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From New International, Vol. XVI No. 6, November–December 1950, pp. 371–378.
Transcribed & marked up up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
That political type which calls itself “liberal” in the United States today is admittedly very disturbed. An article in the New Republic of March 6, 1950 was entitled Liberal Cachexia: Its Cause and Cure, with “cachexia” defined as a “condition of ill health with malnutrition and wasting of the body.” One distinguished literary figure strenuously tries to show that “The Liberal Imagination” still has validity, while another literary person squirms to maintain some of his liberalism as he finds much to extoll in the ideas of a Metternich as part of a “Conservatism Revisited.”
The most apt picture of the current status of many American liberals was unwittingly portrayed by one of the accepted intellectual spokesmen of a large school of present day liberalism. Max Lerner, writing in the New York Post on April 3 about the convention of Americans for Democratic Action, declared: “Where can liberals go? That has been the persistent question of the past five years, since FDR’s death. It is hard to live life without father. It is hard to take part in a drama that has no hero.” The rest of the article was favorable to the ADA Convention (without “father” or the “hero”) which decided against formal allegiance to the Democratic Party. Lerner favored this move, but it was apparent that he would have been much happier if there were still the party dominated by FDR, with no ADA necessary.
“A condition of ill health with malnutrition,” and the pressing need for a “father” – these are the diagnoses of two of the more hopeful partisans of American liberalism, writing during the days of “their” Fair Deal Administration (and, incidentally, well before the Korean war began). Yet, they both claim some vigor and optimism for their side. For socialists to delight in their cachexia would be, indeed, a petty victory. It is much more our task to understand and explain it, and trust that the still remaining optimism provides a meaningful background for the reception of such explanation. For, the varied set of politicalized individuals usually included under the rubric “liberal” in this country at this juncture are the group to whom socialist appeals must primarily be directed. They include not only the better elements of the political public but also, for better or worse, both the leadership and the most politically-interested elements of the rank and file of the labor movement.
Much of their current dilemma is part of the ambiguity of the term which they have chosen as their political label. What is a liberal, and who should be included within the liberal domain? Many an extreme Hooverite rugged-individualist considers himself a “liberal.” A book called The Liberal Tradition, published several years ago, finds the author equating liberalism with a combination of the doctrine of “natural rights” and a private property economy, plus the feasibility of a tie-in with “Catholic collectivism.” It is obvious that liberalism is a huge umbrella covering a multitude of political tendencies. In the not too definitive world of political terminology, it is surpassed only by “progressive” in vagueness. An essential beginning for the extrication of any discussion from some of this ambiguity is the realization that there are at least three logically separate dimensions of liberalism; they may be historically connected, but must be analyzed as distinct items.
The first, and most usually presented dimension, is what might be considered the “liberal ideal” – the basic philosophy of liberal values. The author of the cachexia article lists the following tenets: diversity of human goals, freedom of choice, altruism, belief in the social nature of man. Peter Vierick, author of Conservatism Revisited, considers accurate Metternich’s designation of the liberal as a “presumptuous man” who believes he is a better judge of human actions than are absolute formulae or tradition. The author of the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences article on “liberalism” states essentially the same thing, although he adds some philosophically romantic overtones:
“Its [liberalism’s] postulate, the spiritual freedom of mankind, not only repudiates naturalistic and deterministic interpretations of human action, but posits a freer individual conscious of his capacity for unfettered development and self-expression.”
If we ignore the comment about “determinism,” which is not relevant to a discussion of recent liberal doctrine, we have here a general statement of the ideal – the free man, varied in his potentialities but individually and collectively in control of the different facets of human destiny. As an ideal, it is something which liberals hold in common with socialists, anarchists, and various other “radical” ideologists, all of whom spring from the same intellectual heritage. The differences among them have been matters of analysis and program.
One of the best general declarations of faith in liberal values has been made by John Dewey (though he did not specifically use the term):
“The foundation of democracy is faith in the capacities of human nature; faith in human intelligence and in the power of pooled and cooperative experience. It is not belief that these things are complete but that if given a show they will grow and be able to generate progressively the knowledge and wisdom needed to guide collective action.” [1]
With the typical Deweyian emphasis on “intelligence,” which is very similar to the Marxist emphasis on “consciousness,” this is very close to the ultimate basic ideal of socialists. But, more important for this discussion, it is a statement of essential creed to which most of the varied political elements who consider themselves liberals can subscribe.
