THE NEW LIBERAL COALITION
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.
the new Liberal Coalition by ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. T IBERALS SPEND a good deal of time pointing out to other people how their ideas of twenty years ago no longer apply to the realities of...
...not of their prejudices, but of their possibilities...
...The pursuit of consensus as the summum bonum empties politics of meaning...
...A liberal coalition which cannot enlist the support of the young people of this country is doomed to frustration...
...But the serious tradition of American liberalism has never regarded hysteria as the method of democracy...
...by assuring compensation for the unemployed and pensions for the old, the New Deal reduced the sense of common desperation which had created its original coalition...
...The Republican Party remains, as Emerson once said of the Whigs, the "shop-and-till party"— "timid, and merely defensive of property...
...As for foreign affairs, it would appear that, the less education and the less income, the greater backing for harsh and drastic policies in Vietnam and elsewhere...
...This will include a good many of the brightest, most ambitious, most articulate—and most irascible—people in the country...
...And it is a problem for more than the liberal coalition: It is a test of the health of our society...
...The crucial fact is that in a world without a single center of Communist authority—and especially in countries where Communism can survive only as a nationalist movement—we can no longer assume that every Communist state will be a puppet or, in the lingo of Senator Dodd, a "slave state...
...It is possible for po litical leadership, if sufficiently free, cool, and brave, to relate to the young and recover their allegiance for Amer ican society...
...But, unlike the ambitious immigrants of the 1890s or the politically aggressive unemployed of the 1930s, the poor of the 1950s and 1960s were all too often a demoralized and inarticulate minority who in many cases had inherited their poverty and passively accepted it as a permanent condition...
...Our best liberals have not supposed that the debasement of debate, the substitution of rage for reason and anger for argument, could ever very long strengthen the liberal cause...
...This remained the situation at least through the war in Korea...
...for, if it becomes a competition in irrationality, the other side will win every time...
...In short, the New Deal coalition no longer exists...
...Other observers go even farther, raising fundamental doubts about the whole welfare structure and wondering whether it has not become a conspiracy of self-serving bureaucrats against the dignity and freedom of the recipients...
...And the result has been to set all Communist states free to pursue national policies...
...how to cope with the decay of our cities...
...But we must understand that we can preserve liberalism as a vital factor in the American polity only as we forever question our own stereotypes and forever strive to identify the true problems of a rapidly changing world...
...Despite certain sociological opportunities, I would therefore guess that the liberal coalition will not be reconstituted within the Republican Party...
...yet one should not dismiss the importance of an acceptance, however abstract, of the goal...
...The poverty program is one notable example...
...but such a development, however deplorable, does not in itself enlarge the military threat to the security of the democracies...
...As one consequence, the New Deal political machinery has be gun to crumble away...
...Nothing is more disturbing than the defection of so many of the young from the purposes and institutions of a society which they claim to find stifling and absurd and which un questionably gives them a profound feeling of impotence and meaningless ness...
...For all these reasons, the educational constituency will cease to be a group to be treated by men of affairs with disdain and contempt, as even Governor Reagan is bound one day to discover...
...Today, some thoughtful observers believe that the health of our national society requires the dispersion of social obligations among our state and local governments...
...Let us be realistic about the situation I am not suggesting that the economic royalists of the Thirties have undergone a miraculous transformation into children of light in the Sixties...
...A potential political beneficiary of the disappearance of that coalition could, of course, be the Republican Party...
...The farmers are a declining political force...
...It is a paradoxical situation when the views of the AFLCIO on the Far East become more benighted than those of the Chamber of Commerce...
...He understands the intractabilities of society and the ironies of history...
...Another field for rethinking lies in our welfare policies...
...This program, attacking as it does not only the economic but the moral and cultural roots of poverty, must operate without benefit of much prior experience or preconceived doctrine...
...And there are intimations today, however fleeting, of a revival of moral and intellectual purpose within the Republican Party...
...As a Democrat myself, I would be sorry to see the Republicans seize the leadership of innovation and reform in our society...
...The liberal has no expectation that utopia can be achieved overnight, or ever...
