AMERICA II
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the impact of the war on the American public. Is it really being so
foolishly optimistic, as Paul Jacobs suggests, to think a compromise
peace likely under these circumstances?
Of course, the chief prerequisite for such a peace must be a con–
tinuation of vigorous public opposition to the war. I don't think that
Johnson is committed to a messianic, neo-imperialist view of America's
global destiny to police the world. His relative ignorance of foreign
policy and his heavy-handed, bullying political style have led him to fall
back on stock "let's draw a line here" Cold War responses in situations
where they are brutally inappropriate. But his political realism may yet
induce him to extricate himself and us from this degrading, disgusting
and pointless war.
2 and 3. Inflation undoubtedly can and will be checked by those
fiscal policies that will be least damaging to the interests of the cor–
porations and the home-owning middle class. Which means new ex–
cuses for reducing existing social programs and again forgetting the so
recently rediscovered poor. Yet if our political leaders could, in a time
both of relative prosperity and of international tension, be roused once,
however hesitantly and briefly, by the scandal of continuing poverty,
the plight of the poor is likely to remain a focus of liberal-left politics.
Would
PR
even have mentioned poverty as a major problem ten years
ago? We have now become aware that the "system" neither needs an
exploited underclass to continue functioning nor eliminates poverty
automatically in maintaining economic growth-it simply bypasses the
poor. In the society but not of it, the poor can only be helped by re–
forms that directly confront and change the conditions of their existence.
I don't anticipate such reforms in the near future, but I think the
demand for them will continue to
be
part of our politics. Even conserva–
tive economists have, for example, advocated a negative income tax.
Will
it take as long to put into effect this fairly simple idea as it took to
put across Medicare? I fear it may.
4. White Americans have been ready to go along with granting
greater equality to the Negro only so long as it didn't affect their own
lives directly. Now much of the public is ready to seize on any excuse
-the riots, "crime
in
the streets," Stokely Carmichael-to justify call–
ing a halt. I'm afraid white backlash is here to stay. Unlike some of your
other respondents, however, I'm not sure that it is simply an expression
of
straightforward and enduring racism. Many lower-class and lower–
middle-class whites are, I think, envious of what they perceive as an
oversolicitous and coddling attitude toward the Negro on the part of
the
government and the powers that be in general. The reasonable
idea that Negroes deserve not merely equal but preferential treatment in
