A Republican View
GILDER, GEORGE F.
A Republican View By George F. Gilder Lyndon Johnson's Presidency has had its moments. The transition after Dallas was flawless—a marvellous evocation of strength, stability, continuity, purpose....
...A new President would do well to recognize that the United States has in general been hostile to the industrialization and trade of underdeveloped countries...
...New attempts to prescribe a Great Society on the Federal level are likely to meet the same kind of frustrations encountered by President Johnson...
...Since it was expected that a great many countries would turn Communist in the wake of Western colonialism, this failure represents a massive rejection of Marxist discipline...
...The civil rights laws of '64 and '65 represented a historic breakthrough, and Johnson deserves considerable credit for them...
...By making possible the mechanization of Southern agriculture, the program entails steady displacement of Negroes, who are streaming North at a rate of almost 500,000 annually...
...This migration, the principal cause of the urban crisis, is a national movement promoted by Washington...
...Now, in his statement of withdrawal, we have witnessed one of the truly masterly Presidential performances...
...Thus our inevitable setbacks and blunders, though in fact caused by unique local circumstances, are widely considered to be a generic expression of American foreign policy and have been used to discredit the entire anti-Communist cause, especially among young people...
...maintains a heavily protectionist stance against those manufactures—especially textiles—in which the poor countries have a potential comparative advantage...
...If in the future some of them adopt increasingly authoritarian and protectionist economic practices and turn to the Communists, we should not be too quick to attribute their choice to the superiority of totalitarian methods or to international Communist subversion...
...What they usually get from Washington is strings without money...
...makes up for its stinginess and myopia in aid and trade with magnanimous foreign private investment policies...
...Although the Pentagon figure is much lower, its estimates are invariably far below the ultimate requirement—and in this instance the real costs may be compounded by acceleration of the arms race...
...It is unfortunate that the leading Republican candidate is more interested in serving the prejudices of the complacent white majority and in continuing the Johnson foreign policies that have already proven obsolete...
...Municipal governments with largely Negro constituencies would be far more likely to focus effectively on the plight of the poor than Federal bureaucracies hampered by a hostile Congress responsive to a majority of relatively affluent whites...
...Consequently, these municipalities are compelled repeatedly to increase property taxes on urban homeowners who did not invite the migration North and bear no special responsibility for it...
...Along with escalating the American interventionism in Southeast Asia, it has pursued a whole range of neo-isolationist policies di-recdy inimical to the non-Communist development of the poor countries...
...The results today are manifest...
...We have negotiated great reductions in tariffs with other industrial powers, but the U.S...
...Again, one concedes that this Administration is not uniquely responsible for such misplaced priorities...
...The key to Johnson's decline, of course, has been the Vietnam war...
...Federal money for urban renewal, highways, airports, and adc, for instance, were all included in the Administration's catchall catalogue of "anti-riot" measures...
...Meanwhile the Administration continues its vast subsidies for affluent farmers...
...Nixon now claims to have supported the 1964 bill, but he in fact refused to give it an unequivocal endorsement until after it was enacted...
...and indeed, Congress is partly at fault...
...The billions spent on highways, agriculture and space, not to mention unnecessary weaponry, all testify to a failure to recognize the urgency of the city predicament...
...Moreover, our policy rationales support the Chinese contention that they are responsible for North Vietnam's strategy and success...
...The urban renewal program continues to destroy more housing for the poor than it constructs, and other Administration housing and poverty efforts consist of underfinanced and over-supervised experiments—aptly characterized by Johnson supporter Joseph Alsop as "instant politics...
...These men would make a greater contribution to our economic growth in almost any other industry...
...It is not redeemed by rewriting history...
...The next administration, therefore, should insist on a permanent and substantial program of Federal revenue sharing for both cities and states...
...Their understandable sense of grievance sometimes takes the form of racist resentment toward Negroes...
...At the 1964 meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (un-ctad...
...While Lyndon Johnson is in some respects George F. Gilder is the co-author of The Party That Lost Its Head...
...Our private investment in the less developed countries has been diminishing also as a proportion of the gnp, and about half of it is in extractive industries like mining and petroleum...
...Escaping from the clutches of anticipated demagoguery to a higher plane of historic drama, he placed himself briefly among the greatest of Presidents...
...and the Federal money lavished on these corporations would do more to reduce unemployment if spent for virtually any other Federal, state or private purpose...
...Approximately 30 per cent of the Neero males in the slums are unemployed...
...This American acceptance of Peking's propaganda must have been a welcome surprise to the Chinese, who despite their claims actually had a negligible role in North Vietnam's guerrilla achievements and have nowhere succeeded in starting or taking over a war of national liberation...
...Although Richard Nixon now asserts it is time for others to share our burden, we currently lag behind several European countries in the proportion of our Cnp devoted to economic aid...
