Presenting the American Case

IN THE PERIOD AHEAD, THERE WILL BE MUCH TALK about the decline of American influence in the world. This will give pleasure to many and instruction to some, and is perhaps to be welcomed on that score. So much so that a case could be made for holding rather closely the knowledge that this decline has been going on for quite a long while, and that it commenced for reasons having nothing to do with the events or the political leaders of the third quarter of the twentieth century. American prestige in the world reached its height in i g i g with the founding of the League of Nations and the extraordinary position of Woodrow Wilson, who for a moment seemed to embody, and in that sense to unify, the hopes of the peoples of the "civilized" world. The moment did not last long, owing in part to a failure of men and institutions in the United States itself. We were not prepared to make the commitment that would have made possible some practical consequences of this extraordinary, if unfocused and fleeting, consensus. It is a sorrowful enough memory, and there is no use to dwell upon it overmuch, but it is useful at this time for at least some person to be clear about what influence means to a nation: it means that other nations want to be like you.
The United States had had such influence for a long whilemost of the nineteenth century. Anyone starting up a new government in the Western world was quite likely to model it on that of the United States. This influence was shared, to be sure, with the British and French, whose own institutions could be seen as closely related. But America's size and economic power, along
with its newness, steadily eclipsed the constitutional example of the two older nations. In the first chapter of The American Commonwealth James Bryce explained that the "institutions of the United States are deemed by inhabitants and admitted by strangers to be a matter of more general interest than those of the not less famous nations of the Old World . . . for they are believed to disclose and display the type of institutions towards which, as by a law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind are forced to move, some with swifter, others with slower, but all with unresting feet." The seemingly decisive American entry into World War I on behalf of these allies further confirmed the American ascendancy. New nations and new governments, actual or hopeful, not only wished to be like the United States; some wished to be associated with it as well. Wilson at Paris enthusiastically took up the cause of the Armenians, who, unluckily for them, never succeeded in getting the association they hoped for. Unluckily for us, he does not appear to have been in touch with Ho Chi Minh, who was also in Paris at that time, also seeking a new regime. When it was agreed that the world itself needed a new government, the American president had the very thing, a world order modeled directly on the American federal system-constitution, court, legislature, executive, and all.
Now that is influence. Americans, however-and this is not so very unusual, either for individuals or nations-did not seem especially aware of this influence. Or, if they were aware of it, they were not notably zealous to preserve it. At one level, we actively sought to shed it. Certainly it was far reduced a quarter-century later when of a sudden we found ourselves concerned with such matters, and commenced the fretful assessment that has rather characterized us since. This could not be reassuring, and has not been. For the United States in 1945 had a curiously unbalanced mix of power, of which the ideological component was even then recessive. Hans J. Morgenthau, in Politics Among Nations, describes political power in the context of international relations as deriving from three sources: "the expectation of benefits, the fear of disadvantages, the respect or love for men or institutions." It is probably rare for a great power to possess these advantages in a wholly symmetrical manner, and there was certainly a significant imbalance in the American position of a generation ago. We could evoke the expectation of benefits-history will surely attest to that; and we had given evidence of the disadvantages of being on the opposite side from us in a major conflict. We could even evoke the expectation of benefits from the defeated, giving rise in this period, to the reported Israeli plan to declare war on the United States in order to reap the benefits of occupation, a plan finally shelved when it occurred to the smaller country that it might win. But we did not evoke that much respect or love, either for men or for institutions.
How so? A satisfactory answer would involve an achievement of historical analysis beyond the purposes of this paper, and possibly beyond the potential of this period, but two elements appear significant. In the first place, we were too successful; it was unnatural. There, in 1945, was a world in ruins-or, in the case of colonial nations, still in fetters. Only the Western hemisphere escaped, and we stood astride it. All was humiliation save for us. How could we not be detested? The few exceptions are instructive. Britain emerged from the war with enough self-respect, France without enough. Their postwar relations with the United States seem controlled by this beginning circumstance. Germany and Japan, defeated, found it easiest to be emulative. The process by which oversuccessful nations are combined against by other nations and reduced in circumstance is nothing new. To all appearances, some such thing began almost the moment the American colossus made its appearance-a process much abetted by the genuine American desire to see other nations rise again.
