COMPROMISING DEMOCRACY AWAY
Coleman, Mcalister
Compromising Democracy Away By McALISTER COLEMAN Martha's Vineyard, Mass. A BIG-SHOT liberal has just driven 12 miles up island to tell me goodbye for the season and inform me that I am a...
...They had been put into office by the overwhelming majority of the people who now, in the eyes of the Roosevelt "liberals," turn out to be the dummies that Alexander Hamilton once said they were...
...Why shouldn't a good kid who has been out there fighting, as he has been told, to wipe out dictatorship abroad, wonder what fatal sickness afflicts the former champions of democracy at home...
...At these bizarre gatherings where Frank Hague, the symbol of all that is vile in political life, sat cheek by jowl with supposedly idealistic New Dealers, and the corrupt and cynical hatchet-men of the city bosses connived with the worst elements of Southern feudalism, the common man had a chance to see the wheels of compromise go round...
...Submission, that is, for the purpose of furthering a cause, public or private, so that if Norman Thomas, to use my "liberal's" example, had only gone along with F.D.R...
...Roosevelt himself said, "The present economic system of the United States is everlasting...
...Hadn't Mr...
...And that would never do...
...These benighted people seemed to cotton to the New Deal philosophy which was swiped unabashedly from the speeches, writings, and platforms of a lot of "starry-eyed idealists...
...When you amateurs go into politics you louse up everything because you refuse to compromise...
...Note how effective for the cause of democracy at home and abroad have been the compromises of this Administration since 1937 or thereabouts...
...Whichever of these two is elected will be playing footy with the Fat Boys the day after election...
...Worse than that, they have inculcated a whole generation of Americans with their cynical conclusions that democracy doesn't work...
...The resentment of the common man over this treatment was reflected in his vote for a man who under any other circumstances would have been as welcome as a skunk at a garden party, the late Wendell Willkie, super-duper utility privateer and fair-haired boy of Wall Street...
...Later on, my visitor had the same thing to say about the La Follettes...
...Knox and Stimson moved in, Knudsen was to follow, and long, long before Pearl Harbor, the common man had been informed that the basket picnic was over, and that the soup and fish mob would now carry on...
...There are not now, never have been, and never will be, 22,304,755 uncommon men in these United States...
...The Fat Boys hurried back into the temple and set up shop at the old stands, and there was what looked on the surface to be an era of good-will whose unity chorus was broken only by the small cries of genuine New Dealers whose consciences were being pricked...
...Well, "mebbe so," as the beloved Sen...
...In the march away from democracy, it is much later than many of us think...
...And yet that was Willkie's popular vote in 1940...
...And, wondering, become infected with the compromiser's defeatism, saying to himself, "Why bother voting...
...It is a childish delusion to figure that all the common men voted for Roosevelt while all the uncommon men voted for Willkie...
...Burke remarked in his "Conciliation with America" speech: "All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter...
...It's just a game anyhow, and I'll take gin rummy any day to that political razzle-dazzle...
...To have followed out the implications of the major tenets of the New Deal philosophy would have been to destroy the going system of special privilege, and the control of our natural resources by the privateers...
...What he saw of power politics made him a little ill...
...So the new compromise policy was "effective" enough to boost the 16,679,583 votes cast for Landon in 1936 to more than 22,000,000 Republican votes four years later...
...Norris used to say when people made such sweeping statements, and "mebbe not so...
...Of this common man, Thorstein Veblen once remarked, "He is common in the respect that he is not vested with the prescriptive right to- get something for nothing...
...Of course the final pay-off of this "submission to objectionable acts or opinions" was the brutal bludgeoning of Henry...
...Everybody agrees that compromise, in its first definition by Webster, i. e. "a m,utual promise or contract of two parties in controversy to refer their differences to the decision of arbitrators," is essential to civilized living...
...But the power politics boys with the cynicism that will prove more destructive to genuine democracy than an overwhelming military set-back, insist, despite the obvious and increasing alienation of the common man, that they have the only formula for political success...
...Now the "liberals" come around and tell us that it is again necessary to do evil that good may come—the good in this case being the election of Roosevelt for a fourth term...
...in 1932 and thereafter, he (Norman) would today be "effective" instead of rolling around in a vacuum...
...Then he filled up my vacuum with a compilation of cliches about compromise, platitudes about the dumbness of the common man, and howlers about Hague being "one of the master politicians of our day," used my telephone for a long distance call to New York, and drove away into his world of stark reality whose inhabitants, it seems, don't pay for long distance telephone calls...
...They could have been riding happily down the Potomac on the Mayflower years ago, thinking up slick ways for getting in on the European" mix-up if they had been willing to forget such trivial matters as principle...
...Those were the days when the power of successful politics began to go to the heads of the ex-amateurs who were at the levers of government...
...You never seem to get it through your thick head," continued my 'liberal,' "that you must play power politics to be effective...
...Later Than We Think The widespread acceptance by those who still profess liberalism of the hateful doctrine that the end justifies the means is as disheartening a distortion of the pragmatic philosophy of James and Dewey—the philosophy of the machine age—as one can well imagine...
...On the figures alone, it didn't look like a long-time paying proposition, but the practical politicians couldn't think of any other plan than the appeasement one, and they went at it harder than ever, bearing down on all the levers that moved things to the right, and in many cases giving over complete control of the levers to the very men whom they were dubbing as "economic royalists" back in the dear dim days of Administration I. The steady deterioration of the leadership of the Democratic Party was best evidenced by the character of the gang who ran its nominating conventions...
...t We bewail the fact that our overseas men regard the coming election with an egregious apathy and turn the dials off the political speeches in search of a good band or a favorite torch singer...
...But if politics is what the compromising liberals tell us it is—a game of getting campaign contributions from the rich and votes from the poor, with the promise that if elected or re-elected you are going to protect one class from the other (to paraphrase Oscar Ameringer's famous definition) why shouldn't the boys regard the whole sordid business as the bunk...
...Of course, to coin a few cliches of our own, all life is a compromise, he who does not compromise is lost, and, as Mr...
...Wallace at Chicago...
...We stumble over definition 3—"Submission to objectionable acts or opinions...
...A BIG-SHOT liberal has just driven 12 miles up island to tell me goodbye for the season and inform me that I am a starry-eyed goof "living in a vacuum...
...All these ineffectuals, according to the Roosevelt-intoxicated intellectuals, have missed the boat through their stiff-necked refusal to leave their integrity behind them on the pier...
...Now, under the terms of the compromised New Deal, it was the vested interests and their money changers who were to be appeased...
...Missing The Yacht It's this no compromise charge over which I should like briefly to chew the fat...
...So somewhere around the middle of '37 the Skipper, calling out, "A plague o' both your houses," when he was asked to comment on the Little Steel strike, decided to compromise, and, compromising, was lost, lost to genuine liberalism, lost to the common man on whose behalf he had waged so gallant an opening battle...
...In fact there was plenty of evidence that the folks wanted more of its application than the clever lever lads thought wise...
...They have so compromised the ordinary decencies as to make the very word "liberal" an object of derision...
...It's been levelled at better men than this writer since the first apeman climbed out of his tree and shouted, "Look, standing up, with no help...
...John Dewey himself in his Freedom and Culture writes, "If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points, it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 41
