Letter to a Right-Wing Friend: Post Mortem
Jr, Otis L. Graham
Dear ---, In this first letter after the election you doubtless expect us to gloat over the margin, or ride you about the decline of your party, to say that it serves you right, and...
...The success you can never have, either at the polls or, should you someday have it there, through really surgical legislation, would demonstrate as only history can the superficial nature of your reforms...
...It is rather clear who the conservatives were, don't you think...
...It is hard to believe that you seriously have concluded that most of your frustrations stem from government, that you do not recognize them as the fellow travellers of the growth of the corporation, the sheer numbers of us, and the intimate interconnection of all the parts of our ponderous, relentless system...
...Literally, to regain the sort of freedom you mourn requires a really radical revolt, one which addresses itself to economic bigness and population growth...
...Henry Ford regimented more Americans than Franklin Roosevelt...
...And you have your villains wrong...
...You are not the first to have felt stifled, to have suspected that this country is following the entire western world into some sort of disaster, who felt frustrated in some important center of his being by the littleness of individual men in an age when everything seems to threaten them...
...It is hard to be an honest reactionary, for it requires in the end an attack upon our true Santa Claus, industrialism...
...You could have learned it only through victory...
...and in some way you reasoned that an attack upon the Federal Government would bring the life-giving draught of liberty again...
...You can't get there from here, that is the sad reality...
...television and asphalt roads and cities have taught the young to skip church, forget to say "Yes, Sir," and occasionally tear up Fort Lauderdale, and all this without any help from "morally depraved leftists" of the Stevenson/Bowles/ Humph rey variety There was only one way for you to have learned that, and it costs too much...
...Precisely at the time when we ought to have been deciding between the centrism of Lyndon and a candidate further Ieft, we were fighting the old campaign of 1936 over again...
...Of course something was settled, we have retired the Great Dismantler from Arizona, but neither the absurd campaign nor the decisiveness of November 3 have clarified for me a great puzzle: What were you doing there...
...Let me put the best face on it I can...
...What will defeat, what will having carried only six states, teach William Buckley and the other true believers...
...What we must now decide—and we have been prevented by the trial just finished from even discussing it—is just what further controls are necessary to preserve our re sources, purify our air and water, harness our population explosion, defend our essential values against the benevolent threat of a workless day, insure minority rights, and prevent nuclear war...
...To battle for Barry, as you did, was to join those who attack in the wrong direction...
...In his hell-for-leather way Goldwater may have been conserving something, but let's call it by its name: conserving the dwindling liberty of businessmen to deal with consumers any way they please, conserving the liberty of the racists to deal with the Negro any way they please, the lost privilege of the United States to treat small Caribbean nations as she pleases...
...But had the Senator won, you would have gathered in a few short years it great burden of lessons...
...But you are not one of these physically comfortable but psychologically miserable insurance salesmen, realtors, brokers, the recently arrived upper-middle class white Americans of the Goldwater movement...
...I can see the appeal of all this to a businessman or a racist—but to you and to me...
...He sought conflict with "international Communism," while Johnson, timidly and half ashamed, pursues the path of accommodation and compromise...
...Your motivation in standing with Goldwater, I must assume, is that of a sensitive soul who prefers privacy in a world that presses in with its crowds, its limitations of space, its confinement of spontaneity, its forms for filing, ranks for standing, lines for waiting, its diminished horizons for heroism and great ness of spirit...
...What is throttling your spirit is not our modest welfare government, but the daily jostling of others against you in this vast economic web we are in...
...The first, that this country is conservative (that is, on dead center) and no radical, of right or left, has much chance to carry through fundamental reforms...
...You can't gain back the old oaken bucket, the Old South, your docile old Negro maid so blissfully ignorant of the minimum wage, the clean unspoiled beaches of pretourist, pre-beer can America...
...But I had thought it obvious that a man who wanted to restore the excitement and untrammeled sense of opportunity we presumably had in this country not too long ago would recognize that to have lined up with Goldwater was to line up with those who fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of American life...