If one element of the American difficulty arose from too little competition, another arose from too much. Our economy was the largest on earth, our atom bombs the biggest, our Navy the best. But much of the world was then engaged, and for several generations had been engaged (and has continued to be engaged), in an ideological struggle between totalitarian and democratic socialism. The American liberal example attracted few followers. Those who were attracted have not necessarily been the worse for it, but their example has produced little emulation-suggesting that history has simply not been with us in this time.
The first communist revolution-totalitarian socialism-came with the end of World War 1, and, after a phase of expansion, communism was consolidated as "socialism in one country" for a period that lasted a generation. With the end of World War 11, expansion resumed with great success, only to cease more or less by 1948. By that time-less noticed, somehow, but not less emphatic-the rise of democratic socialism had commenced. The scores of new nations that came into being the world over modeled themselves not on the United States, nor yet on the Soviet Union, but on various models of democratic socialism that had been formulated in Western Europe earlier in the century and had to some degree been put into practice there. The most conspicuous example was that of Britain under the Labour Party, an example certainly not lost on the forty-six new nations formed from the British Empire after 1947. This trend has been so marked, I have argued, that if the first event is to be termed the Russian Revolution, the British Revolution seems a fair designation for the second. In each instance, a nation was first influenced by an ideology, whereupon the ideology was influenced by the nation. A distinctive compound emerged, only to be adapted further in other settings, and even to be transmuted in some, but always, if you will, with this genealogy in its luggage.
In the "Russian" and "British" competition, the United States was ever a poor third. This was not merely a matter of other models of government being more attractive: both these other models had acquired specifically anti-American biases so strong that to be attracted to them was to grow averse to us. For communists, we were capitalists; nor could they forget that after their revolution had begun, Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to try to put it down. For socialists, we were, in the old sense of the word, liberals. Charles Francis Adams, as minister in London, was perhaps not wrong when he wrote in 1865, "The progress of the Liberal cause, not in England alone, but all over the world, is, in a measure, in our hands." Well, the liberal cause was not the socialist cause-certainly not as time went by-and this opposi-
tion, however muted at first and however civil, was never lost from view and in time grew less civil, rather as world politics did. Henry Pelling, in his study America and the British Left, traces the centurylong transformation of the American image from admiration in the nineteenth century to something near detestation-certainly fear-in the twentieth. On the British Left America came to be singled out as a place where the worst was likely to happen: not a good kind of country to be. Pelling notes that to such British observers, "the New Deal itself, it seemed, might be a first step on the road to the creation of a Fascist state." We have, of course, been trudging that weary road ever since. Little wonder that when American economic and military power declined relatively, the time should have-come when American influence as a whole would be seen to have precipitously declined.
This history, if it be accepted as such, does somewhat suggest how the United States might respond to this declining position. At the very least it suggests the nature of the decline. It must be understood, for example, that while we have spent a generation mobilized or actually at war on the borders of the communist world, during that time the socialist world, a different world, has been changing in ways little to our advantage. It must be understood, too (a point made by Zbigniew Brzezinski), that the Soviet Union is increasingly the beneficiary of confrontation between the United States and the new nations, just as the new nations had benefited from confrontation between the Soviets and us. Perhaps first of all it must be understood that ideas matter in world affairs, and that competence in dealing with ideas is likely to become more, not less, important. Hence Max Weber:
Interests (material and ideal), not ideas, dominate directly the actions of men. Yet the "images of the world" created by these ideas have very often served as switches determining the tracks on which the dynamism of interests kept actions moving.
If we had had, for example, a better sense of our ideological disadvantage in the world, we might have better understood what we were getting into in Southeast Asia.
Such reflections, if at all sound, would have been warranted at almost any time, but they would appear to have a special relevance to this moment when so many indices tell us that the long postwar era is coming to a close. Political commentary has more than its share of this coming and going of eras, the half-life of any one of which suggests that "episodes" might be the better term. Yet the signs this time are persuasive. The settlement of World War II is now about agreed upon, it having proved well-nigh impossible to change it in any very significant way.
