The Politics of Surrender
M. Stanton Evans believes that chickens come home to roost. Or, in the words of the late Richard Weaver, that “ideas have consequences.”
The consequences of pseudo-liberal ideas for the West, as they are set forth in Mr. Evans’ voluminous but tightly argued The Politics of Surrender (Devin-Adair, $6.95), are likely to be pretty horrendous. The root assumption of pseudo liberalism, as Mr. Evans sees it, is that convergence of western capitalism and communism is more or less ordained by “history,” and that there is no use fighting it. This “liberal” assumption isn’t pure Marxist determinism, for the pure Marxists believe that capitalism is destined to go down in a series of catastrophic convulsions. The “liberal” assumes that as the West moves toward socialism, the Communist East must move toward democracy, with a peaceful embrace in a world state looming as the culminating destiny of mankind. It never occurs to the “liberal” that socialism, which implies state compulsion in dealing with the energies of men, is, if pressed beyond a certain point, utterly incompatible with democratic politics. The “merger” of West and East which the “liberal” hopes to see accomplished depends on the surrender of one set of ideas or another — and it is the thesis of M. Stanton Evans that the West is in process of doing the surrendering.
It is, of course, a straggly process, for humanity balks at “clean” solutions, and ideas beget counter ideas. However, the pseudo liberal has a way of achieving bureaucratic power that is somewhat frightening. Mr. Evans begins by analyzing some of the important pseudoliberal documents which, even when they are officially denounced, manage to affect the speeches of important statesmen and the course of action of administrators.
There are The Liberal Papers, with a revealing preface by James Roosevelt, for example. And there is Study Phoenix, prepared by Vincent Rock, a “senior research analyst” at something called the Institute for Defense Analysis. The ideas expressed in these and other “liberal” documents all revolve around the theory that the intentions of Moscow and Peking must be ultimately peaceful. The consequences of this theory will be devastating if it is wrong.
Mr. Evans is encyclopedic in tracing out the connections between idea and “happening.” Study Phoenix talks about an “interdependence” between Moscow and Washington. To Vincent Rock “interdependence” means that a “balance of terror” can be maintained by the two great powers through simultaneous cuts in armament. Picking up from the Phoenix assumption, Dr. Seymour Melman of Columbia University and Dr. Jerome Wiesner of Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been telling recent Washington administrations that if the U.S. refrains from “provocative” arms building, Russia will follow suit.
Hence a decision, taken in the Kennedy Administration, not to go ahead with the deployment of a Nike-Zeus or Nike-X antimissile missile system. Wiesner considered that such deployment might convince the Russians that we were getting ready for an atomic blow off. The result of “scaring” the Soviets would be to provoke them into speeding up the development of an effective antimissile grid on their own.
Alas for the Melman-Wiesner way of thinking, the Russians have gone ahead with antimissile research and development even without being “scared.” Mr. Evans can take it as an ironic justification for his book that its publication practically coincided with Secretary of Defense McNamara’s announcement that the Russians have an antimissile missile and are proceeding to deploy it in a way that makes it necessary for the U.S. to come up with a more potent offensive atomic weapon than can currently be fired by our forty Polaris submarines.
For libertarians, Mr. Evans’ long discussion of the foreign policy ideas disseminated by “experts” who wrote for the publications of the Institute of Pacific Relations is particularly pertinent. The IPR has been denounced by a Senate subcommittee as “a vehicle used by the communists to orientate American Far Eastern policies toward communist objectives.” (The quote is from a 1952 report of the Senate Judiciary Committee.) Whether or not there was conscious collusion between the communists and the IPR, the IPR publications encouraged the idea that Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communism wasn’t really communism, but just an Oriental version of Jeffersonian agrarianism. The IPR writers accused Chiang Kai-shek of heading a “corrupt” and “reactionary” government, and sold the notion to General George Marshall that there should be a “coalition” regime in Peking. When Chiang Kai-shek refused to make a coalition with his Marxist enemies, the U.S. withdrew military support from the nationalist Chinese. And, after the dust had settled, the communists had taken over the mainland and Chiang had been driven to the offshore island of Formosa.
