Schlesinger and Hughes: Observations On Left Politics

The recent American number of the left-wing British journal New Statesman, containing essays by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Prof. H. Stuart Hughes among others, provokes some observations about the current state of Left politics in America.

At the outset of his piece on "The Administration and the Left" Schlesinger delineates two distinct, historical strains in American progressivism. The "pragmatic" strain "accepts, without approving, the given structure of society and strives to change it by action from within." The "utopian" strain "rejects the given structure of society, root and branch, and strives to change it by exhortation from without."

Schlesinger says "the difference between the two groups is probably at bottom a difference in temperament." He adds that the emotional origins of contemporary radical thought "lie in a profound dislike for what the critics regard as a suffocating consensus blanketing American life--a consensus which most of them trace to a refusal to confront the implications of nuclear war."

Such attempts at classification, especially in the American context, have limitations. But one is fairly safe in including Prof. Hughes and men like Prof. David Riesman and Paul Goodman in the "utopian" camp. Also in this group is most of the so-called "peace movement"--Student Peace Union (SPU), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a large segment of Tocsin.

It is a curious kind of radicalism these people espouse. As Daniel Ball has pointed out in The End of Ideology there is virtually no ideological content in their dissent, no unifying theme. Indeed, some don't even know what they're dissenting from. Some talk about the "Establishment," some about the "military industrial complex," others about bureaucracy" and "big government." Dwight Macdonld and Paul Goodman call themselves anarchists, Prof. Hughes says he's a "socialist" (at least when he's not seeking votes). But the labels hardly help one's understanding, and are of even less value when one surveys the student political scene.

Student radical politics, even more than its adult counterpart, is the politics of confusion, of dissatisfaction, of fear. The students in SDS, the peace groups, the socialist organizations, don't like things the way they are. But they don't know whom to blame, nor how to go about changing things, nor even what kind of society they'd like to have instead. This is quite unlike the student radicals of the '30's who saw very clearly what they disliked in depression-ridden America. The immediacy and clarity of their problems--like finding a job or enough to eat--lent their dissent a tangible and invigorating quality. And too, many based their opinions on various forms of socialist and communist ideology.

Today the growth of the governmental bureaucracy and our complex economy, and the resulting inability to see clear political alternatives, plus the passing of meaningful political ideas, has meant the waning of coherent, positive radical thought on the student level. Both on the student and adult level radical activity is largely a series of highly personal reactions to the world.

As Schlesinger notes, however, there is an overall theme: much of contemporary left-wing dissent does find its origins in the fear that America and the entire world is not confronting "the implications of nuclear war." Men like Hughes, Riesman, and Roger Hagan, periodicals like The Nation, organizations like SANE and the Women's Strike for Peace, are all pre-eminently concerned with awakening a slumbering public to the evils of the Cold War and the Arms Race, and mobilizing them against the unseen, unnamed enemy.

Twice in the last year the radicals have rallied their forces and made massive attempts to bring their message to the public. The first was the march to Washington by 5,000 college students last February; the second was Prof. Hughes campaign for the Senate and similar "peace" campaigns conducted prior to the November elections.

The peace march was a failure. Most Congressmen listened to the student-visitors, but of course none changed their positions. Only the known friends of the peace movement, like Rep. Robert Kastenmeier (D.Wisc.), showed enthusiasm. But even Kastenmeier warned, almost sadly, that decision-making in foreign affairs "is very difficult to influence." He added that the students must abjure emotionalism, and destroy the image of "extremism" if they were ever to have any effect in the political world.

When one looks at the whole affair from a distance, it all seems rather incredible. The students who participated learned a great deal, and perhaps they stirred up some discussion among their fellow students. But the Washington Project had little or no effect on the public at large and official Washington. Actually, it is difficult to imagine how anyone ever thought it could.

The Washington Project was created because radical student leaders thought "something had to be done" to influence what they conceive to be a spiralling arms race that can lead to world-wide devastation. At the least they fear a perpetual war economy diverting vital public funds from hospitals to missiles. But if the students were disappointed after the Washington affair they were not disillusioned. Something still had to be done, and the Hughes campaign provided the perfect opportunity to reach the still unenlightened masses.

