America's Crisis of Confidence

...No one wants to do anything about it—because no one is confident that what would be done would make things any better...

...As if to signal the "energy crisis," 1966-73 also saw our output per man hour in coal mining actually decrease...

...What is to be done...

...Let me offer a statistic...

...Certainly it was African countries, at the last OAU meeting in Kampala, which broke the gathering force of the movement to suspend Israel from the General Assembly...

...For democracy is indeed under attack, and increasingly the attack succeeds...

...By the 1970s officials were setting 6 per cent as the goal—admittedly a short-term goal, but when does the short-term end...

...We recently calculated the length of time the typical UN member has enjoyed a relatively stable government without violent overthrow or usurpation, including revolution...

...It is what the State Legislature is not doing, and the Congress is not doing, and the Governor and the President are not doing that is the giveaway...

...No nation is so poor that it cannot afford free speech...

...If there is to be an increased flow of wealth to the countries of the South, the United States will insist that it be channeled into the pockets of individuals and not into Swiss bank accounts, and that necessary precautions be taken to that effect...

...indeed, at the end of those 30 years we find ourselves furthest from doing so...

...I myself would argue that the conclusion of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe this summer was not a defeat...

...We are prosperous because we are—or were—an industrious and productive people living under a system that has encouraged the development of our capacities and energies...

...In the days immediately following passage of the Employment Act of 1946 (originally the "Full" Employment Act), it was thought that a 3 per cent unemployment rate was acceptable...

...Since 1950, only when the U.S...

...The United States acknowledges no such debt...

...Totalitarian Communist regimes and assorted ancient and modern despotisms make up the rest...

...The old democracies of Europe were reviving...

...But let there be no illusions: Most of the new states and most of the old ones have ended up enemies of freedom as we know it, as we have inherited it, and as we have tried to preserve it...

...It is only 11 years since the median member country of the UN experienced its last overthrow of government—in a world where nuclear energy technologists measure the length of storage of reactor wastes in what they have come to term "geological time": 5,000 years, 30,000 years...

...Now, you can blame the policies and people of the moment for this...

...I think we are in a position to respond to this...

...The years ahead—with the proportion of young workers in the labor force increasing—will have to be harder than those of the recent past, raising the question of what our prospects are for doing better...

...They are wrong...

...This time, however, we suffer not only from internal disorders but from external assault...

...delegation, is fighting against the latest such move, a resolution before the Third Committee that equates "Zionism" with "racism," and calls for the eradication of both...

...During President Kennedy's first year in office the American investment rate fell to 13.8 per cent of GNP...

...A quarter century ago the future looked reasonably good for democracy, at least in most parts of the world...

...Let me focus on the issues in what is now my field, foreign affairs, and especially on the aspect of foreign affairs that tends to legitimate or delegitimate democratic practices and private institutions...

...Abroad our situation is no better...

...When half the people in the world with democratic rights lose those rights—lose them in a sequence of government repression that began, typically, with the breaking of a strike and the imprisonment of trade union leaders—then the American democracy also suffers...

...If what he means is "never recently"—we can accept, can we not, that when the British burned Washington it was a sort of setback, and there have been others—then probably most of us would agree...

...representative to the United Nations, is a previous NL contributor whose article is adapted from a recent address to the AFL-CIO...

...Nor is there any doubt that some will find pleasure in our predicament...

...Eleven years...

...In the context that President Ford spelled out at Helsinki, and that Secretary of State Kissinger conducted the negotiations, the Conference was something which had to come, and came as much on our terms as the realities of power allowed...

...But we should not allow this to deter us from trying to discover what it is that we have got wrong—or perhaps more to the point, never got right...

...Japan's rose to 40.5 per cent...

...What did the median come out to be...

...The United States will further insist on broadening the definition of welfare to include not only the economic condition of the individual, but his political condition as well...

...For the period 1965-72, we had a Gross National Product (GNP) growth rate of 3.2 per cent...

...The same is true where I work...

...It seemed to me that many of the new countries of the world had inherited, mostly from Western Europe, a decent and honorable tradition of Democratic Socialism...

...There will be more campaigns...

...There is, it seems to me, no question that this is the way we have to go...

...In the same years Japan's economy expanded four times faster...

...Everyone has been talking about the new international order, and as the United States has already indicated in Secretary Kissinger's September 1 address to the special session of the General Assembly, we stand ready to participate in the creation of a world where starvation would disappear and everyone would be assured a basic minimum of economic sustenance...

