After the Election (Winter 1961)

ON ONE point everyone seems agreed: had Eisenhower run again he would have won again. It seems likely that even Nixon would have won, had Eisenhower entered the campaign a week or so earlier than he did. The President, our greatest celebrity, might have carried the country for the Republicans had he only been a bit more energetic. Instead he was loyal to his principles: his contribution to the campaign consisted of pious words and a little golf, the suppression of unemployment figures and a final ride through cheering crowds. It is worth recording that the Republicans lost because of a failure of will and energy—and that they only barely lost, since after all, this very lack was once their greatest strength.

The central theme of Kennedy’s campaign was America’s decline. Whatever that means in terms of future policy, it marks the end of the great celebration. And for the moment, at least, the atmosphere in Washington is definitely changed. Kennedy has yet to prove himself, but he has made the point that complacency is out of date. There is an openness to new ideas probably unlike anything since the thirties; we are told to expect significant new po1icies. The liberal critics of the past eight years are job-hunters at last; they do not always get from the careful Mr. Kennedy the positions they would like, but they will be active and even important members of the new administration.

IT IS DOUBTFUL, however, that there exists a liberal politics which can provide a background of ferment, discontent, agitation—and, where necessary, support—for Kennedy’s ‘new frontier.” We find ourselves in the sixties almost by accident. No great liberal movement s1ept Kennedy into the White House. To be sure, both parties felt compelled in 1960 to adopt the most liberal platforms in their history, and they were surely both responding to a kind of public demand. The ‘58 elections seemed to indicate some vague but pervasive sense of things gone wrong, of the need for new ideas and energies at the center of government. Kennedy managed to express this restlessness—to make it somehow more urgent, though no more specific—and there was just enough dissatisfaction to elect him president.

At the same time, however, liberal congressional candidates were defeated in many parts of the country and the new Congress will be more conservative than the last. The group of young Congressmen who worked together on the Liberal Project was decimated: almost half its members will not return–among them Porter of Oregon and Meyer of New Hampshire. The point is not simply that Kennedy failed to win a big enough victory to pull local candidates behind him. What is more important is that in the course of the campaign the “new frontier” acquired no programmatic substance; Kennedy did not win support for his policies or for the men who would support his policies. Narrow as his victory was, it was his own—another triumph of personality. Like an Eisenhower victory, it was accompanied by such extensive ticket- splitting that it provided no mandate. Eisenhower, of course, required no mandate, since he was not going to do anything.

Voting for Kennedy (as distinct from voting against Nixon) was an act of faith. Having elected him, his supporters are now holding their breath to see what he will do. He is a president presumably liberal, but without a liberal constituency—that is, with no constituency at all of any definite political shape. Workers, Negroes, urban Catholics, Jews: all voted Democratic in proportions similar to those of New Deal days. But only the Negroes still make specific demands, and the unions in some limited areas; Kennedy is not obligated in any precise way to most of the groups that supported him.

How can he hold their support? In the future, he must try to avoid run- fling against a candidate like himself. Otherwise he will quickly discover the volatile, unstable quality of contemporary interest groups. There are already large numbers of voters who do not ask the primary political questions: would this or that candidate be good for business, good for labor, good for the Jews? Such voters are “autonomous,” disinterested, and thus far, at any rate, their behavior is quite unpredictable. They are politically educated only through the mass media; they respond mainly to the “image” a candidate or a party projects.

THE RESULT of this kind of an election is that the winner cannot simply proceed to carry out a program to which he is committed and for which he is held responsible by a substantial, organized section of the population. Kennedy has something like a free hand—he must worry about his “image,” yet in a new way he is irresponsible. The need to appeal to “disinterested” men tends to break down the connection between policies and politics. The President-elect will govern in what is almost a vacuum of organized, articulate, programmatic support. At the same time, there are enormous opportunities for men of good will—which is why, perhaps, the politics of liberal intellectuals has concentrated so much in recent years on getting “men like ourselves” into official positions.

They have succeeded, and now the politics of personal influence and position is to be tested. We may well get many liberal reforms without getdug a liberal movement, in Washington today, for example, it is possible to talk practically about health insurance for the aged and federal aid for education; the curious thing is that both are likely to be enacted—-in some partial, emasculated form—-before they become significant political issues in the country at large. Liberals in government may discover, however, that they need more support outside of government than they yet have.

Almost through default, Kennedy represents the various possibilities of the Democratic party; he is a man capable of looking in different directions for support. For some years now neither the old New Deal elements nor the union politicians have had sufficient power or intellectual force to provide the basis for a consistent liberalism. And Kennedy himself has hardly been a consistent liberal. Today it is urgently necessary to recreate a left-wing constituency, to reestablish intellectually and then practically the excluded politics of the fifties—from the radical ginger group to the pragmatic liberal organization. As it is, Kennedy lacks what Roosevelt so obviously had: a steady source of new ideas and energetic men on the left, a barrage of criticism, a radical conscience. He has academic advisors, but they are not kept honest, so to speak, by an extracurricular enthusiasm. The organizations which have grown up in the civil rights struggle, groups like SANE which seek to influence foreign policy, the new student politics: these constitute the bare beginnings of a new liberalism, which may someday act together with the dormant but still powerful labor unions. Without a far more substantial development, however, liberal politics will remain largely a matter of trusting Kennedy.

SOCIALISTS and radicals can and should work within these new liberal groups—as many of us have done on issues like civil rights and peace. But it is also necessary to make demands of our own. Though the election does not suggest any radical change in American politics, there are new possibilities, however limited, and there is a new audience. There are young people ready to listen to our critique of the compromises and hesitations of politics in Washington, and to our suggestions of alternatives. Michael Reagan’s program for the sixties, printed in the last DISSENT, suggests a minimum demand. It has the great virtue of being concrete, even when, given Democratic party politics, it may be dismissed as wildly impractical. Concrete we must be: in our attack upon inequality, in our demand for steps to combat unemployment and the threatening consequences of automation, in our concern for cultural integrity, in our new interest in city planning and urban renewal. In all these areas there may well be people involved again, devising schemes, seeking support. And all this suggests the possibility of a restored political life in America; without that elections mean very little.

– December 20, 1960.