NEW RADICALISM
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of jobs and schools, of automation and megalopolis, requires public
expenditures and social planning which are realizable only through
the Federal government. Aid to dependent children, unemployment
compensation, welfare payments, civil liberties of the poor- all of
these concrete issues around which students are attempting to organize
the poor are primarily matters of national policy and legislation.
Significant breakthroughs for the poor can occur only in alliance with
the politically active liberal forces in the country. Once organized,
will the poor not want to join with the AFL-CIO and ADA (to use
Hentoff's examples) in day-to-day lobbying and mobilizing for a
$2.00 minimum wage, new housing programs, public works and other
reforms? Or will they be persuaded by the breakaway scions of the
middle class that their demands are trivial, that liberals are enemies,
that cooperation with them means absorption into the Establishment,"
and that the only correct course
is
the cultivation of "revolutionary
alienation," as one new radical spokesman puts it.
Here lies the road to defeat. Some new radicals recognize
this
but justify it on the grounds that only through a series of defeats and
failures can the dispossessed grow in the discipline and consciousness
required for ultimate victory. They are, of course, entitled to that view,
although it clashes with my own, that defeat leads to demoralization
and apathy. Their only obligation, it seems to me, is to inform the
poor, before the event, where they expect their policies to lead.
The alternative
is
coalition politics, the building of a political
movement based on the trade unions, Negroes, the churches, the liberal
middle class and the poor. To the extent that these forces engage in
national electoral political action, they are to be found overwhelmingly
within the Democratic party. But they do not control that party in
the sense that the victory of that party insures the implementation of
their program. The reasons for this are well-known: the power of the
Dixiecrat caucus and the disfranchisement of southern Negroes; the
loose ideological and organizational structure of the national parties,
the vestige of nineteenth-century sectional rather than class politics;
under-representation of urban-liberal voting strength, etc.
These reasons are diminishing in importance. The power of the
Dixiecrats has been slashed by the liberal numerical landslide of 1964
and by the registration of hundreds of thousands of southern Negroes.
The political parties will increasingly reflect the urban-rural and class
