The Politics of Stability

...I offer three propositions...

...At stake is not just the viability of municipal governments, but also the sense of urban populations controlling their own destinies...

...How widespread and how successful remains to be seen, but the probability is so great that ignoring it would be an act of irresponsibility or of cowardice...

...They are persons of immutable conviction on almost all matters we would consider central to liberal belief, as well as men of personal honor and the highest intellectual attainment...

...What aerospace corporations have done for getting us to the moon, urban housing corporations can do for the slums...

...Probably the most important reason for this is that until recently these were the areas where such problems first appeared, and where the wealth and intellect??and political will??existed to experiment with solutions...

...But we would do well to remember similar times of crisis in the past when our failure to lead gave the direction of events to others whose purpose was more to destroy than to build...

...The first theory is that the national government and national politics are the primary sources of liberal social innovation, particularly with respect to problems of urbanization and industrialization...

...What, as someone once said, is to be done...

...The time for confronting the realities of black and white has come in America...

...Fate took another direction, and has exacted a double price: not only troubles abroad, but disasters at home because of??or seemingly because of??the troubles abroad...

...And to top it all, some of the worst violence occurred in Detroit, a city with one of the most liberal and successful administrations in the nation...

...It is pleasant to hear the New Left declare that the white liberal is the true enemy because he keeps the present system going by limiting its excesses, yet the truth is that the informed conservatives deserve the greatest credit for performing this function??the Robert Tafts of the nation??and at the present juncture they arc needed...

...A terrifying example was the response in ultra-liberal quarters to the findings of James S. Coleman in his massive report on Equality oj Educational Opportunity...

...I cannot imagine what would constitute irrefutable evidence for either stand, and I assume that persons adopt one or the other according to their personal taste and condition...

...Not because of their leadership, which has often been brilliant, but because of the resources available, and particularly the bureaucracy available...

...3. Liberals must somehow overcome the curious condescension that takes the form of defending and explaining away anything, however outrageous, which Negroes, individually or collectively, might do...

...The Federal government is good at collecting revenues, and rather bad at disbursing services...

...the effort itself will go against most of our tendencies...

...It is encouraging to note how much ferment there seems to be in this direction at this time...

...Therefore, we should use the Federal fisc as an instrument for redistributing income between different levels of government, different regions and different classes...

...It happens that Washington is, for practical purposes, a Southern Protestant city which combines both these pervasive conservative tendencies??or at least has done so in the past...

...a disorganized, angry, hurt group of persons easily given to self-destructive violence...

...that he was in favor of "massive" Federal aid to city governments, but not through the techniques of proliferating grant-in-aid programs which he and many like him thought to be an ineffective form of administration...

...Over the course of the summer it became clear that there are two distinct, though related, groups in the Negro community...

...It has produced the gravest American political disunity in a century, and it has aggravated the profound discontent with America of the postwar generations...

...It is worth stressing that no one whose views we have learned to trust over the years would offer us a happier option than the latter, which means that if we do not think well enough, or work hard enough, or if our prayers are not answered, we can bring this republic to ruin...

...In particular, we must attend to what the Federal government is good at...

...Rovere continues: "In the new agencies, for example, almost everyone feels that there is no greater hindrance to the war on poverty and no greater force for the perpetuation of slums than the public-welfare system administered by, and providing a raison d'etre for, a huge, entrenched, and complacent sub-bureaucracy in H.E.W...

...Interestingly, in the area of foreign affairs the idea that Republican Congressmen and Senators are supporters of a moderate course is more readily accepted...

...The apocalyptic view has many supporters, of course, most notably those of the newly emergent Left who foresee a period of Right-wing oppression and excess, followed by the triumph of a new ideology??a conviction that will seem absurd to anyone who has ever visited East Berlin...

...In the spectrum of American religious groups, American Protestants have fairly consistently been more conservative than American Catholics, and Catholics in turn more so than American Jews...

...If state and local governments are to assume effective roles as innovative and creative agents, they simply must begin to receive a share of Federal revenues on a permanent, ongoing basis...

...Trying to be kind, trying to be helpful, we somehow have got into the habit of denying the realities of the life-circumstances of the lower class, and this has curiously paralyzed our ability to do anything to change these realities...

...Worse still, a new set of signs tells us something that is painful, even hateful to have to hear: We must prepare for the onset of terrorism...

