[This is Chapter Six in Murphey's book Liberalism in Contemporary America.]
CHAPTER SIX
Dissimulation
In various of its aspects,
liberalism cannot be identified precisely with either socialism or alienation.
The coalition that has made up the modern Democratic Party has been broader
than liberalism and has included groups and individuals who have been neither
socialist nor alienated. This is even true of a more narrowly defined
"liberal coalition" and of liberalism in its popular expression as a
mass phenomenon.
It is important to realize this if we are to avoid thinking of liberalism as more homogeneous than it actually is.
If, however, we inquire into the nature of liberal thought, we are involved with a body of ideas that has been intimately related to the intellectual culture. A completely honest analysis then requires a recognition that this thought has been fundamentally socialist. Liberalism in its aspect as an ideology has been one of the consequences of the alienation of the intellectual and of the intellectuals' search for alliances.
This is not to say that liberal and socialist thought have been identical. They have not. The difference has been in the willingness of socialists to accept the socialist label -- indeed, to proclaim it loudly -- and to stand up openly for their objectives. Subject to brief periods of overt radicalism, American liberal thinkers have generally done everything they can to avoid the socialist label and to obscure their ultimate objectives. This has been especially true with regard to the face they have presented to the American public. This face has differed substantially from what they have said in the writing they have addressed to each other.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the thinkers who have been designated "liberal" have been those who for reasons of personality and tactics have chosen not to divorce themselves from the American mainstream. To embrace the socialist values of the West's intellectual culture (of which they have wanted very much to be a part) without seeming to do so, such men as Herbert Croly, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey and John Kenneth Galbraith have woven into their ideology an elaborate fabric of dissimulation.
The other ideologies I have discussed in my series of books on understanding the modern predicament, Burkean conservatism, classical liberalism and the various forms of socialist thought -- have all been straight-forward. They have said what they mean, directly and forcefully. But this has not been true with modern American liberalism. Much of its expression has been masked by euphemism and dissimulation.
This subject irritates liberals. They detest any suggestion of dissimulation when it is mentioned by conservatives. It is worth noting, though, that the dissimulation has been discussed at length within liberal literature. That discussion is what I will be review in this chapter.
1. Liberal literature has often admitted the existence of the dissimulation quite candidly.
Thus, Max Lerner wrote about Thorstein Veblen that "the Veblenian irony is a way of saying things and yet not saying them, the Veblenian mystification is a form of protective coloration." Lerner argued in 1935 that Veblen "no longer needed to hide his meaning" after he finally tore away the veil by publishing The Engineer and the Price System. In that book, Veblen had called for a seizure of power and the creation of a "technical soviet."1
In 1931, John Dewey called for a new political party. Here is his discussion of the dissimulation he thought necessary for it: "I think a new party will have to adopt many measures which are now labeled socialistic... But while support for such measures in the concrete, when they are adapted to actual situations, will win support from the American people, I cannot imagine the American people supporting them on the ground of Socialism... The prejudice against the name may be a regrettable prejudice, but its influence is so powerful."2
In 1970, Michael Harrington wrote of "a mass social democracy in the United States." He said that it "is invisible because, in typically American fashion, its socialistic aims are phrased in capitalistic rhetoric."3
Irving Kristol has spoken of the "paradoxical" use of labels in the United States, and has said about liberals that "it would certainly help to clarify matters if they were called, with greater propriety and accuracy, 'socialists' or 'neo-socialists.' And yet we are reluctant to be so candid. In part, this lack of candor is simply the consequence of a great many 'liberals' being demagogic or hypocritical about their political intentions." He went on to say that "I find it striking that the media...should consistently refer to John Kenneth Galbraith as a 'liberal' when he has actually taken the pains to write a book explaining why he is a socialist."4
In 1939, Bernard Smith wrote a review of Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought. Of Parrington, Smith said that "his radicalism wasn't altogether obvious. He was certainly not so foolish as to flaunt it...I can state quite dogmatically that he had some acquaintance with Marxism, had been influenced by it, and knew that his method was related to it. I have seen a letter by him in which he said as much."5
