The Republican Paralysis

...Contrary to the view of David Danzig, who innocently repeats the propaganda of Americans for Constitutional Action in the March issue of Commentary, Right-wing congressmen suffered more than any other group in 1964...

...This may be difficult, but it is the only way to the kind of substantive unity which can revitalize the party's efforts...

...His current approach, which has already won him the lavish praise of Goldwater, is to ingratiate himself with the Right wing...

...Right-wing Republicans, between calls for "unity," are already muttering about starting a third party if an unacceptable candidate is nominated...

...Organization is vital and necessary, to be sure, but without appealing issues and candidates it is ineffectual...

...Bliss even failed to elect his dream candidate, Robert A. Taft Jr., to the U.S...

...On two occasions over the last six years in the "right to work" disaster of 1958 and the Goldwater disaster of 1964 the party failed to do this, and Ohio is now Democratic...

...Finally, to recover its political health the Republican party must end its curious repression of the instructive facts of 1964...

...And the party must provide enlightened leadership to win back the nation's young people, who, despite wild Rightwing claims, were overwhelmingly alienated in 1964 and, according to polls by Samuel Lubell and Louis Harris, are far more opposed than their elders to the theories of archconservatism...

...In 1963, Laird was appointed chairman of a joint House-Senate committee on Republican principles...

...The rest of Laird's speech was a drearily predictable, if occasionally sound, attack on the Administration...

...So far the Anderson-Reynolds group has done little beyond repudiating the five Alabama Republican congressmen who travelled to Selma to oppose the voter registration drive...

...and they seem to spend more of their time competing for individual acclaim than advancing the progressive Republican cause...

...He has also been amenable to fostering a moderate image for the Congressional Republicans...

...Many GOP progressives had hoped that last November's defeat would purge the extreme Right from major influence, and provide a salutary political lesson for the more reasonable conservatives...

...The GO P should not be driven to a compromise choice out of the misconceived notion that the progressives were disloyal, for this alleged "disloyalty'' will be one of their most important assets in appealing to an electorate which did not treat "loyal" Republicans very well in 1964...

...But otherwise the Republicans will be reduced again to those Southern bastions...

...On March 2, Laird delivered his first major address as Chairman of the House Republican Conference...

...Meanwhile progressive Republicans, generally from more competitive districts, usually managed to win, sometimes by increased pluralities...

...The Alabaman, an able and ambitious man himself, has announced that he will run for governor and may be more difficult to please in the future...

...It should not be supposed that there will be no risk in nominating a progressive in 1968...

...It seems the South becomes more expensive every year...

...It reached special heights of absurdity, though, in its discussion of foreign and defense policies, an area in which Laird regards himself an expert...

...For petty personal reasons they have blackballed at least one liberal Republican, Seymour Halpern of New York, from membership, while at the same time allowing themselves to be stymied on some issues by the presence of conservatives in their midst...

...But at the moment most of them are distracted with the idea of getting out of the House and moving on to higher office, while in the House Laird alone is more influential than all of them together...

...they divided and neutralized themselves in the Minority Leadership struggle between Halleck and Ford...

...Bliss should be an expert on the limitations of placing "unity" and "organization" first among priorities...

...It is estimated from tax returns that the far Right spends over $15 million every year on its multifarious activities and publications...

...The issue, as defined by John Grenier of Alabama, recent Executive Director of the National Committee and one of the most powerful men in the Goldwater movement, was: "What are you willing to pay for the South...

...All this will require new approaches and personalities in 1968...

...Angling for the Vice Presidential nomination, Ford had accommodated Goldwater until the Convention, when pressure in Michigan led him to give a seconding speech for George Romney...

...But the most striking evidence of the present Republican decrepitude is the re-emergence of Richard Nixon...

...granted, it did not call for voluntarization of Social Security...

...According to the Gallup polls the Republican organizational effort exceeded the Democrats' by 40 per cent...

...Moreover, Bliss had assumed that his delegation to the National Convention was united behind the favorite son candidacy of Governor James Rhodes, but the chimerical "unity" dissolved when Rhodes, its technical repository, withdrew...

...Even the story of Goldwater's nomination has still not been adequately told...

