The Goldwater Movement

...Barry's men, or at least some of them, are even modern and urban: how are they to be accounted for by theories which have always emphasized that rightwing politics was the anxious response of pre-modern men to the cosmopolitan and contemporary world...

...Times, August 13, 1964...

...Certain political commentators have been inclined to treat the Goldwater movement primarily as an emotional reflex, a revulsion from the complexities of the twentieth century...

...once, in brief, there was no great danger that if the right wing detached itself from the political center, a resurgent Negro-labor-liberal alliance would pour into the resulting power vacuum —then the Goldwater movement was able to set out on its present course...

...This is filth: a blatant appeal to the most primitive racial phobias and prejudices...

...The man who in his speech at the Republican convention stirred the bestialities of racism by his innuendoes about "bullies and marauders" in the streets is not a good man...

...Placate the Southern Democratic leaders and Southern voters just as far as possible...

...Such intervention should be encouraged and magnified...

...The right wing has also done something which, thus far, no other political movement in America has managed to do: it has stirred thousands of middle class people to leave their ranch houses and enter the hustle of politics...

...At times our society may approach this kind of equilibrium, and for certain kinds of shortrange analyses, like those of Samuel Lubell, it may be useful to employ such a "model...

...N.Y...

...once it became clear that a large fraction of even enlightened white sentiment consisted of passive sympathy, not active solidarity...

...When there is not enough pressure from the liberallabor movements upon both government and society, the right wing feels free to risk its own political course, breaking off from the moderate center to which it has usually been semi-attached...

...It still does not dispose of, nor even begin to consider, the primary question: what effect would a Goldwater victory have on the disposition of social and political forces in the country...

...A "law" might here be advanced about recent American politics: the more housebroken the left, the more adventuresome the right...

...This represents a significant intervention in political life by a section of the population that had previously been mute and powerless...

...Part of the feeling behind the Goldwater movement also rests upon a sense of national frustration: if the U.S...

...Kennedy before Cuba was troubling, Johnson retaliating in the Gulf of Tinkin equally so...

...Drummond continues: What the Johnson platform—and strategy—seek is to appeal to everybody but the Far Right and the Far Left, which is what the Republicans have done until last month...

...And the most the Johnson regime, creating a concommitted and fervent political activ-stant pressure from the right, and proity may be expected to come from viding for many Americans an ideoGoldwater partisans who now can fi-logical lure in which the imagery of nally feel they have a cause of their nostalgia nestles against vicarious own...

...This curious determinism is expressed, among others, by the Wall Street Journal (July 15, 1964): "Goldwater as President Would Move Cautiously in Changing U.S...

...There would follow in the Negro community a widespread demoralization, the mushrooming of a bitter and apocalyptic chauvinism, and the discrediting of the serious Civil Rights organizations...

...Like it or not, we must recognize this as a fact—and try to seize whatever opportunities it offers...

...To say all this is not to suggest that a victorious Johnson Administration left to it own devices would undertake the radical measures necessary even to begin working out solutions for such problems as automation, unemploy ment, racial discrimination, etc...

...We have nothing in common with those who yearn for catastrophe and apocalypse, for we know who, in such an event, would be the first victims...

...We democratic socialists, precisely because we believe in fundamental socioeconomic change, want that process to continue and go deeper...

...He Wouldn't Try to Dismantle Welfare State, But would Bar Many New Programs...

...The apparatus of a major party all other political tendencies have belies in the grip of his friends: nor will come sated, slack or feeble...

...For what did happen during the Kennedy years was not so much an unfreezing of the legislative process as an unfreezing of intellectual life: it was no longer assumed that we had reached a stasis of glory...

...IV And Johnson...

...and the notion that Negroes have nothing to hope for through an alliance with any segment of white society would be accepted even more than it already has been...

...The Wall Street Journal (July 14, 1964) has noted as much: With American political thought thus polarized between Johnson and Goldwater, the conclusion seems almost inescapable that the center of political gravity must now move rather sharply to the right...

...And as for fascism, obviously the Goldwater movement, like all of our native right-wing movements, diverges crucially from the patterns of European fascism...