And so new kinds of relations begin to assume a saliency that in some cases is long overdue: economic policy toward the communist nations; military policy toward the new nations; outer space and the seabed enter the domain of international politics. The problem of war continues, while the specter of famine and pestilence, long essentially absent from the West, reappears as an aspect of domestic no less than international politics. For an incontrovertible aspect of the international system that Mr. Wilson helped to found is that the claims one society may now routinely make on another are of a kind once virtually reserved to communities within national societies. A further aspect of the emerging international system is that it begins to reflect the bias for equality over liberty that is more and more in evidence in the worldmaking it, in that measure, a world more and more distant from the one Wilson would have wished for. This must be seen as a matter of balance. The liberal tradition can be utterly indifferent to equality and see it as quite opposed to liberty, but this is a nineteenth-century heresy more than anything else. Correspondingly, the socialist tradition has room aplenty for liberty. (The question may be asked whether communism is in this sense a nineteenth-century socialist heresy.) But as liberty is the first principle of liberalism, for socialism, and of necessity for communism, equality is the prime test. And equality is the great object of collectivist politics, as Samuel Beer has used the term.
In that sense, world politics are becoming collectivist: an enormous change-one which would register, in this reading, the impact of socialist as against communist mores. We have moved beyond the long-established arrangement that Wordsworth described in Rob Roy's Grave:
... the good old rule . . . the simple plan, That they should take, who have the power, And they should keep who can.
Which is not to say there are no nations that will any longer act in this way, but such actions (until they succeed?) will be depicted as illegitimate in terms that even the most illegal acts of the past were spared. Or they will be so depicted when carried out by nations whose regimes are seen as unreconstructed and accordingly disposed to such predatory actions.
In domestic politics, collectivism asserts a high level of obligation not so much between individuals as between groupsparticularly groups defined by economic function and status: the rich, the poor; the middle class, the workers; the dock laborers, the intellectual workers. It is not so far from the medieval concept of estate, with its notion of entitlement. What is easily, and routinely, left out in the modern and secular version is the corresponding notion of obligation. Certainly this is so in the international version of collectivism. In the present world, nothing contrasts more sharply than the fierce individualism and assertion of absolute rights of sovereignty over their own resources of those very states that are making collectivist claims on the resources of others. So it might better be said that the language of world politics is becoming collectivist-but even such a limited event is of profound import for the United States. The main claims of collectivism are for the redistribution of wealth, for equality; hence the preponderance of these claims will now be made upon the United States. They will be made primarily by governments-now the majority of governments-that have proclaimed egalitarian collectivist ideals within their own societies and, finding it difficult or impossible to achieve these ideals within the constraints of their own domestic politics, turn to world politics for relief. They hope to gain resources they can import; if not, they can export the blame. This means there is going to be a lot of blame around, for the world is now made up largely of regimes that have made promises, decent and understandable promises, on which they have not been able to deliver so far and on which they are not likely to be able to deliver in the politically relevant future.
Consider India, until recently a great socialist democracy, the greatest-the first of the new nations to engage in serious socialist planning, proclaiming collectivist goals. What have been the results? Padma Desai and Jagdish Bhagwati, in a paper presented to the 1974 meeting of the American Economic Association, report: ". . . growing studies of income distribution in the country suggest strongly that the bottom deciles have not improved their consumption levels since planning began and may, in fact, have become worse off." Consider what will have to happen in India for this to change much. It has been noted that in India the growth rate of per-capita income, from 1958 to 1973, or roughly since planning began, has been a respectable 1.7 percent-better than the historic growth rate of Europe in the nineteenth century. And yet at this rate it would take India 12o years to reach the $1,3oo divide that in international statistics separates the developed from the underdeveloped nations.
Yeats wrote:
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man; Ireland shall have her freedom and you still break stone.
