War, Politics and Intellectuals-Two Views For a Dynamic Majority
HARRINGTON, MICHAEL
For a Dynamic Majority By Michael Harrington There is a desperate need to build an effective anti-war movement which could help bring the tragedy in Vietnam to an end. But the fact that this task...
...Finally, there are certainly tendencies to anti-activism among academics, radicals and liberals...
...Rather, it is a function of the fact that the people are much more manipulable—and therefore changeable—on international questions than on domestic ones...
...There is not even a benevolent pacifistic general waiting in the wings, as Eisenhower was in 1952, or a Michael Harrington, whose books include The Other America and The Accidental Century, is now Chairman of the Board of the League for Industrial Democracy...
...But in the process the academics cannot make themselves the center of the world and ignore the mundane questions troubling the people, or pretend the masses are secretly for peace...
...Therefore, I would reiterate the scenario which Weissman finds "an unrealistic and ironic repudiation of 'coalition politics.' " The creation of a dynamic new political majority in the United States will take place, if at all, around domestic issues in the first instance...
...With these negative and pessimistic observations, let me turn to Weissman's argument...
...Part of the problem, of course, is the absence of any guiding precedent...
...Teach-ins can have some impact upon Presidential decisions and they can prepare the way for popular change (much as the Ful-bright hearings have begun to refashion the basic American image of what Communism is...
...Under present conditions, I believe the middle-class agitators should do as much as they can within their own constituency, and as far outside it as they can get...
...This, however, is not true because of happy reasons, i.e., that the masses have thought about Vietnam and reached visceral, unarticulated conclusions about the wrongness of our position there...
...There is no military collapse of the kind that created the setting for the revolutionary peace movements of Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1918...
...The unions and the religions began to stir...
...He quotes Irving Howe's tough-minded recognition of the decline of the Socialist movement in America...
...And there was a detente with the Soviet Union which, after the terrifying Cuban missile crisis, led to the Test Ban Treaty of 1963...
...There is abundant evidence that the nation is dissatisfied and unhappy with the war, yet at the present moment the unrest seems more congenial to hawks than to doves...
...and the general powerlessness caused by the remoteness of foreign policy issues from the personal experiences of the vast majority...
...I am not suggesting that the politics of foreign affairs are so inherently elitist that there is no point to doing anything about them...
...In saying that the focus of the effort should in general be directed toward the Democratic party (and there are obvious exceptions where a third party tactic or even support of a Republican would be indicated), I am not, I hope, making a fetish out of my own perspective toward political realignment in America...
...It is thus a bit silly to congratulate the civil rights movement for disregarding advice which it never received, and then to propose that the peace movement do likewise...
...I have two cheers to give for coalition politics, that's all: if there is any hope in the present situation, it is in this direction...
...In Weissman's thesis, it was this constitutional flaw of these personality types which caused a retreat after the initial success of the teach-ins...
...There were academics, radicals and liberals who gave way before the onslaught...
...Thirdly, he believes the decline of the teach-ins in 1965 was associated with the drop in the "Negotiate-Withdraw" responses to the polls...
...I would suggest a more historical analysis which documents a bit of the coalition scenario...
...or upon radical departures for peace, I suspect that he could carry a majority of the people with him...
...I grant that this is addressed to the long run—and perhaps even that Keynesian long run in which we are all dead...
...Secondly, Weissman believes there is a hidden peace sentiment among the masses which could well be catalyzed by reinvigorated teach-ins...
...others did not...
...Some of the most reactionary drives in American life dominated the scene...
...This advice was never offered to the civil rights, peace, labor or any other movement fighting for immediate social reform, since they were not, and have no immediate prospects of becoming, Socialist...
...My somewhat pessimistic analysis of the situation also makes me critical of Weissman's indifference to whether the peace thrust comes in the Democratic or Republican party...
...the failure of liberal militancy...
...It was, Weissman says, a reflection of deep social trends: the anti-action bias of the professors...
...for the rest, the peace issue will not have this effect in the foreseeable future...
...Only next time, I earnestly pray for a domestic reform period long and profound enough to create a dynamic majority which will then be able to face up to, and stave off, the escalation of the war...
...Once such a movement communicates to its members the hope and elan which Southern Negroes developed in their struggle, then it will be possible to seek mass participation and decision-making on foreign policy questions...
...or rather, of the many, and sometimes contradictory, things that Communists are...
...My reaction to Steve Weissman's analysis is ambiguous...
...That is why I favor the revival of teach-ins...
...Howe rightly argued—at the time he helped to found Dissent, and ever since—that Socialists should abandon the illusion that they were only suffering a temporary setback and recognize the depths of their debacle...
...The campus came to life, first around issues like desegregation, the House Un-American Activities Committee, capital punishment, then with regard to poverty, voting rights, slum organization...
...Thus the President, who is normally elected for domestic political reasons, is given something of a blank check in foreign affairs, even to the point of a vast outpouring of support for a disaster like the Bay of Pigs (John Kennedy was fully aware of the irony involved when his most spectacular failure made him momentarily more popular than Eisenhower had ever been...
...At this point, though, I would refuse to act on the basis of this pessimistic possibility, despite its being quite real...
...Then academics and others who can afford to base their positions on moral and intellectual considerations may be forced into a "witness" which they know has no immediate hope of success but which, if the world survives the crisis somehow, might communicate some meaning to the politics of the future...
