IX What is the intellectual Idea of the New Consensus...
...Madison hit on federalism as a revolutionary device for experimentation, for if the small group made a mistake, it did little harm to the whole...
...5) The fuzzy liberals, part of the coalition who don't really belong...
...Most important of all, finally, with the Kennedy Administration there emerges for the first time the possibility of a National Unity to "wage" the Cold War...
...Oscar Gass deliciously reports the expression "posture of sacrifice" as a threat...
...Roosevelt— and apparently even Bowles and Stevenson —never quit when thereis the appearance of "influence" (they supported Wagner, and Mrs...
...how does the professor, as an intellectual individual, keep down his nausea in front of the TV screen and not have to change...
...In the Eisenhower chain-of-command routine, there was at some level a definite decision, also routine and usually lousy...
...and if a region is not a battleground, it is not considered useful to help at all...
...Also, they are not brain-trusters, pragmatists who might come out with future-thinking like the TVA or the uncensored WPA...
...Instead, the people would merely vote on issues and party-programs...
...It is said that one reason that Woodrow Wilson hesitated to declare war was that he knew that the industries vastly expanded and empowered by war could never be displaced from power after the war...
...3) By a modest social legislation and a modest advance in Civil Rights, to hold the unions and organized Negro groups, while reassuring business and convincing the Southerners that, in our world position, a progress toward desegregation is inevitable...
...Is it boring because we're sick of talking about personalities instead of issues, or is it boring because Kennedy is boring...
...Like the artist and live person he is, Mailer responded accurately to the type during the campaign...
...They did not campaign for these purposes, but I am puzzled why, except for the politicians, they did campaign...
...More serious has been the error of the liberals who were "realistic" and who, instead of going about their business of dissenting and building a movement that they believed in, supported Kennedy on the theory that, once elected, he would drop the morals and techniques that got him the nomination...
...There is no adviser on Civil Liberties...
...About half a dozen members of this Club have access...
...Eisenhower's Administration, in its personnel and motives and chain-ofcommand staff-work, rather simply expressed these underlying existing forces and inertias...
...Our emergency is not in Berlin, etc., as the newspapers keep proclaiming but in the economic, social, and psychological need for the Cold War...
...But of course this double standard of scrutiny has long been familiar to us in the mysterious law of Economics whereby expenditures in 000,000,000, for armament, are never questioned with regard to nine or ten figures...
...Unlike the previous crew, the professors know from experience that propositions do not bite, and they do make the best conversationpieces...
...For two reasons: first, the public will to politics, whether or not it was possible to exert power, had absolutely no object on which to exercise itself...
...We have now had the Cold War for fifteen years and it is about time that it became politically domesticated, with its own ethos and personnel...
...I myself have been urged, by one who has access, to continue my indispensable "role of dissent...
...Is he still worrying about the close vote...
...On the other hand, from the beginning Kennedy visited Nixon and Eisenhower and as far as General MacArthur...
...And of course the behavior of all the other sovereignties—including new-fledged cannibals and feudal lordlings as well as tall generals and ideologists even crazier than our own—confounds the frustration...
...Let us go back to the Professors, who are not now class-objectionable because, in principle, everybody who is not underprivileged goes to college...
...Yet De Sapio did deliver New York City in the nominating convention, after oddly backing Symington, although any honest poll would have given most of the city to Stevenson...
...Persons like myself and my friends are gently encouraged as "utopians...
...We then have, in scheme, the following devolution: (1) For Jefferson, the chief use of democracy was to improve the electorate and so itself...
...4) Lionel-Trilling-literary, especially "posture...
...His lack of moral courage is no defect because, with Franco, Chiang Kai-shek, and tommygun-defended bombshelters, we are far beyond principle anyway...
...But it doesn't help when they play it cool and by ear...
...With whatever hopes and purposes the Administration came in (and, as Oscar Gass has pointed out, these were already quite marginal and inoffensive to anybody), it has met the massiveness of the status quo and its established powers, venal, blimpish, police-ridden, prejudiced, and illiberal...
