POLITICAL NOTES
477
business, and its close allies in the top military bureaucracy, more and
more run the war. A certain balance, however, is always kept, so that
the more extreme policies of the army-big business group are blocked
by Roosevelt, as with his shelving early in the war of the famous "M-Day
Plan." The farmers, the middle class, the labor movement are also part
of the status quo, after all, and exert their own pressures. But the general
drift has been to the right in the country since 1937 and in England
since the Churchill-Labor government took power in 1940.
THE WILLKIE
The so to speak natural, organic opposition to the con–
ADVENTURE
servative war policies of Churchill and Roosevelt would
he expected to come from what the British call the "lib–
labs" (liberal-labor). But the liblabs in both England and this country
have been the most loyal supporters of these policies, and the working
class, still the one social group with broad enough interests and a suffi–
cient capacity for organization to lead any movement for revolutionary
progressive change, has allowed its leaders to integrate the trade unions
into the structure of these conservative governments.*
In the absence of this "organic" opposition, a kind of political
vacuum arises, into which rush all kinds of adventurers, hoping to exploit
the widespread uneasiness and dissatisfaction with the conservative war
policies of Roosevelt-Churchill. England last summer saw the reactionary
press lord, Beaverbrook, playing a mysterious game against the Churchill
government which involved his papers joining the British Communists
in putting on joint demonstrations for a Second Front. Analogous, but
even more paradoxical, is the quickening Willkie opposition to Roosevelt's
war policy, much the most interesting political tendency in recent months.
Like Beaverbrook, Willkie is a Second Front enthusiast and a great
admirer of Stalin, but where Beaverbrook's game goes no farther than pro–
moting
th~
Second Front, Willkie's only begins there.
In my article, "The (American) People's Century," last summer, I
described .the curious kind of liberalistic "neo-imperialist" line developed
since 1940 by Willkie and Henry Luce (publisher of
Time, Life, Fortune,
and of Clare Boothe Brokaw Luce). Since then, Willkie has made his
Chungking speech, which echoed Wallace's "mankind-is-on-the-march"
speech; and he has delivered a "Report to the American People" on his
world travels which is much the boldest criticism, from a liberal view–
point, of Roosevelt's war policies to be expressed by any important
American politician. The Luce papers have printed the most sympathetic
material on the Indian Congress to appear outside the Trotskyist and
• Our own labor leaders have abdicated even more completely than their British
colleagues. It is true that in England the conservatives (Tories) are in power, but
they have had to admit labor into their government as a junior partner. Our own
.conservatives (Republicans) are not in power, but neither is the labor movement,
which has not for one moment to date-including the Hillman comedy- been per–
mitted to hold any important position
in
the war apparatus. Roosevelt has, further–
more, turned the Army and Navy cabinet posts over to Republicans, and put the
top production, price and manpower posts into conservative hands.
