NEW RADICALISM
371
that happens in Atlantic City can change the fact that there is no
proletariat that makes up a present or potential revolutionary majority
in America. There can be no "politics-by-the-poor" approach except
within the framework of coalition. And the Movement and the new
radicals must look forward, perhaps sadly and warily, to cooperating
with the liberal groups. You and I both hope that the case for
radicalism and the inevitable course of events will drive those liberal
groups beyond meliorism in time for us to confront our revolutionary
technological world. But it would be a disaster to interpret the basic
disagreement at Atlantic City as an expression of the division between
the militant Negroes and their radical white allies, and those you call
meliorists. Yet that is what you and too many of the new radicals do.
Your position is, I am sure, cathartic and bold; politically it is a
sentence to permanent failure for the black and white poor.
Before concluding, let me talk about something neither you nor
I really touched upon: foreign policy. The new radicalism certainly
had roots in the peace movement, particularly in the ban-the-bomb
campaigns of the late fifties and early sixties, but it has always been
defined by its position on domestic issues--civil rights and poverty.
And domestic questions led the new radicals to an analysis of society.
As
a result, there was a lengthy period, coinciding with the American–
Soviet detente and the nuclear test ban, during which international
issues were secondary. The new radicals had opinions about Fidel or
Mao or Algeria, but these were much less important than their feelings
about Mississippi.
But the recent disastrous escalation of American involvement in
Vietnam and our crassly imperialist invasion of the Dominican Repub–
lic have changed this situation. One encounters new radicals who are
so infuriated, and rightly, by Lyndon Johnson'S foreign policy that
they feel vindicated in their previous rejection of coalition on domestic
issues with those who support the administration's international posi–
tion. This mood is intensified by the
National Review-like
stand of the
AFL-CIO, or more precisely, of the Meany-Lovestone team, on
scandals like the Dominican invasion.
But how can the position taken by America in other parts of the
world be changed? Internationalism has not been the strong point of
the Left since World War I and the collapse of European Social
Democracy. But some steps in that directiQn might be possible.
H