...Since I am nervous about the self-discipline entailed in the New Consensus, I ask about Civil Liberties...
...ours tend to jut the jaw...
...All this talk around here finally tends to revolve around what He is like, and that's boring...
...Being in office, however, is less favorable than campaigning for the display of jumpy vitality well-heeled, morally uncommitted and intellectually shallow...
...Like asking Frost to alter his poem at the Inaugural...
...In like manner, the scientists make bombs and missiles, but they do not make policy and they do not strike to enforce peace...
...Most of this was a one-upping cynical product of the system itself, yet it did not express dissent and was disillusioning to the young...
...All this was regularized after the Second World War...
...So it becomes a symbiosis: since he takes them seriously, they are flattered and give him a good press, and he gets sucked in...
...To these workers the effect of the Web of Tensions is confusion, the feeling of purposelessness or divided purpose, of being out of contact and therefore absolutely frustrated when their earnest efforts are disregarded for reasons that cannot be explained to them...
...Though he is high-toned himself, he has a nice family...
...he is in error...
...To the horror of John Birch, Inc., the TV attitude toward the Communists is often understanding and almost admiring—they are a powerful enemy, we shall have to confront them for "a generation and maybe two generations"— I quote from a TV documentary called The Remarkable Comrades...
...to revive civil liberties and try to improve the quality of American life...
...Then why did you support him...
...Since, by this philosophy, man is incurably stupid and his institutions evil, we must not get too hot to reform this or that present evil...
...But this was soon re-integrated into the bureaucratic central government by the paternalism of Roosevelt and his Agencies...
...Maybe the chief use of this Administration, especially after the last, is that it shows that livelier, better educated, and more likable people are even more boring in this situation, unless they stand for something...
...At least Eisenhower was a genuine Rotarian...
...The sphere of free action diminishes...
...The political units select their federal delegates...
...More big money, more unashamed tax-dodgers, more cops, and more army...
...He is his own Secretary of State...
...I cannot agree with otherwise excellent observers that we can write off the New Frontier as simply another sell for business as usual, for history does not simply repeat...
...But the problem, it seems to me, is an existential one...
...Bundy warns that our rapprochement with Europa might amount to a Rich Man's Club against the rest of the world—yes, so it might...
...Masturbating proves you are weak and makes you weak...
...The impotence is caused partly by obstacles and partly by their characters...
...It is simpler to take it as the inevitable accumulation of frenzied expedients, as with the beast in The Burrow...
...By the way, why should he...
...So I demur...
...but how is their own policy any different...
...He is a great one for the style, the nuance, of life...
...Robert Engler speaks of the society of the continuing Cold War as a "garrison state...
...But an American administration is bedeviled in these things by business as usual and militarism, provincialism and jingoism...
...4) The imminent breakdown of the system in 1929 brought back a surge of popular participation in some respects not unlike the age of Jackson...
...The Roman style is highly esteemed: tough, terse, we play for keeps...
...This would be literally the despotism of the majority that Mill feared, manipulated by a popular Administration to meet a chronic Emergency...
...Within three months of being in office, Kennedy had lost the more earnest liberals who had supported him anyway only because of their congenital obsession not to leave a blank space on a ballot...
...I asked a young Ethiopian what was the image of America in Ethiopia...
...But the aristocrats of the violent-minded are the new-come professors from the old OSS, trained in the prudence of Strategic Bombing...
...officially existing in the Pentagon, the Treasury, the FBI, the Civil Service, the Scientific corporations, a large part of Congress...
...Bundy more for administering...
...it doesn't look like that...
...Yet the President himself is also a serious man, sage in the French sense, commensurate with the need for caution in the Emergency...
...The answer is Analysis and Tabulation...
...This Hegelian notion is pyschologically correct...
...And so they think...
...They act on schematic preconceptions, with a crazy emphasis on Analysis and Facts...
...Con• sidering the theme of Hawthorne's tale, this is really carrying the profiles of history to the point of juvenile hybris...
...In Game Theory, the Web of Tensions is finally isolated completely from any contact with common reason, biological safety, or even any opponent except one's projections...
