CHAPTER THREE

Notes on the New Politics

THE OBJECTIVE REALITIES to which American politics must address itself have been changing drastically in the last fifteen years or so:

• in population structure;
• in social and political structure;
• in respect to the power centers in American society;
• and in the international environment.

As a result, fundamental assumptions accepted as near axioms in both our domestic and our foreign policies are becoming increasingly untenable.

The issues around which American politics is tending to organize itself will increasingly be both new and different from those of the last half-century. Long-accepted issues, or at least their traditional formulations, will increasingly come to appear unreal, if not meaningless.

Above all, the new realities are rapidly obsoleting traditional political alignments.

Alignments that have molded the American political process for most of the last hundred years—the “bridge” role of the “Solid South” and its political power, the strategic role of economic blocs, and so on—are likely to lose their significance. This process is just beginning to be visible, above all in the turmoil and agony of the Republican party. It is likely to change both parties, however, if not to revise the accepted polarization of American politics around “nonideological” interests and around domestic affairs. It is also quite unlikely that foreign policies can continue to be “bipartisan”; they are more likely to become the center of major political controversy.

President Johnson’s “Great Society” represents a first response to some of the new issues, both at home and abroad. But it approaches these new issues largely within the old framework. It appeals primarily to the old values, and it employs mostly the traditional rhetoric. It is thus essentially a transitional phase; and one would guess that the President is highly conscious of this. The emphasis on “consensus” is, above all, an attempt, both highly constructive and politically very dangerous, to accomplish some of the most important of the new tasks before they have become political issues. Even at its most successful, the era of “consensus,” like any earlier “Era of Good Feeling,” can therefore only be a prelude to a (probably prolonged) period of vocal dissent, violent political ferment, and sudden political landslides.

New Domestic Realities

The recent past—the two decades since the end of World War II, or the fifteen years since the Korean War—has produced clearly visible shifts in the political, social, and economic realities at home and abroad.

In bald statement, the changes that appear most significant to me are:

(1) Within the last fifteen to twenty years, the United States has become a Metropolitan Society in which the great majority of the people live in a fairly small number of large, densely populated metropolitan areas, dependent on common services, each an intricate system of great technical and political complexity.

(2) The center of gravity of the American work force has been shifting from manual worker—skilled or unskilled, on the farm or in workshop or factory—to the Knowledge Worker with a very high degree of formal schooling. For the knowledge worker, and for an economy based on knowledge work, poverty ceases to be the general condition of mankind. Not that the knowledge worker is “rich,” but his income tends to be so high as to remove the constant anxiety about the next meal in which mankind as a whole has always lived. Above all, the knowledge worker enjoys a job security unknown to history.

As a further result of this shift to knowledge work, there is in process a radical change in the position of the manual worker. Neither his job security nor his income deteriorates. But he tends to be seen as economically “nonproductive” and as socially “marginal.” He is no longer seen as essential. In his stead the employed, educated middle class is increasingly becoming the New Majority.

(3) Within these last fifteen years, the United States has become a society of big, semiautonomous, and tightly organized institutions. There is not only “big government”—federal as well as state and municipal (within which the civil services and the armed forces represent large, tightly organized power centers of their own, semiautonomous and with their own rules and their own leaders); there are also the big university, the big hospital, the big labor union, and many others.

Business was only the first sphere in American society in which the large organization appeared—which explains in part why we tend to think of “business” whenever we say “bigness.” American society, as, indeed, every modern industrial society, has become a Pluralist Society of big organizations, each serving one, but only one, of the purposes and needs of society.

The decisive interactions in American society today, and increasingly in American politics, are therefore interactions between highly organized, large, powerful, and professionalized institutions, each concerned with its own specific task.

(4) Traditional federalism sees relationships of coexistence and competition between the federal government and the various states. But in the New Federalism other political units in addition to the states (especially the metropolitan areas) are directly in relation with the federal government and work directly with it. More important, perhaps, institutions that are not “government” but “private” increasingly become the agents of government in the fulfillment of public functions and even in the formulation of public policy: the universities, the big corporations, the large teaching hospitals.

(5) There is an emergence of new power centers in our society, rivaling if not already overshadowing the traditional power centers of American politics, such as the traditional economic interests. These new power centers are: the Military, Education, and Big Science. True, education, while rapidly becoming the largest single employer and investor of capital in this country, is not yet organized as a power center. Yet surely the emphasis on the diploma as a condition of employment represents a tremendous social victory for the educator and puts him in a position of social control such as this country never before granted to any single group.

