Who Speaks for America?:

...The totalitarian state reposes upon a single control, and it is the ease with which large-scale interests escape control that typifies mid-century America...

...It was, of course, nothing of the sort...

...But there is not only peril for them in the use by or against the United States of atomic or hydrogen bombs...

...For as long as Britain went undefied at sea and the Concert of Europe—except for local wars—had not irretrievably broken down, not only could she be both paramount and isolationist: no conscious pattern was evident in international affairs...

...Who, then, speaks for America...

...Developments have been such as would put on their mettle the most seasoned of peoples and the least cumbrous of systems...

...Instead of One World, we have a planet split not by the accidents of history but by the clash of ideologies—one on which the conquerors of geography might be conquered by their own technology...

...A democracy ceases to be one when these two no longer interact...

...The dimensions of the world contest increase...

...Democrats may now assail the Republican conduct of external affairs, but their votes remain, for major global undertakings, the Republican Administration's chief prop...

...That his forebodings were valid Woodrow Wilson and the entire free world between German wars were to discover...

...The fact is that an eighteenth-century separation of powers might, by dividing twentieth-century American power, serve also to hamper it...

...Loose organization on the Victorian world stage would, however, be replaced by contending societies more closely integrated within and with each group more tightly knit against the other...

...But there is also a general element of unpredictability by which they are perplexed...

...It is, however, not only sound judgment but the capacity to follow through which the leader of the free owes the led...

...Who, allies may wonder, speaks for what...

...Instabilities within the framework of American democracy itself may, however, have to be redressed before it can, in its own national interest, best serve interests that are greater than its own...

...To neither, as it happens, can the United Stales lay claim...

...Knowland, to forbid his own team that room for maneuver over Europe and Asia which is a prerequisite of leadership...

...The wider its net is spread, the more it may, on the world scene as at home, slip out of control...

...as long as there is a multiplicity of power centers there can, in opinion as in other industries, be no exclusive, nationwide monopoly...

...Yet to the observer schooled in the unitary powers of parliamentary government, it is American constitutional arrangements themselves which invite trouble—and not only in domestic but also in foreign affairs...

...It is, however, not only through the traditional vehicles of American democracy that doubt is cast upon the great affirmations of postwar American policy...

...And that is what marks off the totalitarian revolt, Left and Right, from old-fashioned autocracy...

...The conditions of American freedom may change...

...For the ups and downs of coalition morale, no one member can fairly be saddled with all the blame...

...But they did suggest how, if circumstances were ripe, the American system might, as never before, be convulsed...

...Lionel Gelber is a Canadian who has lived in New York since the war...

...And this is especially so in realms of opinion—from information media to political utterances by national figures...

...Nor is this all which distinguishes the present era of fear and phobia from earlier ones...

...Yet queries such as these underlie some of it...

...Ten or fifteen years ago, it was—from Harold Laski to Wendell Willkie, from Henry Wallace to Lin Yutang—considered bad taste to question the advent of One World...

...Such alternations of impulse, long rooted in the American past, may not be taken tragically by enlightened Americans...

...This is his second article for The New Leader...

...Enlarged, too, is the scale on which major rivals function internally...

...Senator McCarthy has been no worse than others of his kind...

...where organized pressures hold sway, it is organized counter-pressures by which these must, more and more, be withstood...

...The Western coalition is all the more unwieldy when its American leader must promote between free peoples unison by consent in depth...

...John Hay thought that it would and he was the first among Secretaries of State to cherish a global concept of his country's role in the modern world...

...Bipartisanship survives but its party base is likewise askew...

...He is the author of The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship (1938), Peace by Power (1942), Reprieve from War (1950) and the highly-praised The American Anarchy, published last year, which deals with the impact of bigness on a democratic society...

...It is, however, friends and allies who tremble lest there be a rash forward lunge at one moment, American self-immobilization at another...

...Gladstone and Disraeli lent prestige, when Britain was in the ascendant, to British parliamentary forms...

...And over the McCarthy-Army hearings President Eisenhower did at last take a stand...

...A totalitarian state emerges where, as large-scale techniques are acquired, there is no heritage of liberty to provide inner correctives...

...But at one, the techniques of bigness, totalitarian states have become adept...

...But setback in Asia, coupled with stalemate in Europe, tends to accentuate the irrational, and it is this which, under the universal shadow of technological devastation, frightens the Western alliance...

...Allies may differ with the United States over specific lines to be pursued in Western Europe and Eastern Asia...

...As a conspiracy to exploit conspiracy, these did not have to be Fascist...

...Not that in global measures these have, since World War II, fallen short...

...In the isolationist America of McKinley or of that interventionist manque, Theodore Roosevelt, gloom such as Hay's could be dismissed as an amiable idiosyncracy...

...After a creative decade, however, the lack of a surer touch is bewildering...

...But how even will the weights be when the machinery of government is not designed to keep them so...

...But now the stakes of power, at home and abroad, are co-extensive with society itself...

...They may, therefore, be all the more preoccupied with that segment of their fate over which they can still have a word—with manifestations of responsibility or irresponsibility in an American system by which much of their own destiny might be decided...

...Bigness may project the East-West contest onto a world screen...

...in the heyday of the United States, her political institutions have not worked so well at home that they are borrowed abroad...

...It is as portent of the future rather than as hangover from the past that McCarthyism has had to be combatted...

...As leader of the West, the United States has, since World War II, made clear the American purpose...

...And if, on these issues, the associates of the United States have shrunk back, one reason is that there is a second, harsher American voice drowning out the first...