And this is the hard reality. The world is now almost wholly given over to nations whose governments are committed to social equality and economic growth. But few have much of the former, and even a good deal of the latter produces only slow changes. In this setting, the temptation of governments is to direct attention to inequalities between nations that ascribe national ills to international causes. This argument invariably goes to the matter of economic inequalities, never to inequalities in political and civil liberties. As Theodore A. Sumberg notes, "Freedom and economic growth used to be allies." But somewhere in the postwar period the connection was lost-a change all but unremarked. No
national leader engaged in this rhetoric need have any serious concern that his own regime might be found wanting by similar international comparisons addressed to inequalities of liberty. It is the sad but inescapable fact that almost everywhere save in Europe, and a few English-speaking outposts, democratic socialism has become steadily less democratic in the quarter-century since regimes of this order began to be founded in such profusion. We cannot know whether this is because socialism produced demands on government which made democracy impossible; or because that socialism was never nearly so democratic as we thought, and always was marred by Marxist-Leninist authoritarian tendencies; or, as is increasingly proclaimed in places like India, that democracy is a fetish of Western intellectualism and has no place in non-Western societies. What we do know is that the world is now mostly comprised of communist and socialist nations (a distinction persists, and an important one), none of which looks to American democracy as an example of anything desirable. Our economy is envied, but the effective response is not to try to emulate it so much as to try to destroy it. Everywhere, equality is the cry.
To write of this phenomenon with ill-temper or with ridicule is unworthy. Men and women of true decency and honest commitment to social justice find that not only is this the only thing they can safely say, but also that this is the only way they know how to think. Especially in the new nations, the received political culture of European socialism just doesn't provide alternative explanations to these problems that have got to be explained. (Latin America, with a different tradition, has nonetheless found a compatible and reinforcing language.) Thus, at the meeting of the Non-Aligned Bureau in Havana in March 1975, the Indian minister of external affairs, Y. B. Chavan, found the world economic situation "on the verge of a crisis of global proportions" and did not hesitate to see the cause for this in the political economy of the developed nations:
This global phenomenon has been caused mainly by the policies of the developed countries, by their mass production, technology, by their
prodigal consumption standards, by their growth-mania, by their diversion of resources towards a meaningless arms race and by the rapid depletion of the world's non-renewable raw materials. In the result we have more and more missiles, hair-dryers and tape-recorders, and less and less foodgrains, fertilizers and essential goods.
. . . If the present situation were to continue unchanged, we shall see the rich nations getting richer and the poor nations poorer, while the earth's non-renewable resources disappear.
The fact that liberty seems to be disappearing even faster seems to matter even to men of Chavan's stature. Seemingly for all, the ready answer is available: economic inequality has made freedom impossible. Very simply, at this time, it appears to be a sufficient answer to the question.
Moreover, it has been for some time, which is to say that the rise of collectivist doctrine in Britain and elsewhere ineluctably diminished the independent claim that liberty could make on social arrangements. It is useful to recall that to the liberal nineteenth century, freedom was the key to social harmony, including international harmony. Morgenthau records that adherents of free trade, such as Cobden and Proudhon, "were convinced that the removal of trade barriers was the only condition for the establishment of permanent harmony among nations, and might even lead to the disappearance of international politics altogether." Cobden was more than convinced. "Free trade," he pronounced, "is the international law of the Almighty." This confidence did not survive the twentieth century, certainly not in Britain. In 1942, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party issued a report, "The Old World and the New Society," most likely written by Harold Laski, which made this transition explicit. The war was basically attributed to an "unplanned economic order [which] went into a frenzy of unreasoning nationalism." The capitalist class in Germany and Italy destroyed democracy to protect its privileges. Similar interests elsewhere acted similarly.
It was fear for privileges which, in the epoch of "appeasement," led so many of the corresponding classes in Britain, France and the United States to sympathize with the habits and the purposes of the Fascist and
Nazi dictators. . . . They preferred to break the League of Nations rather than risk the overthrow of the forces of privilege in Germany and Italy. ... All the major evils of the "appeasement period" are directly traceable to the unregulated operation of our economic system.