...Unless we start now to reverse that trend...

...a city in which the social and economic position of the Negro was generally agreed to be far and away the best in the nation...

...The more sanguine view commends itself to those who would like to believe it true...

...Fifty years of social reform has pretty well destroyed the bases of working class politics in this country...

...Martin Luther King Jr., and many other liberals, are no doubt correct in holding that the war in Vietnam has stalemated government efforts on behalf of Negroes at home, but they are wrong, I would think, in their proposed solution: The government should get out of Vietnam...

...Determined to make the world of the first-class passengers recognize his existence, he makes his way to Fifth Avenue and the 50s and begins jostling top-hatted gentlemen and insulting bejeweled, bcfurred ladies...

...Who among us today could state with certainty exactly what did become of the Area Redevelopment Administration, that early, shining creation of the New Frontier...

...on the other, that we have entered a troubled time and will not only survive, but will emerge from it wiser and having demonstrated anew the deep sources of stability in American life...

...In the spectrum of regional politics, the South has for a century been the most social and politically conservative part of the nation...

...Potomac fever became a liberal disease under the New Deal and it has turned out not only to be catching but congenital, having somehow worked into the gene structure itself...

...All the signs declare that the violence is not ended...

...The alternatives, then, are to agree with Andrew Kopkind that this past summer the war abroad and the revolution at home contrived to "murder liberalism in its official robes" (with few mourners), or to conclude that although we are in a lot of trouble, we can think and work (and pray) our way out of it...

...There is another reason which we tend to be reluctant to talk about, but whose discussion is perhaps admissible in a time of trouble...

...It is not at all funny to note that having broken the power of the bosses, destroyed their control over city jobs and cleaned up the police force to boot, we find the Federal government pouring millions into what Bayard Rustin has termed a "bedlam" of community action programs to overcome the sense of powerless-ness among the urban poor, while private donations are sought to enable mayors to hire proletarians who could never pass civil service examinations, and the Justice Department laments the fact that organized crime rather than the police seems to control the streets...

...The syndrome derives from one correct fact that is irrelevant, and two theories that are wrong...

...But our responses will have to be sufficiently different from those of the immediate past to suggest that we are aware of some of our apparent shortcomings...

...The task of liberals is to make it politically worthwhile and possible for the administration to disengage...

...But the pattern persists: the bright idea, the new agency, the White House swearing in of the first agency head, the shaky beginning, the departure 18 months later of the first head, replacement by his deputy, the gradual slipping out of sight, a Budget Bureau reorganization, a name change, a new head, this time from the civil service, and slowly obscurity covers all...

...Finally, it is also reasonably clear that we must begin getting private business involved in domestic programs in a much more systematic, purposeful manner...

...Neither may be our fault, yet in a world not overmuch given to nice distinctions in such matters, they most surely must be judged our doing...

...The second theory I have labelled false is that you can run the nation from Washington...

...1. Liberals must see more clearly that their essential interest is in the stability of the social order...

...I would note that 20 years ago the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop, and that today the closed shop is probably more completely in effect in our building trade unions than ever in history...

...THINKING ALOUD The Politics of Stability By Daniel P. Moynihan President Johnson is said to be fond of relating the experience of an out-of-work school teacher who applied for a position in a small town on the Texas plains at the very depths of the depression...

...He is driven mad by "I beg your pardons," finally turns violent, and in the end is destroyed...

...But the situation is especially embarrassing for American liberals, because it is largely they who have been in office and presided over the onset both of the war in Vietnam and the violence in American cities...

...The next irony in the history of the Negro in America will be that having acquired a majority of the votes in a number of major American cities, he will find direction of city affairs has been transferred to Washington...

...For liberals, this poses a special problem that derives in a sense from our own decencies...

...It will not be pretty...

...In foreign affairs, surely, this involves the recognition that getting out of Vietnam is not just a matter of summoning the will, but also of finding a way...

...One is the vast Negro underclass that has somehow grown up in our Northern cities...

...For too long we have been prisoners of the rhetoric that Republicans do not know or care about the social problems of the nation...

...Walter Lippmann, with merciless clarity, has argued that the unexampled mandate of the 1964 election was "to be quiet and uninvolv-ed abroad and to repair, reform and reconstruct at home...

...This requires that we continue to work within the party system, and to make clear that we do in fact love peace more than we love the Vietcong...