...Grenier was not satisfied with the price paid in 1964 because some "ambitious" Northerners "out for themselves," notably George Romney, refused to walk the Goldwater civil rights and extremism planks...

...A third party would give the Right wing its chance to show how many of those vaunted 27 million 1964 Republican voters are really "dedicated conservatives," as they define the term, and how many are merely loyal Republicans...

...Laird went on to produce a book, A House Divided...

...But until they can acquire staff their efforts can never be fully effective...

...Ohio is one of the few states in the country where the Republicans are close to the Democrats in registered voters, yet "unity" and "organization" brought victory only when the GOP provided acceptable candidates with acceptable positions on the important issues...

...In the Senate, the Right wing has been strengthened by the arrival of South Carolina's Strom Thurmond from the Democratic side of the aisle, while the progressives have been weakened by the electoral defeats of Kenneth Keating of New York and J. Glenn Beall of Maryland...

...But the party cannot afford to "unify" behind the Rightists or some compromise mediocrity like Nixon who will leave things the way they are...

...during the Eisenhower years, the Democratic effort always exceeded the Republicans...

...One staff member of the Goldwater campaign who traveled around the country estimates the number at not over 2.5 million, mostly in the South...

...By contrast Arthur Larson's vaunted antiextremism group, the National Council for Civic Responsibility, has just expired for lack of funds, the Republican Negro Assembly is quiescent, and New York Republicans are unwilling to promise John Lindsay the money he needs to run for mayor of New York City...

...Like Goldwater's Why Not Victory, it argues inanely for more courageous, militant, and moralistic foreign policies, with greater willingness to risk nuclear war, on the grounds that the Communists will always back down, and God is on our side anyway...

...The Right wing is reasserting its baneful influence in Congress, and Richard Nixon, the eager legatee of Goldwater's support, is stealing its heart...

...As Platform Chairman he again turned to the American Enterprise Institute...

...Such members of the Wednesday Group as John Lindsay and Ogden Reid of New York, Bradford Morse of Massachusetts, Clark MacGregor of Minnesota, and Charles Mathias of Maryland, are the most promising men in the Republican party, and perhaps in the future the group will be able to mobilize effectively...

...It is possible that such a party, a Dixiecrat or national Conservative party, could win the states, except for Arizona, that the Republicans won in 1964...

...If he succeeds (and the Right wing has a long memory), they deserve each other, and if he is nominated, the party will deserve its defeat in 1968...

...He appealed to "all [his italics] who reject the Federal extremism of the Administration" to join in the fight against it...

...Yet as Ray Bliss, a most reticent reformer, prepares to take over the Republican National Committee on April 1, the GOP has rarely seemed weaker or less capable of revival...

...But they have yet to get together even on a matter as basic as the acquisition of staff...

...Ford's tendency toward moderation, however, was soon neutralized by the aggressive re-emergence of the Right wing under the leadership of Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, his ambitious successor as Chairman of the House Republican Conference...

...Although his political philosophy is nearly identical to Goldwater's, Laird has escaped notoriety by a greater care in expression...

...Laird continued by citing a few constructive alternatives proposed by his friends, then gave a long apologia for the 1964 platform_ attacking various misrepresentations of it...

...The party could provide a candidate capable of reaching the silent vote not the white backlashers or the underground conservatives, but the six million Republicans who stayed home this year or skipped the Presidential contest to vote for lower offices only, eloquently testifying to what they thought of the "choice...

...Brown already is ranking member on the Rules Committee...

...The money raising failure is perhaps most ominous of all...

...Outside the Congress the party is in similar disarray, and there is a similar repression of the realities exposed by the 1964 election...

...One quote will suffice as a measure of his expertise...

...Apparently little was learned from that experience...

...But the progressives' hopes have foundered on the party's amazing faculty for resisting enlightenment and repressing traumatic experience...

...But there is little that was good or constructive about it, and it remains difficult to take seriously a document which calls for liberation of the Ukraine...

...Florence Dwyer, like John Lindsay of New York (who also cannot get the committee assignments he wants), regularly commits the unforgivable offense of winning as a Republican in a Northern city...