The report continued: "We have learned from the war that the anarchy of private competition must give way to ordered planning under national control." The nation must own and operate the es sential instruments of production. Wartime controls in industry and agriculture must be retained. This would enable "the reorganization of our export trade to proceed in an orderly and balanced way." In commodities, for example, there would be an end to "reckless speculation"-and so through a familiar prescription for economic controls, but now linked to an international as well as national order. Thirty-three years later, a Commonwealth Conference convened in Kingston, Jamaica. The Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley, according to reports, set the tone for the meeting. Since the era of political colonialism was almost at an end, he declared, the time was at hand for the Commonwealth to turn its concerns to "the wide disparities in wealth now existing between different sections of mankind." He noted one recent response to the unregulated operation of the world economic system: "The third world has been driven by its poverty and the inexorable working of the free-trade system to the discovery of the producer association. The Organization of Petroleum [Exporting] Countries has changed fundamental equations of economic power as decisively as did the Industrial Revolution." What the Almighty will think of this is not certain, but what is fairly clear is that the inequality of economic conditions between different nations has become politicized-in the sense that in the community of nations it is a situation which is seen as appropriate for collective political action.
Two further matters seem equally clear. First, the present situation is not going to change very much very fast. Some large changes have occurred: the rise of Japan and the decline of Britain. But in the main historic relationships persist, changing only slowly. It has been pointed out that the ratio of per-capita in-
come in America to that in the Soviet Union is today only ever so slightly lower than it was before the Russian Revolution. If the Soviets have not closed the gap in fifty-eight years of intense competitiveness, with a continent to work with, what may be expected for the often artificial, frequently resource-poor new nations of the world? Finally, it should be clear that what the United States faces is a world of communist and socialist regimes-at various times twenty or so nations in the world might be otherwise-in which the language of politics is persistently refractive of any argument that might make American arrangements appear attractive or even legitimate. Ideas, just now, are all against us. How, then, is the American case to be presented? A first point, not that obvious, is that the American case must be presented. It no longer speaks for itself, as it may have done in 1945. Others no longer speak for it, as was the case perhaps in 1918. From 1975 on, our competence with ideas and the vigor with which we present and examine them will have consequences for us of a higher order than we are familiar with. It has been remarked that in American foreign policy there has been a tradition of high politics and low politics: high politics being security politics and low politics being those other concerns, at once symbolic and ideological and yet somehow workaday and even drab, which occupy, let us say, most of the specialized agencies of the United Nations system.
It is, of course, precisely because the ideological disadvantage of the United States is reversed in the case of so many other nations, especially the new ones, that there is so much emphasis on ideological matters in international forums. Here again it is essential to distinguish the socialist from the communist impact on the world scene. American foreign policy could ignore "rhetoric" so long as it was communist, on the repeatedly demonstrated grounds that such rhetoric was not in itself much of a threat. It won no elections. Communism everywhere "came out of a barrel of a gun." (Which only seemed to enhance the "natural" primacy of security politics.) But this was not, and is not, the case with the rhetoric and ideas of nationalist socialism. They have great persuasiveness in the widest range of economic and political settings,
our own included. But like any rhetoric it can be put to distorted and unproductive purposes, and this has been done increasingly in the present world. To ignore it or to deal with it badly is to make matters, in the present situation, worse for ourselves and not better for anyone else, save the elites who manipulate this rhetoric for their own narrow purposes.
Our task is to be compassionate and yet reasoning. It should be seen as a task, an undertaking. It should be seen as something we have not done before. It should not be seen as something we are not likely to do well.
