The Party of Ideas?
by R. F. Tannenbaum
A Democrat Looks at His Party. by Dean Acheson. Harper. 199 pp. $3.00.
Politics is an art which deals in ideas and interests. The voters’ interests must be served; otherwise they vote for somebody else. This means that the policies of a party, in or out of office, must be framed in response to the demands expressed by the various “interest groups” which make up the electorate; that is the practical politician’s job. But it is not enough to know what the people want—one must also know how to get it for them. This means that a party must produce ideas, creative solutions to the hard problems of modern life that will appeal to the voters and further their interests; that is the intellectual’s job in politics. The rare man who can do both, who can create an idea which arouses and serves an interest the people did not know they had, is called a statesman.
Dean Acheson, in A Democrat Looks at His Party—a stimulating and elegant essay on the two-party system—compares our parties with regard to both interests and ideas, and gives the Democrats top marks in each case. The Democrats, he says, are and always have been a coalition of “many interests” and, as a result, always have the interest of the broad mass of the people at heart. For the same reason, they are willing to apply every governmental power to the advancement of the general good, and are able, by mutual reconciliation of conflicting interests, to arrive at an optimum policy for the nation as a whole. The Republicans never do any of these things, he says, because they represent only “one interest,” that of business.
This is not only inaccurate, but a dangerous thing for Democrats to think in this election year. Any political party, to survive on a nationwide scale in a country as diverse as ours, has to be a coalition of varied and even opposing interest groups, regional, economic, and otherwise, that shape party policy by a process of pulling and hauling among them. Much as Republican leaders may like businessmen, they know there are not enough of them to swing an election. Most businessmen like Secretary Benson’s agricultural policy as it is, yet the demands of various farming interests are now reshaping it out of all recognition. Business itself is not a single interest, but a collection of many special interests often in open conflict: different kinds of businessmen were on both sides of the Republican fight over tariff reform in 1954. Indeed, the real issue is not that business is the one interest the party represents, but that the Republicans, particularly under Eisenhower, tend to favor the many special interests of business over the interest of the general welfare.
Now the Democrats claim that the coalition of interests they have represented since 1932—labor, the small farmer, minority groups, the South—includes most of the common people, so that the Democrats are always the party of the general welfare. The trouble is that, in the 1950’s, there are fewer and fewer common people. Fifty-two per cent of American families now earn between $3,000 and $7,500 a year, 40 per cent earn $5,000 or more. Well over 50 per cent now own their own homes. And this sort of tax-paying, property-owning middle class has traditionally been a Republican interest. This does not mean that the Republicans can’t lose, but it does mean that the Democrats can no longer automatically win. Certainly Eisenhower was the decisive factor in the Republican victory of 1952, but that victory was also the political expression of a great social change which will not be cancelled out when “Ike” retires. Democrats who follow Mr. Acheson in thinking that the Republicans can only represent the interests of business, or who believe that the New Deal coalition of the underprivileged still represents the general welfare, are likely to find themselves leading invisible battalions against an enemy who isn’t there.
But these are matters of practical politics; Mr. Acheson is on firmer ground when he deals with the political role of ideas. The policies of the Democrats, because they boldly use the powers of government for the people’s good, require “knowledge, perceptiveness, imagination—in other words, brains. . . . So the Democratic party is hospitable to and attracts intellectuals. It has work for them to do. . . . The Republican party is cool to intellectuals, unless they are lawyers, when they talk about government. They are apt to be called ‘eggheads,’ ‘radicals,’ or ‘pinkos’ for their pains.”
The Democrats do seem to attract a higher percentage of intellectuals, and to make better use of them, than their opponents do. Just the reverse used to be ‘true; nearly every college professor in the country was a Whig—as long as there were such things. But the progressive ferment at the turn of the century (Mr. Acheson himself switched to the Democrats in 1912), and the general reaction against “Babbitry” in the 20’s, turned most of the American intellectual community against conservatism and the Republican cause. There is now some movement in the other direction, but it does not seem to have made great headway. As for the Republicans, they have a tradition of practical-mindedness which makes them prefer to employ lawyers like Dewey and Dulles, or engineers like the two Herbert Hoovers and C. E. Wilson. Mr. Acheson implies that the Democrats’ kind of intellectual (the man of liberal education?) is more creative, and cites the Democratic achievements of 1932-52 as evidence. The imaginative economic and social policies of the New Deal, and the brilliant improvisations of American foreign policy in the first years of the cold war, both more impressive than anything the Republicans have come up with before or since, show that the Democrats are the party of ideas. To me the interesting question is whether this is still the case. The Democrats, facing an election amid a fast-changing situation at home and abroad, could use some bold new ideas. Are they getting them? Mr. Acheson’s own book must be taken in evidence.
