Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR DISAPPOINTMENT It is with disappointment that I noted your failure to speak in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin. New York City James T....
...His equation of the New Left with the Radical Right, therefore, has no rational basis...
...Costly lobbies...
...Nobody would want to disparage the importance of democratic methods, or the primacy of democracy as a principle of political life...
...It is outside the pale of political power in the United States, has no economic strength, nothing to defend...
...Letters to editors...
...What normal democratic process would he have them use to make their opinions known and influential...
...Field has succeeded in obfuscating an important part of political education for freedom...
...But I persist in a childish belief that "Center" is a sort of synonym for stand-pattism and self-satisfied admonitions to any boat-rocking...
...What political procedures are available to the New Left that would conform to Field's requirement of "reasoned judgement...
...The entire political-economic ethos of American life, favoring as it does established institutions and procedures, literally drives those who are disaffected by it to pickets, sit-ins, draft-card burnings and other demonstrations compatible with their situation...
...The latter, however, represents a well-organized, well-financed "hodge-podge of diverse elements" with one thing in common: to maintain and perpetuate vested interests in existing conditions and institutions...
...The result of these two situations is that the New Left's "substitution of direct action for democratic political procedures," which Field decries, is inevitable...
...It doesn't seem to add anything to political understanding to include anyone outside Stalinoids and Fascists in an amorphous Center...
...Outside the Center is a small group of "extremists" of Left and Right, who are attacking the democratic tactics of the Center with increasing impunity...
...Minneapolis, Minn...
...Granting the strong totalitarian impulse on the Left-and I do grant it and dislike it-I find that Field's diatribe against it is unreasoning on the grounds which he offers...
...The vote...
...The former is, as Field admits, a "hodgepodge of diverse elements" which knows quite well what it does not like in American society and governmental policy, but cannot reach agreement as to what it does like...
...It knows what it wants as well as what it does not want...
...Of course, Field's Center has a lot of members, from George Dirksen and the Jaycees to Norman Thomas and the LID...
...Letters to congressmen...
...Who on the New Left can equal H. L. Hunt or the Birch Society or Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing for economic resources...
...People on what we like to call the "Democratic Left" have been trying to get across to Americans the idea that Left does not necessarily mean totalitarian...
...Most of these operations yield less than the investment in time and money warrant for groups which are, by Field's own definition, too diverse to function as a unit...
...Quite to the contrary...
...Aaron Miller...
...Field's democratic center, the prime value of which is "a readiness to compromise," is not likely to eliminate the radicalism of the New Left...
...However, Field refuses to come to grips with the forces which dictate such a concept, forces which are essentially economic in nature...
...By presumably including people who favor (among other things) national planning, tenfold expansion of the War on Poverty, or an active support of democratic Left movements abroad in the Center (perhaps as a compliment...
...But I'm not sure whether to feel flattered or insulted...
...And in fact, Field ought to be thankful that radicalism has not been more violent in its expression up to now, a fact which may be attributable to an ideology nobler than the milieu in which it operates would warrant...
...Great Neck, N.Y...
...New York City James T. Farrell DYNAMIC CENTER As a democrat, I guess I'm part of that Dynamic Center George Field is pleading for ("For a Dynamic Center," NL, May 23...
...Steven Kelman In his argument for support of a "democratic center in political life," George Field aligns himself with democratic proceduralists and incrementalists like Robert McCloskey and Robert Dahl, whose essential dictum is that democracy must be only a set of political procedures divorced from fixed goals, lest ideology corrupt the operation of these procedures...
...it is non-ideological on its surface, but at its heart lies all the mythology of 19th century natural law and economic determinism, a mythology which still pervades American society at every level...
...There is little consensus as to what its various elements would settle for in exchange for existing conditions and institutions...
...It will aggravate that radicalness because it automatically perpetuates the New Left's exclusion from established political and economic formulas...
Vol. 49 • June 1966 • No. 12