...But, fourthly, the retreat of the academics was not an accident...
...Yet, if I agree with many of his conclusions, I find Weissman's way of reaching them much too optimistic regarding both the political potential of the professors and the latent peace sentiment of the people...
...Now, it is certainly true that the polls are problematic and that great changes in popular sentiment are possible (but I think it is an unnecessary confusion to list a dove like James Wechsler as a supporter of the President—or do I miss a very subtle irony...
...For such a movement has never been created under the conditions prevailing today: relative prosperity at home and military stalemate abroad...
...This was one of the factors which deprived the civil rights movement of its forward momentum...
...Who can be instinctively, viscerally hopeful in the situation which exists right now...
...In fact, those of us who share Howe's view have, I suspect, a longer record of involvement than some of the teach-in participants...
...This pattern, it seems to me, corroborates my analysis of the way in which social change will develop rather than Weissman's...
...psychologically, politically, it cannot...
...The intense period of the cold war—say, from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the Korean Peace in 1953-4—made international issues central to American politics...
...It was, I would argue, precisely the appearance of popular mass movements challenging domestic wrongs and the relaxation of international tensions that energized the activist potential of the academics, radicals and liberals...
...And it was only a little more than two decades ago that the Germans were beastly and the Japanese untrustworthy...
...But the real issue does not turn on this misreading...
...On the one hand, I share his frustration with the present state of peace action, his enthusiasm for the accomplishments of the teach-ins, and his hope for their revival...
...So I agree with Weissman that the polls are complex, yet I find two edges to the fact...
...Finally, even though he has suggested many reasons why the teach-ins?and the peace movement itself—will not grow, Weissman feels that they should do so...
...Then, with the Supreme Court decision on school integration in 1954 and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, Negroes began to prove that free men could stand up and effect their own destiny...
...the retreat of the radical intellectuals from activism to ideology...
...Still, there is no torturing the poll data to demonstrate than an academically centered movement of professors could persuade a significant portion of the American people to change their attitudes on Vietnam because they are irrational...
...If the President were to decide upon a dramatic, intense escalation of the war...
...On social questions, the daily experience of the people provides them with sources of information and evaluation which allow them to defy the majority opinion of all the media—as Thomas E. Dewey discovered to his sorrow in 1948...
...At the same time, John F. Kennedy was changing the mood and style of the country—a most palpable and political accomplishment...
...In the international sphere, the population is dependent upon what it reads in the press, sees on television and, above all, is told by the President of the United States...
...I agree with Weissman that something very valuable was lost when the teach-ins collapsed...
...And the massive reversal of trends—from cold war detente and domestic hope to a hot war and domestic retreat—provided a mood in which the anti-activist tendencies of the academics, radicals and liberals could assert themselves...
...Nor is there a minority nationalist feeling of the type that turned many French Canadians into draft resisters and allowed them to have a real impact on their country's defense policy during World War II...
...Only when this was done could Socialists, in a period utterly uncongenial to Socialist activism, devote themselves to the painful task of rethinking hallowed verities and confronting new realities—and to activism in progressive, but non-Socialist causes...
...attitudes which have taken place in recent years...
...For the college educated among them, the issues of peace could possibly become so overriding as to motivate a bolt...
...Rather, I am suggesting that the peace movement cannot become so concerned with its own transcendent single issue that it ignores basic social questions...
...The first is that the 1965 teach-ins were a hopeful political development, providing a national forum for serious debate on Vietnam, and should be revived forthwith...
...One possibility is that this is simply impossible...
...But the fact that this task is so imperative does not make it easy...
...Then came the tragedy of escalation in the Vietnam war, making the cruel disappointment of civil rights and anti-poverty hopes politically inevitable (economically, the United States could fight the wrong war in Asia and the right war at home...
...I too look forward to the day, the sooner the better, when American intellectuals seek, in the words of a favorite philosopher of mine, not simply to understand the world, but to change it...
...In dealing with my approach, however, Weissman promotes a very important confusion...
...So the 10 per cent minority of black America began to revive the conscience and consciousness of the entire nation...
...charismatic strongman like the de Gaulle of 1961-62...
...The fundamental question is, how do you build an effective, democratic movement for peace in America...
...One need only think of the dramatic changes in official U.S...
...On this point Weissman and I agree, though I am not at all sure his particular plan for institutionalizing the revival is the right one, and I am quite sure—as will become apparent—that he overstates the potential of this professorial movement and wrongly makes it the very center of the peace effort itself...
...The brave Russian allies of 1944 became the plotting conspirators of 1946-47 with whom we arranged a detente and signed a treaty in 1963...
...As I read his "Lament for the Teach-ins," it puts forth five basic ideas...
...It is a commonplace that the constituencies for foreign and national affairs differ profoundly...
...For obvious historical reasons, the great mass of American Negroes, workers, liberals and other groups concerned with social change are in the Democratic party...
...This was the time of the rise of Mc-Carthyism and the defeat of the New Deal coalition by a fatherly and vague general...
...But I would not close on a polemical note...
...For, as Aaron Wildowsky recently showed, statistically the Congress has been much more ready to accede to the White House's proposals for Europe or Asia than for the United States of America...
Vol. 50 • March 1967 • No. 7