...And the churches and colleges will also involve more of the affluent than responded to Roosevelt and the New Deal—men and women in upper income groups, rendered newly sensitive by religion and education to their obligations to the less fortunate in their community and society...
...But the unorganized poor will be a new and significant element—especially if given the opportunity, through such instrumentalities as the poverty program, to act on the basis, not of their resentments, but of their hopes...
...Our churches have been attacking the ills of our society since the time of the Social Gospel...
...John F. Kennedy showed this in the brief time allotted him...
...Any party which can elect Ronald Reagan as the governor of the most populous state of the union and seriously consider running Richard Nixon a second time for the Presidency is self-evidently a party in which the death-wish is advanced almost beyond the possibility of recovery...
...The ethnic minorities have to some degree turned against each other, in part because of the Negro revolution...
...The emergence of these new problems has split the old New Deal coalition...
...And it is not, alas, the poor and uneducated who object to billboards or to the excesses of commercial television or who care about the beautification program or government support for the arts...
...The contention between Russia and China is more than a brawl between the two leading Communist powers: Its larger significance is that it signifies the death of Communist universalism—the universalism of Communist discipline as well as of Communist ideology...
...In the field of foreign affairs, American liberals, I think, have been more prepared to re-examine the conventional wisdom than they perhaps have in domestic affairs...
...Yet most indications show that the privileged classes, on balance, are somewhat more sympathetic to the Negro struggle for equality than the non-privileged...
...That coalition consisted of the Democratic Party city machines, the trade unions, the ethnic minorities, the family farmers, and the intellectuals—a disparate and often diverging group, based on the poor and the uneducated and unified by the political genius of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Some liberals act as if that coalition still existed today...
...My impression would be that the Democratic Party will remain the chosen national instrument for innovation and reform—if the leaders of that party can build a new coalition as effective as the one built by Franklin Roosevelt thirty years ago...
...To do this requires hard, sober, and precise rethinking by liberals themselves about the character of our contemporary problems and remedies...
...But this question is intimately related to the character of our national society...
...The basic liberal proposition is that complicated problems can be solved only by thoughtful analysis...
...And the point is that all such questions are irrelevant to the shibboleths of the Thirties—to the old arguments between the common man and the economic royalist, big government and little government, Federal intervention and free enterprise...
...But it carries with it the hard question whether our states and our communities can mobilize the honesty, intelligence, and imagination essential to the wise use of public funds...
...All it may mean is that a country has succumbed to a dismal and dogmatic creed, with repression and misery for its people and losses for foreign investors...
...but it does not necessarily offer the same kind of challenge to our own security that a new Communist state would have offered in the days when the Communist movement was an arm of the Russian national state...
...and, indeed, the record of the last half-century would make this judgment, if anything, an understatement...
...even the national or ganization of the Democratic Party is dilapidated and ineffectual...
...and liberal political action to this day is dominated by the memory of the New Deal coalition...
...But liberals can perhaps help to shorten this period by themselves enlisting in the war against poverty, by assisting anti-poverty projects in their own communities, and by analyzing the comparative results of varying programs...
...This was not, of course, precisely true, for plenty of poor people remained...
...privilege, now as then, continues to nourish selfishness and greed...
...for only trial and error can tell which approaches will work and which will not...
...it requires also a political coalition which can organize legislative support for the appropriate measures...
...Twenty years ago Communism was still a relatively unified and disciplined world force...
...Because the New Deal secured the basis of life for so many, contemporary liberalism has been able to move on to qualitative tasks—to measures, in other words, designed to improve the quality of life in an industrial society...
...Perhaps we liberals should occasionally consider whether this bracing proposition may not apply to some of our own ideas...
...Nothing is more dangerous to the future of the world than the in tellectual indolence, the addiction to extinct cliches, which leads our gov ernment to conclude that, because they all style themselves as Communist, the Vietcong must therefore be the spearhead of a coordinated and disci plined Chinese system of expansion and that the issue in Vietnam today is the restraint of Chinese aggression— a proposition which was never very convincing in the past and which makes even less sense now, with China itself collapsing into an obscure and ferocious civil war...