Military strength and educational strength are now seen as the twin pillars of national strength in the modern world and as the two attributes of great power status.

These two power centers, the military and education, come together in the commitment of government to the promotion of Scientific and Technological Thrust as a major new national responsibility and a major new national purpose.

New Domestic Issues

(1) In domestic politics we have already shifted from economically centered issues to issues that are basically political: constitutional, moral, and aesthetic. The outstanding example is, of course, civil rights. Indeed, civil rights is a major issue only because it became apparent that economics alone cannot provide citizenship to the American Negro.

The “War on Poverty,” too, though it uses economic terminology, is a shift away from the economic and toward the political. It was imposed by an affluent society on itself by its own bad conscience—and, in large measure, by an aesthetic concern with the squalor and ugliness in which so many live in an economy of abundance.

The educated professional employee, on the other hand, is altogether

• prone to alienation rather than to poverty;
• beset by the fear of futility rather than by lack of income.

What he lacks is not a job but the satisfaction of achievement and a sense of function. The creation of such satisfaction will be a basic purpose of American politics.

(2) Congress and its function may well become an issue by itself. The developments of the last two decades have largely pushed Congress out of being a partner in political decisions. It is being reduced, instead, in a good many areas to being a critic and commentator. The complex arrangements of the New Federalism are largely beyond the power of Congress, if not altogether beyond its purview.

Issues in International Politics

The central reality which is likely to generate, or at least to shape, the issues in American international politics is the fading away of the two axioms on which American foreign policy hase been based since World War II: the axiom that the international economy was dependent on the United States economy, rather than that there was interdependency; and the much more important axiom that “Communism” and “Russia” were synonymous, and both words for “the enemy.”

As the result of the erosion of these axioms, it is no longer possible to assume that any action taken by the United States in its capacity of leader of the Free World community is automatically in the interest of the United States as a nation, and vice versa. The national-interest approach might, for instance, give us a “soft” policy in respect to China where the world-leadership approach might lead to a very “hard” one, i.e., containing Chinese aggression anywhere and everywhere.

Bipartisanship in foreign affairs cannot last. “Pragmatism” has had its day; we now need policy again.

I. Political Alignments

The most important decisions of the last fifteen years in American politics were made essentially outside of the political process proper. They could have hardly been made within it: they concerned issues on which no decision is possible within the traditional alignments.

The two crucial decisions in domestic politics during the last decade or so were probably School Segregation and Re-apportionment. Both were reached, without any political discussion to speak of, by the Supreme Court, that is by an organ outside of party politics.

Similarly in foreign affairs: the most important decision was surely the one that committed us to a major war in Vietnam. This decision was reached without any “decision” whatever and certainly without any public debate. What is amazing is not that there has been criticism of our involvement in Vietnam, but that there was so little discussion and so little dissent until we were irrevocably committed.

Indeed, the most important among the traditional alignments of American policy are in the process of disappearing altogether.

The South Loses Its Casting Vote

During the last few years, one of the two main bases of the traditional alignments, the “Compromise of 1876,” has in effect been repealed.

The history books tell us little of this Compromise other than that it seated a Republican Presidential candidate (Rutherford Hayes) who had actually been outpolled by his Democratic opponent, in exchange for which the federal government withdrew the troops that had kept the “carpetbagger” administrations in power in the states of the former Confederacy. But implicit in this deal, as was clearly understood by all concerned, was a far-reaching compact between North and South. It guaranteed the South noninterference in its “domestic institution,” that is, the unchallenged maintenance of white supremacy. In exchange the South promised tacitly to accept and not to challenge the leadership of the North in all areas excepting only race relations. This was expressed in the common saying that no southerner could become President.

The Compromise gave the South power in American politics, and especially in Congress, way beyond its population strength, way beyond even the quality of southern leadership. One reason for this was the control by the southerners of the chairmanship of important congressional committees as a combined result of the congressional seniority system and the unchallenged one-party structure of the South.

More important, perhaps, though much less visible, was the function of the South as the bridge between the major parties and major factions; this guaranteed almost every President a workable majority in Congress, but also made the South indispensable. It was obviously to the interest of the South not to have any one party predominate in Congress: the southerners in Congress, therefore, always tended to make common cause with the minority—except in times of great emergency, such as the outbreak of war or the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

For ninety years, practically every administration has faced a coalition in Congress in which the South, though the junior partner, essentially dictated the terms.