...Given our present concern over the balance of payments, the United States seems unlikely soon to abandon this invidious and exploitative posture in the Southern hemisphere...
...all the industrial countries except the United States supported tariff preferences for poor country manufacturers...
...This was one of the most dismal episodes in Nixon's tenebrous career...
...Our principal welfare program—Aid for Dependent Children (adc)—has long been actively eroding family stability in the ghetto by requiring an absentee father as a condition of payments...
...Washington, however, refuses to recognize any special responsibility for this situation...
...But this Administration has had the experience of a uniquely compelling crisis in the cities, a uniquely vast Gross National Product, and uniquely urgent appeals from both the intellectual community and from the nation's city officials...
...The Johnson Administration, nonetheless, has greatly increased the likelihood of future Communist gains...
...In terms of real transfers of funds, it has been reduced by over 300 per cent as a proportion of the Gross National Product since the Eisenhower Administration...
...And like the Chinese we suggest that the free Southeast Asian-governments are all teetering dominoes on the brink of revolution...
...Clifford further advocates going ahead on a new generation of manned intercontinental bombers, though they are already obsolete and, as the recent accident with nuclear explosives indicate, much less safe than missiles...
...The most outrageous prodigality occurs in the defense budget, where Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford is evidently succumbing without qualms to military demands for weapons systems which could not pass any reasonable test of cost effectiveness...
...Our foreign aid program, for example, has been effectively scuttled...
...Another consequence of superfluous defense and space projects is diversion of the nation's growth away from the cities and away from the poor...
...As Steven Roberts has noted in these pages "Tapping the Resentment Vote," NL, March 11), many are now turning to the candidacy of George Wallace...
...a great man, in sum his Administration must be considered a failure?even if he spends the rest of his term attempting to redeem his mistakes...
...The U.S...
...The Administration's inadequacies are especially poignant in contrast with the President's great achievements in civil rights...
...The Administration chose to fight the Communists precisely where their cause was strongest—in the only country in the world where the Communists had led a nation to victory against a colonial power...
...The best way to rectify priorities as well as attack poverty may be to get income tax money out of Federal hands—where it is likely to be spent on the military or on the interests of the well-off national majority—and into the hands of city and state governments...
...Our trade policies have been similarly parsimonious in the case of the poor countries...
...Johnson blames Congress for refusal to appropriate more funds...
...But a great many of the programs cited are irrelevant or even positively harmful to the interest of slum residents...
...even if Richard Nixon celebrates them as triumphs and promises to repeat them all...
...Unlike the depression, when poverty was a national crisis afflicting almost everyone, present-day poverty is localized...
...Domestically, Johnson Administration derelictions have been equally catastrophic and only some of the failures can be attributed to the Vietnam war...
...It should not be imagined that the U.S...
...But the Federal government does not give the Northern cities adequate money to cope with it...
...Such a program is acceptable even to conservative Republican Congressmen like Melvin Laird...
...The Administration cites an array of programs affecting the cities, compares their costs with urban expenditures of previous Administrations, and concludes it is aggressively fulfilling its obligations...
...The chief problem, though, is a crazily distorted order of national priorities...
...There is no clear national majority today eager for a massive Federal onslaught directed specifically against privations in the urban ghettos...
...Most current Federal programs do little to meet the fiscal crisis faced by American mayors with heavy slum populations...
...Aero-space industries are large corporations that employ some of the most valuable and catalytic manpower in the economy: scientists, technicians, and skilled laborers who tend to live in the suburbs and have no trouble finding employment...
...As long as the Federal government assumes that city problems are enormously complex and need nothing so much as further study and experiment, riots will continue and our racial tensions will worsen...
...Together these two useless novelties, neither of them justifiable in terms of the national security, will probably cost more than $30 billion...
...This is one aspect of the Johnson Presidency that Nixon may well not emulate...
...This will only induce our enemies to circumvent or neutralize it, at a cost far less than its construction...
...Looking to the future, the Johnson failures, domestic and foreign, portend nothing but trouble for the next President, whoever he is...
...Racial animosities are at a new high...
...While the riots in the cities cannot be imputed to any one administration, the Johnsonian response to this epochal crisis of American democracy has been negligent and misconceived...
...Against the inclinations of former Secretary Robert McNa-mara and the recommendation of President Eisenhower, the United States is going ahead with building an anti-missile system...
...then compounded the error by representing this conflict as the crucial test of China's strategy of national liberation wars...
...The civil rights speech of 1965, bravely sentimental, sternly resolute, found a wave of righteousness in the American people and confidently rode its crest to catharsis: "We shall overcome," Johnson said, and that evening for a moment we did...
...Yet when the rhetoric fades we are left with the record...
...The American cities need money without strings...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 8