...The 19th century is irretrievable, for we will not repudiate the industrialism that took it away from us...
...The principle of recruitment of the average right-winger includes outright economic selfishness, status problems, the mental torment of adjusting to a world without certainties, racial bigotry—how did you get over there...
...Dear ---, In this first letter after the election you doubtless expect us to gloat over the margin, or ride you about the decline of your party, to say that it serves you right, and "that settles that...
...You always insisted that you were a "conservative...
...A man like yourself, dedicated to an enlargement of personal freedom and some sort of fundamental reversal of the direction of modern life, never belonged in the Goldwater camp...
...I can only guess that your language provides a clue...
...why should you be joining them in their splenetic counter-attack in the general direction of those forces that seem to be threatening the ease, income, and suburban enjoyment of recent acquisition...
...What made me most unhappy about this long siege we were under was the absurdity of having to endure it in the 1960's...
...It is the giant corporation that has devoured the spaces where a man can become his own economic baron ("entrepreneurial bravura," Richard Hofstadter calls it...
...Going back, in a merely political sense, was the wrong issue in the wrong country at the wrong time...
...The freedom that our 19th-century ancestors revelled in was reduced by population and combination and war, and you are not going to restore it by repealing the New Deal...
...You are a poor boy and something of an intellectual...
...But even assuming, after a Goldwater victory, that his favorite measures were to be successful, a more important lesson would be forthcoming...
...But little help is to be expected through diminishing the size of government, for were there no government at all, you would still be nicely hemmed in by the monster corporation, by the rules of cities, and by the self-doubt of the twentieth century...
...But by what reasoning did you arrive, by way of cure, at an attack upon government...
...Words like "confinement," "limitation," "regimentation," and "coercion" sprinkle your conversation...
...Once Barry tackled that Democratic Congress, this lesson—borne in so harshly on John Kennedy—would have been assimilated...
...It was not a fit place for a thoughtful man...
...Count me, under these circumstances, as a dedicated conservative, hanging on tightly to my freedom from economic insecurity (such as it is), from adulterated and over-priced drugs and food (here again, I would prefer to extend this freedom, but one must defend until the initiative passes), and especially my freedom from the suicidal hanker ings of manichaean patriots for the relief of a nuclear showdown...
...You think your right-wing activities are admirable in part because they are unpopular, marking you as an independent thinker...
...In certain moods you went ahead and called yourself a reactionary, and I have tried to use that to account for your enlistment with Barry...
...They were the cautious citizens who turned down the invitation to go on the Great Crusade, and the Presidential candidate who practiced the lower arts of compromise, steadiness, pragmatism, patience, realism, adult control over the emotional yearnings for simpler days...
...Very little real freedom, very little decrease in the annoying limitations on personal eccentricity and initiative would be the result of throwing the rascals out and cutting down their cherry tree...
...He was devoted to a "radical" program, while Johnson defends the status quo...
...If you are not ready to join in that effort, surely it is not too much to expect that you withhold your aid from reactionary brigades of the Goldwater type, the armies of the selfish and the confused...
...You must have come to your reactionary persuasion out of a sense of being cramped in a world so cluttered with the ambiguous and the threatening...
...It was perhaps a fit place for those whose successes are cribbed in some small way by federal efforts to spread them to the less fortunate (we call this rather puny, good-hearted effort "liberalism"), and who are not willing to allow this sort of humanitarian meddling...
...You want to go "back" to "freedom...
...But Goldwater wasn't a man of conservative temperament, being given to rigid abstractions such as "free enterprise" and "the Free World" without a glance at changing circumstances (Burke would have shunned him as an ideologue), and being further given to impulsive action...
...Try being seriously for anti-trust activity and birth control, and learn what it is to be unpopular, i.e., really radical...
...The pessimism we feel, the collapse of old certainties, the world wars, the interminable waits for one inch of action, these things have very little to do with Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...What regiments you is not some bureaucrat from Washington but the necessary arrangements of the ant heap, where so many millions must get to their places at the wheel and home every day and where, without rules, all would be trampled...
Vol. 12 • January 1965 • No. 1
