What Do the Liberals Offer?:
SHUB, ANATOLE
WRITERS and WRITING What Do the Liberals Offer? Call to Greatness. By Adlai E. Stevenson. Harpers. 110 pp. $2.25. Realities of American Foreign Policy. By George F. Kennan. Princeton. 120 pp....
...only two disputes were actually arbitrated on the basis of any of these instruments...
...in the New York Times...
...In the light of current stress on armament, Stevenson offers the sobering perspective of the past: "The first and second planetary wars have helped to make of this half-century the most barbaric interval of the Christian era, branded with the restoration of slavery and torture, the destruction of whole cities and the extermination of tens of millions of our fellow men...
...Kennan, who has seemed in the past to be overly emphatic about "national interest," shows here that he does not conceive such interest narrowly...
...would bring dismay and despair to people all over the world who would like to think of themselves as our friends...
...And most of them began not under McCarthy and Eisenhower but under Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...It is not the America of today...
...As Kennan puts it: "Peoples of the world are not going to accept leadership from a country which they feel is drifting in its own internal development and drifting into bad and dangerous waters...
...to a rural America, an unmechanical America, an America without motor cars and television sets, an America of the barefoot boy and the whitewashed board fence, the America of the Webster cartoon...
...Some of these recent practices may be "necessary," but surely it cannot be argued that any of them promote the democratic spirit...
...These are the principal positive virtues in both books...
...unable to receive stimulus and inspiration from without and unable to impart it to others...
...But these are only stated briefly and tentatively...
...peoples for whose liberation some of us are so concerned as an appalling and unjustified injury...
...The deeper political erosions I have been mentioning are far more dangerous...
...His hope lies in long-term historical processes...
...Yet, somehow, in the course of our two struggles against totalitarianism, our media of opinion have become (a) alarmingly more centralized and (b) far less resistant to the disarming plea of "national security"--a security increasingly defined by central authority rather than by the democratic responsibility of free citizens and institutions...
...We will find the major Soviet design, Kennan shows, "not in elaborate blueprints and timetables of military conquest but in hopes for the demoralization and disintegration of our world...
...Carefully, he reminds the impatient that "the creation of higher political forms has normally been a process of erosion from despotism and not the result of the workings of any social compact...
...fails to inspire either confidence or enthusiasm...
...Political life is an organic process and we must stop trying to force historical growth, "tearing the plants up by the roots when they fail to behave as we wish them to...
...Looking to the future, Kennan thinks that neither a sudden grand settlement with the Soviets nor all-out war is probable...
...He offers several suggestions toward a healthier development of American life--more regional and municipal planning, better utilization of resources, de-commercialization of culture, an opening of our doors to people and ideas...
...Sometimes their dissent becomes evident in a phrase...
...The most frightening and menacing thing today" to Kennan--a man who has been interned by Hitler and banished by Stalin--is the "deep inner crisis," the "gnawing fear" of millions of Americans over the "relatively minor and almost routine problem" of domestic subversion...
...Examining the postwar wave of political sentimentality in America, he warns: "Our national myth relates...
...Both authors firmly believe that (in Stevenson's words) "the concept of peace through a preponderance of power became obsolete as soon as our atomic monopoly was broken...
...To be sure, 50 million Americans will go to the polls next month to choose a new Congress...
...Our country is still one of the world's great democracies, and the freedoms secured for us by "the blood of patriots and tyrants" shine brightly against the dark tapestry of history...
...primarily in material goods and gadgets...
...Conversely, he remarks that in recent years "no other American undertaking has ever commanded more interest and respect" abroad than the TVA...
...Both Democrats resent such parochial concepts as "the defense of the West...
...Kennan personally is quite sensitive to such growth...
...Surprisingly, Kennan the diplomat, rather than Stevenson the Presidential aspirant, is most insistent on the paramount importance of our own democratic vitality...
...Therefore, Kennan concludes, "In no area of our foreign policy will we be well served, in this coming period, by an approach directed strictly to countering the Soviet threat as a straight military problem...
...These and more have already been ably dealt with elsewhere, notably in the wise review of Kennan by A. A. Berle Jr...
...American liberals, it seems to me, are mistaken to begin and end all discussion of anti-democratic trends with the name of Senator McCarthy...
...They should have been most firmly resisted by writers, scholars, journalists, teachers, philosophers and theologians...
...Kennan thus appraises any future "war of liberation": "Any war that might appear to be the consequence of our own policies...
...For not only is the America "of the Webster cartoon" a thing of the past...
...from the New School for Social Research to the RAND Corporation...
...At the same time, a significant number of our intellectual elite have personally become financially dependent on the dispensation of the Federal power or of corporate foundations...
...2.75...
...In international life, Kennan says, we must be "gardeners and not mechanics...
...while Kennan observes that, to many people abroad, "the sight of an America in which there is visible no higher social goal than self-enrichment...
