Beyond Liberalism: Some Proposals For The Sixties

Like other dissenters, I can go along with a number of the specific proposals of the major party platforms (particularly the Democratic document) for meeting the domestic needs of the Sixties. But socialists and radicals, it seems to me, must challenge liberalism’s assumption that ameliorative measures are enough. We must go beyond liberalism to begin the task of reshaping the social structure so that it will be compatible with the goals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

American liberalism is a straddle between democracy and plutocracy: it assumes that a society of political and social equality can be erected upon an economic base of flagrant inequality. It asserts that the formal political equality of one man—one vote is in itself sufficient to ensure the responsiveness of public policy to the needs and demands of the majority, ignoring both the direct political power of wealth and the barriers to social and cultural equality that it inexorably creates. But democracy is more than a procedure for discussion and voting; it is a way of life, the way of sufficient equality of condition so that, as G. D. H. Cole said, “no one is so much richer or poorer than his neighbors as to be unable to mix with them o...