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PARTISAN REVIEW
Finance Corporation to rebuild American heavy industry, and a
new military outlook along the lines of James Fallows' recent book
that would shift emphasis from high-cost technology to more reli–
able, simpler weapons and the upgrading of manpower. Such pro–
posals are certain to alienate segments of the left which dislike the
"corporatist" implications of Rohatyn's scheme and prefer to slash
defense spending across the board rather than to allocate it more
effectively. Yet if the Rohatyn plan were to be politicized through its
adoption by leading Democrats , it would provide ample scope for
the injection of "left" content, such as the appointment of union
leaders to corporate boards (as Douglas Fraser now sits on the
Chrysler board). The Reagan approach to defense grossly over–
values the sheer accumulation of complex and expensive weaponry,
but the need for a foreign policy backed up by military strength is
not going to abate. More generally, this is a good time to abandon
the habit of thinking of politics solely in relation to a one–
dimensional left-right continuum. Such a view necessarily defines
any new proposal as movement in only one of two possible directions
and thus mobilizes passions attached to symbols against change of
any kind. Resistance to new ideas is not a monopoly of con-
servatives.
D.W.
THUNDER ON THE LEFT.
In the middle of October, two
momentous though unrelated events took place which may have
long-range consequences for the American left. On Columbus Day
weekend more than three thousand people jammed the Roosevelt
Hotel in New York for the first American Writers Congress since the
days of the Popular Front. Ten days later several members of the
Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army were seized
after a bloody armed robbery in Nanuet, New York, which left three
men dead and many in the radicals' own student generation in a
state of shock and revulsion.
Neither event should be discussed in strictly political terms .
The Writers Congress, the brainchild of Victor Navasky and his
colleagues at
The Nation,
was cosponsored, at least in name, by a