...Maybe, in his own way, Goldwater has something when he talks of moral malaise...

...What a comedy that the notion of "a mass society" in which men flounder in apolitical passivity should be shattered by these crusaders from the barbecue-pits...

...And they are bound to create, as they already have created, new and desperate conflicts of interest and idea...

...The Goldwater movement is not yet fully formed: there are conflicting interests at work within it and, especially if it suffers a humiliating defeat, there will be plenty of splits and transformations...

...holding long enough to a lean diet," a mode of starvation...

...There has appeared in a recent New Leader (August 17, 1964) an article by the ADA National Chairman, John Roche, in which he tries to show that Kennedy's New Frontier, despite its paltry legislative record, achieved something of great value: it reopened, says Roche, the possibility of public discussion, It brought to the forefront such problems as poverty, Negro rights, etc...

...Nor is it to assert that the Goldwater movement is at present fascist or neofascist...

...All the criticisms of the Johnson Administration offered by H. Brand on an adjacent page seem to me correct and pertinent...

...that Goldwater is sincere, nice and good...

...And it is a politics that rests on the dirty halfwinks of racism, called euphemisically "the Southern strategy...

...No matter what anyone says or does, the racial question looms large in the election, and this because the Goldwater movement has chosen, with venom aforethought, to make it so...

...Right now it seems to consist of a loose coalition between a hard reactionary core, providing muscle, ideology and money, and a larger scatter of traditional conservatives, providing votes, emotion and precinct committees...

...Here is its election strategy as summed up, sympathetically, by Roscoe Drummond in the Herald Tribune (August 26, 1964): 1) Be gentle with the South...

...it would not abolish the graduated income tax, scuttle Social Security or sell off TVA...

...but given either a depression or a group of major defeats in the Cold War, a minority segment of the Goldwater movement could well transform itself into pin-striped fascists...

...Once the right wing saw that the Negroes would more or less have to go it alone...

...Johnson's "moderation...

...And while reconciling to his campaign a good part of the Southern Democrats, he also agrees to having seated at the Democratic convention the Freedom Democrats of Mississippi...

...Chose the way of this present Ad ministration, and you have the way of mobs in the street, restrained only by the plea that they wait until after the election to ignite violence again...

...inquiry and restlessness began to matter...

...This last seems to me especially im-Whatever else, it ought by now to be clear how inadequate was the official liberalism of the last few decades...

...What matters here is not so much Johnson's personal opportunism as the possibility it offers for certain limited advances in American politics...

...could be handled with gunboats...

...Roche exaggerates, in the way most Kennedy admirers do, but there is an important strain of truth in what he says...

...No, it is neither political sophistication nor common sense to suggest that a Goldwater administration would result in little more than a somewhat conservatized stewardship of the welfare state...

...At the moment there is no serious possibility of an American fascism on a mass scale...

...But note the qualifying phrase: the Johnson Administration left to its own devices...

...But in the long run—and in the unlikely case of electoral victory, the short run—there can be no reconciling nostalgia for laisse-faire with lust for world domination...

...To do little or nothing about automation may not threaten the continued existence of the welfare state, such as it is...

...That this man speaks in the name of morality, and that softheaded liberal commentators tell us he is, despite his intellectual confusion, a nice man, I find nauseating...

...And here the kind of assuaging sentimentalism practiced by Reston and other moderate liberals is very annoying...

...No right-wing movement ever begins with the full support of big business...

...Two full terms might yield an enduring influence upon the body politic, nevertheless, not by surgery so much as through holding long enough to a lean diet...

...Conflict is inescapable, and the only question is what forms it will take and what value it will have...

...What is needed now is an overwhelming defeat of the Goldwater movement, so that it wili be dispatched from the forefront of American political life and a renewed Negro-laborliberal alliance can press forward once again in behalf of the true needs of our society...

...Michael Walzer, writing from England, has a pertinent comment: "the theory of ressentiment has got to be stretched beyond breaking point if it is going to include the frustrated, bankrupt embittered types who voted for Hitler...

