'Twas A Famous Victory - But Who Won What?
Howe, Irving
DECEMBER 10, 1964 Well, the nation has saved itself from the disgrace of Goldwaterism. Mostly, it seems, because the fear of atomic war proved to be decisive: it's one thing to rant and...
...To suppose, however, that the Goldwater impulse is exhausted, or that its spokesmen will simply be swept out of the Republican Party by an aroused Eastern establishment, seems a mistake...
...Within the Republican Party, the Goldwater tendency retains a great deal of bargaining power...
...and what we wanted could be intensely dramatized...
...Indeed a good synonym for Liberalism is Tokenism...
...It first affected the Democratic Party, as the old-style precinct workers were more and more replaced by motivated workers from the unions and from Liberal circles...
...Can we continue to guide our foreign policy with compulsive slogans: "anticommunism," "containment," "the free world," etc...
...Those problems that can be attacked within the framework of welfarism, they do confront, more or less...
...To this process of disintegration Lyndon Johnson will undoubtedly contribute by offering posts to a number of "moderate" Republicans, thereby speeding up the migration of conservative sentiment and money from Republicans to Democrats...
...but concerning the problems which require a breakthrough beyond the political economy of more, they have almost nothing to say...
...If we want at all to be involved in American politics, we must try to guide and speed this process so that the labor-lib eral-Negro coalition will become stronger, more articulate, more pro grammatic...
...This first kind of problem indicates a need to extend the welfare state, the second to move beyond its increasingly constricted limits...
...Embittered antagonists as the two wings may be, neither alone can soon rebuild the Republican Party into a formidable opposition to President Johnson...
...But where are good neighborhoods, or clean rivers, or rural reconstruction, or liberating education, or an effort to improve the quality of the standard of living, to countervail regimenting and brainwashing, to broaden rather than narrow civil liberties...
...as an ideologicalpolitical movement, it did extremely well...
...Those right-wing ideologues who have some long-range perspective are not discouraged, and from their point of view, are correct not to be...
...For in the present fluid situation, what hap pens in Washington depends to a considerable extent on what is done to Washington—done by that loose laborliberalNegro coalition which delivered so large a portion of the Johnson vote...
...than one can only conclude that too large a portion of American political thought consists in providing unsolicited blessings for whatever happens to exist...
...More and more, this means defeat in advance—that is, the failure of passing a watered-down version of the legislation that might have been adequate twenty years ago but no longer is today...
...This sort of realignment, very far from completed, may not satisfy those whose conception of politics comes from textbooks, Marxist, pseudo-Marxist or otherwise...
...The remarkable changes in Southern voting are another instance of this process, as is the equally remarkable shift in Negro voting...
...One reason im portant social legislation was passed in the New Deal era was that for some decades earlier the labor and radical movements had been agitating for spe cific measures such as unemployment insurance and laws enabling union or ganization...
...But at the moment, the Goldwater tendency controls the national apparatus of the Republican Party, and even if in January it loses that control, it will still remain the party in many states...
...One clever reporter, Ted Lewis of the New York Daily News, calls the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson a party of "the tent and the table...
...1I Now, in an authoritarian state—that is, one retaining the governmental structure of totalitarianism but without active terror—whatever political life is possible gets squeezed into the single ruling party...
...That Nixon and Lodge should object is understandable: they thrive on murk...
...DECEMBER 10, 1964 Well, the nation has saved itself from the disgrace of Goldwaterism...
...Peace" is the continued accumulation of hardened missile-sites, contracts for new bombers, billions for moon shots...
...Such a program, which might not explicitly go beyond the limits of the status quo but if serious would be bound implicitly to challenge those limits, should obviously begin with the idea of democratizing the U.S...
...Mr...
...What will now happen is that the divergent group and class interests which have hurtled themselves into the political Center will, after a brief reign of Big Daddy's harmony, begin to struggle over the disposition of politics and economics...
...All pressure groups and interests crowd toward the center...
...If the Nixon-Scranton-Lodge alliance (assuming such a union of humpty-dumpties) tries to remove the right-wingers from control, it risks a split that in a good many states would virtually destroy the party...
...we knew what we wanted...
...but it continues...
...The ground had been pre pared...
...It has thrived organizationally...
