Are the Liberals Killing Liberalism?
FITCH, ROBERT E.
Are the Liberals Many refuse to admit past errors or scrap outworn dogmas Killing Liberalism? By Robert E. Fitch Dean and Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion Ancient...
...At this moment, American political liberalism exhibits the symptoms of such a self-righteous remnant...
...But when Government and leadership are as they should be, the American people can stand even worse in death and taxes...
...The liberty of the preacher, the professor and the writer was a freedom of thought and of expression, and the commodity he owed society consisted of truth and goodness...
...Its values are centered not only in the Government, but in the home, in professional associations, business corporations, labor unions, churches, universities, and all the various forms of human association in a free society...
...Every shift in the center of power in society is accompanied by a purge...
...Is it possible that those who now call themselves liberals must in their turn become the new reactionaries...
...But it was true in that purge, as in the present one, that the judgment against the class as a whole was not a discriminating one, and that the innocent were punished with the guilty...
...Must it be one of the ironies of our history??as in Plato's day??that liberty should be assassinated by the liberals...
...But as I listen to the lamentations of the liberals, I am curiously reminded of a scene some twenty years ago when other persons sat around and abused "that man" in the White House and told stupid jokes about lady Eleanor and railed against the iniquities of the New Deal...
...But while the capitalist was reforming his character, the politician was gradually becoming the "dirty" fellow, and the professor was letting his brain become clogged with dogma...
...Fischer discussed in Harper's...
...Was not this what the pastor of their church, or their professor of sociology, had always told them...
...It was organized into a few giant corporations, which represented a monopolistic concentration far in excess of that of any business corporation in American history...
...Few liberals have had the candor of Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Most significant, however, is the fact that, in the one-sentence definition of liberalism Mr...
...Also, along with a new prosperity, labor had found new power...
...A liberal society is not a society that has a fixation on some one agency and some one technique of salvation...
...The New Deal was humanitarian, idealistic and reforming...
...to be a landlord was to be a leech...
...What we have now, then, is the clean-minded and public-spirited capitalist arrayed against corrupt politicians, predatory labor leaders, and well-meaning but weak-minded professors...
...Just why the new industrial population of the South should not enlarge the ranks of the liberals, or just why all these forces should come to fruition in November of 1952, is not explained...
...In each instance, there is the abuse of a sacred liberty and the punishment for that abuse...
...the Fair Deal was a program to establish labor in privileges and powers it already had...
...This analogy, I know, must be unpalatable to some persons...
...Current American political history suggests the concept of the self-Righteous Remnant...
...No doubt the change in character owed a lot to the severe discipline imposed on the capitalist by the New Deal and the Fair Deal...
...Now, one may believe that it would have been a privilege to help elect Mr...
...One remembers an episode in Herbert Agar's Pursuit of Happiness in which Agar explains why the American people had to elect to a second term the man who was probably the worst President in our history??General Grant...
...it is not even being indoctrinated with a set of ideas...
...Let us concede that, by the end of the 1920s, capitalism had become the "abomination of desolation"??made stupid by its own delusions of grandeur, eaten away by corruption and dishonesty, infecting all of society with its shortsighted rapacity, and sowing poverty and injustice where it pretended to reap prosperity...
...It had the political power to dictate to Government, and it had the economic power to build or to lay waste...
...For one thing, the youth he celebrates is not being taught to think and to choose for itself...
...or Wall Street??then liberalism is dead...
...But there is a more serious symptom...
...By this time, the capitalist appeared pure as compared to the politician, and disinterested as compared to the professor...
...The point is that the Democratic party was not at fault, and the American people were not really responsible, for the outcome of the election...
...Indeed, we may be confident that they are not...
...But the heirs of this tradition are already Don Quixotes in politics, pathetic caricatures of a once-noble ideal, who can only tilt vainly now at windmills, and who utter Utopian declamations which are ludicrous not because they are too far-sighted, but because they are antiquated and irrelevant...
...The corruption was where the Republicans, for their part, had tried to put the depression of the 1930s?in the mind...
...But, by the 1950s, the roles were reversed...
...The more direct approach, however, is simply to deny that the corruption was there...
...And in each instance, let us insist on the necessity and the justice of the purge, even as we regret and robustly resist the injustices that inevitably accompany it...
...Twenty years ago, we had another name for the dinosaurs??a name which I still think was used justly against them...
...Clark Mayor of Philadelphia, and one may still be alarmed at the implications of his social philosophy...
...For one thing, labor had achieved a large measure of its objectives, and was especially well established in its two most sacred rights—the right to organize and the right to strike...
...Most of these dinosaurs called themselves Republicans...
...the Fair Deal was an effort to eliminate the hazards of the market and to guarantee prosperity to those who were already the most pampered sector of our economic order...
...Arrayed against him were the ranks of honest labor, pure politicians and impartial professors...
...The change is marked by the difference between the New Deal and the Fair Deal...
...There has been, of course, a sociological change in this country in the last two decades, although it has nothing to do with what Mr...
...This strategy carries with it the assumption that the defeat of the Democratic party in 1952 was due not to a rational choice between alternatives, but to the inevitable unfolding of impersonal social forces...