...No doubt it is, but what else can one reasonably expect when a government tries to do something which no government has ever attempted...
...Even the Negro revolution has lost its coherence of purpose—at least until its contending leaders were briefly reunited by the martyrdom of Adam Clayton Powell...
...For surely the elements of a new coalition are coming into existence...
...The issues are no longer social and economic so much as they are cultural and moral...
...T IBERALS SPEND a good deal of time pointing out to other people how their ideas of twenty years ago no longer apply to the realities of 1967...
...using the affirmative state to protect jobs, homes, bank accounts, and farm prices...
...If liberalism is to survive as a vital force, if it is to offer programs to a new liberal coalition, it must face the challenges of abundance with the same freshness and boldness—the same freedom from the stereotypes of the past —with which Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers faced the challenges of privation and scarcity...
...But perhaps even more important than affluence in the withering away of the New Deal coalition has been the rise of new issues...
...In short, we will never have a strong and united liberal coalition until we have a foreign policy which faithfully expresses this nation's best traditions and highest ideals...
...For a change of incalculable significance has come over the world since the liberals of Americans for Democratic Action at their first national convention in March 1947 endorsed the Truman Doctrine and the policy of aid to Greece and Turkey...
...Critics have called the poverty program confused and contradictory...
...But in the years since, the world Communist problem has taken on a radically new form...
...Instead of the old city machines, there will be the new movements for urban modernization and reform which have already produced such notable results since the war under Democratic leadership in such cities as Philadelphia, New Haven, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Boston—and which, because the reform impulse in New York City could not effectively express itself through the Democratic Party, brought about the election of a Republican mayor...
...and that insistence on reason is the final hope of a democratic society...
...That process of rethinking has only just begun...
...One can easily understand why this should be so: these are luxury issues,, to be tackled after the assurance of the necessities of life...
...As for our colleges, they represent a constituency of ever growing significance and power in our society...
...But it is entirely possible to have an American foreign policy which will at once protect the national interests of the United States and advance the welfare of a diverse and suffering humanity...
...The ethnic minorities, now so upset and confused by the Negro revolution, will probably not have the same role as in the coalition of the Thirties...
...I do not apologize for this, for politics is the means through which a democracy determines public policy...
...The elements of a new liberal coalition, I would suggest, thus exist in abundance, if chaotic abundance, in our land...
...But a government or party committed to the world of diversity—committed to the affirmative role of the United States in working toward a stable and progressive world community embracing a variety of economic systems, political philosophies, and religious creeds—can, I believe, rally the latent idealism of our country in the service of peace and decency...
...And it will represent not only an accumulation of criticism but also an accumulation of knowledge...
...In any case, this is a moment for liberal stocktaking...
...The Democratic city organizations have mostly fallen into disrepair...
...and if the liberals can define the issues of our time in a way which will offer that coalition its intellectual basis...
...And the acknowledgment of the pluralism of world power—the recognition of what President Kennedy called the "world of diversity"—is fundamental to the reconstitution of a new liberal coalition...
...Some would therefore replace the public welfare system altogether by a guaranteed annual income, perhaps through a negative income tax...
...The problem is whether liberalism can help evolve the ideas which will unite these elements and give them common purposes and common objectives...
...This liberal generation has tended to write off the Republican Party as constitutionally devoid of imagination, ideas, and initiative...
...The question liberals must consider is whether this coalition can be restored...
...The solution of these problems requires intellectual discipline, technical knowledge, and social imagination...
...The intellectual community today is divided and querulous...
...and, in any case, labor leaders can no longer deliver a labor vote...
...In great part this has been a grievously belated response to the struggle for civil rights...
...but never, I believe, have churches of all denominations concerned themselves so realistically and unitedly with social problems as today...
...It may take years of experimentation before a comprehensive strategy begins to emerge...
...The existence of poverty in this country remains a national shame and scandal and requires our best efforts of social invention and public investment...
...But I do suggest that the emerging issues of the 1960s and 1970s—even the poverty issue itself—will to a considerable degree cut across the familiar social and economic divisions of the 1930s...
