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poor and unemployed who would like a taste of these irrelevancies.
I hope they get it, that they fight hard for it-despite the heddings
of some new radicals (especially those for whom a $2.00 minimum
wage would be a decided comedown).
Hentoff goes on to say, incredibly, "Nor do the liberals or the
churches seem fully to realize not only that the War on Poverty
is
inadequately financed and narrow in scope, but that it cannot succeed
in terms of the present definition of 'work' and the sacred link between
the traditional definition of production and income."
If
the liberals
and churches do not realize (even "fully" ) the inadequacy of the
War
on Poverty, where then is the push for an expanded program coming
from? Unless, of course, Hentoff would deny that there are any forces
to the left of the Johnson Administration other than the "new
radicals" ! To say this is clearly to deny that what he calls the
"tradi–
tional package of demands of the AFL-CIO, the ADA and the
rest
of the liberal 'coalition' "-namely, "such limited immediate
goals
are massive public works, national health insurance, a two-dollar-an–
hour minimum wage"-that these are to the left of, or different from,
the program of the Administration.
If
there is no difference, then what
an embarrassment to the new radicals. For, as Hentoff also writes,
"they aren't themselves so fully utopian as not [sic] to overlook the
need to gather support for such limited immediate goals...." But
if
these immediate goals already constitute the Administration's program,
rather than a significant push from the Left, the new radicals have
in fact been sucked into, are no different from, the "Establishment."
What strange conclusions follow from all-or-nothingism! Not enough
that liberalism isn't socialism (alas), it's not even permitted to
be
liberalism. It is part of the oppressive Establishment, and there's no
one left to fight it but "us." (And "us" is an ever diminishing
quantity as, one by one, we fail Hentoff's tests.)
There are some among the new radicals who have carried
this
mode of analysis even farther than Nat Hentoff. They see the welfare
legislation of New Deal liberalism not as inadequate meliorism but
as
an extension of the Establishment's bureaucratic controls over the
poor and, on balance, as an evil. They speak of "corporate liberalism"
as -a quasi-fascism which has corrupted all of the institutions of
American life. Aside from the fact that such an equation overlooks
with insufferable glibness the crucial existence of political democracy