...Every day, on every side, we are assailed at the United Nations...

...We repudiate the charge that we have exploited or plundered other countries, or that our own prosperity has ever rested on any such relationship...

...We no longer think we know what to do...

...as someone once said...

...Instead, we have been redefining where we want to be in terms that have made the original goal steadily recede...

...President Ford affirmed our commitment to universal human rights at Helsinki, and we will continue to affirm it...

...And it is the clue to New York City's position...

...There is much that the United Nations has done in its 30 years that is honorable and good...

...But this outrage is likely as not to be voted for by a majority of the membership of the United Nations...

...What we acknowledge is a common humanity and a common concern arising out of our own sense of what we can and ought to do...

...Then came the 1950s and the long period of economic doldrums following the Korean War...

...And it is no accident, I am afraid, that this "racist murderer"—as one of our leading newspapers called him?is head of the Organization of African Unity (OAU...

...It is hard, I suppose, for us to understand this—or perhaps too easy to ascribe it to the wrongdoings of democracy itself, to mistakes that we have made that have brought on inevitable, justified, even admirable reprisal...

...There has been a change of mind...

...At present, for example, Leonard Garment, Counsel to the U.S...

...It was an event of symbolic and substantive significance when, in the course of the 1960s, output per man hour in the Japanese iron and steel industry bypassed that of the United States...

...Moreover, increasingly it is seen to succeed...

...Yet let me say that we distrust ourselves to our utmost disadvantage...

...We elect to act because the plight of people in other countries increasingly presses itself upon us, and we wish to take whatever measures we are capable of to alleviate the suffering that can be alleviated and to eliminate the causes of suffering that can be eliminated...

...But it has done damn little for democracy...

...We are moved as a matter of free choice and out of growing willingness in our culture to broaden the boundaries of fellow feeling beyond those which define the territories of the nation-state...

...They will not abate, for it is sensed in the world that democracy is in trouble...

...On the contrary, it has grown endemic, like fever in a swampland, and weakened the society...

...George Meany has said that the "nation has never suffered more foreign policy defeats than it has in the past year...

...It is these realities that bedevil us, and to suppose otherwise is to court self-deception and even worse setbacks...

...Not because events there were the result of anything America did, but simply because of what those events do to America...

...and if we have taken more than a little punishment, possibly this has served to wake us up to what is going on: to the systematic effort to create an international society in which government is the one and only legitimate institution...

...That was the clue in the detective story, what did not happen...

...And that we can go this way with confidence...

...The first reality of power is economic...

...We are assailed because we are a democracy...

...We put ourselves down for 199 years, Australia for 74, and so on...

...And nothing so unites these nations as the conviction that their success ultimately depends on our failure...

...In truth we are likely, on form, to do worse simply because we have not been laying down the foundations Daniel P. Moynihan, the U.S...

...The idea of reparations implies a debt incurred as a result of past wrongs...

...We are handling issues spanning centuries with governments that cannot survive even 11 years...

...There is blood in the water and the sharks grow frenzied...

...Too rarely have the results been what we expected, though, and too frequently what we did not expect...

...In any new international order, the right to a minimum standard of political and civil liberty must be no less fundamental than the right to a minimum standard of material welfare...

...It must be clear, however, that the United States does not wish to do this because we accept responsibility for the economic condition of the Third and Fourth Worlds...

...This is the second reality of power, the reality that democracy today faces growing hostility, that freedom is on the defensive, if not on the run...

...If this had a certain anti-American bias, it was nonetheless a tradition we could work with and respect...

...and only once, 22 years ago, did it drop below 3 per cent...

...There are those in this country whose pleasure, or profit, it is to believe that our assailants are motivated by what is wrong about us...

...In 1950 our investment rate was lower than all other nations save Britain, and before long we were outstripped by the British...

...Injustice is Justice...

...More and more America shows symptoms of what Walter Lipp-mann once called "the sickness of any over-governed society...

...If, as I believe, it is a sign of strength that such actions can occur without retaliation—if when America and its allies speak about respecting the territorial integrity and independence of other countries they mean it—it is no less a sign of weakness that such actions can have serious effects...

...Unemployment is the disease of capitalism, and we have not eliminated it...

...In the United Nations today there are roughly two dozen democracies left...

...What the UN has done is simply to extend the nation-state to the farthest reaches of the inhabited world...

...But here again there is a crisis of confidence, for many Americans would not at all agree on the particular events the President of the AFL-CIO regards as defeats...