...The foreign policy of the United States must express the new realities...
...Nor do I say that the imperative need for a much larger allocation of our resources to the public sector will not continue to encounter the stubborn and selfish opposition of that large section among the rich who hate doing anything to help the poor...
...My own guess is that the lines of division in our politics have fundamentally altered...
...He served as special assistant to Presidents John F. Kennedy and tyndon B. Johnson...
...And it is not only a possibility: it is a necessity if we are to grow as a vital democratic society...
...And I am constrained to add that, despite some gallant individuals, I do not think this is likely to happen...
...This is partly because of the very success of New Deal policies...
...It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate slaves, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant...
...But the fact remains that the New Deal coalition, forged in the struggle for the necessities, is not as such deeply engaged in the current attempts to improve the quality of our civilization...
...Even education, the key to the equalization of opportunity, does not seem to command the ardent support of those in our society who would benefit from it most...
...Indeed, when liberals abandon rational debate, they sell the pass to the enemy...
...But, if we are to be realistic, we must acknowledge the fact that the New Deal coalition has fallen apart...
...The analytical work taking place today in our universities on critical issues of our national future—racial adjustment, social alienation, the cities, the effects of automation—will not only help us understand our problems but will generate energies toward their solution...
...I do not say that we have finally resolved the quantitative problems of our society...
...As one politician said after the 1952 election, "The trouble is that we ran out of poor people...
...how to protect individual privacy in an electronic age...
...his sworn foes are, above all, those ideologists who would sacrifice humanity on an altar of dogma and abstraction...
...The component elements lost their early sense of solidarity and began to strike out on their own...
...the new Liberal Coalition by ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR...
...for the Republican Party has traditionally been the party of the more affluent and the better- (or at least the longer-) educated...
...but that struggle has plainly awakened a religious conscience which will carry over to other questions of inequity and injustice in our national life...
...The New Deal, observing the general incompetence of state governments and understanding the need for a national approach to national problems, tended to centralize welfare efforts in Washington...
...Such a foreign policy must, of course, take into account the bitter realities of a passionate and dangerous world...
...This idea of decentralization, with the possibility of wider citizen participation, has great appeal...
...and it was that coalition which, perhaps less from conviction about the policy than from confidence in the leader, supported the internationalist course in foreign affairs in the 1940s...
...Communist parties everywhere took their orders from Moscow and, in effect, served the national interests of the Soviet Union...
...An issue of transcendent importance in the formation of a new coalition is the question of foreign policy...
...In this new age of polycentrism the extension of Communism no longer means the automatic extension of Russian, or of Chinese, power...
...Again, the idea of freeing the nation from elaborate administrative machinery has great appeal...
...No doubt this may be in great part because the privileged are insulated from the immediate consequences of this struggle...
...He is a passionate idealist but, in the words of John F. Kennedy, an idealist without illusions...
...The New Deal program tackled the elemental needs of the American people —a job, a suit of clothing, three meals a day, a roof over one's head, and a measure of security for old age...
...But this too raises hard questions, especially whether public funds would not do more good if used for the expansion of public facilities than for the expansion of private consumption—for schools, say, rather than television sets...
...And, in addition, foreign policy, which until the end of the Thirties was a subordinate and marginal consideration, has now become a central issue in our politics and lives...
...Because there are no precedents, its course must perforce be one of experiment...
...American liberalism must keep its pledge to the gospel of reason...
...In contending for a course of realistic idealism, the modern liberal must expect to enrage the ideologists and dogmatists of our time, whether of the New Right or the New Left—those for whom politics is a means, not of action, but of catharsis...
...Let me be more precise...
...His most recent book is "The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy 1941-1966," published by Houghton Mifflin...
...The mere fact that a state proclaims itself Communist is no longer by that fact itself proof that it will serve as the obedient instrument of expanding Russian or Chinese power...
...It was that coalition which produced the revolutionary social changes of the 1930s...
...If liberals remain ardent and unswerving in this faith, we may see the birth of a new coalition dedicated to liberal purposes of freedom, justice, and peace...