...Meanwhile, the social problems of this country, some blatant and others insidiously subtle, continue to accumulate and fester...
...and that is where an astute politician can most readily play the role of the broker mediating among a variety of interests...
...Urban Reconstruction" is the cabal of Washington, city party-bosses, real-estate promoters, and automobile manufacturers to destroy neighborhoods and communities......Agriculture" is the underwriting of chain-grocers and latifundiae, pesticides, the eradication of farmers, and the enclosure of the countryside for motels......Political Economy" is the galloping Gross National Product, stepping up TV advertising, the unchecked aggrandizing of the broadcasting networks (including the bartering away of Telstar), and more highways when there are already too many cars...
...and the struggle between FDR and the Liberty League...
...some relief provided for Appalachia...
...are appropriated while the substance is neglected...
...does it not strengthen democracy in England...
...Mostly, it seems, because the fear of atomic war proved to be decisive: it's one thing to rant and rumble about getting tough with the Commies, quite another to put a man in the White House who might act out his fantasy...
...What happens, more often than not, has been pungently described by Paul Goodman: "Education" m e a n s subsidizing schools to train National Science Foundation grade-getters for higher status and salaries in Research and Development, and as professional institutional personnel...
...In Poland, for instance, a considerable range of political views struggles for expression through the constricting agency and muddling vocabulary of the Communist Party...
...reapportionment threatens further losses...
...No doubt, certain desirable steps will follow: Medicare, even if in a poor version, will be passed...
...How is the scale of the military budget to be determined...
...At the moment, the United States has the kind of one-and-a-half party system which seemed likely to be—but was not—established in Europe during the 1950's, when the Christian Democratic and other center-bourgeois parties seemed totally secure in office and the Social Democrats permanently confined to an ineffectual opposition...
...When Barry Goldwater suggested a division into liberal and conservative parties, he was attacked by the Republican "moderates" as, in effect, un-American...
...In any case, realignment does not mean that at the stroke of midnight the country would divide itself, like boys choosing up a game of stickball, into rigidly opposing camps...
...At the head of the big table in a very big tent sits an affable and lording Big Daddy who passes out slices of the barbecue with a sharp eye toward the number of votes and amount of pressure each can summon...
...This year the same process has come to a head in the Republican Party, withthe emergence of a powerful force of committed conservatives as the decisive section of Republican campaign workers...
...Considering his gift for absorbing whatever attractive rhetoric is at hand, as well as his sense that the health of the nation requires meeting certain pressures and needs, one can anticipate a flurry of socio-economic programs...
...Today, however, there is not nearly enough effort at program matic thinking in the labor and Negro, nor in the liberal, communities...
...No, for some time ahead the GOP cannot be expected to provide an effective opposition to the Johnson administration, and it remains an open question whether it can reconstitute itself as a coherent force capable of dislodging the Democrats from either the Presidency or the Congress...
...Which brings us, finally, to the topic of "political realignment...
...Thus, the two-party system is endangered, and not, as establishment liberals now claim, because there has been an influx of ideological politics from the right, but more fundamentally, because, with the left disabled and the center brilliantly preempted by Johnson, there is no serious basis for a resurgent Republican Party except as some kind of voice for the Right...
...Frank Meyer in The National Review, not exactly our favorite magazine, writes nevertheless with simple accuracy: A change has been in the making in the mechanics of American politics for a number of years...
...it operates a wide network of radio programs...
...What seems depressing right now is that even for so limited a conflict, the labor, liberal and Negro groups are not well prepared...
...How is a policy of reconversion to be brought about...
...It is slow, torturous and often frustrating as hell...
...There is a strong inclination to depend on Washington, and an even stronger inclination not to venture beyond the well-marked and well-worn limits of the familiar...
...It is insulting to hear these people talk of a Great Society...
...Most of the present signs suggest that the Johnson administration, freed from any precise political indebtedness by the enormous margin of its victory, will gravitate toward a liberal-conservative Center...
...Their hold on office is broken...
...Johnson feels most comfortable...
...III These notes are being written at a somewhat disadvantageous time, before President Johnson has delivered his messages to Congress announcing his program...
...That is what politics and economics are partly about...