...It is not the repudiation of actuality, but the recognition of actuality...
...many who now condone these practices in the interest of fighting Communism have already forgotten how the very same practices, used in the name of anti-fascism, helped FDR appease Stalin...
...The greatest disappointment in both books is their failure to assess the very real new factors which, in the last 15 years of war and cold war, have inhibited both domestic experimentation and genuinely democratic resolution of key international issues...
...As Philip Rieff once put it, a generation has gone "from social science to policy science...
...Both books range over a wide field, but four constructive amendments to prevailing policy emerge: 1. Wariness of war...
...Both Democrats agree that "by no means all of our troubles are due to Communism," and that often we can only hope for partial relief at best...
...They recognize totalitarianism for what it is--an international disease which infects all peoples to some extent, and for which all peoples must bear some measure of responsibility...
...our very need of it is a symptom of deeper complications...
...Here it is worth noting that in our first 150 years as a nation we were isolationist--and yet the promise of our own society exerted a profound revolutionary force throughout the world...
...After a penetrating analysis of the long- and short-term results of foreign aid, Kennan concludes that "even benevolence, when addressed to a foreign people, represents a form of intervention into their internal affairs, and always receives, at best, a divided reception...
...yet all too many vital decisions in the atomic age have, on one pretext or another, been made by secret inter-bureaucratic caucus, rather than by representative government...
...Smith Goes to Washington...
...Latin America and Africa even if Bolshevism had never existed, says Stevenson in one of the many emotional peaks his book attains...
...It would come to the...
...But America in 1954 is also (as the America of 1939 was not) a nation of "classified" information, wiretapping, official "briefings," "unvouchered" funds, and both overt and covert Federal manipulation of opinion...
...Both illustrate clearly how thoughtful Democratic leaders differ from the present administration...
...We would be concerned with the masses of Asia...
...in every sense, the economic, the demographic, the cultural and the intellectual...
...for poverty, oppression and ignorance have always been our concern, and those who see virtue only in self-interest and self-preservation mistake...
...If American democracy is to regain its vigor at home and abroad, it is chiefly the responsibility of Roosevelt's heirs, among them Kennan and Stevenson, to subject these poisonous trends to intense, genuinely critical public scrutiny...
...What about "demoralization and disintegration" in our own United States...
...Both authors recognize the intimate relation between the state of American democracy at home and America's standing abroad...
...he is too easy a scapegoat...
...The ironic upshot has been that the intellectual group most vocal about the integrity of the democratic process has been a small band of atomic physicists--possibly because they were more awed by nuclear power than by the power of governments and the men who run them...
...This thought was to me the most important in either book...
...I shall not repeat here the various weaknesses which are equally apparent: the uncritical hopes for "coexistence," the distrust of relationships between peoples (as distinguished from governments), the occasional tendencies to Machiavellianism, and so on...
...Discussing rifts with our allies, Stevenson says, "I sometimes think that what America needs more than anything else is a hearing aid...
...To these qualities which the two books share one must add the incomparable merit of Kennan's: his careful delineation of the psychology of the Bolsheviks and the crucial importance in their plans of how we in the democracies conduct our lives...
...It is urgent, he says, that our society work "toward the ultimate merging of its social and political identity with those of at least certain other nations...
...In a democratic society, Kennan says, foreign policy must always be regarded as only a means to an end, "one of the means by which some higher and more comprehensive purpose is pursued...
...and if we cling timorously to its image as the ceiling of our cultural outlook, we not only run the risk of a deep and neurotic division within ourselves as between the dream and the reality, but we run the risk of becoming essentially a provincial nation...
...Their books, therefore, are not only accurate guides to liberal thinking on world affairs but are extremely timely in an election year...
...He notes that, during the first third of this century, the United States signed 97 international arbitration agreements...
...We must begin now "to change ourselves from an exclusive to a receptive nation...
...our character and misread our history...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub WITHIN FORTY months, Adlai Stevenson might well be our Democratic President and George Kennan our Democratic Secretary of State...
...Certainly the formal diplomacy of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln had negligible results abroad as compared with the massive impact of the new, open equalitarian society they forged and preserved...
...3. Genuine internationalism...
...Kennan contributes two case studies: the American passions for conciliation machinery and for handouts...
...and it was Western jealousy and disunity that opened Europe's door to the Soviet Union...
...so is the America of Mr...
...4. Recognition of limits...
...And yet I think it is not enough to say that we need a refreshment of the democratic spirit...
...After surveying the events of the last forty years, Stevenson declares: "It was Western failures that first introduced modern totalitarianism, Fascism and Nazism...
...Diplomacy, says Stevenson, "is not the art of asserting ever more emphatically that attitudes should not be what they clearly are...
...2. Respect for history...
...Their failure to do so, here or elsewhere, is the most disturbing chink in their otherwise liberal armor...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 40