...if it found something useful, it could be adopted by others and benefit the whole...
...5) The election of 1960 was remarkable in that now there was not even the semblance of issues or programs for the voters to decide between...
...Newsmen had to edit him, satire had to be suppressed, lest the image of government break down altogether...
...Attempts to control them, e. g., by silver legislation and trust-busting, themselves centralized and increased the governmental power...
...These are called, probably unfairly, the Irish Mafia...
...3) At best in a megalopolis like the United States government, the Web of controversy is far removed from even its own staff-workers, who nevertheless have to provide relevant materials and know what they are doing when they execute orders...
...and also, 1 think, it is too ill-considered as a political policy for such astute politicians...
...But if it is a matter of lending a much greater sum to a railroad that every banker has rejected as a bad risk, then there is no difficulty, there is a much looser interpretation of the public interest, and the Administration is willing to push...
...They then naturally withdraw into the usual bureaucratic apathy, now not even orderly...
...But to no reasonable person's surprise, the Administration proves, after the election, to have the same basic character as when the candidate was wresting the nomination and waging an uphill campaign...
...There had ceased to be a democracy even in form...
...The New York Times has editorially described his interest as "tepid...
...This gets you coming and going...
...to diversify and decentralize our economy...
...First, they are not eggheads...
...In my opinion, the present Administration is committed to the Cold War (despite some evidence, I cannot believe it plans a first-strike nuclear war...
...6) The professors...
...so their purpose, he says, must be a calculated deception of the Americans, to prepare for our making a first strike...
...They never think of clearing up an imbiguity by going and asking...
...With the best will in the world, the status quo is a rocky mass to move...
...I am then lectured to the effect that "if you had lived in the Administration of Jefferson, you would have been dissatisfied in the same way...
...You ask, what do they talk about in the White House...
...The plan for the New Consensus, therefore, emerges as follows: (1) To drop the trouble-making liberals as quietly as possible...
...One had the impression that Cuba, etc., was intimidating in this way, as if a gang suddenly realized they were on a tougher block than they had been brought up on...
...If the Cold War is to be relaxed and catastrophe prevented, we must do it by action outside of their politics, by every means and on every relevant issue...
...He is vigorous and has physical courage...
...His musicale has been praised by Paul Henry Lang who was so brutal to Ike...
...Civil Rights for Negroes are never spoken of as social justice but always as enhanc ing our Image in Africa and Asia...
...We cannot exchange goods with half the world...
...the NAM to send him ideas...
...But he is a professor from Notre Dame and his view on civil disobedience is that we cannot take away a man's God-given right to rot in jail (he does not go on to Hobbes' dictum that the State breaks the social compact if it jails you, and it's your natural duty to escape...
...The Pentagon could become only more so...
...his brother and sister-in-law have formed a study group " In the East Wing of the White House hangs a picture of the Great Stone Face...
...so that in spite of the bureaucracy they pulled together and got going...
...After a year, including a Hundred Days and everything, and having learned that it is powerless and irrelevant except to "lead" in an inten sified Cold War (which is itself, of course, powerless and irrelevant to any human good), the boyish elan is more sober...
...The sense of duty does not seem to be himself, but his submissive—and evasive—obedience to some grown-ups...
...The old-fashioned diplomacy of J. F. Dulles, as brinkmaniy as it was, still did not provide sufficient popular identification for so immense and continuing a deadlock...
...We cannot engage in space-exploration without competing, nor develop modern technology without polluting the atmosphere...
...This is called the Cold War, and of course this has become the greatest frustration of all, since the final and only proof of power, to fight and win, entails suicide and losing...
...It is the more moralCatholicism of the little boy who disciplines himself from masturbating and checks off his victorious days on the calendar...
...g., of urban Negro preachers and southern politicians, of leftists and financiers—quite impossible to maintain...
...Kennedy took full responsibility for it, like a Roman—and made full use of the scapegoat that he had poor Intelligence...
...As philosophers, they affirm a broad tolerance of ideas and an absolute pessimism about ideal or "utopian" action...