We do not wholly believe our own case. There is the nub of it. If the influence of "American" political ideas in the world reached its high point in i g i g, and has declined generally in the world ever since, that influence has declined in America also. It is scarcely elegant to chop up a century into ideological epochs before any one ideology has fully run its course, and yet there is a certain Hegelian structure to the libertarian, totalitarian, collectivist sequence, and in that sequence "American" ideas grow steadily more remote. In the meantime, subsequent waves of doctrine have broken on these shores also, and have had their impact. Thus the Russian Revolution had an enormous, and after a point quite visible, impact on American intellectual life. There was a time-the 1930s, as Robert Warshow has written-when "virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist party." A huge proportion of American intellectuals were within the party orbit; those outside were likely to be in opposition and devoted much of themselves to maintaining that opposition. In its Stalinist form, this doctrine was not only implacably opposed to "American"' ideas, it was also viciously illiberal. Lying became a routine tactic, and deceit a normal device; so that when this influence began to move into the universities, as it did after World War II, resistance to it was disorganized and uncomprehendingoften save only for the opposition of ex-Communists and others of the Left who had been close enough to the phenomenon to recognize it for what it was. Nonetheless; by the late i g6os the Stalinoid student newspaper was common on campuses everywhere, and remains so. And as the cohort of former communists
and anticommunist socialists gradually disappears, universities seem even more uncomprehending and undefended than ever. It would not quite be accurate to say that the wave of collectivist influence came next, as it did in the world at large. In reality, it came first. The American encounter with both socialism and communism has been greatly influenced by immigration, so much so as to be in some ways as much an ethnic phenomenon as an ideological one. Immigrants brought their doctrines with them, or were waiting when doctrine, as it were, followed on the next ship. But socialism was a doctrine not only of continental Europe and suchlike regions of emigration, but of Britain also. Indeed the most prestigious and influential of all socialist movements-the least Marxist, by far the most liberal, and the most brainy-was British socialism, especially Fabian Socialism. More than a doctrine, it was a culture, such that by the early years of the twentieth century, when America was still very much a colony in such matters, merely to be cultured meant to be influenced by socialist doctrine. At a time when still relatively few persons had "read an American book" or in any event "seen an American play," which Americanif he saw plays at all-had not seen one by Bernard Shaw? With time-a Fabian mode!-this influence grew and spread. American arrangements changed under the influence: it might not be too much to say they were transformed. The time came in postwar America when avowedly communist ideas had become once again sectarian, at most a marginal influence on the culture. But socialist ideas had by then gained the widest currency, although rarely with socialist labels. Americans were becoming British indeed, willing to change anything but the appearance of things-a sensible arrangement, but not one that makes for intellectual clarity. Expenditure in the public sector, largely for the provision of social services and myriad forms of redistribution, rose to a third of the GNP. But somehow the point was lost as successive national administrations denied they were engaged in any such social transformation. Educated youth began to partake of that curiously dichotomous view of American life to be encountered among the upper-class Left throughout the world. We are seen as a society impacted and near traumatized with mindless mass consumption, born of the need for capitalist profit, while simultaneously a society that is near heartless in its treatment of the unpropertied-this too a consequence of capitalist necessity.
All foreseen by Schumpeter! Capitalism, of its own intellectual vitality, would create an intellectual class which in turn would delegitimize it. Could even Schumpeter, however, have foreseen the utter collapse of libertarian defenses in the second half of the twentieth century? The American. business system went on doing tolerably well, or better than that, but proved wholly incapable of making a case for itself. It did justifiable things; it could not justify them. It did admirable things; it could not make them seem admirable. Postwar opinion surveys trace a steady, inexorable decline of confidence in corporations, the fundamental economic unit of the society, while baffled corporation executives gathered at Greenbrier to ask why no one spoke up on what is right about America. As if in response, their children deserted the business system, and the public sector as a proportion of the Gross National Product rose to a third, and headed for half at the turn of the century.
The symbols of progress, in Samuel Beer's term, had been captured by what was no longer so clearly "the other side." It is important to be precise at this point. There is no necessary sense in which nationalist socialism is to be seen as a doctrine incompatible with American traditions and values. Even to bring up the question suggests that such values and traditions are more precise than in fact they are; it has previously been asserted that there has already been a tremendous incorporation of socialist values and practices. If the United States were to become a socialist democracy in the British manner, nothing indispensable to our society would be lost. Living standards might fail to rise, might decline relatively. The Labour Party report of 1942 noted that Britain was then the second wealthiest nation in the world. Well, that is no longer so, but then the United States is no longer the wealthiest either. The problem is that, in its current manifestations in the world at large, socialist ideology is decidedly antiAmerican and that, to the degree it informs the policies of a majority of the nations of the world, those policies also become anti-American. This is a situation we must seek to reverse, or else have little to complain about if things don't go well.