The proximate cause for the “repeal” of the Compromise of 1876 was the northward migration of the Negro which began after World War I. With the Negro in the North having formal political equality, deprivation of the same rights in the South could no longer be considered a “domestic affair.” As soon as—following the Supreme Court school decision of 1954—the federal government attacked white supremacy in the South, the southerners ceased, therefore, to honor their part of the bargain. This in large part explains the frustration of President Kennedy’s domestic policies.

But the ultimate cause of the sharp change in the position of the South in American politics is the shift in the white population and its distribution. Because the Old South has tended to stay heavily rural and small-town, it no longer has the numbers to support a bridge role and to cast the deciding vote. Or, rather, a South that stays rural and small-town cannot have enough population to matter; while a South that becomes metropolitan ceases to be the “Solid South,” as Atlanta and Miami have demonstrated.

That both Mr. Truman and Mr. Johnson were not supported by the South amounted to a renunciation of the traditional alliance. But that both could be elected without the votes of the South was much more important: it proved that the South no longer held the balance of power. Even Mr. Kennedy would still have been elected, despite the hairline margin in his popular vote, if most of the states of the Old Confederacy had given their electoral votes to a states-rights southerner. That, as a by-product, a southerner has been shown to be capable of winning both nomination and election to the Presidency is a rather meager consolation.

The price in civil rights that the nation paid for the bridge role of the South was, of course, exorbitant. But in terms of contemporary American politics, during these ninety years, the peculiar role of the South has on the whole been healthy and productive.

There is a belief abroad that the southerners in Congress tended to be “reactionaries.” But this holds true only for their position on race relations, which did not become an issue in American politics until the Depression and perhaps not until World War II. Otherwise, the southerner in Congress was more often than not a populist radical. But above all, to preserve the power position of the South, the southerner in Congress had no choice but to seek a consensus. National policy did not shift to the left or to the right because the South shifted: the South shifted because the national center shifted first. In effect, the southerners always had to make it possible for “liberals” and “conservatives” to agree at least sufficiently to permit the business of government to go on.

The long-serving committee chairmen, while often autocratic and immovable, also usually did their homework and thoroughly knew their area. They endowed Congress with a solid backbone of expertise such as no other parliamentary body in the world possesses. One would be hard-pressed to find men who worked harder or who knew their area better than the two men from Georgia, Senator Russell and Congressman Vinson, who for so many years headed the Armed Services Committees in their branches of Congress. It is this expert knowledge that makes Congress still capable of dealing with the federal bureaucracy and gives us a degree of political and policy control over the civil service such as is unknown in any other modern nation.

In foreign affairs, the absence of major manufacturing and labor union interests in the South enabled the southerner often to regard the national interest and to take a much larger view than the Midwesterner or New Englander, swayed as he so often has been by the immediate, shortsighted interests of this or that company or industry.

Finally, “that no southerner could become President” meant that the senior southerners in Congress had no further ambition and knew that they had to make their mark in history through their performance as legislators.

For better or worse, this position of the South is gone.

It is no accident that for the first time in the history of the Senate a civil-rights filibuster could be broken so decisively (in the fight over President Kennedy’s Civil Rights bill) that, two years later, the South did not even try to filibuster against Mr. Johnson’s much more sweeping bill of 1965. It is no accident, either, that, for the first time since the present system of committee chairmen was introduced around the turn of the century, committee members have successfully revolted against their chairmen (against Representative Smith of Virginia, the Chairman of the House Rules Committee, and Representative Patman of Texas of the House Banking Committee).

I am by no means convinced that the South will abandon the one-party system. It is conceivable that, for many years to come, the pressures toward conformity, and for resistance to an alien and critical outside world, may enforce strict voting discipline, to the point where opposition candidates have no chance at all in large areas.

But even if nothing changes in the South, it would not matter greatly one way or another. For almost a century, the arrival of a two-party system in the South has been looked forward to by “liberals,” inside and outside the South, as the hour of deliverance, if not as the panacea for all the ills of the South. It is ironic that, just when the two-party system has a real chance to establish itself in the South, it has also become quite unimportant. In national affairs the South must increasingly cease to be something separate, indeed, something unique. Whatever is left of the “Old South” is rapidly becoming just another sparsely settled and relatively poor section of the country—and, as such, a fairly unimportant one.