Writing in New Statesman (a longer version of the same article appeared in Commentary) Hughes says that a campaign such as his "suggests that if a candidate and his friends are willing to go to all that trouble--and with no chance of electoral reward--they must mean what they say. In the simplest terms, this is what we tried to do last spring. We were trying to impress on the minds of our fellow citizens that for a minority of people in one key state of the union the issue of human survival was worth an extraordinary commitment of time and energy. And that I think we accomplished."

If all Prof. Hughes and his followers set out to prove was that they really were worried about "peace," then I think they wasted their time. So they're sincere. So what. But I do not think that was the principal purpose of the Hughes campaign.

Like the Washington Project (and all the peace campaigns around the country) attempted to make "peace" a major political issue. It wanted to get the constituents stirred up about "peace;" it wanted, in short, to make everybody as worried as the people who were making "an extraordinary commitment of time and energy." The underlying assumption, no less arrogant for its subtlety, was that only those who subscribed to the Hughes line on foreign affairs were really interested in "peace."

Then in the middle of the campaign Cuba happened. If Hughes had spoken personally to everybody in the state he couldn't have made the population more aware of the possibility of nuclear war. The only trouble was, no matter how concerned people became, they couldn't do a thing about it. The feeling of importance, which crept into the consciousness of the Washington marchers and was pushed aside, gripped the entire population, peaceniks included. Hughes writes of that time: "my support appeared to be melting away. A manic-depressive cycle seized a number of my co-workers."

In his article Hughes gives the opinion that the Cuba incident might have cut his vote in half. He adds "What to my mind it did rather more was to underline a cruel truth which had been present from the start but to which my friends and I had refused to pay attention. Even in its best days my campaign had had an air of unreality." But Hughes never explicitly says why his campaign had this sense of unreality. He implies it was because people will not vote for a candidate with no chance to win. I think that is only part of it.

Prof. Hughes' campaign only had meaning for the voters, for his workers, and for himself as long as the myth persisted that it really made a difference whether someone was interested in "peace." The frustration of the peace marcher, who was so insulted when the State Department did not actually talk policy with him was similar in kind, if not in quantity, to the frustration of the American citizen who stood by watching the drama unfold in the Caribbean. Both felt impotence, both felt despair.

Hughes was saying you should be concerned about "peace." So you were not only concerned, you were petrified. So you couldn't do anything. So why vote for Hughes?

The peace movement, which includes the bulk of the radicals in the country, has been virtually silent since October. The Brandeis Justice last week published an article by the head of the campus peace group describing the "profound sense of despair" that has settled over the peace movement. Tocsin is struggling to recover, but its continued effectiveness is still in doubt.

If the Cuban incident proves to have been the death blow of the peace movement, it would be extremely unfortunate. But if it causes some rethinking about the merits of certain activities, and perhaps turns radical thought to new problems, it could be a blessing in disguise.

First of all, Tocsin and other peace-groups might well realize that the most important work they can do in regard to the international situation is to expand their program of education, both for their own members and the community at large.

But the re-thinking might be broader than that. Bell writes in The End of Ideology, "But where the problems are, as Karl Popper put it, of 'piecemeal technology,' of the prosaic, yet necessary questions, of school costs, municipal services, the urban sprawl, and the like, bravura radicalism simply becomes a hollow shell." And Schlesinger in New Statesman writes "Apart from civil rights, the contribution of the utopian Left to the discussion of domestic issues has been unimpressive."

The Left has not been silent on domestic issues. Michael Harrington's important document, and Goodman, according to Schlesinger, writes "vaguely of diversifying and decentralizing our economy." But radicalism in general, and student radicalism in particular, has not provided the searching thought on crucial domestic problems the country needs from its dissident intellectuals. Nor has it provided the public support many of the Administration's progressive welfare measures could use very well in Congress.

Perhaps in the aftermath of Cuba, as the hard truth about the conduct of foreign affairs in this world is squarely faced, American radicalism might re-discover a traditional but recently neglected area of concern. This is not to say radicals should abandon their role as public critics in the field of foreign policy; but it is to say their talents, both as chastisers of the established and creators of the new, are also needed elsewhere