But how can such a set of criteria distinguish, for instance, between John Dewey and Thomas Dewey? The typical contemporary American liberal has at least one other distinctive characteristic – the second dimension of liberalism as a political concept. The earliest liberals were those who asked for regular, but slow, social- political-economic changes, as opposed to the more stand-pat conservatives. That type of identification has carried to this day. There is a prevailing picture, at least in this country, of a political continuum on the basis of attitudes towards modifications. On the one end are the “reactionaries,” who want to “go back,” followed by the conservatives, the liberals, and, at the other end, the “radicals,” who desire more quick and drastic change.
The application of this dimension engenders more confusion in contemporary political thinking. Are Fascists and Stalinists radical or reactionary? They are both, depending upon what is to be described by the particular slogan used. In any case, either term hardly communicates any substantial idea of the nature of such political movements. But, in the case of the contemporary American liberals under discussion, the change continuum is the best classificatory device. By their own identification and the attitudes of others, they are those political people who desire more alteration of the going political-economic fundaments than the conservatives, less than the socialists. They are, to use a general locating device, more or less New Deal partisans, with New and Fair Dealism representing in essence, the desired gradual change. American Social-Democrats are currently hardly distinguishable from this liberal type. As vague as such a classification system may be, it is the best around for pinning down the politics under consideration, much better than the set of philosophical ideals which the New Deal liberal holds in common with so many political rivals.
As yet, nothing has been said about any specific economic political ideas. These are the third dimension of liberalism. The ideas propounded are in historic continuity with the original ideal, and concomitant with the accepted position on the change continuum. But, they too must be separately analyzed. As will be shown, the political program that has developed is often in conflict with the philosophic ideal. The planks of the contemporary American liberal platform, stated and implicit, will be considered in the context of historical developments and the political answers to them of those who descended from early traditional liberalism.
The original political-economic ideas of liberalism were enmeshed with the liberal philosophic creed and the desire for gradual change, within the setting of the transition from the medieval to the modem world. If the ideologists of the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their successful followers of the nineteenth were pleading for freedom from both tradition and authority, included was the “economic freedom” of the rising bourgeoisie from the restrictions of the remnants of feudal arrangements and the mercantilism of the absolute monarchies. The world they extolled was one of free competition in both ideas and economic life, with the state an occasionally intervening umpire to see that the system was not seriously upset. The self-reliant business entrepreneur would compete against his rivals (none, presumably, getting too large) in a market with an automatically adjusting mechanism. Politics was to be under the jurisdiction of a parliamentary system, with wide suffrage and the fullest exercise of civil rights. The debates of the parliamentary representatives were analogous to the competition of economic units; the “decision” in either case was to come from the natural harmonious interplay of the mildly conflicting elements.
Later, differences appeared among liberals on the question of state intervention, even in the classic liberal homeland of Great Britain. People like John Stuart Mill asked for state protection for the maintenance of the liberal order, while Herbert Spencer thought he found further justification in Darwinism for complete laissez-faire. But, the common ground of the self-reliant, competing equalitarian man, competing in both the markets of ideas and of commodities, was central to all. The British Liberal Party was the best organized expression of the combined tenets of liberalism in the mid-nineteenth century; interestingly, the most persistent point of conflict between Gladstone’s party and Disraeli’s Conservative Party was the dispute over free trade versus protectionism and Empire expansion.
The label has little meaning in Europe today. It was Beveridge, a British Liberal Party spokesman, who proposed an all out state-operated plan for social security and full employment before the victory of the Labor Party in 1945. On the continent, liberalism, sometimes as a party title and sometimes as a political ascription, has been connected with bourgeois parties that are strongly for church-state separation and, usually, for measures to secure more economic competition (resulting in a “little unemployment”). Ironically, their closest cohorts on the latter point in Britain are in the Conservative Party, and in the United States usually in the Republican Party.
From the above account, the term “liberal” has little relevance to European politics today, and appears to be seldom used in debate. It remains popular mostly in the United States as anything but a name. It is generally associated with New Dealers, who are actually further from the original liberal political-economic program than Robert Taft. The latter is more an advocate of freedom from state intervention in the economic sphere and the supremacy of the legislature in the political. Whether New Dealers are more liberal in terms of the fundamental liberal philosophical ideal is not known. They are clearly more liberal only in relation to the continuum of change. Their actual program is thus a product of political-economic developments in American history and the varying doctrines that have accompanied them.