...The record of social innovation through various public programs is equally unreassuring, largely because the American system of public administration has turned out not to be very good at that sort of thing...

...2. Liberals must divest themselves of the notion that the nation??and especially the cities of the nation??can be run from agencies in Washington...

...Certainly things have not turned out as we had every reason to think they would...

...With the hand of the Federal bureaucracy barely concealed, Coleman was labelled a racist by people who went on their way deploring conditions in slum schools and blaming Lyndon Johnson or John Lindsay...

...By this I mean that President Johnson will almost certainly be re-elected in 1968 and that, with some modifications, the national government will remain in the hands of the same kinds of liberals who have been much in evidence for the last seven years...

...In an odd combination of historical events, the cities of the North have been dominated by Catholic votes and Jewish intellect, and the result very simply has been a much greater level of liberal political innovation, [f this potential has not been much in evidence of late, it is mostly, I believe, because we have allowed state and local governments to get into such fiscal straits that they have no resources left for innovation...

...The plain fact is that if these men got us into the current predicament, who are we to say we would have done better...

...This, in effect, means decentralizing the initiative and the resources for such programs...

...It is time the idea became familiar in domestic matters...

...On examination, this becomes fairly clear...

...We have to pay attention to what it is we are good at, and to work from strength...

...Last year, Governor Rockefeller was re-elected for precisely the same reason...

...Two views are possible: On the one hand, it may be argued that the nation is entering a period of political instability from which it will not emerge intact...

...The Vietnam war was thought up and is being managed by the men John F. Kennedy brought to Washington to conduct American foreign and defense policy...

...It is time to acknowledge that the prestige and the credibility of the Armed Forces is involved and is entitled to consideration, as is the self-regard of the tens of thousands of American youths who perform honorably and well in those jungles because they were asked or told to do so by their government...

...The violence abroad and the violence at home??regardless of political persuasion, all agree that these are the problems, that they are somehow interconnected, and that in combination they have the potential for polarizing, then fracturing, American society...

...He elicits only politeness, which, actually is a refusal to acknowledge that he is what he knows himself to be...

...I don't doubt they deserved what they got in that uproar...

...If the politics of stability are to come to anything, they must be translated into programs...

...The argument can nonetheless be made that we would have more to show for it all if somewhere along the line the Democrats had taken at face value the statement of Congressman Melvin R. Laird (R.-Wis...

...In New York City two years ago, Mayor Lindsay was elected because he was the most liberal of the three candidates...

...As far as I can see, an American national government in this age will always give priority to foreign affairs...

...they were not disturbed by the thought that they might be wrong, or that the politics of stability might involve something more hardheaded than the untroubled indulgence of sado-masochistic fantasy...

...But the impulse and potential remain there rather than in Washington...

...Who are we, then, to be pointing fingers...

...Most importantly, the violence in our cities, tensions between racial and ethnic groups, is just as likely to continue and if anything get worse (as indeed the war could get worse...

...Think of the dreams that had to die before that sentence could be written...

...Typically, we have blamed ourselves for the shortcomings of the poor??and left it at that...

...Let us be frank: The original, determining opposition to this proposition in Washington has come from liberals, not conservatives, and we should be ashamed of ourselves...

...That is the position of just about anyone who would assay the state of the American republic at this moment from that middling vantage point known generally as liberalism...

...The only option for the nation is to deprive them of the Negro underclass which is the source of their present strength...

...The war in Asia is likely to go on many years, too, although possibly in different forms...

...It is only when we come to see how very probably our national life is tied to them that they acquire a sudden interest...

...How one wishes," Nathan Glazer writes in a forthcoming article, "for the open field of the New Deal, which was not littered with the carcasses of half successful and hardly successful programs, each in the hands of a hardening bureaucracy...

...Their course is set...

...This means facing up to some of the realities of life in that class that liberals have been notoriously unwilling to acknowledge, so much so that I would not be surprised if it developed that this fact itself was an element in the rage that roared through the streets of America this past summer...

...and given the present threats to that stability, they must seek out and make much more effective alliances with political conservatives who share their interest and recognize that unyielding rigidity is just as great a threat to continuity of the social order as an anarchic desire for change...

...In the field of legislating social attitudes and practices, it is pretty clear that the old-time Tories had a point when they said you can't change human nature??for good or for ill ??with a bill-signing ceremony in the Rose Garden...