...Is that a prospect to be faced with equanimity...

...Such contradictions are real enough, and no doubt there are a good many Goldwater partisans who manage, through the magic of sheer desire, to reconcile these perspectives in their minds...

...There is a new political enthe Republican nomination, Senator ergy surging up in this country, it is Goldwater has left a strong imprint on an energy of hard-bitten resentment, American politics...

...To intensify the support of the liberal-labor world he chooses Hubert Humphrey for the Vice-Presidency, surely the best of the available possibilities—yet makes cercertain that Humphrey first publicly reassures the "business community" that he is no longer quite the liberal he once was...

...and why, as we edge toward omnipotence, can we not simply eradicate Communism with one swoop of our strength?* There is more to be said than this kind of impressionistic sociology allows...

...But the realities of our social life are too rough and intractable for the politics of equilibrium to be able to contain them indefinitely...

...When Goldwater says that Johnson's conversion to civil rights is belated, as a scrutiny of Congressional voting demonstrates, he is again telling the truth...

...This politics rests in part on the social selfishness of large segments among the upper middle class which consciously disdain the sentiments of "welfarism" and are prepared to let the poor and the ethnic minorities stew in silence or, if noisy, be slugged into submission...

...The Johnson Administration, partly in accordance with the self-image cherished by the President and praised by his admirers as the very summit of political astuteness, has set for itself a consciously "centrist" course...

...Whom would it encourage to greater boldness, whom discourage...

...Judging by his initial campaign speeches, Goldwater intends openly to capitalize on the "white backlash...

...Malcolm X, or someone like him, demagogically inflaming the entirely justified dismay of the Negroes would become a dominant spokesman...

...This politics rests on the desire of powerful men—Ralph Cordiner is not a mid-Western automobile salesman, George Humphrey not a malaise-smitten petty bourgeois, H. L. Hunt not a bewildered storekeeper—to call a halt to social reform and then slowly to push it back...

...NY Times, July 21, 1964...

...and the more diverse everything is, the more they want it all reduced to identity...

...His low-grade sediment of the not-very-liberal New Frontier leaves not much reason for enthusiasm...

...it would assuredly not smash the labor unions...

...I do not believe it...

...By now Goldwater need merely insert a phrase here and there in his speeches about "marauders in the street" and everyone will understand that he is speaking not about unmolested murderers in Mississippi but desperate juveniles in Harlem...

...A good part of the feeling behind the Goldwater movement does stem from a nostalgia for the days when Negroes knew their place, cities had not swamped the landscape, income taxes were not so oppressive, and little countries crossing the U.S...

...But political phenomena must be seen not merely in their momentary appearance, but also in their potential...

...but would anyone maintain that in such situations, where nations tremble at the edge of war and the immediate fateful decision does lie in the hands of very few people, it would not be heart-chilling to have to depend on the judgment of Goldwater and his cronies...

...the more irrational the world seems, the more they long for rational answers...

...But at a time when problems have a way of "suddenly" breaking out with intense violence ("suddenly," because there has been a studied failure to cope with them in advance), a decision not to push ahead with change and reform is equivalent to social retreat...

...A single term of Goldwater conservatism might have surprisingly little lasting reverse thrust upon domestic affairs...

...Thus, when the Freedom Democrats from Mississippi win a notable moral-political victory at the Democratic convention, it is foolish merely to stress the incompleteness of that victory or to dismiss it as a mere placatory maneuver on the part of the Establishment...

...A smashing defeat of the Goldwater movement would offer the labor and liberal forces, as also the Negroes, a major opportunity to come forward and press for those social and economic measures which will be desperately needed in the next five years...

...It has fired them with the passions of a cause which, in the style of many demagogic movements, brings together the rhetoric of national interest with the urgencies of social selfishness...

...Those who feel this way are undoubtedly attracted to Senator Goldwater, and many part-political and part-ethical movements have gone further on less...

...When Goldwater says that the Administration's "anti-poverty program" is mostly political publicity, he is telling the truth...