...In the teeth of this magnitude of bucks, one cannot seriously point to the minimum wage of $I.25 (excluding many categories) or 10,000 in the Peace Corps (after three years and $300 million) or the anti-discrimination housing order (applied to a minority of cases...
...That is where Mr...
...he has not rebuked the vulgar outbreaks of J. Edgar Hoover (whose immediate dismissal could well be the first step in a program of national welfare...
...and more combative...
...and even when solutions are proposed for urgent problems, what all too often happens is that the names of the solution (anti-poverty, etc...
...But at least it cannot be accused of wanting to blow up the world...
...everything consequently becomes smarmed over (the latest and smarmiest catchword being "moderation...
...Complain as you like about the American electorate: charge it with complacence, selfishness, ignorance and backlash...
...Should we plan and for what...
...Silly though it may be for the Right to claim all 26 million Republican votes, there can be no doubt that it has grown in power and influence...
...Political realignment is a process that has been going on for decades and continues now: it bears something of the inexorable...
...Are present budget priorities really designed to produce a "great society" or a caricature of one...
...These are beginnings...
...it issues a large volume of printed matter...
...At least for now there is no other way...
...But when a variety of liberal writers claim that there is some inherent genius in the American character which precludes ideological politics (a notion that distorts the nation's past: was Jacksonianism not ideologi cal...
...How do we propose to cope with the consequences of the scientific-technological revolution...
...that is where the pendulum of American sentiment seemingly comes to rest...
...We badly need a schedule of socio-economic legislation: let us give it a pompous name, A Charter for America...
...Congress and go ahead to the proposals advanced in the Triple Revolution statement...
...Now there is a certain gesture or pretense of coping with these problems, but increasingly these efforts tend to muck up the issues and to discredit the very idea that there can be significant ways of confronting common needs...
...There are portents already...
...If we are indeed to have a politics of "the tent and the table," then let those who speak for the needy and the poor, the oppressed and the neglected, crowd into the tent and press around the table, even if this means some jostling of elbows...
...Above all, it can expect that the kind of malaise induced by the transitions and failures of the welfare state—the malaise upon which it feeds—will continue to afflict millions of Americans and make them receptive to its appeal...
...I see no reason to conclude that it has reached the limit of its strength—except insofar as the nature of American society may, at some undetermined point, place a check upon any political-ideological movement...
...In an economy whose structure is already badly distorted, somehow all the remedial measures of the Liberals — whether the tax-cut or the campaign against dropouts— tend to increase the take of the suburban middle-class, the diplomates, the school-monks...
...And here the experience of the 'thir ties seems relevant...
...And in an era of sparse blessings, that is something for which to be grateful...
...They fall under two rough headings: those for which an answer is more (social and welfare measures) and those for which an answer is new (social restructurings caused by automation, the allocation of national resources, etc...
...It would be foolish to take them at face value, equally foolish to dismiss them as mere deception...
...Social Welfare" is the proliferation of social engineers and the reduction of 6 whole populations to being permanent clients, and the establishment of isolation-camps for dropouts and deviants...
...and then proceed to suggest that ideological politics would destroy democracy (why...
...Their one symbol of success— victory in the deep South—is actually a portent of disaster, since it foreshadows isolation as a bitter-end racist minority...
...Here, in the U.S., the Republicans have been reduced to a shambles...
...I am not being unfair...
...You would think that intellectuals, if no one else, would try to see beyond the limits of the moment, the horizons of the narrowly empirical...
...and funds devoted to educa tion, even if the increasing distortion of value and purpose within the American educational system makes federal aid far less of a blessing than it once seemed...
...In a thoughtful postelection piece Carey McWilliams lists both kinds of problems, and his catalogue is worth noticing if only to remind ourselves of the urgency of the obvious: Is a "great society" one that, on an ever larger scale, continues to despoil the environment...
...As an electoral machine, Goldwaterism suffered a rout...
...How should resources be allocated...
...inside their ranks fester murderous hostilities...
...Why not...
...Today in America a somewhat parallel development seems to be taking place, not because of legal restrictions on political activities, but because of the inanition of the democratic process and the moral-social paralysis of a stalled welfare state...
...The President has begun to woo the Southern "loyalists" like Senators Russell and Talmadge, in part to maintain a check against liberal pressure...
Vol. 12 • January 1965 • No. 1
