What this new consensus will support and eventually demand is informed, conscientious, positive action over a long period of time and on many fronts in the direction pointed by the conception of the world as an organic community, divided though it may now be by Soviet ambitions. This effort will call for the full use of our material, physical, and moral resources on a scale which the American people have not yet contemplated in times of peace. Working politicians and students of government both agree that the initiative for such a national commitment must come primarily from the executive.
But the President's capacity to act is, if not paralyzed, at least drastically limited when he knows in advance that proposals which are fully adequate to the evolving world situation are likely to precipitate not only a difficult public debate but a costly, deeprooted, bitter division within his own party in Congress. The fact that he can count on a bipartisan majority will be scant consolation if the biggest part of that majority is provided by his pilitical opponents....
Critical Difference
There is a critical difference between this and any similar period in our history: in today's world, as I have already suggested, we cannot wait until disaster overtakes us to forge a new political answer.
This hard fact adds a formidable new dimension to the political challenge which confronts our generation. In other periods we could wait until a developing crisis created a light so brilliant that the new or broader truths were no longer obscured. Our slowness in achieving the necessary new perspective was costly. But it was not catastrophic. In the Nuclear Age our problem is to achieve the essential clarification before our democratic society is overtaken by total disaster from which there may be no recovery....
A new consensus will necessarily accept and vigorously continue the struggle to create rising standards of living and opportunity here in America. Yet the factor which will distinguish it from its predecessors is its realization that freedom in this tightly inter-related world is becoming indivisible.
The influence of free institutions, revitalized and newly focussed on current world problems, will either resume its historic evolutionary growth throughout South America, Africa, and Asia, or it will expire everywhere, including its birthplace, the nations of the Atlantic Basic. Whether the demise of liberty as an important political and economic force occurs gradually, through communist strangulation combined with hardening of the political arteries, or suddenly in the aftermath of nuclear war is, for the long haul, beside the point.
This central fact is now self-evident to many American political leaders of both political parties, to newsmen, government officials, and to a large segment of our people. But will it become self-evident to enough Americans to provide the consensus necessary for a new orientation of our national purpose and policy while there is still time for positive and creative action?...
New Leadership Needed
The adequacy and timeliness of our response will largely depend, I believe, on the development of a new or revamped American leadership that rejects the cynical assumption, which sometimes seems to be held by many American political leaders as well as by the leaders of the USSR, that modern Americans can be interested only in larger paychecks, faster cars, and more garish entertainment....
Demagogic extremes in Washington and elsewhere have emphasized and heightened, I think, a widespread but vague public concern about the health and vigor of our free institutions. It is reassuring that this concern no longer proceeds on the naive assumption that our difficulties may be remedied by passing new laws or by mechanical tinkering with governmental commissions.
Something deeper is involved, which has to do with the quality and substance of the consent of the governed as that consent is registered by the political structure. Here, as on questions of foreign policy, the divisions among us stubbornly refuse to follow the familiar lines which separated "liberal" from "conservative" in economic matters....
Whatever lies ahead will be momentous and will profoundly touch the lives of us all. This survey of American policies has attempted to look beyond this year of partisan encounter and to catch a glimpse of this hazy but crucial tomorrow.
In the din of the current campaign most of the questions and possibilities I have raised will be forgotten. Yet in the vision of a world of expanding hope and opportunity for all peoples, in which America will serve as a partner and even as an architect, lies the only salvation of a free people and a free society. Without such a vision in this Nuclear Age the people perish