Dissimulation has not only been acknowledged generally, but also in connection with specific liberal undertakings. In 1936, for example, the British socialist Harold Laski, writing in The New Republic, wrote that "under the auspices of the American Historical Association a commission sat for the five years from 1929 to survey the educational position in the United States with special reference to social studies." He said that "stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a socialist America." 6
In 1939, a New Republic editorial reported that "Mr. Thomas R. Amlie, nominated to be Interstate Commerce Commissioner, admitted to a great skepticism about the future of capitalism. His senatorial listeners watched him with shocked faces. As experienced men, they themselves had precisely the same skepticism; what shocked them was the fact that Mr. Amlie had the courage and candor to say what was in him." 7
Christopher Jencks said that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was "like all Johnson proposals,...being promoted with a highly traditional rhetoric." He added candidly that "nevertheless, anyone who looks carefully at the bill will see that it...proposes" what Jencks described as a major centralization of educational decision-making.8
Liberal literature has often referred to the compromise and opportunism inherent in the Fabian method. In 1914 in one of its first editorials, The New Republic said that "anything so vast as a reconstruction of society can only be accomplished by an immense amount of little steps, a constant readjustment of theory, and a depressing amount of compromise." It called for people "who are loyal to their end and opportunist about their means." In 1930, an article by William Orton about England urged progressives to "avoid everything doctrinaire" and "to leave the particular means to be developed pragmatically." He added that "this is, no doubt, a plea for opportunism." In 1939, Bruce Bliven called for a Fabian emphasis on incremental steps: "New Dealers... need to stop talking in cliches which unnecessarily frighten the average citizen, and to appeal instead to the concrete opportunities for a nation."9
Liberals have often spoken among themselves of their "foot-in-the-door" strategy -- or, as Senator Robert Wagner referred to it, of their tactic of "getting the camel's nose under the tent." In the context of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society agenda in 1965, TRB wrote that "many of these are toe-in-the-door programs for future amplification." A year later, he spoke of "the government's foot in the door with the rent subsidy program."10
2. Liberal literature has also commented extensively on the reasons for the dissimulation.
In 1931, Matthew Josephson spoke of the personal motives that often lie behind it. He told about "how in adolescence those of us who received their education more or less consciously became socialist at heart," but that "then, as prospective men of letters or of the professions, we foresaw the most meager stake for ourselves under the heedless capitalist arrangement; so that our interests, quite deterministically, lay behind our indifference and made us secretly or waitingly Marxian...Not all of us wished as yet to be uninvited 'martyrs': or, as successful, practicing agitators, to pass a life resembling that of Jesuits."11
A fear of the adverse impact of candor on the political acceptability of liberalism has, of course, long been a major concern among liberal politicians. Charles Beard said that "Theodore Roosevelt praised [Croly's The Promise of American Life] but looked upon Mr. Croly as too radical for practical purposes." In a 1912 editorial about Robert LaFollette, The Nation observed that "radical public men... when they seek support for high office... minimize their radicalism." In 1936, Thurman Arnold, later Franklin Roosevelt's chief trust-buster, wrote that "I decline to support the Socialists until they become less perfectionist...and show signs of becoming an effective political group with ability to use political techniques." In 1968, David Riesman revealed that "a senator from one of the Mountain States once said to me, if my constituents knew what I was really like (which in fact the right wing keeps telling them) they would throw me out."12
Not surprisingly, though, liberalism has been recognized as an advantage for a faculty member's success in the academic world. Morton Cronin wrote in 1957 that "the adoption of a liberal orientation is an important method for getting on in the academic world." Personal motivations for success in a career are important in sustaining an ideology. Cronin added that "the world of academic liberals, in short, is saturated with careerism."13
3. Liberalism's dissimulation has been the counterpart of American conservatism's success in causing the American public to reject socialism and anything that the public understands to be socialist.