...Britain, Canada and other countries of the Commonwealth resort to Royal Commissions as a device for the probe of abuses...

...Yet audible, too, in Allied ears have been stridencies over the Korean War and East Asia, a menacing note over German revival and European defense, tones at once so imperious and yet so uncertain over Indo-China...

...For what confronts American democracy nowadays is an intermingling of irresponsibilities, small-scale and large-scale, traditional and newfangled...

...The range of popular consent expands...

...The scope of the world contest has not only been enlarged...

...FDR and Truman could count in Congress on the solid backing of co-partisans...

...for her response to the necessities of the era, the United States deserves praise...

...France, too, would have done better if the Fourth Republic had modelled itself more than it did on Westminster...

...He wished to combine new oceanic burdens with more general responsibilities: what debarred these was a method of government which, according to him, made for irresponsibility...

...And it does not only illustrate how, in a mass structure, mass instrumentalities might be misused...

...it is by being arbitrary at home that such regimes can be arbitrary abroad...

...McCarthyism may prove a transitory phase, yet there could be no real precedent for it in the context of American world leadership since that, too, is so new...

...In a large-scale order, fresh centers of social power are established...

...The private citizen can still compete among equals in the market place of discussion...

...And the defense of the West has, under an American aegis, had to be organized on a commensurate scale...

...Nor can American government dispense with its own Question Time...

...never could their incitements be so immediate, so far-reaching, and therefore so adverse...

...About Russia there is little, short of capitulation, which the allies of the United States can do...

...deemed automatic, it seemed to be in the very nature of things...

...The problem did not start with Senator McCarthy and will not terminate with him...

...They are, moreover, not the sort with which friends and allies could tax a Fascist, a Nazi or a Communist dictatorship...

...a tool of modern tyrannies, it has in the twentieth century also been reshaping American freedoms...

...A former Rhodes Scholar, he lived in London for a number of years, taught international affairs at the University of Toronto and served in the RCAF...

...American power is the main stabilizer of an unstable peace...

...That partners who have been pleading for it since World War I should now rebel against it, is the supreme irony of American leadership...

...poor as a substitute, however, are those ad hoc press conferences with the President or Cabinet officers where reporters or commentators with no formal mandate fill the breach...

...One voice is that which expresses itself with the firm accents of United Nations sponsorship, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, NATO, Charter enforcement in Korea, treaties in the Pacific and Southeast Asia...

...America has had the misfortune to come of age in an era of coalitions when the very bigness which underpins her own predominance may be employed not to unify humanity but to deepen cleavages...

...Harry Truman has urged his successor at the White House, Dwight Eisenhower, to resist encroachments by legislators upon the sphere of the Executive...

...In the conduct of American foreign policy, is the force of domestic politics excessive...

...Large-scale techniques do not only permit a progressive society to better its lot...

...An answer to them mattered less when less depended on an American lead...

...Americans themselves cannot tell whether their country will go too far or not far enough in an hour when the process of politics is distorted by those impassioned controversies which derive from events in China, when the American public mind is distracted by those disclosures about atomic espionage and pro-Soviet activities among some wartime officials upon which McCarthy ism has battened...

...It is over specific issues that coalition discord might be rife...

...Advantages enjoyed by those who gain access to levers of power breed incongruities which could alter the character of democracy itself...

...More confusing are the efforts of the Senate Majority Leader, Mr...

...so do those of the domestic struggle for power...

...Do institutions, in which a bigger one is played out, help or hinder a steady hand...

...Coinciding with British interests, a free world order might, that is, be taken for granted...

...He constantly railed against machinery which allowed an Administration to negotiate but not commit and a branch of the Congress to commit but not negotiate...

...McCarthy-ism is but an overt example of how opinion may be manipulated, conformity imposed, provincialism delocalized and rendered militant throughout the land...

...But it is the give-and-take between Ministers and Members during parliamentary deliberations which airs much that Congressional committees of inquiry must afterwards ventilate...

...it needs the support of other free peoples...

...Hers instead is one of checks which tend to impede as well as safeguard, balances that are upset by vast national imbalances, disproportions which are the essence of bigness...

...Gelber has also contributed to numerous English, Canadian and American journals...

...But even to them that game once meant less...

...That, however, is not the danger which the United States, with checks and balances sleeplessly in operation, really faces...

...What baffles the latter is their inability to find that locus of authority in the American system on which they themselves can rely...

...For chancelleries to march in step is no simple job...

...On two interconnected fronts, from within and from without, the historic institutions of American democracy are thus subject to unanticipated strains...

...That also is why the adventures of Joseph McCarthy could, in this day and age, have had a wholly novel significance...

...Yet when a Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations like Senator Wiley speaks out of turn, he may on his travels still reflect the temper of the Administration...

...To keep an enemy guessing is shrewd tactics...

...And it is these, rather than the tripartite separation of powers, which new Asian democracies now adopt...

...Many are the sources of American strength...

...It makes capital out of a time when the impact on each other of the foreign and domestic is not spasmodic but continuous...

...By Lionel Gelber In an era of bigness, when America must choose for a broad coalition, our institutions often tend to promote confusion IS THE American system geared for world leadership...

...From isolationism to leadership, an epoch-making transition is attended by other potent factors of public irresponsibility...

...And it should also be remembered how much more complex is the American task than that discharged by the British during the palmy days of the Pax Britannica...

...in such decivilizing weapons, a civilization of bigness might yet attain its ultimate symbol...

...American foreign policy must, by contrast, reckon now not only with the American national will...