...Our hope lies in stretching the limits of the wel fare state, in continued free discussion that permits us to raise the need for transcending those limits, in an atmosphere of democratic self-confidence and participation...

...His more frantic fans anticipate and his foes forecast something like a rev olution of the right—but not Barry...

...And he need not even do that, for he has made himself sufficiently plain: every whitesuperiority punk in the country has gotten the message...

...How would the Negro community respond to a Goldwater victory...

...I would venture the speculation that what crucially enabled the Goldwater movement to enter its "take-off" phase was the failure of the labor and liberal communities to cement a sufficiently strong alliance with the rising Negro movement...

...Rapid technological change, gnawing economic inequalities, a profound moral malaise, the growing discrepancy between a politics geared to diffusion and an economy requiring discipline—these are a few such realities...

...Even if from the mouth of the devil, the truth is the truth...

...Consider foreign policy...

...The tragedy of the moment is that it has been the Goldwater movement which has taken upon itself— with comic inappropriateness, but also frightening earnestness—the role of crusader...

...To insist that there is a firm reactionary intent behind the Goldwater movement is not, of course, to claim that the major centers of American big business are supporting it...

...And neither is the man who, when "asked by a European reporter to comment on his policies toward Europe and Germany," replied: "I think that Germany originated the modern concept of peace through strength...

...Both the Negro movement, on the one hand, and the new right wing, on the other, refuse to settle into the mild assumptions of a political equilibrium, that moderate balance in which "countervailing powers" are supposed to play off one against the other, reconcilable in their opposition...

...III There is a variety of sophisticated analysis, found among both left and right-wing commentators, which denies that a Goldwater victory wounld importantly change the shape and direction of American society...

...James Reston writes, for example: The more complicated life becomes, the more people are attracted to simple solutions...

...What matters is not the motives of Johnson or anyone else, but the fact that Aaron Henry was seated and Bull Connor walked out...

...Let us, for the sake of argument, accept this analysis...

...it is the major immediate hope for American politics...

...To Goldwater is utterly routed in the eleca notable extent the terms of public tion, his movement—for it is a movedebate will be determined not by the ment, not merely a candidacy—will surauthentic and pressing needs of the vive as a powerful force...

...it would not pare Federal spending to fit into a peanut bag...

...At the present moment, the idea of socialism is unfortunately not a central issue in American politics...

...Leaving aside the far right, most of the significant politics in this country will be fought out within the loose confines of the Democratic party...

...An opportunist in the root sense of the term, Johnson is remarkably sensitive to the cross-workings of social pressures: he consciously balances off left and right, while preempting for himself the wide middle...

...In and around the Goldwater movement there reside the cadres of a fascist group...

...Standing still can be a form of retrogression...

...Muddled nostalgia, homestead economics, day-dream brinkmanship all enter the Goldwater complex...

...Speaking on September 3 in Arizona, he painted himself as a gallant defender of white womanhood: Our daughters, our wives, all you women, feel unsafe on our streets today...

...For all practical purposes, the overwhelming bulk of the liberal-labor-Negro forces will exert their political pressure within the Democratic party during the next period...

...That this potential simmers in American society is significant enough...

...By hauling the Republican party rightward...

...The man who voted against the Civil Rights Act is not a good man...

...It is easy enough to point out the contradictions in the Goldwater platform: e.g., the promise to cut federal spending and decrease the power of national government coupled with the intent to build up still further the armed forces toward possible adventure abroad...

...But the fact that it could not exist in case of a Goldwater victory and would in case of a Johnson victory, is the key...

...It is probable that power would have a chastening effect upon Goldwater, probable that he would not start by "unleashing" Chiang Kai-shek or invading Cuba or even promoting a full-scale war in southeast Asia (though the order of probability decreases with each of these examples...

...To undercut Goldwater in conspicuous patriotism and as part of an increasingly "firm" foreign policy, he launches the Gulf of Tonkin attack...

...In its vocabulary, and at least part of its intent, this movement is not satisfied with a mild defense or a mild improvement of the bureaucratic and militarized welfare state...

...Unless they easily be dislodged from it...

