WHY I AM FOR CARTER
Neuhaus, Richard J.
WHY I AM FOR CARTER RICHARD J. NEUHAUS Sensitivity combined with vision and enormous energies Why am I for Carter? Because a Carter presidency will be an effective symbol of healing and justice...
...Carter has, very sensibly, declared MAD to be literally mad...
...Aspiration, hard work, the achievement of excellence, and then moving on to new challenge...
...Carter might be wiser to remain more aloof from the press, or at least not to offer bis throat to the wolves, but then he might be attacked even more viciously for being too distant from "the people...
...The above seven theses stated, my enthusiasm for Jimmy Carter is not unstrained...
...A Ford presidency would be grudging accommodation to that liberalism, thus sustaining its hegemony over American social thought...
...Carter can complete the New Deal, if you will, by stealing what Ben Wattenberg used to call "the social issues" from reactionaries and by reuniting patriotism with the passion for justice...
...Because Carter displays sensitivity to the poor, the marginal and the shut out...
...He is the perfect undeviating product of his Republican Grand Rapids background...
...At least the possibility of a new synthesis, beyond the tedious and outmoded liberal-conservative contentions, is very real with a Democratic administration under Jimmy Carter...
...When first I declared in December of 75, the smell of freshness, of moving in from the outside, of defying the pretensions of the powerful and expert, it was all more exhilarating then...
...If I am right, we are moving into a time in which we will negate the noxious proposition- debilitating to religion and politics alike-that religion and politics don't mix...
...Those who see American power as inevitably exploitative and imperialistic and who welcome the revolutionary scenario implicit in that analysis should vote for Ford...
...Because Carter's election would signal the sense of new beginnings essential to the democratic experiment...
...The abortion debate- which is in reality a touchstone for deciding the kind of world in which we want to live-will undoubtedly benefit from that alliance...
...Inseparable from race is, for the first time since the Civil War, the symbolic reunion of North and South...
...Maybe because, as Bill Shannon of the Times has observed, Ford really doesn't care that much, he doesn't take himself that seriously...
...But on this score I have come to trust the intuitions of ordinary black folk...
...Then too, there is that perverse notion of journalistic ethics that compels people to turn upon their own lest they be thought less than "objective...
...Because Carter has demonstrated a readiness to challenge the conventional and the courage to go against the stream...
...with the Carter of a campaign on the edge of conquest, I have no doubt the former better reveals the man...
...A Ford presidency will not...
...Is this conviction entirely reasonable...
...As one who was a delegate and campaigner for McGovern (and before that for McCarthy), I think Carter may be too earnest about the need to unify the party, as they say, but I am not in principle pledged to backing a loser, and Carter clearly intends to win...
...Because the only alternative is supporting Gene McCarthy and, despite bonds of friendship and nostalgia for the days when a protest vote seemed interesting, I wish neither to help elect Gerald Ford nor to resign myself to despair in churlish wit's act of spoliation against an admittedly flawed electoral process...
...Both candidates are "tough," perhaps too tough, on the need for a militarily strong America...
...Foreign policy also touches on the third thesis, sensitivity to the oppressed...
...Much has changed, and Carter represents much that has changed, since Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma in 1940...
...I am impressed by Andrew Young and others who note that Carter's unique credibility derives from his having paid his dues where it counts, in the deepest South, unlike Northern liberals for whom being "right" on the race question costs little or nothing...
...Military decisions should be made for military reasons," he noted, "and economic decisions for economic reasons...
...I worry that the personnel of a Carter administration might look too much like Kennedy-Johnson redivivus, but I worry much more about the prospect of chapter three of Nixon-Ford...
...I agree...
...Ford represents the brake, Carter the motor force...
...While Carter is pressed for lexicographical precision on every utterance, Ford answers questions at his presidential convenience...
...The stunning fact is that for almost four years,, at least since 1973, the United States has not had a president whose legitimacy was not in grave doubt...
...Neither Carter nor Ford promises a renewal of Great Society programs, and perhaps just as well...
...but, then as now, the search for community between black and white is the primary moral challenge of the American social experiment...
...On the courage to challenge the conventional, the fourth thesis, it seems to me the record is clear...
...Carter offers the hope of changing that perception, and whatever realities attend it, in new relationships of cooperation that translate charity into justice...
...On the question of abortion Carter, like Ford, is captive to the dismal divorce of public policy from moral tradition and logic...
...The tone, if not the substance, of populism is of necessity tempered by success...
...Because a Carter presidency would accelerate the cultural and political development beyond the sterile liberalism that derives from the secular Enlightenment...
...Disappointed but not disillusioned,-for in comparing the Carter of the days of "Jimmy who...
...Ford's election would not...
...No doubt this is related in part to Carter's being very bright and Ford's not being very bright...
...These types may yet create the Carter parallel to the one-thousand-dollar-per-person-income proposal with which they savaged McGovern...
...That prospect is-as they used to say back in the days when "Vigah" was in vogue-invigorating...
...Ford has not...
...Also linked to race, among other factors, is the future of our great cities...
...America, and America's influence in the world, will not move from under the shadow of the Nixon-Ford years of personal corruption, institutional corrosion, and constitutional crisis without a really new administration...
...Because a Carter presidency will be an effective symbol of healing and justice between black and white in America...
...On the issues of nuclear strategy, disarmament, and economic conversion, SANE concludes, "Ford is clearly unacceptable . . . A Carter-Mondale administration offers Americans the hope of a new foreign policy...
...The first, on black-white relations, is reason enough to support Carter...
...During that 27 minutes of silently eloquent indictment of our political process how one longed for anything- a joke, a deprecating remark, merely a shrug of the shoulders-anything that showed human beings transcending the thing for which they were programmed, anything that might have changed the impression of two marionettes waiting for someone to untangle their strings...