The Erosion of the Economic Blocs

The second major shift in the structure of alignments in American politics is the steady erosion of the traditional economic blocs. These blocs, whether “labor” or “farmer” or “business,” can no longer be carriers of policies. They can only, increasingly, become obstacles to any policy whatever; for any change is, in effect, a threat to them.

The three agencies of the federal government which reached Cabinet status between the Civil War and World War II were Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. Each was created to represent a major economic estate of the realm and to make sure that its interests were protected. The particular interest group which any one of these bureaucracies represented had a virtual veto power over the appointment of the secretary. Indeed, the secretaries often behaved like ambassadors of a powerful foreign sovereign rather than as members of the President’s Cabinet.

By sharp contrast, the two new Cabinet posts created since World War II (leaving out Defense as a special case in which formerly separate agencies of Cabinet rank were consolidated) were Health, Education, and Welfare, and Housing and Urban Affairs—both established not to represent economic interests but to remove major areas of policy from the control of, and domination by, economic interests. And the proposal to make Transportation a Cabinet department serves the same purpose.

Of all the traditional groups, only one has an opportunity to remain influential and a carrier of policy: the “managers.” For managing is a function that is essential in all the new big organizations; indeed, managing is the specific function of big complex organizations—whether business or armed service, university or government agency, or hospital. But, of course, the only reason why this group might survive as a distinct and organized power center is that the “capitalist” of yesterday had been replaced by the “professional manager” of today who is not confined to one economic interest but pervades the entire society and who is not exclusively economically oriented. The extent to which managers have succeeded in the much-publicized attempt to make themselves “trustees” for all the interests in the organization—employees, investors, customers, and so on—is a moot point. That they are trying is the important thing. This explains why President Johnson has been wooing them: they are a bridge between yesterday’s alignments and tomorrow’s alignments and, as such, essential to Mr. Johnson’s “consensus.”

Labor, by contrast, has not even begun such a transformation. Except in the event of a major economic crisis, it seems rather unlikely that a sufficiently large part of the “employed professional middle class” will unionize itself, not only to restore labor’s vitality and growth potential, but also to change the characteristics of labor even more drastically than the change from capitalist to manager has transformed the characteristics of the business interest. The aims of a unionized professional middle class are, in any case, likely to be social rather than economic. And insofar as they are economic, they are likely to be in direct conflict with the economic aims of the rank-and-file blue-collar worker of the traditional unions.

The traditional economic blocs no longer represent the dynamics of American society, if only because the big tasks and the big problems are not economic but political, social, moral, or aesthetic. This does not mean that the economic blocs will become unimportant or powerless. The farmer, for instance, has long ceased to have the key position he had up until World War I; but the farm lobby is losing its importance only very slowly.

What does happen, however, is that such groups become purely negative. Any change is a threat to them. The aims of policy are not their aims. They therefore become increasingly “vested interests,” concerned with the maintenance of a privileged status. Extortion, rather than policy, becomes their business.

The Changing Role of Ethnic Blocs

The most confusing area is that of ethnic and religious blocs, such as the Irish Catholics, the Jews, the Italians, and so on.

In different parts of the metropolis, their importance will change in different directions.

In the core city, the old “downtown”—the five boroughs of New York, for instance—such blocs should become much more important. The Negro clearly is just now emerging as an organized and powerful ethnic bloc in the core city. His tendency to act as a bloc in city politics must increase; for the individual Negro can achieve advancement and access to opportunities only through organized use of his political power, that is, as a bloc and through “patronage.” The same applies to the Puerto Rican and to the Mexican-American.

This, in turn, is likely to force other groups in the core city to organize themselves and act as blocs. The way in which Irish Catholics in Boston, for instance, have again coalesced as a bloc to beat off a Negro attack on the “neighborhood school” is only an example. And the same holds true of other ethnic groups largely composed of industrial workers or lower-grade service employees, such as the Czechs in Chicago, the Poles in Cleveland, and the Hungarians in Pittsburgh.

Outside the core city, however, in the suburban areas of the metropolis, ethnic blocs are likely to become very much less important. Regardless of his origin (unless he should be a Negro), the suburbanite sees himself characterized by his education—which tends to be advanced—and by his cultural level, rather than by his origin. In fact, he is likely to resent too blatant an appeal to his origin, as questioning his status in the American community.

Ethnic or religious blocs are, therefore, likely to become complicated, with both appeal to them and nonappeal equally unpredictable. Inside the core city, the blocs can be expected to become far more important, and with this advent would come the strong “boss” and the appeal to “solidarity” instead of issues, ideas, or men. Outside the core city, ethnic origin is likely to mean less and less, though religious affiliation may still play an important role in a number of areas.

