Old Coalition, New Coalition
Plastrik, Stanley
COMMENTS AND OPINIONS POST-ELECTION WISDOM is about as good as pre-election wisdom. Still, here goes: The old coalition is dead, long live the new! This seems to me the main point of the...
...THE NEW COALITION–exactly what does that mean...
...I am glad to take your three years for that...
...Examine the black and Puerto Rican vote in and around New York and this conclusion is explicit...
...The warning addressed by Al Lowenstein to Senator McCarthy not to become involved in a "new party" effort seems highly pertinent...
...VADIM DELONE, 23-year-old student, upon being sentenced to prison for protesting the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Certainly Humphrey himself had done little to earn my vote or anyone's for that matter: he ended his campaign as he had begun, in the seedy embrace of Mayor Daley (how ironic that precisely Illinois guaranteed loss of the election: Mayor Daley delivered not...
...This seems to me the main point of the election results...
...This Administration will not shape events, it will react to them...
...What about the Nixon Administration...
...This new movement will be difficult to construct...
...Like others, I cast a lastminute vote for Humphrey, justifying this reversal of an abstentionist position held in September by the halting of the Vietnam bombing plus a growing alarm at the prospect of Nixon...
...Surely, revitalization of the Democratic party makes more sense than "fourth party" and other sectarian ventures...
...But who can believe this was anything but a final flickering of an exhausted coalition...
...It has no mandate for reaction, not even for a consistent conservatism...
...And most important, it will find its mass base in that new middle class (professionals, technicians, teachers, intellectuals, etc...
...Nor should we fail to take into account that whole generation of youth below voting age who, by 1972, will become eligible voters: the McCarthyite youth...
...The Democratic party, re vamped of course, can be made into the vehicle, of this new coalition, with a program for social and economic transformation...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS POST-ELECTION WISDOM is about as good as pre-election wisdom...
...For three minutes on Red Square I felt free...
...We continue to live in revolutionary times, Mr...
...There was no sharp rightward shift in this election: at most, middleof-the-road moderatism has been given a slightly rightish tinge as compared to a slightly leftish one...
...It will be headed by the new breed of liberal-radical Democrats (Senator George McGovern represents experience, Congressman Allard Lowenstein youth) who will fall heir to the party over the next decade...
...The ingredients are there, but the mix has scarcely begun...
...It will include regrouped remnants of the Old Coalition—the more progressive labor leadership, older liberal groups (ADA), moderate Negro leaders, etc...
...True, in the last hours of the election, the old coalition—labor, Negroes, liberals, etc.— drew briefly together once more in an effort to put over Humphrey...
...Such a Democratic party should be expected to become much more of a popular movement based upon individual membership rather than a conglomeration of county, district, and local machines controlled by some hack...
...Nixon...
...And of events we shall have aplenty...
...about whom Michael Harrington has written...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
