Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 7
February 11 – Sometimes it only takes a small crack in a wall to shed a flood of light.
The Maine primary vote may in the long run not amount to anything substantial for the outcome of the presidential election and it may very well be superseded by succeeding primary votes.
But the Maine primary has served as a means for cracking the seemingly impregnable wall of support for Carter’s war policies. The Maine primary served as an outlet for a veritable groundswell of massive opposition to these very war policies.
On the eve of every war crisis, the ruling class cherishes nothing so much as to achieve that indispensable monolithic unity to rally the mass of the people “round the flag,” to let loose wild orgies of chauvinism, of massive patrioteering, and under cover of it all to drive underground every vital issue which confronts the mass of the people in the daily struggle for a livelihood.
What the Maine primary has also shown is the emergence of a fissure in the capitalist establishment which, since the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Iran on November 4, has been deftly concealed by the media and by agreement within the highest echelons of American finance and industry.
[Edward] Kennedy’s major policy speech at Georgetown University on January 28 was not the product of a lonely man who suddenly retired to an ivory tower and there rethought his basic approach to the Carter policies. It was a collective product, not merely of his staff, but of significant figures in the ruling class which have after several weeks decided to air some of the issues of a tactical and procedural character in relation to the growing war danger.
In this connection, the February 1 article in the New York Times by George F. Kennan, an architect of the original Cold War, was a signal that there are doubters in the ruling class. How large, how small, what weight they may carry is hard to assess at the moment. Suffice it to say that it indicates an awareness not only of the great dangers that are implicit in Carter’s plunge toward war but equally important that there is already an incipient opposition to the developing war danger and that it must be reckoned with.
It should be added in passing that the Kennan article, which is an attack on Carter’s policies, and which the Times printed well enough ahead of the Maine primaries, carried great weight with the chain of Northeast universities from Harvard to Princeton and unquestionably was instrumental in helping to obtain a rather large amount of students for both Kennedy and [Jerry] Brown.
Kennan owes his prestige at the present time in bourgeois academia, not only on the basis of his long years of service in the State Department, but by the fact that he appears in the last few years to have made a transition from hawk to dove. This is illusory. It is not that Kennan has become a moderate but that the capitalist establishment, including both the Pentagon and State Department, have moved so far right. (See Leslie Gelb article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine where this is somewhat documented.)
Contrary to the anticipations of both the capitalist media and the Carter administration campaign managers, the Maine vote did not turn out to be a landslide for Carter, but turned out instead to be a mini-referendum on his basic policies. That really is the most important point that emerged from the primary.
Both Kennedy and Brown spoke out against Carter’s war hysteria and especially against the draft. Of course, the fine print in Kennedy’s Georgetown University speech (which, by the way, had all the earmarks of a Kennan thesis) was completely overlooked.
It was enough for the voters to know that Kennedy had said in that speech that “President Carter may take us to the edge of war in the Persian Gulf.” Of course, Kennedy is not opposed in principle to the position outlined by Carter. He merely differs with Carter on tactics and on secondary and tertiary aspects.
For instance, when he calls attention to the war danger in the Persian Gulf, he doesn’t follow up with even a hint of a suggestion that this vast, death-dealing armada, a stone’s throw from the shores of the Persian Gulf countries, should be withdrawn or even reduced.
He doesn’t disagree with Carter that the Persian Gulf is “vital” to the interests of the U.S. He differs with him on how to defend these vital, imperialist interests. Nor does he even allude to the fact that the Persian Gulf as the same relation to the people in the Middle East that the Hudson River or Lake Michigan has to the people here.
The effort to make the Persian Gulf an American lake is what lies at the root of U.S. naval strategy. Kennedy’s sole suggestion that the security of the vital U.S. interests could be maintained by regional consultations means that he wants an array of puppets in the Middle East to fight U.S. wars – an updated version of what Presidents Johnson and Kennedy originally proposed for Southeast Asia. (Remember “Asians fighting Asians”?)
Brown was less cautious in his approach. The fact that he came out against the draft, against nuclear power, and against the steady destruction of the environment was effective enough ammunition against Carter’s pro-nuclear, anti-environment, and pro-war position.