Core City and Suburb

The different appeal of ethnic and religious blocs in core city and suburb, respectively, is only one of the differences that are likely to characterize these two elements of the metropolis and that eventually might divide them sharply in national politics.

Altogether, the core city is increasingly likely to present yesterday’s politics, yesterday’s issues, and yesterday’s alignment. The very fact that bloc voting is likely to be such a factor will make the core city look to the past rather than to the future—plus the fact, of course, that the core city is likely to be the least affluent part of the “affluent society.” The suburbs, representing the young people and therefore the more highly educated and more prosperous citizens, are likely to be looking, increasingly, toward tomorrow’s problems, especially toward the problems of the metropolitan area.

Also, the core city will increasingly have to bear the burden of the metropolitan services while having fewer and fewer tax resources. These latter will be in the suburbs; indeed, it is conceivable that deterioration of the core city will bring a mass exodus of business headquarters to the suburbs. Some of the biggest companies have already moved out. This will create increasing demands on the part of the core city that the suburbs become part of its tax domain—and increasing resistance to the core city on the part of the suburbanites.

But more important than these tangible factors are probably the intangible ones. Increasingly, these two parts of the metropolis will represent two facets of metropolitan culture. It is not only the man from Iowa who says, “New York is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” The man from Westchester County feels this even more strongly.

It is, therefore, conceivable that the geographic alignments in this country—between North and South; between country and town; between agrarian and industrial society—may be gradually replaced by a split between the core city and the suburbs throughout all regions and all areas of the country. It is conceivable that tomorrow the job of building a national party will, in effect, mean bringing together enough groups from those two constituent parts of the metropolis behind one program and one candidate. It is also conceivable that tomorrow’s political parties will primarily be characterized by having a “core city” or a “suburban” temperament.

The Impact on the Parties

The change in alignments which is already in full swing is likely to present serious problems to both parties.

(1) The Struggle for a Republican Future

In terms of its traditional vote base, the Republican party has become the permanent minority party—and becoming the majority in the Old South would not in any way change this; it would rather accentuate the isolation of the Republican party. The reason for this is that the Republican party today is “white protestant” by temperament, no matter how many Jews, Catholics, or Negroes vote the Republican ticket. And the white Protestant is no longer the political majority.

Statistically, of course, white Protestants do constitute two-thirds of the population. Culturally, also, this is, and will remain, a white Protestant country (despite the prevalence of Jewish jokes and Italian pizzas). But, politically, a white Protestant party is no longer capable of organizing majority support. Almost half of the white Protestants in the country are rural and small-town and as such are not an adequate foundation for national power any more. In the metropolis, the white Protestant group is just about half or less, but does not see itself as a coherent group and does not vote as such—precisely because it does not see itself as the minority. And minorities, that is, groups that otherwise would have little influence and little voice, are the ones that see the need for organizing themselves for the fight for power.

What the strategies are that are available to the permanent minority party we know. For this was the position of the Democrats for sixty long years, from the Civil War until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932. In fact, there are only two strategies available; and the party is likely to be torn internally by the fight between the adherents of either.

There is, first, the “moderate” strategy—the strategy of those who essentially say “me too.” They expect to come to power precisely because it is not easy to tell them apart from the majority party, except that they are “out” and therefore not responsible for a catastrophe, a scandal, or whatever accident befalls the majority party in power. In such a situation, the “moderates” hope to be able to attract enough protest votes from the majority party to get into power and to start working on making themselves in turn the permanent majority.

The second strategy is the radical one which aims to recreate a new party “dedicated to principles.” In tune with the ancestor worship that characterizes the rhetoric of American politics, this strategy is likely to present itself as aiming at the restoration of the ideals of the past. William Jennings Bryan was a “Fundamentalist” and Goldwater a “Conservative.” Actually, the strategy aims at creating a major crisis and hopes to capitalize on it.

Both strategies have rather stringent prerequisites, none of which is likely to be satisfied for the Republicans in the present situation. The moderates can operate only if they control some important power centers, such as the Democrats’ control of the Solid South and of the big cities of the North in the long years of their exile after the Civil War. Specifically, the Republican moderates would have to gain control of major metropolitan areas. This would probably require the consolidation of core city and suburbs into one political unit. The voting strength of the Republicans in the suburbs, however, rests squarely on their promise not to let the core city “gobble up” the suburbs.

