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Economics, Ideology and American Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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The ideal, my friend, is the lifebuoy. Let's say one is taking a swim, floundering around, trying as hard as possible not to sink. One might try to swim in a safe direction despite contrary currents; the essential thing is to use a classic stroke according to recognized swimming principles…Some eccentrics who try to swim faster in order to get there, come what may, splash all over everybody and always end by drowning, involving I don't know how many other poor souls who might have been able to continue splashing around tranquilly enough-in the soup. (Jean Anouilh)
To the casual observer and professional analyst, to the intellectual both here and abroad, American politics have frequently appeared as an amalgam of confusion, frustration and irrationality. The political parties have seemed devoid of cohesion and unity, and innocent of a coherent political philosophy. Long ago, for example, Lord Bryce observed that our major parties have nothing to say on vital issues; that “neither party has any clean-cut principles, any distinctive tenets. Both have traditions. Both claim to have tendencies. Both have certainly war cries, organizations, interests enlisted in their support. But those interests are, in the main, the interests of getting, or keeping, the patronage of the government. Distinctive tenets and policies, points of political doctrine and points of political practice, have all but vanished. They have not been thrown away, but they have been stripped away by Time and the progress of events, fulfilling some policies, blotting out others. All has been lost except office or the hope of It.”
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- Copyright © 1961 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 This article is adapted from a lecture presented to the Seminar of the Fondation Européenne de la Culture in Copenhagen, October 14, 1960.
2 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1917 (New Edition), volume II, p. 21.
3 Harold J. Laski, The American Democracy, New York, The Viking Press, 1948, pp. 129, 130.
4 James A. Wechsler, "The Liberal Retreat and the Need for Political Realignment," The Progressive, May 1960, p. 20.
5 According to Supreme Court, Justice William O. Douglas, for example, the American Communists "are miserable merchants of unwanted ideas; their wares remain unsold." They are "the best known, the most beset, and the least thriving of any fifth column in history." Dissenting opinion in Dennis versus United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951).
6 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951, p. 9.
7 Henry Steele Commager, Majority Rule and Minority Rights, New York, Oxford University Press, 1943, p. 7; quoted in D. W. Brogan, Politics in America, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1954, p. 91.
8 Brogan, op. cit., p. 91.
9 Quoted in Brogan, op. cit., p. 53. For a definitive and fascinating study of American third-party movements since the Civil War, see Russell B. Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics, East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1951.
10 Laski, op. cit., p. 81.
11 Dewey Anderson and Percy E. Davidson, Ballots and the Democratic Class Struggle, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1943, pp. 255-57; quoted in Brogan, op. cit., p. 73.
12 Russell B. Nye, "Marx, the Nineties, and the American Myth," Mercurio (Rome), 1961. See also Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1954.
13 Laski, op. cit., p. 5.
14 The European and American attitudes toward vertical mobility are com pared in Walter Adams and John A. Garraty, Is the World our Campus? East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1960, pp. 144-145.
15 The former leader of the American Communist Party complained that it was extremely difficult to "free the minds of the workers from the many Jeffersonian, bourgeois, agrarian illusions which persisted with particular stub bornness among them." William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party, New York, International Publishers, 1952, p. 25.
16 Nye, "Marx, the Nineties, and the American Myth," cit.
17 R. L. Bruckberger, Image of America, New York, Viking Press, 1959, p. 73.
18 Reprinted in E. Wight Bakke and Clark Kerr, Unions, Management and the Public, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1948, pp. 31-32. For a classic account of America's emphasis on "job-conscious" as opposed to "class-conscious" unionism, see Selig Perlman, History of Trade-Unionism in the United States, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1923.
19 Reprinted in Bakke and Kerr, op. cit., p. 32.
20 Nye, "Marx, the Nineties, and the American Myth", cit.
21 Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., "Sources of the New Deal," Co lumbia University Forum, Fall 1959, p. 8. Whatever one may think of Professor Schlesinger's major thesis-"that there would very likey have been some sort of New Deal in the Thirties even without the Depression"-this is an excellent vignette on the temper of an era.
22 Quoted ibid., p. 11.
23 James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1956, p. 242.
24 Burns, op. cit., pp. 245, 246.
25 Address at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932; reprinted in The Public Papers and Addresses of Pranklin D. Roosevelt, New York, Random House, 1938, volume I, p. 646.
26 Burns, op. cit., pp. 245, 246.
27 Quoted in Schlesinger, op. cit., p. 12.
28 Quoted ibid., p. 12.
29 John K. Galbraith, Economics and the Art of Controversy, New Bruns wick, Rutgers University Press, 1955, pp. 100-01.
30 Ibid., p. 105.
31 Ibid., p. 59.
32 Economic Report of the President, January 28, 1954, Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954.
33 The principle at issue was formally written into law in the Employment Act of 1946: "The Congress hereby declares that it is the continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable means…to coor dinate and utilize all its plans, functions, and resources for the purpose of creating and maintaining, in a manner calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise and the general welfare, conditions under which there will be afforded useful employment opportunities, including self-employment, for those able, willing, and seeking to work, and to promote maximum em ployment, production, and purchasing power." Public Law 304, 79th Congress, 2d Session, 1946; emphasis added.
34 Quoted in Galbraith, op. cit., pp. 84-85.
35 The Communist Manifesto. For an interesting comment on the class struggle and its relevance to America, see Marx's Letter to Weydemeyer, London, March 5, 1852.
36 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953; Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1960.
37 Milovan Djilas, The New Class, New York, Praeger, 1957.
38 The Vital Center, p. 150.
39 Ibid., p. 156.
40 Ibid., p. 169.
41 Quoted in Nye, "Marx, the Nineties, and the American Myth," op. cit.
42 Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1960, pp. 406, 408.
43 Quoted ibid., p. 406.
44 Quoted ibid., pp. 405-06. This is the statement of Richard H. Crossman, Member of Parliament.
45 At the annual conference of the British Labour Party in 1960, the dele gates voted overwhelminghly (4,304,000 to 2,226,000) to take a revolutionary stride to the "right." Turning their backs on traditional socialist dogma, the delegates decided instead to give priority to a type of "New Deal" welfare program. They declared that the party's aims are broader than state ownership of industry, and that the major concern at the moment ought to be the elimi nation of class privilege. Over the violent objections of fundamentalists on the "left," the party endorsed a platform designed to improve its chances at the next election. Opting for pragmatic compromise rather than ideological purity, the party apparently felt that half a loaf was better than none. (The New York Times, October 7, 1960). On the growth of political pragmatism in Japan, see Denis Warner, "Prosperity Unlimited," New Republic, December 5, 1960, p. 10.