“Carter is bluffing in the Middle East,” Brown said. “We can’t defend them [meaning the countries in the Persian Gulf] because we don’t have the military force. Carter’s bluffing,” he went on, “and that’s the bottom line.” (Brown’s speech at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.)
Apparently, no one asked Brown, “What if Carter is not bluffing?” Nor did anyone ask him whether he considers the assembly of the world’s largest naval armada or aircraft carriers and other warships full of nuclear missiles and bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons as insufficient military force.
Like Kennedy, he affirms the “vital interests” of the U.S. in the Gulf. And like Kennedy, his State Department cookbook recipe of yesteryear, which is an echo of Kennan’s position, is for “consultation” with puppet regimes in the Middle East region and with NATO.
But again, it was enough for the voters in Maine that Brown’s position was an expression of opposition to the Carter policies.
Of course, the Maine primary voters read much more into the Kennedy and Brown speeches than there actually was. But what there was of it was enough to turn out five times as many for the caucus vote as in the 1976 primary.
Presidential candidates, and especially presidential candidates in a struggle against an incumbent, have always in pre-war periods used peace-loving, pacifist, and occasionally downright militant anti-war rhetoric before taking the country into war. This has been especially true since the days of Woodrow Wilson.
Neither Kennedy nor Brown are opposed to imperialist war in principle. It would be foolhardy to expect this of them, given the nature of their general political approach on other issues of critical importance which the mass of people have the right to regard as fundamental in the struggle against big business and the military-industrial complex.
It should be noted that both Brown and Kennedy have virtually been forced to take a so-called left-of-center position on the spectrum of American capitalist politics. They could not possibly, in the present context, take the right-of-center stance.
The right-of-center stance, which Carter arrogated to himself in the very early days of his tenure in office (he has since moved clear into the arms of the right, if not the far right), is now impossible for Brown or Kennedy.
While all progressives and militants in the working-class struggle are encouraged by the massive rebuff to Carter in the Maine mini-referendum, it is important to bear the above very much in mind.
Given the current political situation and the nature of their so-called political constituency, meaning the progressive section of the population, neither Kennedy nor Brown has been consistently left of center for any length of time. Nor can they be counted on to be so in the future. They have shown all too well how eagerly they can jump from a so-called extreme left position to the far right.
Jerry Brown’s 180-degree turn to the far right on social and economic issues is too well known to be easily forgotten. His embrace of the reactionary Proposition 13 was so swift, and done with such eagerness, he embarrassed not only his loyal followers but the ultra-right as well. He has since tried to talk his way out of it a little.
Brown has tried, however, to keep a foot in both camps. He relies heavily on the young whites in the broad anti-nuclear movement who are middle class and come from middle class property owners. They won’t necessarily hold Brown’s embrace of Proposition 13 against him. As regards the Black and Latin communities, Brown feels that they will be obliged to vote for him anyway in a contest with Carter because Brown would then be the lesser evil.
Kennedy himself, of course, is no stranger to maneuvering and snuggling up to the right and even going further. To those who are deep in the campaign for Kennedy, it may seem ages ago that he made a rather unsolicited pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama. The purpose of that visit was to pay homage to George Wallace, who was still then in the political arena and regarded as the leader of the ultra-right and the racist elements of the country.
Kennedy saw on the horizon the racist campaign in Boston when the school desegregation issue was first emerging. He knew that Wallace had a hand in the matter. It was Kennedy’s way of trying to persuade Wallace to call his dogs off in Boston in return for secret promises to Wallace if and when Kennedy would ever become president.
The maneuver proved a fiasco. Neither Wallace nor Kennedy was able to deliver on his promises.
It did, however, demonstrate that in the wide spectrum of capitalist politics the positions of left, right, and center are utterly unreliable gauges for judging what the capitalist politicians will do in practice. Owing loyalty to the capitalist establishment, which means in the final analysis loyalty to the monopolist military-industrial complex and the banks which serve them, makes it absolutely impossible to pursue any independent and truly principled anti-war, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist position.
The Maine primary vote is significant only because it afforded an avenue for the moment for the people to show their opposition to Carter’s domestic and foreign policy.
Last updated: 11 May 2026