...What is more, in 1964 the Republicans were better organized nationally than ever before...

...A third party would also allow the Republican party itself to attend to the needs and interests of those who voted for Goldwater reluctantly, and to the millions of Republicans who voted for Johnson, even while recognizing the President's very considerable flaws_flaws that under different circumstances might have elected a Republican...

...The Congressional Republicans show little promise of reform...

...Republicans must recognize that extremism in the Republican party is worse than useless in a national election...

...Still, Ford's election did reflect a certain recognition that last November's defeat demanded some sort of change...

...Symbolic of the situation in the House was the standing ovation given South Carolina's Albert Watson by the House Republican Conference when he followed Thurmond into the GOP...

...Early in March Byrnes was replaced as Chairman by Goldwater stalwart James Rhodes of Arizona...

...The election of Gerald Ford as Minority Leader over Charles Halleck was hardly a progressive breakthrough...

...and Charles Percy (who laid down their coattails for Goldwater and were pulled over backward), perhaps 40 Congressmen, almost 600 state legislators, undisclosed millions of dollars, and its traditional principles and still won fewer electoral and popular votes in the South than in 1960...

...In direct contradiction to Ford's often repeated rejection of a coalition with the Southern Democrats, Laird stressed his belief that the principles of the Republican party in the House "are shared in full measure by some members of the majority party...

...The embodiment of "unity" and "organization" is, of course, Ray Bliss, who is about to take over as National Chairman with the support of the progressives and the expressed approval of Goldwater...

...As F. Clifton White, director of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller put it, "Conservatism was never an issue in the campaign...

...The committee provided the usual platitudes, but its real function was to advance Laird's ultimately successful campaign for the Platform Committee Chairmanship in 1964...

...Throw in an apparently hopeful prediction of disaster in Southeast Asia, and you have the tenor of the current "loyal opposition" (Laird's phrase) in the House...

...The consensus of the 1,395 county chairmen questioned by the Gallup poll about the debacle was that nothing is wrong with the party that a little "unity" and "organization" won't cure...

...In the process, Laird has emerged as the most powerful Republican in the House...

...The election was not simply a rejection of Goldwater himself...

...The party must be willing to affront its Right-wing zealots and provide imaginative programs for regeneration of the nation's cities, where a steadily increasing proportion of the people live...

...First, Ford's candidate for the post of Minority Whip, Peter Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, was defeated by the popular conservative incumbent, Les Arends of Indiana...

...The progressive Republican congressmen, meanwhile, are in complete disarray...

...The final tabulations clearly dictated ideological reform on the Congressional as well as the Presidential level...

...It also provided further evidence of the complete ideological banality of the Republican Right...

...Unity, similarly, requires that the issues be confronted and resolved, compromised or amicably accepted...

...it cannot be achieved until the party provides programs and positions behind which to unify...

...Perhaps what the Republicans really need today, as in 1964, is not an emetic but a psychiatrist...

...A House Divided is the product of the Karl ("Extremism in defense of liberty") Hess-William Baroody school of political thought at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research...

...The one-post rule was maintained though, in the case of John Byrnes of Wisconsin, Chairman of the GO P Policy Committee and ranking Republican on Ways and Means...

...Senate in 1964...

...Thus Ford has been surrounded by Right-wingers in all of the party's leadership positions_more so, ironically, than Halleck was...

...According to this view, the party itself is in fine shape and its adoption of a "conservative" philosophy was not connected in any way with its electoral failures...

...And he himself emphasized the need not only for Republican alternatives to Democratic programs but for initiatives in civil rights...

...At the beginning of the session much was expected from the Wednesday Group, a very informal association of progressive and moderate Republican House members...

...Available accounts, though interesting and thorough in most respects, reinforce the tendency of many Republicans to discount the importance of the extreme Right in Goldwater's nomination, though it was that element which created Goldwater as a national figure, published his book, Conscience of a Conservative, and provided the organizational effort for his one significant primary victory in California...

...Hess and Baroody contributed to the drafting and later became Goldwater's chief ideological advisors and speechwriters during the campaign...

...congratulating the four Wednesday Group progressives who went down to lend their support...

