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IRVING HOWE
cannot suppose it to be a focused proposal for our national life. And
by a similar token, it is interesting that Governor Reagan did not
really try to dismantle the welfare state against which he had mock–
raged during his campaign.
I think that for the next period we shall have to live and work
within the limits of the welfare state. There is only one possibility
that this perspective will be invalidated, and that is a racial civil war
pitting white against black - a tragedy which even the most puerile
advocates of "nose-to-nose confrontation" must recognize as utterly
disastrous. Unless we are to delude ourselves with the infantile leftism
of the talk about "Negro revolution" (sometimes invoked most fierce–
ly by guerrillas with tenure), the first point on the political agenda
must
be
a renewed struggle for the fulfillment of the claims advanced
by the welfare state. And that, in tum, means a simultaneous struggle
to end the Vietnam war and to bring large-scale economic help to
the Negro ghettos.
VI. A Word About
t,he
Future
If
one could view the present moment with detachment, one
might say that we are witnessing the breakdown of the old politicai
coalition which helped usher in the welfare state and perhaps the
slow beginnings of a new coalition to improve and transcend the
welfare state. In this new coalition the labor movement would still
have - it would have to have - a central role, but no longer with
the decisive weight of the past. The churches would matter a great
deal more, and so would the American "new class," that scattered
array of intellectuals, academicians and technicians. Issues of foreign
policy would occupy a central place in the program of such a coali–
tion, as would those concerning "quality of life" - though the im–
mediate major domestic concern remains the realization of the wel–
fare-state expectations for the American Negroes. In such a coalition
there might come together the tradition of moral protest and the
bearing of witness with the tradition of disinterested service. All of
this could occur only through a radicalization of American liberal–
ism: a politics unqualifiedly devoted to democratic norms but much
more militant, independent and combative than the left-liberal world
of today.