...But liberalism has always seemed to me in es-sense a recognition that the world is forever changing and a belief that the application of reason to human and social problems can enlarge the dignity and freedom of man...
...These are the issues of civil rights, of civil liberties, of education, of urban planning, of the state of the arts and the beauty of the environment...
...Nothing less than this is adequate either to the reconstruction of a liberal coalition or to the responsibilities of the greatest power on earth...
...Yet, while the liberal never forgets that the struggle for human improvement is long and complex, he is determined at the same time that complexity shall never cut the nerve of action...
...The age of the two blocs is past...
...The world has changed in these twenty years...
...Organized labor will continue to have a role—as large a role as its sense of the public interest permits...
...I conclude therefore that the New Deal coalition is not likely to be restored in its original form...
...A new Communist state may well create other problems...
...Yet members of minorities will find a new field for aspiration and action in institutions which have acquired a new cogency in American politics—above all our churches and our colleges...
...A government or party sworn to the notion of the infallibility of American power will never persuade the youth or the colleges or the churches or the Negroes or the poor—because all these people know well how erring the American state can be...
...The shift from the economic conflict of the Thirties to the cultural conflict of our own times is sociologically favorable to Republican prospects...
...For on the issues of qualitative liberalism it is the poor and the uneducated who tend to be the most emotional champions of the status quo and the more affluent and better educated who tend to care more about change...
...By 1970 there will be seven million students in our institutions of higher learning and nearly three-quarters of a million teachers...
...Yet one must not forget that at the start of the century, when men like Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La-Follette, and George Norris were Republican leaders, that party for a moment was in the forefront of the struggle for progressive reform...
...His vision is empirical and pluralistic...
...others dream of restoring it...
...Liberals, I believe, have been more willing than Secretaries of State to note a change in the character of the Communist threat and to abandon the notion that world Communism, or even Asian Communism, is a homoge neous, disciplined, monolithic move ment...
...While much of the rhetoric of contemporary youth seems to me over wrought and even hysterical, those over thirty would be foolish not to see in it the symptoms of deep and alarm ing disquietude...
...If a country was taken over by the Communists then, it meant the automatic extension of Russian power—and, given the character of Soviet purposes, it meant an increased threat to the security and freedom of the democratic world...
...No policy, at home or abroad, can be expected to satisfy everybody...
...Trade union membership has declined both relatively and absolutely...
...The first question I would submit as we take stock is that of liberal politics...
...It is no longer the common man against the economic royalist or the worker against the boss so much as it is the rational against the indignant, the tolerant against the bigoted, the planner against the spoiler, the humanist against the materialist, the educated against the uneducated, the young against the old...
...As we righteously exhort others to divest themselves of platitude and cliche, conceivably we ought also to divest ourselves of some of our own more cherished banalities...
...We believe—and I think we are right in believing—that the liberal idea and the liberal spirit are imperishable...
...Similarly the privileged appear more ready to protect the freedoms of debate and dissent than the non-privileged...
...For foreign policy is only the face a nation presents to the world—and the question underlying such tormented problems as Vietnam and the Dominican Republic is whether the United States is to project itself abroad as a rational and civilized society, using its power with precision and responsibility, measuring the application of force to the level of threat, or as a brutal and overweening state, plunging pridefully ahead as mankind's judge, jury, and executioner...
...So new issues have eroded the basis of the old liberal coalition in these twenty years...
...By ARTHUR SCHtESINGER, JR., twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, once for history and once for biography, was one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action...
...today only about one-fifth of the labor force is organized...
...The experience of the New Deal shaped the liberal political strategy of the present adult generation...
...This is surely why our most thoughtful and sensitive political leaders these days spend time on college campuses out of all proportion to the number of eligible voters they find there...
...how to encourage the arts...
...Every liberal, of course, will define liberalism in his own way...
...Included in all these groups, of course, is the most vital group of all— the youth...
...For the struggle for equal rights must be the moral core of the new coalition...
...There are many other areas of immense concern to our national future where our thinking remains uncertain, tentative, and incomplete—how best to organize education, for example...
...For the issues of the New Deal were fundamentally those of quantitative liberalism...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