...One would like to think so...
...The purge in the United States in the 1930s was directed against the capitalists and was presided over, for the most part, by the intelligentsia...
...In those days, to be an employer was to be an exploiter...
...The candidate for public office may not tell them any such thing??not when he is the representative and chosen leader of the party against which the charges are made...
...Thus, those who once were privileged to dish it out are now privileged to take it...
...This apologetic had already been supplied by John Fischer, another editor of Harper's, in its March 1953 issue...
...A liberal society is a society that fosters plural centers of initiative and plural devices for coping with our problems...
...Indeed, the presiding evil genius of the present purge, Senator McCarthy, suggests that what we witness now is a classic instance of a political mechanism defined long ago by Reinhold Niebuhr??the case where the brutal and the cynical are used to chastise the sentimentalists and the hypocrites...
...American political liberalism is not just suffering from moral myopia: It is also suffering from intellectual debility??a hardening of the categories...
...But what is appropriate to the pulpit may not be suited to the political rostrum...
...He abused his freedom and adulterated his commodities...
...What Marx did not see, what both democratic and totalitarian societies prove, is that the dialectic of history is really an irony...
...Clark gives us, the Government is the only agency for justice mentioned...
...It was part of the grand irony of history that those we then called reactionaries had been, in their day, among the great liberals in the American tradition...
...Fischer's argument is that the defeat of the Democrats was due to the disintegration of the big city machines and to the rise of industrial technology in the South...
...Nevertheless, it is the formula with which we are constrained for the moment to do our work...
...the Federal Government is the sole instrument for solving the difficulty...
...but, as it is overtaken by the consequences of its own acts, it is all the more vehement in proclaiming its innocence and in denouncing the iniquity of others...
...Its plumes, which were made for soaring, now serve only to weigh it down...
...It just had to happen that way...
...There was a time when it could fly...
...It was, indeed, intolerable that our men should be dying in Korea when there was treason at home, intolerable that there should have been high taxes when there was venality in the expenditure of them...
...The more common attitude, during and since the election, has been to evade or to deny outright the charges of Communism and corruption...
...If at present they are a bit uncertain in self-righteousness, that is because they have been in power too briefly...
...In each case, for abusing his liberty and for doing evil with it, the proprietor of that liberty is threatened with the abolition even of that measure of freedom with which he may be enabled to do good to society...
...The executors of judgment in history must in time be those against whom judgment is executed...
...The primary symptom of self-righteousness is the denial of guilt...
...Are we to fear that, in a crisis, American political liberalism may be about to repeat such a failure...
...Clark simply extends the range of political action through the municipal, state, national and international levels, and expresses his delight that, in our schools and universities, "youth is conditioned to respond to a liberal program of orderly policing of society by Government, subject to the popular will, in the interests of social justice...
...All of them called themselves conservatives...
...It may be in order for the President of Princeton Theological Seminary courageously to remark that anti-Communism has become a harmful obsession with many people...
...now it can only, in earthbound impotence, waddle...
...In part, it was a shift in morals??from the ethics of the creative and of the predatory to the ethics of the more socially-minded conservator of public economic values...
...This was the technique of charging to the whole American public the guilt of corruption in Government...
...In the second place, the entire essay naively assumes the identity of liberty and of justice, although all political experience shows these two values to be in dialectical tension with one another...
...and pointed to the fatal fixation of those who "look to Washington for the answers to all problems...
...It does not occur to Mr...
...We called them reactionaries...
...The pastor may rightfully tell his people that they all share in a common guilt...
...He was punished...
...Right now, there is only one question that is troubling me...
...Karl Marx liked to celebrate his particular brand of purge as "expropriating the expropriators...
...Shall we say that the intelligentsia, too, had it coming to them...
...but, even as it shares in the penalties that are inflicted on loyal as well as disloyal, it has a humble awareness of its own implication in the corporate guilt...
...In the case of labor, the New Deal was a heroic champion of the forgotten man...
...The simplifications of popular discourse are always over-simplifications, but they may help us to understand public issues...
...Surely if there is anything that liberalism does not means,it is what Mr...
...That this kind of liberalism is obsolete, but that the liberals don't yet know it, was indicated in an essay by the reform mayor of Philadelphia, Joseph S. Clark Jr., in the Atlantic Monthly of July 1953...
...The Self-Righteous Remnant suffers from loyalty to false or mistaken principles...
...At the same time, the capitalist class underwent a change...
...In part, this was a shift in key personnel??from the entrepreneur-owner to the professional manager...
...Those who have done the purging must in their turn be purged...
...Today, the scene changes in its personnel, but the tune is still the same...
...When they have been in power long enough, they will be more sure in their self-righteousness...
...The minute a society can see only one agency and only one technique for ordering and for liberating life??whether it be Washington, D.C...
...And they will achieve this condition, as have others before them, not because of their manifest good works, but in spite of both good works and evil works, and simply in virtue of their having been in power too long...
...Clark offers us...
...Its policies have become petrified in what may be called the Federal Fixa-ation...
...He is punished...
...Perhaps the voices are more articulate and a bit more shrill...