...This assumes of course that our common life is now more threatened by bufeaucratized homogenization than by the celebration and lively interaction of the myriad particularisms that are America...
...defiance triumphant descends into that most debilitating of exercises, "discussing the issues...
...As he recently told the national board of SANE, we have to work at disconnecting the complex, moving toward conversion from a war to a peace economy...
...Since he probably does not aspire to being the first Baptist elected pope, one may assume that those enormous energies will be given to an office that Jimmy Carter refuses to believe is beyond human direction...
...That attitude could be winsome in some situations, but I prefer someone who takes the prospect of being president very seriously indeed...
...But the real mark of what might be called courage is the pattern of Carter's own life...
...We will no longer have to check our dreams at the door of the arena of public discourse, the diversity of moral traditions that shape our history will be able to surface more naturally, and through their renewed public potency the pluralism of American life will be enhanced...
...One more thing before elaborating the positive...
...While Kissinger said some good words at the UN last year about a new economic order, his promises seem to have little priority in the Ford administration...
...Ford has not...
...It's hard being a challenger, especially when you accept candor as a campaign issue...
...I am even more impressed by the widespread conviction in the black community of Brooklyn where I live and work that Carter's election will signal white America's sincerity in building one society for all, and that his defeat will be further evidence-heaped upon the assassinations of John, Robert and Martin- that black aspirations will forever be turned back...
...But I am reasonably confident Carter will survive the machinations of those who would make a vice out of the virtue they called for...
...There is no such evidence in the case of Gerald Ford...
...But Carter has a demonstrated capacity to think through "the translation of love into simple justice...
...Neither man shows signs of having thought through the connection between abortion and the most elementary public duty of defining and protecting all the members of the human community, especially the most vulnerable, which includes but is by no means limited to the unborn...
...By this, one means the resources of "mediating structures" in society-family, neighborhood, church, voluntary association, ethnic and racial subcultures...
...This of course moves into the next point about new beginnings that are essential to sustaining the democratic experiment...
...These then, briefly stated, are some reasons for supporting Carter...
...Carter's present position toward a constitutional amendment is essentially the same as his posture toward "right to work" laws...
...Ford's record is, so far as I know, nothing, zero, zilch...
...In the second thesis, it is a mark of sanity in our time to be terrified by the balance of nuclear terror...
...The last president to challenge the secular hegemony was Woodrow Wilson, and before that-and more successfully-Abraham Lincoln...
...While some members of the cultural elite are so insecure as to need the South to condemn, one hopes that most of us welcome the prospect of that reunion, both for the sake of national unity and for the enhancement of the pluralism within our common life...
...On this and other scores, the safe vote is a vote for Gerald Ford, if one believes safety lies in more of the same...
...Carter does demonstrate concern, compassion and an eagerness to experiment with new approaches that would strengthen rather than undercut the resources available...
...he will not get in the way of what "the people" want to do...
...One wishes he would go farther on amnesty for resisters and deserters (by the way, he has the meaning of "amnesty" and "pardon" precisely reversed), and I think he will if elected, but then Ford is nowhere on that one too...
...Back to the seven theses...
...While the position of both candidates on this issue is lamentable, a Carter presidency can, for reasons spelled out below, create a cultural and political climate that will bring moral discourse and public policy into a closer and more candid alliance...
...The promise of new beginnings is turned into bickering over position papers...
...Then too, in politics appearance and reality are interlocked and how things appear to black Americans has a strong bearing on the reality of the country we all share...
...After two hundred or more years, religion and reason, moral tradition and public discourse are beginning to interact in new and, I think, promising ways...
...In his best football fashion, Ford seems sublimely confident of the game plans devised by the technocratic coaches of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD...
...In addition to domestic problems, notably those of minorities, Carter has been responsive to Third and Fourth World concerns, such as those pressed by Bread for the World, the Christian citizens' lobby for justice in trade and aid...
...It assumes also that this is a development beyond sterile and secularizing liberalism...
...I am convinced the risks of a Carter administration are considerably less than the risks involved in continuing our present drift...
...And there are strong signs that another Ford administration would adopt a foreign policy more amenable to the Reagan forces in his party...
...Ford represents his party's grudging accommodation to conventional liberalisim...
...I don't know...
...With respect to specific issues, Carter's record on race is, mentioned earlier, courageous...
...I am not much impressed by what the press calls his "mistakes" during the campaign, mistakes mandated and then deplored by a press that insists upon a candor that it promptly condemns as "unpresidential," by a press that feigns surprise- or, even worse, is surprised-at values and beliefs that are shared by the great majority of Americans whom these scribblers presume to "inform" as to what America is about...
...I expected no more from the other fellow, I was disappointed with Carter...
...At its more cosmic level it is the intuition that we are now witnessing the end of the cultural (and political) hegemony of the secular Enlightenment...
...Ford, under strong party pressure, switched to a reluctant endorsement of returning the abortion issue to the states...
...Ford does not...
...Of course presidents don't create such major shifts, but they can give them political legitimation and accelerated pace...
...The great question is whether the affluence of the few will continue to be perceived as being at the expense of the poverty of the many...
...There is no ideological initiative-with the necessary components of progress, compassion, and the advance of equality -in the Republican party...
...Because there is evidence that the prospect of a nuclear holocaust is an anxiety of pressing urgency to Jimmy Carter...
...The vaunted fourth estate, which daily reminds us of its investigative courage, is not above going after the more vulnerable, especially when the victim complies with its demand to be vulnerable...
...But Carter is not ready to resign himself to the dictates of the military-industrial-labor complex...
...The final point about accelerating cultural shift is crucially important in my political calculus, although terribly complex...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 22