...is indeed as rich, powerful and good as it keeps telling itself, why then do so many countries disobey it...

...and it is driven by intensity of purEverything now shifts in his direc-pose at the very moment that almost tion...

...To do little or nothing in behalf of the Negroes would not remove the Civil Rights Act from the books...

...people began to think and talk...

...but it would radically change the content of that welfare state...

...Dallas may be a barbarous place, but it is absolutely uptodate barbarism...

...but the idea of a new wave of social reforms is...

...This is a kind of fatalist historicism which anyone intensely concerned with the realities of American society ought to avoid...

...Policy...

...For it can then calculate that even in electoral defeat it will gain power, becoming the domi nant pressure upon an administration that lacks firm principles of its own...

...And the article goes on to say: A Goldwater administration might end being noted by historians more for maintaining the status quo than for turning it upside down...

...it would not turn the bulk of Government back to the states...

...No foreseeable society seems likely to be so finely adjusted to the conflicting needs of its population as to preclude serious conflict and discontent...

...It has made them into political activists who learn the art of attending meetings and the craft of outsitting and out-voting their more conventional opponents...

...brinkmanship...

...That Goldwater would not try to dismantle social security may well be true: in fact, I am sure it is...

...Yet I think it would be politically foolish and humanly insensitive to ignore the widespread feeling that with this man at the button we would have grave reason to sleep even less well than we have in the past...

...2) Concentrate hard on winning the votes of Republican moderates the way Gen...

...Consider the racial question...

...it would dismantle not much of the welfare state which this candidate despises...

...in its "culture" of social meanness, racist hostility and chauvinist mania they find sustenence...

...And a second "law": In the politics we now have in the United States, the kind and quantity of the presure put upon the center largely determines where and what the center will be...

...Without any doubt, as a decision by the white majority to halt and perhaps turn back the Negro revolution...

...Probably true, as far as it goes...

...But there is also a hard ideology, a precise focus of interest, and no one should have any trouble in identifying these: they animate a politics of reaction...

...Nevertheless I propose to vote for the Johnson-Humphrey ticket because its victory would at least give us the chance to make them possible...

...For what matters is not merely the inferred motives of the Goldwater supporters, but the visible meaning of the Goldwater movement...

...For it is outrageous to be told again and * One trouble with this kind of motiveprobing is that it explains either too much or too little...

...but it would allow the conditions that breed Negro despair to fester...

...Goldwater to alienate the labor and liberal vote so totally that none of the populous, industrial states will be jeopardized by Mr...

...Goldwater may actually have achieved some part of his dream of turning the country towards a significantly more conservative choice .. . If Goldwater chooses to regard the Eastern financiers as his enemy, bent on control of the GOP for narrow, self-serving aims, Johnson is just as ready to hail them as new-found friends...

...The intellectual guardians of the Goldwater movement, it is worth noting, seem not to have heard about "the end of ideology": perhaps they read the wrong magazines...

...In terms of political relationships, social dynamics and the temper of public life, a Goldwater victory would have enormous and disastrous consequences...

...A segment of the business class is supporting Goldwater, and while not the crucial segment, it is, in terms of re sources and perhaps even numbers, big enough...

...it is essential to keep repeating them...

...In regard to the United States today, such an expectation is sheer wishful fantasy...

...The man who said that "because Joe McCarthy lived, we are a freer, safer and more alert nation," is not a good man...

...the frightened, losing-status types who, we thought, supported McCarthy...

...3)Count on Sen...

...As Mr...

...Goldwater has moved the Republican Party from Right Center to Far Right, Mr...

...Eisenhower concentrated on winning the votes of Democratic moderates...

...Emphasis added...

...No mere electoral result can guarantee such reforms...

...and plenty more could be added...

...It will set country, but by the ideological fan-itself up as the primary opposition to tasias of the right wing...

...At least some of the charges Goldwater will bring against Johnson are true...

...and the triumphantly egotistical, prosperous types who seem to be behind Goldwater...

...Whether such an opportunity will be seized, is another question...

...Johnson is moving the Democratic Party from Left Center to Center (emphasisadded...