Why the Democrats Should Win

by GERALD W. JOHNSON

1

IF THE Democrats win in November they will owe the victory less to their own skillful politics than to a double misconception on the part of their opponents — the President’s misconception of the nature of his office, and his party’s misconception of the state of the world.

This is not a spectacular issue, but it is the real one, for with the thoughtful minority of independents it is operating to the advantage of the Democrats, and it may swing enough votes to tell the tale. Of course campaign orators, especially the small fry, will prefer to concentrate on more dramatic but less significant matters, such as President Eisenhower’s complaisance toward McCarthyism until it began to be politically unprofitable, his toleration of Mr. Nixon’s vicious style of campaigning, the contrast between Mr. Truman’s abrupt dismissal of Caudle and President Eisenhower’s politeness toward no less than five of his men who were also guilty of using public office for private profit, the scandalous Dixon-Yates contract, and the President’s frequent ignorance of what his subordinates were doing, coupled with his innocent surprise that he should be expected to know.

But these are effects, some direct and some indirect, of a single cause more important than any of them, since it is an attribute of the man himself. Mr. Eisenhower came to the Presidency not only without experience in American politics, but with forty years’ training in a system antithetical to American politics. His basic error, to which most of his errors in detail can be traced, arose from that. It was an attempt to substitute the system with which he was familiar for the one that the experience of a century and a half had established; and his persistent blindness to the failure of that effort is a great argument against his continuance in office. The military staff system, perfectly adapted to the needs of a commander accountable only to the President, is unworkable in the office of the chief executive, accountable to the people. The trouble with it is that in delegating authority it dissipates responsibility. In a military system this imbalance is rectified by two factors: in the first place, while a subordinate commander may be, and should be, given authority to use his own judgment in local situations, if he directly defies the orders of the high command he can be shot, and he knows it; in the second place, every officer on a military staff is aware that his own chances of distinction and promotion are bound up with the success of the Old Man, for nobody holds in high regard the staff of a beaten general.

By contrast the civilian subordinates of a civilian President can be disciplined only to the extent that public opinion will approve; and it is often the case that the advancement of a subordinate depends not on the success but on the failure of the Old Man, thereby demonstrating how much better the subordinate is. That is why John Adams was constantly betrayed, and why Lincoln would have been betrayed if Chase and Stanton had been able to manage it. President Eisenhower has not been deliberately betrayed by any member of his Cabinet, but he has had to let out three of the ten: Durkin because he frankly disagreed with the President’s policy, Hobby because she seemed never to have grasped it, and McKay, ostensibly to beat Morse, but really, as many believe, because he had made hash of conservation. A casualty rate of 30 per cent is no testimonial to the efficacy of the staff system as applied to the Cabinet.

It is true that in his first Administration Truman also lost three members of his Cabinet vi et, armis or, if you see it that way, honoris causa. But they were Byrnes, Ickes, and Wallace, none of his choosing, all inherited from Roosevelt. Of Truman’s own first choices, Vinson and Clark went to the Supreme Court and Anderson to the Senate before the first term was out; but these shifts were rewards, not penalties, and the rest stayed in line. The old system obviously worked better for Truman than the new has for Eisenhower.

The real evidence of the failure of the staff system, however, is the loss, not of Cabinet members, but of all sense of direction in the government as a whole. What candid man can seriously maintain that he knows which way we have been heading since 1953? A billion-dollar profit in 1955 is proof enough that this Administration has been good for General Motors, but a two-billion-dollar drop in farm income in Eisenhower’s first two years does not indicate that it has been good for Piers Plowman. The highest national income in history is fine, but the highest national debt in history is not so good, especially since there has been no war to account for it, and the highest cost of living in history is definitely bad.

2

WHEN it comes to matters not measurable statistically, the confusion is even worse. The most ironical claim that has been advanced for this Administration is that it has pursued a middle-of-the-road policy. If there is any place where we have not been for any measurable duration it is the middle of the road; on the contrary, we have been weaving wildly from side to side in the most astounding imitation of drunken driving ever staged by a great nation. It has been slightly steadier since the Democrats recaptured control of Congress in 1954, but even so we have the President saying one day that neutralism may sometimes be a very good thing, and three days later we have the Secretary of State calling it “immoral.”Nor is that the limit; the Secretary of State seems incapable of being consistent even with himself. When the Suez Canal affair broke we had Mr. Dulles one week counseling the British and French to be calm, and the next week counseling the Arabs to be alarmed. He who can trace any definite policy in that must be a soothsayer indeed.

The one personal, albeit momentary, triumph that the President has achieved came when he went to Geneva and so confused the Russians that for an instant they seemed positively amiable. That was perhaps even more remarkable than his success in confusing the Americans, although it didn’t last as long. However, it should not be forgotten that the Geneva visit was not his own idea; at first he was against going, and was pushed into it by Senator George, a Southern Democrat.