For the radical strategy to work—short of a catastrophe such as this country has so far been spared—requires a candidate who has shown ability for political leadership and enough maturity not to frighten off potential recruits from the moderate ranks of his own party as well as from the opposition. If all he does is to attract the radicals of the other party (as Bryan and Goldwater did), he almost insures defeat through distrust on the part of the great majority which fears (and rightly) political adventurers.

This, however, only means that the Republican party is unlikely to make up its mind for either strategy—just as Democrats did not decide, before the New Deal. This would guarantee long years of internal turmoil for the Republican party, in the course of which the first aim of each Republican politician is likely to be to prevent the victory of another Republican rather than to defeat a Democrat. As John Lindsay’s campaign in New York City showed, the only way for a Republican to win in such a situation is to be as little of a Republican as possible and to try to be accepted as a genuine “Independent.”

The Republicans will, therefore, be forced to look for issues that can unite them and to shun issues that must divide them. Because of the shift in alignments in the country, domestic issues are almost certain to divide the Republicans—save only in the event of international catastrophe, serious depression, or truly sensational scandal. The Republicans may, therefore, attempt to make foreign policy into the platform that unites them; and it is possible that, for the first time since the very early days of the Republic, a major party will organize itself on a foreign affairs platform rather than on a domestic platform.

(2) The Dilemma of the Democrats

The Democratic party, too, will be seriously affected by the shifting alignments. It has to gain the allegiance of the “new majority,” the educated, employed middle class. But it must at the same time hold the allegiance of the old power groups, the economic blocs and the ethnic blocs. The attempt to hold the one is likely to alienate the other. It may alienate both, as did the Democratic strategy in the 1965 New York City elections, in which the patent attempt to have the “right” old-fashioned ticket—one Jew, one Irish Catholic, one Italian, and so on—only made the younger and better-educated members of these groups cross over and go Republican in large numbers.

In this dilemma, the Democratic party will try to focus on the issues likely to unify these two groups—and these are the urban issues: the metropolis, health care, and, above all, education. By the same token it is likely to play down what will divide these two groups: the old-style economic issues and foreign affairs.

(3) Creating a New Majority

Victory, in the long run, will not go to the party that does the best job gluing together the shards of yesterday. Victory will go to whoever creates a new national alignment and a new power base, resting not on economic interests but on the “new majority” of the educated professional middle class and capable of crystallizing the issues that are meaningful to them. (The last time a similar job was done in American politics was after the election of 1896, when Mark Hanna used the economic blocs to erect the structure that is still housing American politics, even though the tenant has changed.) Today one can barely even speculate what these alignments might be and on what they might rest.

Thus there is great opportunity for creative party politics—and great need for it. Politicians are needed who can establish the new alignments—politicians who can dramatize the new issues and mobilize the new power centers.

II. Politics for a New Generation

So far I have given an inventory rather than an analysis. Even if correct in every detail, it would still not enable us to anticipate American politics in the years ahead. What matters in politics is far less the specific problems and the answers found to them than the pattern, the configuration. It is not what issues are debated, but what emphasis is given to issues in relation to each other and in a scale of political values. It is not so much what laws are being written as what kind of personality can exercise leadership. Measures and policy matter less than the mood and the basic assumptions.

The most important fact with respect to this configuration of tomorrow may well be that the United States—indeed, the whole world—is in the midst of a major generational shift.

The outward sign of this is, of course, that so many of the world’s political leaders, from President Johnson to Chairman Mao, are so clearly the last of their line, by age alone. Their formative years were the twenties and thirties; but even the postwar era of the forties and fifties is rapidly becoming history.

In terms of age structure of the population, the United States is not a particularly young country today, compared with underdeveloped Latin America, India, or China, for instance, where the “population explosion,” propelled by drastic cuts in infant mortality, is pushing the average age of population down to fifteen or so. But compared to its own history and recent experience, the United States is becoming a very young country, indeed, with half the population already less than twenty-six years old, and most of them highly educated and with experiences and expectations that differ markedly from those that still underlie our social, political, and economic policies. The middle generation (ages thirty to fifty), by contrast, is very thin in this country today and bound to get thinner for another decade—the result, of course, of the lean birth years of the thirties. By 1972, more than half of all Americans old enough to vote will be under thirty-two (a fact which, however, no politician, except Senator Robert Kennedy, seems to have found out).

