32
IRVING HOWE
major shift in foreign policy from the fact that capitalism still pre–
vails in this country; experience has shown that under sufficient
pressure and need social systems can display unprecedented flexibility
and break past their earlier limits of response. But I suspect those
critics are right who say that the present administration, in its suave
"pragmatism" and canny politicking, will not have the courage to
act.
The liberals too need the courage of revaluation.
If
the United
States were to become a nation supporting "movements and leaders
of change," then
all
the usual endorsements of non-intervention would
have to be reconsidered. To favor any kind of intervention in regard
to, say, a rightist dictatorship in the Dominican Republic undercuts
the ground of a principled opposition to intervention in regard to a
"leftist" dictatorship in Cuba. Now the Cuban invasion and the role
of the U.S. in that fiasco were ghastly blunders, stupid and reaction–
ary; they showed how deeply entrenched were the forces of the
political right in Washington, quite apart from any change of ad–
ministration. Yet unless one believes that the Castro dictatorship
deserves moral or political support, a point of view favoring help
to "movements and leaders of change" in, say, Paraguay or Haiti
forces one to surrender any principled opposition to a similar policy
in Cuba. It then becomes, crucially, a matter of the political wisdom
and nature of the intervention.
3) I am committed to the "position" of democratic socialism,
that is, to the idea of a society in which the values of democratic
participation and fraternity will have suffused its major economic
and political institutions. To say this, however, is to speak in terms
of a large historical span extending a century into the past and
perhaps a century into the future. One must in honesty admit that
such a commitment does not necessarily signify that "we" have
answers to particular problems better than those advanced by other
people. Between the historic "position" and particular proposals of
socialists there is some connection, of course, but not necessarily a
clear or direct one.
The "position" of democratic socialism remains for me a valid
and inspiriting one, provided it be thought of not as a series of fixed
ideological principles but as an ethical and historical perspective
animated by a vision of humaneness and devoted to a problematic
