Burial Ground For Liberalism

Shortly after the September 13 primaries, the New York Times delivered the ultimate slap in the face to the anti-war movement when it proclaimed in an editorial that "one-issue candidates" never win. This was an open reference to the Senatorial candidacies of David Frost in New Jersey and Thomas Boylston Adams in Massachusetts.

Before the primary Frost had said that if he polled 20 per cent it would be a substantial expression of discontent with the war. He got 16 per cent. Adams had offered no predictions, but the Boston newspapers were surprised he received as much as 8 per cent, which the Globe termed "surprising strength for a peace candidate here."

"Here," of course, was an important qualification. Massachusetts politics are still at a stage that would have alarmed turn-of-the-century muck-rakers. Any politician worth his shirt in this state gets into either house of Congress as fast as he can and leaves local business to a poor set of political hacks. And unenlightened government breeds as well as preys on an unenlightened electorate.

Nor can New Jersey be considered a great stronghold of political independence. Not since the days of Woodrow Wilson have Jersey voters demonstrated a desire for progressive leadership--and Wilson was at first only the creature of a Democratic machine aiming to regain a superficial tint of honesty.

These facts the Times chose to ignore, producing a political analysis as polluted as the air over New Jersey. In truth neither Frost nor Adams ran a one-issue campaign. Both demonstrated their credentials as progressives on all issues, domestic and foreign, and both sought to overcome a press that dismissed them in much the same terms used after the fact by the Times.

Adams and Frost certainly did prove that dissent on Vietnam is no super-highway to political power --in Massachusetts, New Jersey, or anywhere. But they knew that from the start. What doomed both campaigns was the fact that in American politics these days personality, organization and money are essentials; issues come into account only when the other factors cancel themselves out.

This is not to say that either man could have won had he only possessed more money and better organization. But for lack of these essentials neither campaign brought out anything approaching the full force of voter dissent on Vietnam--to say nothing of the other issues Adams and Frost tried to raise. The failure of both men reflects not the inevitable fate of "one-issue candidates" but the current political bankruptcy of the United States.

Historically, Americans have rarely been aroused to the urgency of foreign policy issues until the point of crisis was at hand. In peacetime -- when foreign affairs are subordinated to domestic concerns--it is customary for the President and/or the State Department to carry forth as they see fit, and to attempt to educate the public on the few occasions when a break with traditional policy seems necessary.

This kind of foreign policy education can be used to promote bad as well as good policy changes. Americans had to be conditioned and provoked to support the Spanish-American War, which represented a departure from isolationism and a venture into imperialism. But in a more favorable instance, Woodrow Wilson tried, before he was incapacitated, to persuade the people that a League of Nations was absolutely necessary. And in the most successful episode of this sort Franklin Roosevelt twisted public opinion into preparing in 1940 and 1941 for a war it still hoped to avoid.

The era of Lyndon Johnson has produced a new brand of foreign policy. The President surrenders to the political considerations of the moment, throwing into Vietnam the troops or bombs necessary to temporarily lift his position in the polls. Actions are then fitted to a vague concept of political necessity, and policy to the steps--however unwise--that have already been taken.

Thus congressional opponents of the war, and those who harbor feelings of opposiiton, find themselves stranded and faced with a seemingly inescapable decision: since they feel unable to guide public opinion independently of the administration, they must either capitulate to the electorate's general, if unenthusiastic, approval of the war, or they must ignore the political consequences and oppose it openly.

True, there is discontent among the electorate with President Johnson and with his Vietnam policies. But no precise and intellectually honest stand on the war can hope to capture the whole of an imprecise spectrum of discontent. Vietnam, for the moment, demands a degree of dishonesty from all congressional candidates who hope to be elected--either they must consciously de-emphasize an issue they know to be paramount, or they must adopt an inconsistent and therefore dishonest stand designed to please all comers.

In this way the war serves as a kind of self-executing purge of honest liberalism in Congress. Either it removes the honest liberal or it makes him dishonest, and both have the same long-range effect.

As if this weren't enough, the liberal in Congress finds himself faced with an equivalent issue on civil rights as the white backlash becomes more and more a force to be reckoned with. "Slow down," says Senator Mansfield, and one more presumed supporter of Negro demands goes down the drain. The 1966 civil rights bill--a modest attempt to do away with a really minor part of a much vaster problem--gets buried in the process.

The dilemma of the current generation of congressional liberals is in large part testimony to the weakness of American liberalism over the last two decades. Had Congress consistently refused to go along with President Johnson--had there been a wide-spread effort to convince the voters of the folly of getting involved in Vietnam--had liberals protested the abandonment of the civil rights movement by Congress--had even a small number of men done any of these things, public opinion on Vietnam, and on Negro rights as well, might not be what it is now.

But 1966 appears to be the year of vacillating liberalism, a disease that knows no limits. We see ostensibly liberal members of Congress taking the political expedient first on one issue, then on many others.

Not always, of course, will one individual's liberalism suddenly fade; sometimes the change is more subtle, and sometimes a vacillating liberal opposes--or runs in place of--a truly liberal incumbent.

The one great irony of the American political bankruptcy is that--so far, at least--the vacillating liberal appears to be faring no better than his rare honest counterpart. California Governor Pat Brown, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, and the like are riding for well-deserved falls, with the promise of even worse men to replace them.

It is from this phenomenon -- the substitution of conservative and moderate Republicans for vaguely liberal Democrats -- that the supporters of Adams, Frost, and Congressional candidates Robert Scheer, Ted Weiss and Edward Keating can derive a perverse sort of optimism. The current purge of American liberalism -- so damaging in the short run -- proves that the concept of liberal politics we have been living with since Roosevelt may at last be in its death throes. And the way may soon be cleared for a new politics in which a broad spectrum of halfhearted "liberalism" gives way to the necessity for radical action.

Vietnam, for the moment, demands a degree of dishonesty from all congressional candidates who hope to be elected -- either they must consciously de-emphasize an issue they know to be paramount, or they must adopt an inconsistent and therefore dishonest stand designed to please all comers.