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friends as that part of the left with which he and
The Public Interest
had friendly exchanges. I am not at all sure that I did in fact "coin"
the word . It was in common use among
Dissent
editors and other
associates of mine, and I do not have the least idea who was the first
to use it .
It was occasioned , not by some tempest in a sectarian teapot ,
but by the fact that a sea change was taking place in the intellectual
world - for instance, the
Commentary
Magazine which published my
first article on poverty in 1959 was in the process of a profound
transformation - and in the Democratic Party. I was, I must con–
fess, much more interested in what was happening in serious politics
than in attitudes in Social Democrats , U.S .A. Lipset, who cites
nothing to prove his point, claims to have known my motivation .
Yet the public facts demonstrate that he is , at best, quite confused.
After my friends and I split with the Social Democrats - the
triggering event was when an old comrade of mine who had thumbed
her nose at the F.B.I. in the fifties told me that she hoped that Nixon
would wipe out the Stalinoid, George McGovern-the SDs engaged
in a vendetta against me. There was a huge mimeographed docu–
ment detailing all of my sins since birth: a trade unionist who simply
endorsed a dinner at which we - the Democratic Socialist Organiz–
ing Committee (DSOC) - were honoring one of his good friends
received the document as a follow-up to a phone call telling him of
how dangerous I was; a one-time protege of mine , who has spent
much of the sixties promoting me and my ideas, explained in a
Com–
mentary
symposium that what had poisoned that decade was the
psychological theory of poverty in
The Other America;
and so on. But
I, and DSOC, the organization which I chaired, had an informal
rule against any reply to these attacks. We wanted to reach out to
people who had never even heard of Max Shachtman and the theory
of bureaucratic collectivism. More to the point, we did. To thou–
sands of them.
Did I maliciously confuse people about the politics of the
liberals or social democrats who were hard-line on foreign policy but
not on domestic issues? As I recount in
The Long-Distance Runner,
one
of my favorite slogans after the 1972 election was the call to unite the
constituencies of the "three Georges" - McGovern, Meany, and
Wallace . Wallace , I argued, was using a bogus populism to promote
a real racism; and Meany, I insisted - not always to the plaudits of
many on the left - was quite progressive on issues like full employ-