...More is the reason that liberals, rather than avoiding or explaining away that reality, should be the ones to work hardest at moving the nation in sane directions...

...A system has to be developed, therefore, under which domestic programs go forward regardless of what international crisis is preoccupying Washington at a given moment...

...The question is addressed as much to the future as to the past, for the probabilities are that the present situation will persist for some time...

...All that is necessary, one fears, is to let enough men make enough money out of doing so...

...This includes, almost without exception, any liberal who has shared considerably in the "rewards" of American life, and who can look forward to continued sharing on, if anything, more favorable terms...

...Richard Rovere recently noted that "the new Federal agencies set up to deal with the distress of the cities??the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Transportation??have turned in generally disappointing performances...

...In this respect, it seems to me that Senator Edward Kennedy's inquiry into civilian casualities is a model of informed and effective liberal action...

...It is certainly a fact that strolling across Lafayette Park to endorse or to veto a public works program is much more agreeable than having to go through the misery of persuading 50 state Legislatures...

...The summer of 1967 came in the aftermath of one of the most extraordinary periods of liberal legislation, liberal electoral victories, and the liberal dominance of the media of public opinion that we have ever experienced...

...I do not believe we have yet realized the depth and intensity of this second group's feelings, nor the extent to which it has succeeded in politicizing the always existing torment of the urban masses??persuading them both of the inevitability and the desirability of a nihilistic solution...

...The politics of stability are not at first exciting...

...I do not believe history will support this notion, for the cities and to a lesser extent the state governments have been the source of the preponderance of social programs in the 20th century— mostly the cities and states in the North, of course...

...But this has to do with the personal comfort of middle-aged liberals, not with the quality of government action, and in a time of some trouble comfort cannot be the sole consideration...

...This is not only a falsehood, but as any New York Democrat can testify, it is seen by the electorate to be a falsehood...

...In domestic affairs, we have got to become a great deal more rigorous in the assessment not only of the reality of problems, but of the nature of proposed solutions...

...Such words come easy...

...hopefully, the liberal community will support the effort to involve private business rather than oppose it...

...The war," he wrote at the end of last August, "has blunted and all but destroyed the hopeful beginnings of the Great Society...

...It is this knowledge, this complicity if you will, that requires many of us to practice restraint where others may exercise all their powers of invective and contempt...

...The point is a simple one: There is nothing whatever to be done to change the minds of the Negro nihilists and their white associates, who have been so much in evidence of late...

...Other liberals also helped to persuade the American public that it was entirely right to be setting out on the course which has led us to the present point of being waist deep in the big muddy...

...Tom Wicker has stated the matter plainly, as is his failing...

...Alongside it is a group of radical, nihilistic youth, not themselves members of this underclass, but identifying with it, able to communicate with it, and determined to use it as an instrument of violent, apocalyptic confrontation with a white society they have decided is irredeemably militaristic and racist...

...Making money is one thing Americans are good at, and the corporation is their favorite device for doing so...

...That thought may not give any of us great pleasure, but my impression is that it is a fact and we had better learn to live with it...

...After a series of questions, one puckered old rancher on the school board looked at the applicant and asked, "Do you teach that the world is round or flat...

...The hooting at the callous indifference of Republicans toward human needs recently reached considerable levels in the rumpus over the rat bill...

...Coleman, a distinguished social scientist, concluded that the disastrously low level of educational achievement on the part of most Negro youth was the result not nearly so much of the quality of their schools, as of their own family background and that of their classmates at school...

...But it happens to be true...

...This is more the case with respect to the violence at home...

...It also requires us to be unrelenting in our exposure of what the war really is doing to the Vietnamese people, and of the future obligations which we incur with every day of its prolongation...

...Finding no clues in the faces of the other board members, the teacher swallowed hard and allowed he could teach it either way...

...But the biggest problem of running the nation from Washington is that the real business of Washington in our age is pretty much to run the world...

...I don't believe you can, at least not with respect to the kind of social change liberals generally seek to bring about...

...Indeed, it may already have begun...

...The situation of the Negro masses today is startlingly like that of Yank, the quintessential, apolitical proletarian stoker in one of Eugene O'Neill's plays...

...The period was, moreover, accompanied by the greatest economic expansion in human history...