...Wagner is a hopeless boob...
...He does his homework and learns the Facts...
...Any basic function could be the principle for the small political unit...
...With all his solid virtues and genuine Rotarian togetherness and Everyman's ignorance, he was often ludicrous as a Chief of State...
...They have given up citizenly independence and freedom of criticism in order to be servants of the public and friends of the cops...
...For instance, when three or four of us ask another Harvard professor to put a little zip into counteracting the nausea of the mass-media—we propose to him a couple of excellent libertarian plans and are even ready to write the legislation and outline the campaign to arouse public opinion—we are treated to the popular wisdom that "people get what they want" and "what great art was ever produced by subsidy...
...The interesting and Iong-range movement of the world has to do with increasing communications, ex change of people, the vanishing of colonialism and the rise of backward peoples from poverty, regional economic cooperation for mutual advan tage...
...3) Through the 19th century, these non-public and non-governmental powers, bankers and industrialists, vastly increased their influence...
...The implication is, partly, that the carping critics really have no alternatives to suggest...
...He is intelligent—not in the sense that we speak of our friends as intelligent, but in that he can read rapidly through a reasoned memorandum and catch the drift...
...Posture' is the favorite word...
...10, 1961...
...The openness to ideas, the hunger for ideas, in fact works out as follows: When a radical reform is proposed—e...
...Roosevelt is now for bomb-shelters if they are community bomb-shelters...
...Now what are the characteristics of such a symbolic government, and what might be its future development...
...Alsop's tack is as follows: two years ago he said there was a missile gap, so we had to build fast...
...We tend to take lightly Jefferson's famous remark about the necessity for a revolution every twenty years, every new generation, but it is probably literally true, to renew democracy as he conceived it...
...Youth has held on a little longer—with the Peace Corps and all —but is pulling away fast in all directions...
...The neglect of this possibility in America, the failure to protect and advance it with new form and content during a century and a half of expanding area and population, of complicating economy and frequently revolutionized technology, and broadening relations with the rest of the world, has resulted in an electorate so demoralized that it is a question if it is possible to govern democraticaIIy at all...
...To learn this kind of practical wisdom, you do not need to go to Harvard...
...A horror is "wargasm," meaning all-out retaliation, which I recommend to Mailer for his hipster-theory...
...now he says that the gap was exaggerated, we are way ahead, so we can take risks...
...There is no other figure whose background encompasses McCarthy (and so guarantee that he is not soft on communism) and the Liberal Democrats (and so guarantees that there will be no wage-cuts during the war-economy...
...This is puzzling...
...for if such a national unity can fully form, we shall drift into a kind of fascism of the majority...
...Finally, "There you are...
...They did not run, they were not elected, to thwart the "industrial-military complex," as the departing President called it: to make peace and internationalize the world...
...and on the same day the President plugged for trade arrangements with Europa...
...All members of the Administration are experts in Game Theory...
...The more hip age-level of the same frustrationsyndrome is Game Theory applied to war...
...The kind of revolutionary attitudes and do-or-die attempts at education that would make for government and tend again toward democratic power, are beyond the talents of these people...
...This group is also characteristic of the Administration and gives it a livelier tone than its predecessor...
...by the 1950s there existed one massive Organized System, inert or expanding by its own law, immovable by any political public power, and administered, rather than governed, by the administration of Eisenhower...
...British...
...Since it is necessary to put up an appearance of being alive, one then adopts a posture or stance...
...Discussions of domestic "policy" fell to an all-time low...
...this is democratic centralism from below...
...These secular movements occur, of course, according to their own laws, independent of Washington...
...Both vested interests and the socialpsychology of the people (and the influence of the vested interests in the social-psychology of the people) are fixed on the Cold War...
...For the remainder of this essay, let us trace the lineaments of the New Consensus as a further devolution of American democracy...
...Rather, as we have seen, the Professors do Analysis and Tabulate Facts...
...Sanitize" is very good: it means to doctor a report, as to Congress, to take out the virulence...
...9) Besides, there is an unofficial night-life circle, generally upperclass and violent-minded...