Power and position are therefore likely to pass fast from people whose working life began before or during the Great Depression to people to whom the Depression is, at the very best, a dim childhood memory—if not to people to whom even World War II is something they heard about in their high-school courses. President Johnson’s young men—his assistants in their early thirties—are only the advance guard of the generation that must get to the top in all important areas of American life very soon—in business and in government, in the universities and in the armed services, and perhaps even in the labor unions.

But this, even more than a shift in chronological age, is a shift in outlook, perception, and formative experience. The world this new generation of Americans considers as “normal” is one of long years of advanced education, of very high job security, of affluence—a world dominated by science and technology. It is also a world of international turmoil and dangers such as would have been unimaginable to their parents at the same age.

Even greater, perhaps, is the jump in perception. What the new generation takes for granted, the older one has not really learned to see. For the new generation takes for granted

• the “global village”: that is, the integration of the entire earth through communications into one locus of immediate experience;
• “man in space”: that is, the reaching out beyond what were considered the human limits of existence;
• technology, both in respect to doing physical tasks and in respect to making economic problems amenable to systematic, organized, and essentially technical solutions.

This new perception may not at all have the results most people envisage. But it will have very significant results.

The perception of the global village may not make us more “internationalist.” Indeed, it may considerably discourage the old American missionary impulse to do things for others without necessarily increasing the desire (also an old American tradition) to do things with others. The perception of the global village is, however, likely to make us stop seeing the outside world through European glasses (whether that of the German savant or the English Fabian), which is the way the American “liberal” has always seen the world.

There are even strong indications that the new generation will turn away from the “secularism” of their parents—not to organized religion but to a new “inner-directedness” with stress on personal values and personal commitment. Most of the “crazy mixed-up kids” on the campuses today will, of course, grow up into depressingly sane adult conformists, and they are a tiny minority, in any case. But they might signal a shift ahead in values and concerns—a shift toward moral and aesthetic values and toward a concern with the person.

This is, however, mere speculation. What one can say with a good deal of assurance is that the generation shift ahead is likely to be also a political shift—a shift in the climate, the mood, the values, the alignments, and the issues of American politics.

Such a shift is bound to be disorderly. It implies a time of transition likely to be characterized by vocal dissent, by sudden sharp landslides burying long-familiar landmarks, by partisanship, and by political passion. It is not likely to be a time of “consensus”; it is exceedingly unlikely to be a time of political apathy; and foreign affairs is likely to be one of the political storm centers.

The election of 1964 clearly marked a watershed in American politics. We now face a period rather similar to that after 1896, if not after 1822—periods that ended an “Era of Good Feeling” and brought long-lasting realignment to American politics.

The Great Society—Substance and Rhetoric

In its concerns, President Johnson’s Great Society clearly addresses itself to the new realities and to tomorrow’s issues. Its main domestic themes are the metropolis, education, health care, and the aesthetics of an industrial society, not to mention its basic morality. In his most significant speech to date, the speech on the Negro in America given at Howard University in 1965, the President clearly put ethics into the center of his politics.

The Johnson administration, also, has begun work on some of the constitutional problems. (This, by the way, is one area where it continues what President Kennedy began.) The “White House Conferences”—on education, for instance, or on the natural environment—at least remove the planning of the “New Federalism” from the inner office and subject it to public exposure. And the new subordination of the military to civilian control, however much it may be due to the personality and forcefulness of one particular Secretary of Defense, was clearly, from the beginning, Presidential policy as well.

Even in international affairs, where both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations have been neither “bold” nor “innovators,” new thinking may have begun, if only because of the realities of Southeast Asia.

But in its rhetoric, the Great Society is old and addresses itself to yesterday.

“Consensus,” as President Johnson uses that term, means in effect bringing all of yesterday’s power groups (and especially all economic interests) together behind one policy for today’s problems. In particular, of course, it means bringing in the one economic interest that has hitherto not joined up with the other economic interests in a common economic policy: the business interest.

In practical politics, “consensus” unites all who accept the accomplished facts of yesterday and excludes only the irreconcilables who still want to repeal history.

The effectiveness of this approach, at least so far, cannot be denied. It has enabled the Johnson administration to get more done than any administration in living memory. Above all it has enabled the Johnson administration to get more of the new tasks done. I doubt that this country, or any other, has ever seen greater skill or more purpose than the President exhibits when he uses the near unanimity of the country on the problems of yesterday to advance new solutions to the problems of today. Perhaps the one thing wrong with the President’s effective use of “consensus” to solve problems and respond to challenges, before they can become issues, is that it is done so skillfully that many do not fully appreciate an extraordinary performance.