...and extending a needed but unauthorized apology to Martin Luther King for the National Committee's election eve distribution of 1.5 million pamphlets urging Negroes to write in his name for President...

...In 1964, the party sacrificed Robert Taft Jr...

...In appealing to these groups, the party must have a progressive candidate, preferably not associated with Goldwater in 1964...

...Two portents for the future are the financial failure of most progressive Republican organizations spawned after the election, and the miraculous emergence of one Richard M. Nixon, a New York lawyer, as the leading Republican candidate for the Presidential nomination in 1968...

...The Right-wingers, with their simple ideological appeals, and the Nixon opportunists, with their tactical flexibility, will hold sway...

...The speech contrasted sharply with Ford's statements as Minority Leader and may be considered the initial manifesto in Laird's campaign for the Minority Leadership, begun just weeks after Ford's election to the post...

...He reveals with alarm: "We allow and even promote Socialistic forms of government throughout Latin and South America, totally ignoring the fact that Socialism is a vehicle for eventual Communist takeover...

...If the far Right refuses to go along, they can be left behind...

...Unlike the Arizonan, who would sell TV A gratuitously for reporters, Laird never says more than is necessary to make a polemical point...

...To win in 1966 and 1968, Republicans must be willing to risk losing their new segregationist House seats in Mississippi and Alabama, and offer a fresh appeal to the Negroes who made an estimated 30 per cent shift to the Democrats in 1964...

...Until the GOP , and especially its progressive wing, succeeds in developing such an alternative, the party will remain demoralized and ineffective, dividing on the initiatives of the Johnson Administration...

...In the spring he went to Wisconsin to speak for Glenn Davis, an old McCarthyite, running against a progressive Republican in a Congressional primary...

...Nonetheless, his voting was so obstructive during the Eisenhower Administration that his proposed appointment as Platform Committee Chairman was vetoed by Richard Nixon in 1960...

...Nor does the party seem to understand the importance of the extremists in engendering resistance to Republicans across the country by their strident and aggressive methods of campaigning, a problem Grenier himself encountered even in his own state, Alabama...

...The success of Nixon, ideologically a complete opportunist and demagogue ever since his defeat in California, is symbolic of the failure of the party to produce a responsible and constructive alternative to the Great Society...

...Some of the new organizations show great promise _ particularly the Council of Moderate Republican Organizations headed by Elmer Anderson, former Governor of Minnesota, and by Grant Reynolds, a New York attorney who also leads the Negro Republican Assembly...

...The cant of "unity" and "organization" was the Trojan Horse of William Miller's regime during his tenure as National Chairman, and in 1964 it disgorged the Birchers and segregationists who tore the party asunder...

...Bliss is an excellent organizer, but his own career is resounding testimony to the insufficiency of these two Republican shibboleths...

...it was a rejection of Right-wing ideology...

...Then, to prevent Florence Dwyer of New Jersey from acceding to the position of ranking minority member of the Government Operations Committee, the Right-wingers allowed one of their own, Clarence Brown of Ohio, to retain the post in contravention of the new rule against a single congressman holding more than one leadership position...

...In fact, many Republican leaders are already working on it, while others_many of them prospective victims_are fatuously calling for "unity" and "organization," as politicians do when they have nothing to say...

...Five out of the six New York Republican candidates who received a Conservative party endorsement were beaten, while several of the Republicans opposed to Conservatives won by heavier margins than ever...

...All across the country, including much of the South, they were selectively defeated or their margins were reduced in some cases by over 15 per cent (a fact not revealed by ACA...

...And that question is still unresolved, though both Grenier and former National Chairman Dean Burch regard 1964 as a good down payment ("absolutely necessary," said Burch recently...

...But perhaps between now and 1968 a suitable price can be arranged...

...The evidence of the Conservative party of New York in 1964, and the Progressives and the Dixiecrats in 1948, does not give reason for the Republicans to be alarmed by the prospect of a third party attempt...

...Baroody is director of this non-profit institute, a Right-wing omnibus, heavily supported by Birch Society associate J. Howard Pew...

...Granted, the platform was about as explicit as the Democrats' on civil rights and in some respects was even superior...