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The second section of Mr. Acheson’s book develops an extraordinarily cogent and intelligent argument for a policy of watchful waiting and limited warfare in the face of the dangers of atomic conflict. He has many excellent things to say against the advocates of preventive war, and against Secretary Dulles’s policy of “massive retaliation.” He speaks instructively on the limits of total victory, which ends war but does not make peace, and on the possibility that ours must be, like the 18th century, an age of localized wars. He has an original suggestion on the effectiveness of nuclear disarmament: what, he asks, would prevent a disarmed enemy, once a “conventional” war broke out, from developing and using atomic weapons as the war went on? On the whole, these chapters constitute by far the best treatment of foreign policy in the atomic age that I have read. But on the new situation which has developed since the Geneva conferences, which would seem to call for a whole range of new policies over and above the fundamentals of living with the bomb, Mr. Acheson has curiously little to say; probably most of his book was written before Geneva, and possibly he is as perplexed about what these policies should be as most of the rest of us are. Yet now, if ever, is the time for the sort of imaginative innovation in foreign policy of which Mr. Acheson and his colleagues showed themselves so capable just a few years ago; it is a disappointment to find so little of this here.
To make up for this, Mr. Acheson strikes out boldly on the subject of the Federal loyalty-security program and its impact on individual rights. In an area in which most public figures have been notable for treading on eggs, Mr. Acheson works up a magnificent indignation. He takes full responsibility for having acceded to the original Truman loyalty program, which he now regards as a howling error in judgment, a retreat from principle that should be reversed without delay. Originally designed “for cases which it was thought would be serious, sensitive and rare,” the system of secret investigations and extra-judicial hearings has gotten completely out of hand. It has decimated and demoralized the intellectuals in public service, obstructing that continuous creation of ideas on which sound policy depends. And even worse, it has corroded the principles on which the civil liberties of all of us rest. What is to be done? Mr. Acheson would have us substantially scrap the security program as it stands. No more covert investigations of all civil servants, no more secret dossiers and faceless informers. Let the professional boards of the services concerned decide on the fitness of new employees, and let security cases in sensitive positions be brought into open court, where the accused can have the full protection of the normal rules of evidence. This, it seems to me, is not only boldness, it is throwing caution to the winds. Mr. Acheson is dead right on the magnitude of the evil, and on the direction in which we must go to correct it, but he would take us too far; without a system of blanket secret investigations, the government’s hands would effectively be tied in coping with infiltration by Communists. By all means let us have far more stringent legal safeguards for the public servant under investigation. Let us have him investigated by more intelligent security officers, certainly. But we must also be able to investigate him.
Otherwise, Mr. Acheson has little to contribute on domestic affairs; foreign policy and civil liberties are what interest him. These are the fields that claim the interest of Democratic intellectuals in general nowadays. Domestic policy, economic and social policy, these seem to be dead issues.
For one thing, the dominating position, in terms of votes, of the new middle-class interest makes present-day politics steer clear of social proposals. Moderation is the watchword. For another, conservative majorities in Congress have blocked major social legislation since 1938; those who want change in this direction have learned to look elsewhere for it. The guaranteed annual wage and school desegregation were both achieved outside politics, and the power of the unions and the courts steals New Dealers’ thunder.
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But if there is one area in which the Democrats today need new ideas in the worst way, it is just in social and economic policy. Automation is certain at least to disrupt employment during the next ten years, and will probably reduce it; this is an issue which could take labor right out of the middle class and set off a whole new realignment of interests. A danger to the workingman, this is an opportunity for the Democrats—if they can be ready with the policies the situation calls for. Mr. Acheson gives automation and its effects a page and a half; he makes a sound suggestion on the use of public works to take up any slack in unemployment, but for the rest can only advise that the Democrats, as the party of ideas, are the people to deal with this crisis—“How,” he admits, “I do not know.” And neither will most other Democratic intellectuals, unless they promptly turn their attention to domestic affairs. A retraining and relocation program for displaced workers, legislation tying the progressive reduction of the work week to the level of unemployment—this is the sort of thing they should be putting their minds to. In foreign affairs, too, the new technology calls for new policies; with automatic factories, we could provide underdeveloped countries with a short cut to industrialization that would bypass their lack of skilled labor; the Russians are already trying this out in Manchuria. Automation, commercial atomic power, semi-artificial foodstuffs already produced in the laboratory—a crash program to develop all this for use abroad is probably our best answer to the Khrushchev version of Point Four.
From Mr. Acheson we get nothing along these lines. If the Democrats are the party of ideas, they should be producing a program now to deal with the problems of the new technology before they get out of hand. If the Democrats are the party of the people’s interests, they should be alerting the voters to what their true interests are in a new age and how they can be protected. That they are not doing this does not invalidate Mr. Acheson’s claims for his party. The Democrats can be proud of the record of both their practical politicians and their intellectuals. The only thing is, the times demand something more than either can be expected to supply; what their party needs now, what the country needs now, is statesmanship.
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