There probably is no other way to get done what Mr. Johnson gets done; the experience of his predecessor would indicate this. Mr. Kennedy, too, was a man of the transition period. But he reversed the balance between substance and rhetoric. In his actions he was primarily concerned with clearing up and finishing the tasks of yesterday; and his politics was clearly based on the old New Deal alignments. But his rhetoric—his “style,” if you please—was that of a new generation. Yet he had to fight every inch of the way and accomplished, essentially, very little. This cannot be blamed on Congress: President Johnson had the same Congress during his first year and got out of it all the actions it had refused President Kennedy. President Johnson, in other words, may have had to smother dissent to get any action whatever.

There are great dangers, however, in the politics of “consensus,” and they are likely to grow with time.

The first danger is clearly that of losing the young—the “new majority” of the educated professional middle class.

There is little doubt, I believe, that the President is no hero to this group. Indeed, there is little doubt that this is the one group in which Mr. Goldwater in 1964 found a great deal of response. This is, in terms of the old issues, a very conservative group; yesterday’s “liberal” rhetoric is bound to bore them. That they have much interest in the program of the extreme right is very doubtful. But at least the Gold-waterites talked “principles.”

Quite apart from personality—and Mr. Johnson is so clearly, unlike his predecessor, not one of the “new generation” and not really “sophisticated”—Mr. Johnson is in danger of being totally misunderstood by the “new majority.” They are likely to miss the policy in his actions altogether and to mistake it for a clever publicity gimmick. Altogether they are likely to hear cleverness where they expect conviction.

How long it will remain prudent, therefore, to risk losing the young by not talking policy (even though talking policy will certainly alienate the old power groups) is a fundamental question for Mr. Johnson. Will he still be able to get through to the young if he waits? Does he, indeed, even understand, after all these years in the Congress, that it is conflict that creates political excitement, generates support, and mobilizes hitherto uncommitted political energies?

Another real danger is that “consensus” which smothers dissent also smothers discussion and understanding. This is particularly dangerous in foreign policy today, precisely because we may have to execute rather startling shifts fast. The public is totally unprepared. And the public has been kept intentionally in the dark—whether the reason for this be Mr. Johnson’s dislike of criticism, or his fear that discussion of his policies might restrict his freedom of movement. Very few people in this country even understand that we have committed ourselves to a major new task: that of the containment of China. Fewer still realize the great challenges to our traditional military, diplomatic, and economic policy that lie ahead in Europe. The reason why this is so dangerous is, of course, that there is grave risk of a violent and irrational reaction should anything go wrong—and something surely will, in so complex and precarious a world.

But the greatest weaknesses of the politics of “consensus” are in their restrictions on Presidential leadership, both in respect to formulating policy and in respect to building the new political alignments.

The new thinking is not being done. Mr. Johnson may expect new policies to grow out of his actions. He could be right. But, in politics, deeds do not necessarily speak louder than words. And the words are not being said. That Mr. Johnson is capable of saying them—forcefully, indeed movingly—he showed in his Howard University speech. But despite (perhaps because of?) his constant public exposure, Mr. Johnson clearly refrains from formulating a new political point of view, a new political idea, a new political direction. And he may, thereby, misjudge the country and the times. There seems to me to be an expectation in the land, a sense of foreboding beneath all the prosperity, a receptivity for seriousness that is not being satisfied.

The politics of consensus also makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the President to be the political master builder, the designer of the new alignments and the modeler of the new—or at least the changed—configuration of forces, perceptions, and ideas which the new realities at home and abroad demand. He is, perforce, so busy making the old configuration serve a little longer that he does not seem to have any time left over to work on creating a new one.

This is not said in criticism. In fact, it would be hard to imagine what else President Johnson could have done—and there is no doubt that what he is doing, he is doing with consummate skill. But it nevertheless seems likely that the question whether the Great Society is, indeed, a destination for the American people, or a mere whistle stop which later generations will pass by, will be decided by Mr. Johnson’s ability to become the master builder of tomorrow—despite the need to preserve, indeed to perpetuate, yesterday.

That the Johnson administration is one of transition is clear. But is the future going to see it as a transition from the Old, or as a transition to the New?

First published in The Public Interest, Summer, 1966.