The original dichotomy in American politics between the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians is well-explored; especially since the early writings of Charles A. Beard, the former have been associated with small farmers, the latter with the growing commercial bourgeoisie. Jefferson’s Democrats stood for a limited Federal Government, Hamilton’s Federalists for a more active one with many facilities for aiding commerce, such as a National Bank. We thus have the American peculiarity of the bourgeoisie as the proponent of a quasi-mercantilism, and their agrarian opponents much closer to the early European liberals. However, both groups were more in line with early liberal doctrine than with any other prevailing political program of the time.
Jefferson’s party in office adopted many measures which assumed strong powers for the Federal Government. But, its ideology and its program, in opposition to that of the Federalists and the later Whigs, were more along the lines of faith in the self-reliant and self-governing citizen and individual economic unit. The later “revolution” of Andrew Jackson further accentuated the idea of the plebeian agrarian as fit to be the governing group. He was free not only from too much control, but also free to administer the government if his party won.
The Civil War completely changed the political pattern. The new Republican Party combined many of the previous beliefs and personnel which were part of the traditions of both Hamilton and Jefferson. Its leadership came from northern capitalists and western farmers, with probably some appeal to the working class because of its anti-slavery record. It became the dominant party, associated with vigorously expanding capitalism laissez faire, in terms of opposition to government controls, but wholeheartedly addicted to large scale government subsidies. The Democratic Party became, almost automatically, a vague sort of protest party, with its strange combination of Southern Bourbons, northern municipal political machines, and some “liberal do-gooders” already evident. That type of liberal held the traditional Democratic Party line on low tariffs, but added such reform ideas as civil service. Its best intellectual spokesman was probably the snobbish founder of the Nation, E.L. Godkin, and its successful political hero was Grover Cleveland. Its leading cohorts tended to agree with just about all of the going setup, if some of the crudities be removed. Strangely, the only mass appeal came from the city machines, who were hardly in complete agreement with the national program.
But, there were vigorous protests against the Leviathan of monopoly capitalism. Besides the infant labor and socialist movements, which were not very influential, leading source of opposition to the concentrated wealth of capital and its political agents came from the mushrooming agrarian Populist movement and the muckraking journalists. The agrarians were traditional Jeffersonians in their emphasis upon the needs of the small property owner and their desire for more direct democracy (popular election of senators); they were state interventionists, opposed to laissez faire, in their call for income tax legislation and federal regulation of railroads. The muckrakers’ exposures of the “trusts” were aimed at uncovering the most blatant evils that required government regulation (like the Pure Food and Drugs Act) and at using government action to restore the competition that the trusts were curtailing. In summary, those “liberals” (from the standpoint of the change continuum) were both trying to regain some of the world of the small entrepreneur by governmental action and to prevent the large combines from committing their most flagrant anti-social acts. Except for the few who became socialists, the only thing they could find that resembled a systematic set of political-economic ideas was Henry George’s Single Tax. The most important political leader was the “political circuit rider,” William Jennings Bryan. To keep the record straight, the ideology of that era did produce one of the most able and courageous of American political figures, even if limited by his acceptance of that ideology, in Robert LaFollette Sr.
By the time the “progressive era” of the turn of the century had reached its zenith, the two basic ingredients had become differentiated. One was the restoration of the place of the small businessman, the other was the idea of regulation of accepted economic concentrations. The election campaign of 1912 saw the two tendencies clearly expressed by the leading candidates. On one side was “Bull Moose” Theodore Roosevelt and his most characteristic spokesman Herbert Croly, the founder of the New Republic. Croly insisted that bigness in the economy was here to stay, and the task of liberals was to see that it was properly controlled and directed. Though TR, who was his own best public relations man, had proclaimed himself the “trust buster” during his terms of presidential office, his history, personality, and expressed beliefs fitted in perfectly with the idea of strong government paternally regulating and cooperating with big business (his “big stick” imperialism did not seem to have extended to his third party). The naivete, with all good intentions, of the Progressive movement of that time was illustrated in that so many accepted as their hero the man who had, in derogatory fashion coined the appellation “muckraker.”
Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 campaign, buttressed by the “Curse of Bigness” ideas of Louis Brandeis, was primarily a series of exhortations to return to the small property ways of the fathers, with large scale monopolistic capitalist concentrations prevented, rather than merely regulated. His administration, at first, actually made some attempts along these lines, though the growth and power of the biggest business organizations were not appreciably curtailed. In any case, World War I stopped Wilson’s “New Freedom” in mid-air, and its leader then tried to utilize Jeffersonian principles as the form of the United States’ new found world leadership, with the results that are so very well known. The distinction between Crolyean and Brandeisian liberalism, noted by many writers, is hardly appreciated by most contemporary liberals of all stripes, though it provides an excellent key for the understanding of their own stands.
The Twenties were the culmination of both the two original tenets of American political life in an Indian Summer atmosphere. The Federal Government greatly assisted business, though accounts of Teapot Dome scandals over-accentuate some of the cruder aspects of that aid. Here was Hamiltonianism at its apex. On the other hand, the rugged individualism proclaimed by business spokesmen was in full accord with the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian faith in the self-reliant individual. The frenzied stock market inflation seemed to offer some outlet to the would-be small capitalist who was blocked by the ever huger economic combines from becoming a small entrepreneur.
The depression, of course, ended that world. The New Deal government which followed nurtured the contemporary American liberal who is the subject of this article. Despite a few feints at trust-busting, the Franklin Roosevelt policy, like that of his fifth cousin at the start of the century, has been mostly Crolyean. From the NRA, through the war-time boards, to the post war full employment plans, it has been big government in an alliance with big business – an alliance that has been alternately harmonious and shaky. Both the need to keep the economy going in difficult circumstances and to placate the varied elements that have made up the New Deal political base have compelled some governmental control over big business that was not always popular with the latter, as well as the granting of more rights to some population groupings outside the business community. But there has been just about no gesture in the direction of any economic structural change, with the isolated exceptions of economic islands like TVA which remain small scale intrusions. The Truman administration has carried on in the same way.
With that program has gone a vast increase in the power of the executive arm of the government. The contemporary New Deal liberal has thus been aptly called by Professor C. Wright Mills an “administrative liberal.” It is the contention of this writer that the current cachexia of many liberal ideologists, their frequent abandonment of the liberal philosophic ideal (as well as the defensive reaffirmation of it by some), during the time of Fair Deal electoral success, is directly attributable to their full acceptance of administrative liberalism. The American Social-Democrats have, generally, also submitted to that frame of political thought. Critics of New Deal liberals are discerningly correct in charging them with a prevailing desire to be dependent on the government, though some of those critics are either romantically adrift with their hopes of return to a Brandeisian world of small scale economic competition, or even more opposed to the liberal ideal in their plans for creating a political system under the more direct domination of large capital. The father image has become so strong that even the growth of the labor movement, won through hard organization and bitter struggle, becomes, in much liberal propaganda, an administrative gift from the White House.
Several sets of attitudes feature the contemporary New Deal liberal ideologist. He has been part and parcel of the push toward an administrative state. This has not been merely another case of adjustment, but something in which he has often been in the forefront. It was the New Deal that extended executive power in spectacular fashion, most of it along lines warmly applauded by the New Deal liberals. The result has been a series of autonomous administrative agencies without any usual legal check. From the time the war agencies became staffed with dollar a year men, many liberals have been upset by the dangers of administrative power. Even the Supreme Court, the much maligned conclave of the “nine old men,” has become a conceivable bulwark against executive usurpations of civil rights. But, most New Deal liberals still seem satisfied with exerting pressure for staffing the agencies with more of “their” people. They rarely seem aware of the potential monster they have helped create and have no over-all plans for dealing with it. Nor do they seem to realize that their slogan of a “welfare state” can, as interpreted by some of its protagonists, further extend the administrative type state.
The psychology of administrative action, which for the first time in this article we will identify with the more unpopular but technically near-synonymous concept of bureaucratic operation, has permeated those liberals who are leaders of organizations outside the government, particularly the labor leaders. As has been earlier mentioned, their propaganda on the history of their organizations will emphasize the extent to which they owe their strength to the benificence of FDR and his administrative colleagues in the NLRB at least as much as their organizations’ spade work and struggle. Taking over the theme of administrative behavior, they fight rivals within these organizations less by open political argument and example, or even by the old method of the strong arm, and more by simple administrative fiat. If this has been most prominently used against the
Stalinists up to now, the difficulties of the powerful International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the New York City AFL, because the former did not support the Democratic Party in the 1949 municipal election, gives an inkling of how the most respectable can be hurt.
1. John Dewey, Intelligence In the Modern World, p. 402.
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