The explanation of this erratic course is not far to seek. It is not that the Republican leadership is either wicked or half-witted; it is simply that it is Republican and in power at a time when Republicanism is hopelessly inadequate to the needs of the day.

The party under its various names — Federalist, Whig, Republican — is, and has always been essentially conservative, which is to say its fear of losing what we have is dominant over its hope of gaining something better. There are times when this attitude is reasonable enough, but there are other times when it is not consonant with the trend of events and therefore is utterly unreasonable. At present the trend of events, not in this country alone, but throughout the world, runs directly contrary to the Republican practice of playing one’s cards close to the vest. Hence Republicans do not understand and, to the extent that they remain Republican, cannot understand the world around them.

Some have modified their Republicanism. When the bipartisan foreign policy was established a segment of the party, typified by Senator Vandenberg, deserted the historical position of the party, typified by the Senator Lodge of Wilson’s time, and moved toward the Democratic position. But to this day a considerable segment does not realize that this move was not apostasy, but merely an acceptance of obvious facts. Thus it has been impossible for anyone, even as popular a leader as President Eisenhower, to bring the whole party abreast of the modern world.

In this particular President Eisenhower is far in advance of his party for the sufficient reason that he had seen with his own eyes what was happening. After his two years at SHAPE, Senator Knowland and Senator Jenner could not instruct him on the condition of Europe. He knew by experience that the bipartisan policy was aimed in the right direction and he has clung to it to the extent that his party would permit.

But on domestic policy he had no such certain knowledge, which has made his leadership wavering and uncertain. It is probable that he remains as scornful of Henry Wallace’s doctrine that this is the Century of the Common Man as his fellow Republicans were of Wallace’s dictum that we must have sixty million jobs to keep our economy booming. Yet Wallace was right both times. We have now more than sixty million jobs, and it is clear that if the number falls much below that figure our boom will bust; and this is emphatically the Century of the Common Man.

What discredited Wallace was not any inaccuracy in his predictions of events, but his genius for getting the facts perfectly straight and then drawing the wrong inference. As a prophet, he is firstrate, but as a logician he is terrible. In the matter of the Century of the Common Man, for instance, he announced its advent with unfeigned satisfaction, whereas it is not necessarily satisfactory at all. Not Wallace but his critics construed the phrase to mean the Century of the Communist Man; yet while the critics may have been disingenuous, they had a point. It could be just that.

In fact, it could be a number of other unpleasant things, for the indisputable truth is that the common man is on the loose to an extent unparalleled in history, and getting him subdued again is a task for archangels, not politicians. What chance is there of reducing the common Russian to serfdom again, or resubjecting the common Chinese to the old-style war-lords? In midsummer Europe stood aghast at the prospect of having to subdue the common Egyptian, and the common Dutchman can no longer be persuaded to hold down the common Indonesian.

Even in London, that last, strongest bastion of social distinctions, there are marvels to behold.

finds himself walking in procession with, or perhaps yielding precedence to, Sir Jockey and Sir Footballplayer. Did plain Mr. Marciano owe allegiance to the saltired banner, he might be Sir Rocky by now.

If you seek analogous phenomena in this country, taken look at Big Labor. When Walter Reuther speaks, Big Business listens with an attention it once reserved for Andrew Mellon. No politician in Washington closes his door to the representatives of the Farm Bureau, the Farmers Union, and the Grange. As the political conventions assembled, that commonest of common men, the American Negro, stood as an apparition scaring the pants off both parties. The Governor of North Carolina might well alter his classic observation to the Governor of South Carolina into “It’s a long time between lynchings.”

The causes of this upsurge are many and complex, but certainly two of the most important are irreversible processes. They are the spread of literacy, releasing the mind, and the growth of mechanization, releasing the body by making it possible to feed the world without condemning the common man for life to brutalizing labor that extinguishes the spark of ambition. The common man is not yet free; he — and the uncommon man, too — will not be free until he accepts Acton’s definition of liberty as freedom to do what one’s conscience says is right. But the common man is loose, and loose he will remain for the predictable future.

This could be a long advance toward genuine freedom. Mr. Wallace thinks it is, and rejoices; but his inference is not necessarily correct. It could be a step toward Communism or, what is even worse, toward anarchy. The Century of the Common Man will be a century of enlightenment only if the common man is offered and accepts wise leadership. Note the word; it is “leadership,”not “command,”or even “guidance.”The common man will not convert his present emancipation into real liberty by reliance on either a dictator or a tutor, yet he will not gain freedom soon, if at all, without the counsel of competent advisers. And he will deem no adviser competent save one whose attitude toward him is that of sympathetic friendship.