...This crisis of confidence is evident in the present plight of New York City, the capital of the country in most respects, certainly our first city, and the place where a sickness of over-government brought only a sickness of unemployment...

...Less and less do we seem confident of what to do next...

...I hope and trust that members of the Organization of African Unity will disavow Amin and all he stands for...

...All this has changed...

...The industrial societies, including the United States, are in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s...

...But there was no real improvement, not even with the stimulus of a wartime footing...

...Or elsewhere as well...

...A year later I am not sure...

...The old dream of an international economic order dominated by a single nation is being replaced with the not different vision of domination by an all-encompassing state—a state with no provision for the liberties of individuals, much less for the liberties of collections of individuals, such as trade unions...

...Ironically, that issue was quietly put to rest on the morning of the very day that Amin was to commence yet a new campaign...

...Communist arms, Communist intrigue and Communist treachery have been so successful in Asia and Africa that the reputation of democracy in those regions has virtually collapsed...

...What worries me is that the last three decades have witnessed all manner of policies, and of people making them, and still we have not managed to reach our objective...

...One by one the colonies of Africa and Asia were becoming independent and establishing democratic regimes...

...By the early 1960s President Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers wished to set 4 per cent as the acceptable unemployment level...

...Some would view them as victories, some as standoffs, some as opening rather than closing incidents...

...That was going to happen, I assume, and the UN is hardly to blame if it happened under its auspices...

...We do not, then, wish to contribute to the creation of a new international order out of guilt or as a matter of reparations...

...was at war has the unemployment rate dropped below 4 per cent...

...It is no accident that on Ocober 1, "His Excellency Field Marshal Al Hadji Idi Amin Dada, President of the Republic of Uganda"—to give him his UN title?called for "the extinction of Israel as a state...

...At home, the one overriding, pervasive fact confronting us is that in 30 postwar years of ever greater economic product and expanding government activity we have never achieved full employment...

...Slavery is Liberty...

...I was assistant secretary of labor at the time, and I recall Secretary Willard Wirtz' struggle to have this declared an "interim" target...

...India is frequently cited among the recent disasters in American foreign relations, and rightly...

...Investment has to be a part of the problem...

...The situation is reminiscent of the Sherlock Holmes story in which the dog didn't bark...

...The rest of the world cannot but note—nor fail, I fear, to gloat...

...The United Nations has 142 members...

...Once more, the crisis of confidence: the trouble we have in trusting ourselves...

...But eventually we fell behind there, too...

...In 1960, while running for the Presidency, John F Kennedy said he was not satisfied with the lowest growth rate among all industrial nations...

...All that talk of freedom gets frighteningly close to the Orwellian inversion: War is Peace...

...We have no desire, therefore, to participate in a new economic arrangement whose beneficiaries will be the state rather than the individual, leaders rather than the individual, politicians and bureaucrats rather than the individual...

...One by one the new democracies, and even some of the old ones, have been disappearing...

...The oil-producing nations have initiated—without pain of retaliation or redress —an increase in the price of energy that has proved jolting to the most advanced economies of the world and devastating to the least advanced...

...A year ago I was far more optimistic about all this than I am today...

...Ours is a culture based on the primacy of the individual—the rights of the individual, the welfare of the individual, the claims of the individual against those of the state...

...They commence, of course, to consume one another and the chaos mounts...

...We are assailed because of what is right about us...

...Old autocracies such as Japan seemed to be following the evolution that had led to democracy in Western Europe, and would have done so in Eastern Europe had not the Bolsheviks seized power...

...The need to change this was a central theme of his campaign, and he won his election...

...Given the existing circumstances, this was surely reasonable...

...For the whole period 1950-72, real GNP per employed citizen in the United States grew at the lowest rate of any Western industrial nation...

...If we have fallen back, we have also shortened our lines...

...We also consider that we have been reasonably helpful and generous in our economic dealings with other countries...

...of economic growth...

...It is too soon to write off India, but hardly too soon to take heed of what is happening there...

...For Israel is a democracy, and it is simply the fact that despotisms will seek whatever opportunities come to hand to destroy what threatens them most, which is democracy...

...For a while we made up for low investment by high production, the genius of American management and American workers...

...The society, experimenting with first one cure, then another, has in turn weakened itself...

...But it is important to stress—as important, it seems to me, as anything can be—that this willingness has as its object the fate of individuals...

...In the main we have responded to softness in the private sector of the economy by expanding the public sector, currently past a third of GNP and heading for half...