The Politics of the Nuclear Freeze (Selected Course Outlines and Reading Lists from American Col‪)‬

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Contemporary American political culture is said by political sociologists to be perhaps the most extensively organized and stratified in history.1 Among the thousands of “associational” groups that serve as mediators between government and the body politic, 2 a few are devoted to revolutionary political change along Marxist-Leninist lines. On the national level this includes, clearly, the Communist party USA, Youth Against War and Fascism, the Revolutionary Workers party, fronts of these organizations such as the U.S. Peace Council, and many other obscure, tiny, and often short-lived groups.

There are other groups on what we have chosen to call the Professional Left, however, that are always less explicit and usually less doctrinaire about Socialist or Marxist ideology and that while not necessarily pro-Soviet do espouse an eclectic variety of anticapitalist views with respect to national and global economic organization. Concomitant with such views, generally, is a strong positive disposition toward a foreign policy orientation sympathetic to the “Third World” agenda, and an equally strong opposition to U. S. military power of all sorts. Some of these groups are the Institute for Policy Studies, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the War Resister’s League, the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, SANE, Benjamin Spock’s Mobilization for Survival, Clergy and Laity Concerned, the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, Women’s Strike for Peace, and many others. Most of these groups have their own publications that outline their views. One can also consult a coterie of more general periodical publications, particularly The Progressive, Mother Jones, The Nation, In. These Times, Nuclear Times, The Village Voice, The Rolling Stone, The Guardian (New York), and sometimes the oped pages of the nation’s most influential newspapers.