Further, and more important, there should be no question that the totalitarian powers stand to benefit greatly if relations between the United States and the new socialist nations (including, of course, the increasingly leftist nations of Latin America) become embittered and deadlocked. Prudence requires that we assume the totalitarians could actively be seeking this outcome. If evidence be needed, none could be more persuasive than the declaration adopted at the Ministerial Meeting of the Coordination Bureau of the Non-Aligned Countries, at which the Indian minister of external affairs spoke in March 1975. The bureau met, to begin with, in the "nonaligned" capital of Havana. The language of the "Declaration of Havana" is totalitarian: "The Bureau greets the people of Cambodia's great and decisive victories over the sieged lackey regime in Phnom Penh. . . ." The United States is anathematized in virtually every paragraph. Western developed countries are enjoined "to cease obstaculizing the United Nations." The Leninist rhetoric of imperialism is nicely folded in with collectivist worries about consumerism.
The obstinacy of the imperialist powers in preserving the structures of colonial and neocolonial exploitation which nurture their luxurious and superfluous consumer societies while they keep a large part of humanity in misery and hunger....
The entire thrust of the document is to merge the rhetoric of the communist states with that of the socialist ones, and to establish a unity of viewpoint in fundamental opposition to the supposed views and behavior of the United States.
There were genuine democracies present at this meeting as members of the Non-Aligned Bureau. There were a number of reasonably democratic countries on hand as observers. And there were outright communist countries in both groups. It cannot be in the interest of the United States, nor of these democratic countries, to be in such company, to join in such declarations. At very least, it is
not in the interest of the United States that it should be. Those not certain of this could do worse than consult the list headed "Delegations from the following countries were also present as observers." (My italics.) After the Palestinian Liberation Organization comes the Socialist Party of Puerto Rico. (In point of fact, the communist party.)
There is-or there might well be, and it would be foolish not to entertain the hypothesis-a process at work whereby democratic socialist regimes become less democratic in situations of ;relative economic decline where disciplined totalitarian cadres on the Left can offer support and influence. Certainly the "emergence" of powerful communist influence in the British trade unions-after years of full employment, socialist governments, a welfare stateat a time when such influence should have been diminishing, has come as something of a surprise. Similarly, in India, a once great socialist democracy finds itself governing in an open coalition with the Communist Party of India, a small group but now one with considerable influence. The danger, of course, is that such groups almost instinctively opt for the old Stalinist tactic, "the worse the better." Wherever they gain influence in democratic socialist regimes they act so as to increase the probability that the regime will fail-in the expectation that they will succeed to power, either directly or in stages. (Those who think this strategy discredited by the German experience might well recall Walter Ulbricht's comfortable life and peaceful death.) Surely it is within the capacity of such communist cadres to see that the prospect of democratic socialist regimes collapsing in the new nations will be considerably "improved" if an antagonistic relationship can be developed with the United States that will cause the United States to withdraw its concern and its support. This process is already visible, and likely to hasten in the aftermath of the Indochina experience. Was it accident, as the old Marxists would ask, that the day after the New York Times carried a story from the Commonwealth conference headlined "MRS. GANDHI HAILS VICTORY IN SAIGON," a story from MOSCOW was headed "MOSCOW APPLAUDS VICTORS IN VIETMAN IN RESTRAINED TONE"?