Benjamin Ginsburg was angry but accurate when he pointed to the practical underpinning of liberalism in The New Republic in 1931. He paraphrased liberals as saying: "One must never mention the word socialism, inasmuch as the American people will not hear of socialism...."14
4. Euphemism, used extensively, has been a stylistic by-product of the dissimulation. One of the earliest, best and most influential examples of this was Herbert Croly's book The Promise of American Life (1909). The closest he came in hundreds of pages to announcing his socialist goals was a sentence such as: "...the organization of labor like the organization of capital may gradually be fitted into a nationalized economic system." No one could quarrel with a suggestion that something may happen; nor could anyone say absolutely that he had advocated it. Croly's style of suggestion rather than advocacy has remained typical of much liberal writing. Thus, we have become accustomed to seeing such statements as that made by Dow Votaw in his book Modern Corporations: "The great corporation may ultimately itself become a political or electoral unit in a vastly different governmental structure than we know today."15
After John T. Flynn broke with The New Republic, Flynn attacked the term "planned economy" as a euphemistic substitute for socialism. In 1949, he wrote in The Road Ahead that socialism "is being promoted in America by organizations that never pronounce in public the word socialism. They call their system the Planned Economy." He added that "that is a fraudulent brand name. It is used to sell socialism to an unsuspecting population." (Flynn was guilty of considerable dissimulation himself in that book, in which he did not tell his conservative readers of his own earlier endorsement of the "planning" concept. He had been a leading columnist for The New Republic during most of the 1930s. In 1936, he declared he would vote for Norman Thomas, and found it "disconcerting" that many on the Left were coming out for Roosevelt. "The great choice which confronts the peoples of every country today is -- who is to control their economic societies? By control I mean conscious, deliberate, planned control.")16
5. Those further to the left, of course, have always looked upon the dissimulation with contempt; and during the brief periods when the liberal intellectual culture has itself been willing to endorse socialism more overtly, many have expressed disgust with the cravenness of the less forthright approach. On other occasions, individual liberals have from time to time become willing to declare their socialist affinity -- and then have looked back scornfully.
The New Republic had no sooner started publication than Amos Pinchot wrote it complaining that "The New Republic... concentrates attention on symptoms and incidentals, and maintains silence in regard to the foundations upon which the whole fabric of social injustice rests."17
In 1931, Edmund Wilson argued passionately for liberals to give up Croly's "gradual and natural approximation to socialism" and to embrace socialism openly. "They must take Communism away from the Communists, and take it without ambiguities or reservations...." A letter from Lewis Mumford in 1935 congratulated The New Republic for "leaving behind the stale liberalism of capitalist compromise," and called for liberals to create a non-totalitarian communism.18
In 1956, Paul Goodman, one of those who laid the foundation for the New Left, made the same radical critique: "Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the radical-liberal program was continually compromised, curtailed, sometimes realized in form without content." In 1957, Harvey Goldberg and William Appleman Williams wrote that "'radical' defines a nature different in quality from the temporizing 'liberal' spirit, so expert in weighing principle against expediency." They said that Heywood Broun had "made the point with characteristic directness: 'In the final count of reckoning I believe the angels will indulge in few long cheers for any liberal. With minor exceptions he's a trimmer.'"19
6. It is this tension between temporizing and radical assertiveness that explains the phenomenon of "liberal 'guilt'" that is so often commented upon. Thus, Ronald Berman has spoken of "the guilt of liberalism -- a guilt which exists because liberalism refuses to make the leap between what it is and what, given its doctrine, it might become."20
A pathetic passage in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, The Politics of Upheaval speaks to this: "Measured against the Bolshevik, with his infinite courage and his terrible calm, the American bourgeois [liberal] could only feel a sense of his own unworthiness." Referring to the time in 1934 when Lincoln Steffens had declined an offer to join the Communist Party, Schlesinger quoted him as having said: "I think I am not to be trusted in the party or in the front ranks of the struggle...We liberals must not have power, not ever; we must not be leaders, we must not be allowed to be parties in the leadership...We, who have fitted successfully into the old culture, are to the very degree of our education and adjustment, -- we are corrupted and unfit for, -- the kingdom of heaven.'" Schlesinger spoke of this as "liberal self-abasement."21
