Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics by Marc Stears

Author:Marc Stears [Stears, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Advocacy, History & Theory, United States, Modern, Political Ideologies, 20th Century, Political Science, Political Process, History, General
ISBN: 9780691157900
Google: DmmYDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17130571
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Revival of American Radicalism

It often appeared that all that the new generation was left with was doubt: doubt about the place of certainty in politics, doubt about the possibilities of political action, and doubt about the capabilities of American citizens. And this doubt threatened the whole purpose of radicalism. As Judith Shklar put it, “radicalism is the belief that people can control and improve themselves and, collectively, their social environment” but one that “at present … even those who regard themselves [as radicals] seem to lack.”39 No one, it seemed, was prepared to predict the future with any certainty or to insist that desirable political outcomes would necessarily follow from particular political strategies. Indeed, some commentators even expressed uncertainty as to whether American democracy as it currently existed could survive in the late twentieth century. The Soviet threat, the unsettling demands for ever greater economic prosperity, the ongoing war between capital and labor, the tensions between different ethnic groups, and the decreasing faith in the psychological capacities of citizens—all were considered potential causes of the unraveling of the American political order.40

All of this doubt provided deeply unpromising material for the shaping of a new radical democratic theory, yet that was the task that this generation set for themselves. However daunting they looked, these multiple expressions of doubt were not intended to obstruct but rather to assist with what Arthur Schlesinger called “the revival of American radicalism.”41 Having accepted that all efforts to understand the social and political world were flawed, noted that politics was always likely to be corrupted by those “intoxicated by power,” and rid themselves of the belief that citizens were in any serious way “perfectible,” it was now necessary for self-identified radicals to build their theory up again by outlining a series of key principled commitments and concrete political practices that could survive such an onslaught. For all their pessimism, they had no intention of giving up entirely on the “images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization” that had characterized the greatest moments of previous generations.42 After all of the “heartbreak” it was now time for radical democrats to return “to the basic principles of democracy.”43

The Cold War itself provided the backdrop for the first of those basic principles, which Schlesinger described as “the affirmation of a belief in free society and an absolute repudiation of totalitarianism.”44 It was not just anti-Communism that justified this claim, however. The new generation of radical democrats were full-blown Pluralists whose primary commitment was to the inevitable diversity of human experience. Intellectually reared on the works of Harold Laski, Walter Lippmann, and Mary Follett, they shared the basic pluralist conviction that it was impossible to fully and accurately identify a substantial common good that bound all of America’s citizens together.45 We must “accept a pluralistic destiny for mankind,” Schlesinger insisted. “Free men know many truths,” he continued, but no “mortal man knows The Truth,” both because the human intellect is too limited and because the truths of some individuals necessarily conflict with those of others.

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