He who could name those competent advisers without hesitation or reservation would be the prince of politicians, and he is not among those present. The best we can manage is a more or less informed guess, taking into consideration on the one hand the obvious requirements of the situation, and on the other the known attitudes and aptitudes of the aspirants.

3

THE world situation today is extremely fluid and seems likely to remain so for several years to come. the balance of political-military power is precarious; a relatively small weight shifted to either side could tip the scales. The ancient moralities exist unchanged in themselves, but their moorings are no longer certain. For example, since his emancipation from British rule a Hindu questions the absolute value of truth no more than he did before, but is Mr. Dulles telling the truth, or Mr. Bulganin? The Hindu is not sure. The economy of the world is in a state of indescribable confusion; there is no longer a medium of exchange universally valid or even as nearly so as Victoria’s pound sterling, so trade is half-stifled. Even the free exchange of ideas is forbidden, so science languishes.

To deal successfully with a situation of this kind the obvious requirements include intellectual alertness, adaptability, and resourcefulness. Change is a condition of life at all times, of course, but at this particular time change is rapid and radical beyond all precedent, and great mental agility is definitely necessary to cope with it.

As between the major American parties, there is no question, in my mind, of which comes closer to meeting the requirements of the situation. I am far from rating Mr. Truman with the authors of The Federalist as a political philosopher; but it is a fact of record that the organization he led — and which was, to do him justice, largely his own creation— met four unprecedented threats with four unprecedented defenses, and every one of them worked. The Greek-Turkish crisis was countered with the Truman Doctrine, the economic chaos of Europe with the Marshall Plan, the political pressure with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military pressure with a coalition of fifteen nations in Korea.

For determining our future course, the success of these measures is less significant than their resourcefulness. The fact that in those years each thitherto unheard-of peril was promptly met with a thitherto unheard-of safety device affords hope that the same political organization will remain capable of meeting new perils with new resources in the future, as in the past.

In the three years that have elapsed since this party was dismissed from office the threats have continued, but not the success with which they were met. When Indonesia boiled over, Mr. Dulles could offer nothing new, but had to fall back on a sort of replica of NATO and it didn’t work. When Algeria boiled over, he could think of nothing at all to do except wring his hands. When Suez boiled over last summer, he could think of nothing except to cry out against the horrors of war.

This is not conclusive evidence that Mr. Dulles is less intelligent than his predecessor, Mr. Acheson. The conditions under which the two men worked were basically different. One had behind him a party that from its beginning had risen to greatness only when it accepted change cheerfully and adapted itself to the current of events readily and confidently. The other had behind him a party that has been at its best only when it sturdily resisted change and beat down innovators. This is all very well when innovation is nothing more than the wild dreams of fanatics; but when a new world is in the making it is fatal.

It is hard to understand how any rational man can doubt that a new world is in the making at this moment. We ourselves are largely responsible. Of the seven empires that have been overthrown since the beginning of the century — Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Austria, Turkey, Japan, and Czarist Russia — we struck at six and struck heavily. Only Czardom was destroyed without our help.

The political vacuum left by this devastation had to be filled, and it is being filled, not by new emperors, but by the common man. An odd kind of Caesar he may be, but there he is, loose and on the rampage, and his favor means empery. The nation that secures his confidence may not extend its political boundaries by one foot, but it will gain moral hegemony over a large part of the globe. That hegemony will be more effective than armies and fleets in enabling the nation exercising it not only to restore political, social, and economic order, but also to “proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

This is the most tremendous stake for which the nations have gambled since history began; but the winner will not be one whose most ardent wish is to be out of the game, and who throws in his hand if he holds anything less than a royal flush. The United States will not gain leadership of the modern world by dreaming of restoring the days when good Cal Coolidge ruled the land, when a dollar was a dollar, when labor was submissive, when the Negro knew his place, and when men of substance could conduct their affairs without taking into account the wishes and preferences of the rabble that never met a payroll in their lives.

Those days are gone forever. Lamenting will not bring them back, but idle tears may easily blind our eyes to the opportunities — new and strange, but brilliant—that the new day offers. In this situation the great merit of the Democratic Party is that it never cries over spilt milk. To claim more, to hold up the party as the complete satisfaction of the heart ‘s desire, would be fatuous. If it wins in November we have no guarantee that it will succeed during the next four years, and none but an irresponsible campaign orator would offer such a guarantee.

But the light of the past shows us reason to believe that if it wins, its chance of great achievement is better than the chance of its opponent. It is not because Democrats are superior in wisdom and virtue to Republicans; it is because the history of their party has demonstrated that they are superior in ingenuity, resourcefulness, and mental agility. They should win because those are precisely the qualities most desperately needed in the world of today.