...that, except for a few (one thinks of a Mildred Horton, a Bishop Oxnam, a Sidney Hook), they display neither courage nor dignity nor deftness in the conduct of the fight...
...In brief, the difference is not merely sociological...
...Fischer that what the American people most wanted was not quick solutions to problems, but Government that was marked by integrity and leadership that could inspire confidence...
...Most of these dodos call themselves Democrats...
...In all this writing, there has been no suggestion that the powers that now be are immune to the taint of self-righteousness...
...And may we not say that there is gross lack of discrimination in the indictment of an entire class this time as in the former time...
...Indeed, they suggested most of all a convention of dinosaurs met in conference to pass a resolution in denunciation of the climatic changes which would soon make them extinct...
...it is profoundly ethical...
...There is a difference between the two: The Righteous Remnant has suffered through loyalty to high principle...
...By Robert E. Fitch Dean and Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion Ancient Hebrew religious history has made us familiar with the concept of the Righteous Remnant...
...These are merely the normal outcries of a political parry which is not yet able to face the fact that its policies have been repudiated...
...The liberty of the capitalist was free enterprise, and the commodity he owed society consisted of material goods and services...
...One finds this in an article by an editor of Harper's magazine as late as June 1953...
...This is quite simply the conviction that whatever problems may confront us??whether of war or race or inflation or labor or oil or housing or sickness or peace...
...In brief, the corruption was not in the handling of surplus agricultural commodities, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the State Department, or among the cronies of President Truman...
...it is simply being "conditioned to respond" mechanically to a "program of policing...
...The gravity of the situation should oppress intelligent conservatives as well as liberals, because it means that, at the moment, there is no really effective opposition party in the United States...
...The Fair Deal soon became predatory, materialistic and conservative...
...One remembers the cries of delight with which liberals greeted the moral courage of the man who told them that the fault lay in all of society and not in any one part of it...
...So far as there is any sanity in our society, let us remember that a healthy democracy requires alternations in the centers of power and that these alterations in power call for recurrent cleansings...
...The gist of Mr...
...This time, the collective personality suggests some antique archeopterix, some dilapidated dodo bird...
...Fischer's argument comes to its climax when he remarks sardonically that "it will be heart-breaking, in the months just ahead, to watch the anguish of those Ike-likers" who counted on simple and quick solutions to the problems of Korea, of international relations, and of high taxes...
...The various changes also marked an alternation in the role of top dog and bottom dog...
...This was the time of a glorious knight-errantry which championed the forgotten man, rescued tenant farmers in distress, and set out to release laborers from captivity to capitalist ogres...
...In speaking of the self-righteousness which makes the liberals unfit for their functions, we may ignore certain superficial symptoms: the cry that too many faithful civil servants are being ousted, the lament that the State Department is being badly demoralized, the outraged protest that Dulles is too firm in principle and too deficient in tact, the objection that Eisenhower fails to live up to the prima donna theory of the Presidency...
...He abused his freedom and degraded his goods and services...
...In fine, disdainful phrase, Richard Rovere remarks: "The fears which centered around Communism and corruption may in large measure have been synthetically generated, but they had, nevertheless, a genuine existence in the minds they assailed...
...The purge of the 1950s is directed against the intelligentsia and is presided over, for the most part, by a businessmen's government...
...to be a banker was to be an embezzler...
...In the 1930s, the "dirty" capitalist was seen as the hated top dog...
...Regardless of superficial differences in the two purges, they have a common meaning within the framework of democratic values...
...When that moment comes, will the liberals have an acceptable alternative to offer...
...The early days of the New Deal had a magnificent chivalry...
...In the case of the farmer, the New Deal was an effort to abolish debt and tenantry, and to restore the dignity of private ownership...
...And some people began to think that the capitalist was the brave bottom dog, and that labor and the intelligentsia were the despicable top dog...
...John Dewey knew that much...
...Let us admit that the capitalists had it coming to them...
...I am not sure that it is yet prudent to suggest that anti-McCarthyism has become an equally harmful obsession??that in the grip of this obsession liberals show a self-righteousness which only heightens their lack of a decent contrition...
...In a brilliant article in the Reporter over a year ago, Joseph C. Harsch asked the question, "Are Liberals Obsolete...
...writing after the election), with his shrewd observation that the Democratic party, like the Party of the Mexican Revolution, had achieved "an adroit combination of progressivism in program and corruption in administration...
...Let those who will take sides absolutely with the professor or with the plutocrat, and find all purity here and all pollution there...
...There was a time, before it was a remnant, when it was righteous...
...Agar's reason is that the Democratic party at that time offered such a complex of contradictions and political dishonesties that the American people could not possibly accept it as an alternative...
...The evasive technique was exhibited in its noblest dimension by Governor Stevenson during the campaign...
...All of them call themselves liberals...
...to be a property-owner was to be a public enemy...
...that they manifest a hysteria which only inflates the foe to monstrous proportions of power...
...Whether this political formula has an absolute superiority over the previous one??pure politicians, high-minded professors and honest labor arrayed against dirty capitalists??would be hard to prove...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 2