7. The dissimulation has allowed a great deal of socialist thought to be presented in disguised form.
In the chapter here on "Liberalism and the Modern Corporation" I will discuss the "Berle and Means thesis." We will see that one of the major concepts of modern liberalism has had a long history in socialist thought and was even advanced in Marx's Das Kapital. A reader would not know the idea's lineage, however, from reading liberal discussions of the concept. They talk as though it originated with the book by Adolf Berle, Jr., and Gardiner Means in 1932.
It has been surprising to me how much R. H. Tawney's thought is incorporated without attribution into liberal writing. Tawney, a British socialist, wrote The Acquisitive Society. There, he distinguished between "an acquisitive society," in which people pursue their own "rights" for their own advantage, and "a functional society," in which the performance of "functions" (public service) is paramount. He argued that commerce must give up its profit orientation and take on the characteristics of service-oriented professions. Tawney classified property into several types according to the degree of absentee ownership. In his book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, he was not entirely favorable to the Middle Ages, but he nevertheless praised that period for its "functionalism," which he said was undermined by the later victory of bourgeois acquisitiveness.
The reader will recognize that this as consistent with the standard critique made by socialists generally. But we want to notice the vocabulary. Tawney expressed socialist concepts in an easily recognizable form.
A few years ago I used Joseph W. Towle's book Ethics and Standards in American Business in a course on business ethics. It contains a chapter by Albert William Levi of Washington University. No mention is made of Tawney either in the body of the chapter or in footnotes. From the presentation, the students would think simply that the ideas are those of a liberal professor in the United States. But here is some of what the chapter says: "The aim of business is profit. The aim of a profession is the performance of a service... Modern capitalism is based upon a philosophy of individualism which, when spelled out, implies that the basis of society is to be found not in responsibilities but in rights...Medieval economic structure enthroned principles which were just the reverse... A philosophy of individual rights has gradually undermined the organic functionalism of medieval society. What has happened, then, over the past five hundred years has been the gradual development of a 'functional' into an 'acquisitive' society."
This is unadulterated Tawney, but the students aren't told that.
A chapter in a business ethics textbook is only a small example, but when multiplied by tens of thousands of others it becomes one of the more significant facts about liberal ideology. The content is socialist, the style one of dissimulation.
ENDNOTES
1. New Republic, May 15, 1935, pp. 8, 9.
2. New Republic, April 1, 1931, p. 178.
3. Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1970), p. 133.
4. Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Mentor Books, 1978), p. 127.
5. New Republic, February 15, 1939, p. 42.
6. New Republic, July 29, 1936, p. 342.
7. New Republic, March 1, 1939, p. 86.
8. New Republic, February 6, 1965, p. 17.
9. New Republic, December 26, 1914, p. 6; New Republic, January 29, 1930, p. 266; New Republic, June 21, 1939, p. 184.
10. Senator Wagner's tactic is discussed by J. Joseph Huthmacher in his Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1968), at p. 113 and again at p. 214; New Republic July 10, 1965, p. 4; New Republic, May 14, 1966, p. 4.
11. New Republic, February 18, 1931.
12. New Republic, November 8, 1939, p. 78; The Nation, January 4, 1912, p. 4; New Republic, September 30, 1936, p. 223; New Republic, April 13, 1968, p. 21.
13. New Republic, January 7, 1957, p. 11.
14. New Republic, February 18, 1931, p. 17.
15. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914), p. 390; Dow Votaw, Modern Corporations (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 96.
16. New Republic, November 4, 1936, pp. 17, 18.
17. New Republic, May 29, 1915, p. 96.
18. New Republic, January 14, 1931, p. 234; New Republic, February 6, 1935, p. 361.
19. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 15; Harvey Goldberg (ed.), American Radicals (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1957), p. 1.
20. Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 108.
21. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), p. 185.
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