Does the Goldwater movement Have a Future?

...Minimizing the effect of such ideologies involves checking those dominant trends which now disenfranchise and alienate the new middle class...

...Either adjustment or creation must prevail as the defining characteristic of progressive ideology—and adjustment becomes increasingly more difficult, dangerous and sterile...

...Though they do not constitute more than a significant minority within the movement, their presence suggests that Goldwaterism derives its major impetus and significance from a political revolt of a segment of the new middle class...

...An abundance of consump tion opportunities and a high but impotent social status are insufficient...

...Thus the Goldwater movement is not merely a status revolt, nor the panic of a dying class, but a genuine quest for the power to remake a society which these people feel has betrayed them...

...efficiency, progress, and science against waste, stagnation, and superstition...

...The capture of the regulatory commissions by the regulatees is merely the most obvious development in this area...

...Having aspired to become citizens, they find themselves merely consumers, tax-payers, and employees...

...Foremost is the growth in scale of our social institutions, which tends to locate initiative exclusively within insulated elites and to separate the direction of social activities from those who perform and suffer them...

...One must reject the view that the Goldwater movement is simply an irrational response to a world the Goldwaterites do not understand and cannot contend with...

...What has happened instead is that their expectations have been systematically denied by the going structure of American life—viz., megaorganization, rationalization, bureaucratization, and the substitution of institutional relations for political processes...

...Granted there is among them a large measure of irrationality, particularly on nuclear matters...

...Such notions can be maintained, however, only by ignoring the evidence of Engler, Kolko, Nossiter and others that to the degree the Federal government assumes authority in economic matters, it becomes the willing minority partner of the economic interests involved...

...Given certain conventional assumptions about prospective changes in the economy, the movement of traditionally blue collar people into oc cupations demanding greatly increased training will accelerate...

...A good deal of evidence supports this view...

...If I am correct in assuming that Goldwater and his associates are exploiting a widespread social protest, at least two important conclusions may be drawn...

...There are hopeful possibilities, however, that the protest can be turned to democratic and humane purposes...

...On election eve, one such person told me he had voted against Goldwater precisely because he believed the Arizonan incapable of controlling those desirable international crises which his essentially wise policies would provoke...

...And while the movement has been forced to compromise within the Republican National Committee and is unlikely to recapture the presidential nomination in 1964, it will retain considerable power at state and local levels...

...In short, they expected to enter the old and celebrated middle class...

...Sharper clashes between one's expectations and one's actual life, a widespread and realistic fear of unemployment, and an intensifying feeling of helplessness in the face of malignant events, are likely to form the common experience of the new middle class in the next decade...

...It is this experience that nationalist, racist, anti-egalitarian and authoritarian ideologies will continue to exploit...

...The fact is that liberal and socialist writers have taken ambiguous positions with respect to these trends...

...turns (decisively, I believe) on the ability of intellectuals to solve three related problems: • What, if any, are the institutional innovations which would enable the new middle class to develop life styles enhancing personal independence and responsible work, and which would consequently enable it to play a more decisive role in national political life...

...To a group which was led to expect a society so different from contemporary America, an interpretation of society which locates an inincreasing monopoly of power within Big Labor, Big Government, Big Minorities, and—to a lesser extent—Big Business, must sound extremely cogent...

...These children of the New Deal, or if you will, these white collar proletarians, have been asked to accept inadequate rewards for their educational sacrifices...

...Or should he instead work to devise political and economic institutions which will enhance freely chosen sets of values...

...These people accepted the alien disciplines of school, college and institute training, along with the deferment of adult life, because they were armed with expectations regarding personal independence, jobs where individual merit would be decisive, and participation in the political life of the country...

...If this view was common, then the movement could resolve its tactical problems merely by replacing Goldwater with a saner Goldwaterite, just as Burch was exchanged for Bliss...

...Second, we may expect that the movement will grow rather than decline...

...The prospect, therefore, is for growth in precisely those groups which now find political expression in the Goldwater movement or nowhere at all...

...In particular, the growth of the Executive Department of the Federal government— in many ways the crown of the whole process—has been presented as the triumph of popular will over private industrial caprice...

...I hope Lipset is right, but I fear he is not...

...One can see this in Goldwater's rhetoric...

...The problem is intensified by an increasing tendency among elites in government, business and labor to define their publics as the leaders of other bureaucracies and to act primarily with the expectations of these bogus publics in mind...

...Consequently, our initial question— has the Goldwater movement a future...

...We are now faced with a growing movement of social protest against these centralizing trends...

...Contemporary social analysis indicates what these trends are...

...Is the task of the progressive intellectual to extract democratic values out of increasingly hostile technological and social directions...

...Among the chief supports of these trends and their social consequences is the continuing acceptance on the part of social critics that they are in some sense inevitable...

...Planned obsolescence, gaudy over-packaging, and the desperate promotion of otherwise dormant demand are clearly incompatible with traditional notions of efficiency...

...Attacks on the pow er elite, on the senselessness of current social directions, and on the dehumanization of ordinary living, are no less rational for not having been expressed in the language of Mills, Riesman or Goodman...

...Granted there is an incredible blindness to the decisive role business has played in the very developments which have irritated the movement into being...

...The Lipset thesis fails to account for the large numbers of non-WASP, non-rural, anti-traditionalist, college trained and highly skilled young persons who have responded to Goldwater...

...How can the dissatisfaction of the new middle class be related to the civil rights movement and to the tentative beginnings of protest among the white poor and unemployed...

...The term "new middle class" refers here to those first-generation-college and-business-course graduates, technicians, and sub-technicians who were propelled out of blue collar America partly by the demands of World War II but primarily by the technical needs of postwar American industry...

...The way in which these questions are answered—or not answered—will be a decisive factor in the next decade of American political life...

...The dynamism of a class seeking political expression should enable the movement to overcome that kind of disappointment...

...But if these trends no longer represent progress, if they daily grow more dangerous to the democratic fabric, and if they present lively possibilities of social chaos, then the way is cleared to examine seriously— and to reject—the claim that they are inevitable...

...Polls have shown, for example, that Goldwater's positions on the American-Soviet detente, on the Civil Rights Act and on the welfare role of the Federal government represent a declining as well as a minority viewpoint...

...The election returns seemed overwhelmingly to confirm this...

...It must nevertheless be conceded that an analysis which locates the forces hostile to an older life-style in the corporate relations of government, minority group, business and labor elites, can appear to be quite reasonable...

...Furthermore, as technological changes increase more rapidly, the accompanying social changes will grow more abrupt and profound...

...Nor does centralization create economic and social efficiency...

...Centralization has been seen as reinforcing the rationality of planning against the blindness of the market...

...What strategies and new appeals can induce the new middle class to seek a more adequate expression of its needs than that now offered by the right...

...Whether this can be done will depend in part on the ability of left intellectuals to shake loose from some of their ideological heritage...

...To the view that giant organizations control the electoral process—by duping and bribing the "less ambitious" segments of the population— there corresponds their own feeling of being deprived of the political power they believe to be rightfully theirs...

...First, defeats such as the one inflicted in the November elections will not destroy the movement...

...It is clear, moreover, that numbers of potential Goldwater voters were deterred from casting their ballots for so unsteady a man as Barry Goldwater...

...Seymour Lipset has argued, in Encounter, that the Goldwater movement has significance chiefly as the last desperate gasp of a dying social grouping, the final effort of traditional, Protestant, small town, innerdirected America before it succumbs to the assaults of the 20th Century...