HERE AND NOW
519
• The programmatic demands - advanced by the liberal..1eft
groups for domestic reforms during the thirties have by now either
been mostly realized or require merely - but that's
some
merely!–
quantitative implementation. By itself this does not yield a dramatic
or inspiring perspective; it does not excite the young, it barely arouses
those in whose behalf it is advanced, and it proves more and more
inadequate for coping with the new problems we all experience more
sharply than we can define.
• There has occurred over the Vietnam war a split between
groups focusing primarily on domestic issues, mostly the unions, and
the groups focusing primarily on foreign policy, mostly the middle–
class peace organizations and radical youth. During the twentieth cen–
tury, with the possible exception of the 1916 election, foreign policy
has never played a decisive role in American elections; or, to modify
that a bit, disputes over foreign policy, such as the interventionist/
isolationist quarrel in the thirties, did not threaten the survival of the
liberal coalition. Today this is no longer true, and cannot be true
- even though I am unhappily convinced that in an electoral
showdown the moral protestants, among whom I wish to include
myself, would prove to be a very small minority. Never in the past
has it been possible to rally a successful liberal-left movement on
issues of foreign policy alone or predominantly. Whether it -can be
done today remains very much an open question.
• We are living through an exhaustion, perhaps temporary, of
American liberalism.
It
is not, at the moment, rich in programmatic
suggestions. It has lost much of its earlier elan. It has become all too
easily absorbed into establishment maneuvers, so that it shares a mea–
sure of responsibility for the Vietnam disasters and ghetto outbreaks.
It has not developed new leaders. In short, as its most intelligent
spokesmen know, it is in a state of moral and intellectual disarray. -
Yet in fairness one should add that pretty much the same dif–
ficulties beset most or all other political tendencies in the United
States. One of the remarkable facts about our political life is the
paucity of specific proposals to come from the far Left or far Right.
A comparison with the thirties is instructive, for whatever else was
wrong with American radicalism (almost everything) at that time,
it did advance specific proposals for legislation and thereby agitation.
Today that is hardly the case. "Participatory democracy" may be a
sentiment as noble as it is vague, but even its most ardent defenders