The percolation of IPR ideas did not end with the de facto creation of “two Chinas.” For, as Mr. Evans points out, the IPR theories are surfacing again with the drive to throw the Formosa Chinese out of the UN and to seat Red China.
This drive is of peculiar significance to libertarians for the simple reason that it threatens an island that has become a most heartening example of what men can do in freedom. Unable to put his ideas across on the mainland because of twenty years of war and revolution, Chiang Kai-shek has had a peaceful island interlude during which he has solved the agrarian question that still bedevils his great rival, Mao Tse-tung. Instead of expropriating absentee landlords on Formosa, the Chiang government bought them out by offering them shares in the big national cement companies. Then it proceeded to denationalize the companies, which forthwith became very prosperous. Thus the old landlords became the new capitalists on Formosa. And the peasants, now in possession of their own rice paddies, have had an incentive that has made Formosa self-sufficient in food.
Indeed, it is far more than that. Not only does the island, which is less than three hundred miles long, feed its thirteen million inhabitants; it is also managing to develop a big export surplus of canned pineapple, bananas, sugar, mushrooms, and even rice. The relative economic freedom that pertains on Formosa has given Free China the second highest standard of living in the Far East. By contrast, Mao Tse-tung’s Red China is the worst of slums.
Since these are ascertainable facts, it is doubly amazing that the “politicians of surrender” should even dare to talk about handing Free China’s seat in the UN to Red China, or even to promote a “two China policy” that would weaken Formosa’s defenses in a world that shows no signs of forswearing violence.
Virtually a library in itself, Stanton Evans’ book provides detailed histories of all the important East-West confrontations since 1945. In its pages you can find all you need to know about the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Dominican Republic affair, the war in Katanga, the Diem murder, the partition of Laos, and the communist drives in Africa. This is a “must” book for anyone who wants to know the world of 1967.
1787: THE GRAND CONVENTION by Clinton Rossiter (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966) $7.95, 443 pp.
Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton
This is a fine handbook for anyone interested in the making of our Constitution. The information about the framers, like the documents in the appendices, is, of course, helpful, but the most valuable passages in the book are those devoted to the leading ideas in the air during the summer of 1787. As another reviewer, M. Stanton Evans, has remarked, one could hardly ask for a better expression of the “key ideas in the consensus of political thought in the new republic” than appears on pages 60-64.
As is well known, the Constitution is a “bundle of compromises.” While most of the delegates to the Convention wished to build a new nation, shared the goal of “ordered liberty,” and agreed as to the general form of government best for Americans, their deliberations represented a clash of interests, each one jealous of powers granted to the others. But the framers, although representing opposing interests, never suggested resolving their differences by an appeal to arms. Nor did they express any desire to bring about unity in the form of a dictatorship. Most of these men had earlier risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of liberty, and they wanted nothing to do with any form of despotism, either dictatorial or democratic.
Vital to success was the privacy of the convention’s proceedings. In our age of “instant publicity” it is difficult to imagine such an event taking place with hardly any leaks of information by the participants and little pressure from outsiders to learn what was taking place behind closed doors in the State House (Independence Hall) in Philadelphia. In the glare of publicity such as we have today, the necessary frankness in debate and the flexibility to compromise would have been impossible.
The framers, although not without confidence in their abilities and in the use of reason tested by years of political experience, did, nevertheless, hold to a humble view of their limitations. Their goal was not a perfect society but a tolerable one. They did not deny the shortcomings of their finished work but asked its critics if a second convention could produce anything better that would be acceptable to the people of the several states.
Although these men deliberated in privacy, the fruit of their labors had to be submitted to the people for approval and then, if accepted, it would have to prove itself in actual use. The framers did not intend their document to be a lecture room exercise in political theory; they aimed to produce a Constitution which would work.
Throughout the book Rossiter challenges those who have accused the framers of acting solely from selfish motives or of bringing off a bloodless counterrevolution. On the contrary, the fifty or so men who labored from May to September, 1787, were disinterested to a remarkable degree and their splendid efforts represented a necessary and proper culmination of what had begun in 1774-1776.