If it is difficult to see just how the interests of nonaligned countries are served by such statements, it is easy to see how they might serve the interests of the totalitarian nations even more than at first appears. For the long-run effect of uncontrolled rhetoric from the nonaligned, contrasted with rather modulated and subtle responses from the totalitarian centers, could create a curious compound tropism. The West as well as the South will find itself turning East. Anything for a kind word. What a fantastic aftermath of the cold war! And yet a possible one. In just this way the United States could find itself responding to the state capitalism of the rest of the world with a state capitalism of its own: nationalized and cartelized economies abroad doing business with a not dissimilar economy here. Pragmatism will have proved our greatest failing, as first one state trading arrangement is worked out, and then another; first one cartel, and then another; with all the movement away from the American system. If it were toward a true socialism, a case might be made. But this will nowhere be the case, for nowhere is there socialism. In the communist world and among the new nations what normally obtains are more or less brutal and thoroughly exploitative versions of state capitalism run for the benefit of the new collectivist elite. (Socialism in India, for example, has resulted, as Desai and Bhagwati observe, in a rentier economy in which the key class lives off rents obtained from the ubiquitous government license.) This is not, perhaps, what was intended, but then ideologies produce surprises. A point, however, which American negotiators are not likely to perceive, having in the main little sense of the ideologies with which they are dealing, other than to know that they are somehow different and somehow must be dealt with.
We must learn socialism as we once learned communism. There is, after all, a respectable record of our having found ways to comprehend, and eventually to interact with, Marxist-Leninist leaders. We have not much engaged the new nations at the level of ideology. Over and above any sense that we might not come off very well, there was, in American foreign policy circles, a kind of redskin disdain for such paleface maundering. "Drip" was the
term with which one of the great men of postwar American foreign policy would dismiss the crazy talk, as he saw it, which in the end would lead to such things as quadrupling the price of oil. There _was also, possibly, a certain misreading of the "end of ideology" thesis. As Seymour Martin Lipset has now noted:
What we were referring to was a judgment that the passionate attachments of an integrated revolutionary set of doctrines to the anti-system struggles of working-class movements-and the consequent coherent counter-revolutionary doctrines of some of their opponents-were declining, that they were, to repeat C. Wright Mills' term, "a legacy from Victorian Marxism." They would not reemerge in advanced industrial or "post-industrial societies," although they would continue to exist in the least developed nations.
Well, of course, they have indeed continued, and have grown more intense, in language at the very least. To meet the challenge so presented, low politics are going to have to be elevated somewhat. The United States government now has more than its share of intelligence and energy within its bounds, and more is yet available. But such talent will not be directed to this range of matters unless it is known that the issues are seen to be important. It needs also to be understood within the larger society, and notably within the circles concerned with foreign policy, that to deal with these matters is no longer to court the easy approbation that may once have come from going along with whatever seemed the sentiment of the hour. Not only outside but within the United States, persons charged with this responsibility will encounter suspicion and hostility from just those quarters where they might wish their actions to be most clearly understood and even valued.
One hesitates to prescribe, and yet we are not altogether without experience in coping with such situations. It is an honored maxim of folk medicine that cures are found where maladies arise. Something similar holds in politics. The American response to communism in the world, and within America itself, was enormously informed, even fashioned, by persons who had been near to or even involved with that doctrine. In the present not so very different situation, it is on the Democratic Left that we are most
likely to find both informed and unintimidated advocates of a vigorous American role in world affairs, and equally unashamed partisans of American performance. In the clamor of recent years, with so many newer voices and shriller ones raised in protest of one form or another, the social democrats of America have had difficulty being heard. But they are with us now as they were with us before, closely involved with the labor movement, committed to long perspectives in politics, and able somehow to live without overmuch illusion. In a curious way the world struggle between democratic and totalitarian socialism goes on in this country, too. If the essential statement to be made about presenting the American case is that those elements in American society which might most be expected to do this are today the least disposed to do so, and the least able, then the next most important statement is that in the present circumstances the most effective presentation of the American case is likely to come from just those quarters which have been least associated with the celebration of liberal capitalism. It is not that the labor movement and the social democrats like what we have, so much as that they are aware of the alternatives, and acculturated, if the term may be used, to the realm of ideology in which the American case must be presented. In time a foreign service might be trained to this task, but it will be difficult. Its recruits will come from universities where, in the main, the American case is not believed. They will, in the main, be the offspring of a demoralized business class where the American case is not thought to be important. In any event it will be a long task. For the moment we should look to the defenders we have. As in point of fact we are not likely to do this, we must accordingly not expect to be well defended.