...So we are presented with the embarrassingly unimpressive spectacle of impotence among men who, by their personality, intelligence, and freer methods have promised to make America move...
...I did not have the chance to see Harris Wofford, the adviser on Civil Rights, since he was out of the country...
...These causes are intrinsically related, for if the United States were not the kind of society it has become, its Administration could work toward a world order...
...It was the chance of getting the Democratic machine away from De Sapio...
...But it's my city...
...Jefferson was not, in fact, given to ill-considered slogans nor even dogmatism...
...The pressing problems of Youth are recognized by the Administration either as delinquency to be handled by the Justice Department or in terms of the few thousand, FBI screened, in the Peace Corps...
...really to help backward peoples according to their needs and customs rather than for our own profits and war-aims in alliance with their ruling cliques...
...Yet here too, because of circumstances, action is impotent—except for the one grim potency of destroying everything...
...Must we not assume that "tragic" bureaucratic mishaps and failures-to-communicate are importantly due to the persistence of forces that want no change...
...Soldiers are mobilized and will perhaps be demobilized...
...Economic controls, social insurance, and other welfare began to break down altogether the formal division between government and the monopolies and other great powers of society...
...This is younger than hipster, but it must be remembered that in international affairs statesmen always regress to more adolescent attitudes, whether friendly or hostile...
...3) Bureaucracy and Civil Service in the other agencies, also mostly continuing...
...Foreign Aid is a sad example, as if the racketeering governments in the aid-countries were not intractable enough...
...I am told, "Bobby Kennedy is not against civil liberties, he does not have any notion of what civil liberties are...
...And of course the stresses and dislocations of war speeded up these processes...
...It was the end of the Jacksonian idea, since with mass-communications and national commodities, people's passions and prejudices were themselves nationalized...
...I0 iv The impotence of the administration is due, I have said, to the past down-slope of our history and its present irrelevance to world historymaking...
...But Kennedy says, 'Now Jimmy Reston shouldn't have said a thing like that.' " "He calls in Life to explain himself to them...
...So the Center can go this far left...
...2) To exclude and ridicule the Extreme Right...
...he failed to remember that, as Kant said, a characteristic of art is to be Zweck ohne Zweck, purposive without a purpose...
...but we must ask also what are the moods and paralysis in the culture that demand such a sustained, pointless, menacing, and potentially catastrophic enterprise...
...The preposterous syntax in the President's speeches: 'Ask not—' 'Let no one think, etc.,' especially when he occasionally mispronounces common words...
...To my ear, in the rhetoric of Kennedy's big set speeches, there is an incompatibility between the two strains of the stoical-Catholic and the figure-of-history...
...Kennedy can take care of himself in public and with his peers...
...but in stupider times his Enlightenment daring seems outlandish...
...Attacking Kefauver's anti-drug-monopoly bill, the spokesman of Aerospace explained that it would retard progress in space exploration, e. g., in developing medicines for victims of nuclear fallout...
...will we get out of it alive?—after a marvelously established regime of business as usual...
...Given this much and the continued support of, for example, Senator Humphrey (the Senator is alleged to have said, "When I accepted the leadership, I gave up liberal principles"), the Administra tion can rely on the ADA milieu of the N. Y. Post, without impeding further gains...
...Meantime, during that century and a half, while the democratic power was being corrupted and was dwindling, other kinds of power and inertia have boldly filled up the vacuum, up to our present feudal system of monopolies, military and other bureaucracies, party machines, communications networks, and Established institutions...
...one is not convinced of his moral courage...
...But to my mind the most alarming clue of what the Administration promises on civil liberties was its bland, and entirely innocent, proposal to raise the news-rates in order to make the Post Office pay for itself...
...It was embarrassing...
...The Administration would be, however, the necessary symbol of government...
...But expenditures for useful domestic purposes, in 000,000 or even 0,000, are most strictly scrutinized...
...We may here include Robert Kennedy...
...It would be a rule of things by active personalities instead of a bureaucratic staff...
Vol. 9 • January 1962 • No. 1
