The Goldwater Phenomenon-Three Articles

...3. Although the theology of Goldwaterism castigates the growth of the Federal Government, the movement receives much of its financial support from interests and sections that have waxed fat from the Federal trough...

...Moreover, the first obligation of these local and state political organizations is to survive (at worst) and win office (at best) at the local and state levels...

...A just cause is worth a hundred armies...

...It is predictable that Goldwater's praetorian guard will exercise the same vigilance to protect him from off-the-cuff interviews that the Communists and their allies employed to prevent their candidate from letting down his hair...

...The European Response By Ronald Steel Paris "BARRY GOLDWATER is not Adolf Hitler," the Observer felt compelled to reassure its readers in an editorial response to the events at San Francisco...

...observed, that "Goldwater's aggressively anti-Communist policy will create a chasm between America and Europe as wide as the Atlantic...

...Hence the irony today that the prosperity for which the Democrats will take credit may enable many voters to feel secure enough to vent their spite against Negroes and "ethnic people" (a phrase I heard in San Francisco from a Goldwater delegate...

...It believes in the possibility of final solutions to domestic and foreign problems...

...And this will create baleful problems for the Goldwater campaign staff...

...And far from vanishing with its nominee, the Republican coalition will reconstitute itself and be back at the post, perhaps with increased vigor, for the election of 1968...

...What goes on at the top of the ticket is important to them mainly insofar as it contributes to their parochial success or failure...

...I recall Jimmie Wechsler noting at one point in the '48 campaign that it was easier to interview the Pope than Henry Wallace...

...Even the pro-Labor Guardian is now calling for a "fallback policy" to "restart a nuclear weapons program" in case of emergency...

...In fact, just as the savage Communist attack on liberal institutions in 1947-48 generated a counteroffensive, Waring's assault is uniting his opponents as they have not been united previously...

...But our political rhetoric is egalitarian...

...There is no point to overworking the analogy, but I think it has real institutional significance...

...2. The popularity of Goldwaterism is directly related to American prosperity—it is a phenomenon of affluence...

...McCarthyism reached its peak during the boom times of the Korean War, and began a swift decline as a political force when Bensonism and the Eisenhower recession again made bread-and-butter issues a central electoral concern...

...at some time in the past I had witnessed this same sort of pageant featuring this same sort of man...

...Although only the Observer openly drew the parallel with Hindenburg, Eisenhower's endorsement of Goldwater led the London Daily Mail to accuse the former President of playing "a despicable role," while Patrick O'Donovan wrote that his political philosophy seems to have "been fed by the lust to be liked, and, it must be added, by a certain obvious self-love...

...Here lies a powerful argument for those who, with General de Gaulle, believe that Europe cannot leave her destiny completely in the hands of a protector whose intentions, while excellent today, might change tomorrow...

...Thereby they become a threat against democracy in America and a kind of echo of the shot in Dallas...

...It believes America fails only because there are people who fail America and are members of a conspiracy...

...Ronald Steel, author of The End of Alliance and a frequent contributor, is currently The New Leader's roving European correspondent...

...To cite London again, the Daily Herald charged that "With the Republican Presidential nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater, the world's leading nation has turned its back on the 20th century...

...The Republican National Committee may have become the Dean Burch Society—but national committees are virtually powerless entities...

...policy resting upon a democratic consensus at home and moderation in foreign affairs...

...For it is simply not true to say, speaking technically, that Goldwater has captured the Republican party...

...According to William Rees-Mogg in the Sunday Times, "this modest, honest and upright man represents unreason on the loose, just as much as the fascist parties of the twenties represented unreason on the loose," and ReesMogg expressed a widespread anxiety at the fact that "the apparent majority of the minority party in America are supporting a man who risks war and who wholly rejects the system of modern America...

...The Germans, who have based their entire foreign policy on close ties with the United States, appear to have been particularly shaken by the Republican party's endorsement of the kind of extremism they have been trying to purge from their own public life...

...They have set the tone for a campaign which may be, like Gold Water (the pop that was distributed in the Cow Place), "for the conservative taste...

...By the very success of his capture of the Republican party, he has discredited the leadership of the United States in the world community, reinforced Gaullism throughout Europe, vindicated the Chinese argument that Communists dare not compromise with the West, and undermined the position of the United States in Europe and throughout the entire "third world" of neutral and underdeveloped states...

...We owe no allegiance to any group which does not serve that welfare...

...When McCarthy died, his seat was won in 1957 by William Proxmire, an Eastern-educated liberal who campaigned primarily on economic issues...

...It is not to mine...

...When in 1956 most Southern Democratic leaders abandoned Stevenson for Eisenhower, they did so in terms of an explicit bargain: They gave the GOP the top of the ticket and the Republicans in turn left them alone at the bottom...

...The Europeans, of course, know that there is nothing they can do to effect the outcome of the November elections, and that, indeed, the less they say the better...

...Thus Goldwater's nomination has undermined European confidence in American leadership of the West and reinforced the position of Gaullists all over the Continent who have argued that Europe dare not take U.S...

...By God's grace, the People's Peace will usher in the Century of the Common Man...

...SHADES OF '48 Gideon of the Right By John P. Roche I was endowed with what one of my friends once called a "secret police memory...

...He, too, excoriates the present in the name of an allegedly betrayed heritage and appeals to what Reinhold Niebuhr, in the last issue of The New Leader, has called "the politics of nostalgia...

...Goldwaterism has, in other words, injected into American national politics an ideological virus that has not been seen on a large scale since 1948...

...Throughout Europe—from the Tories in Britain, to the Socialists in Sweden, to the Communists in Poland— Goldwater's nomination has been greeted with a dismay bordering on disgust...

...Two examples will suffice...

...By brandishing the independent deterrent that offers Britain a way out of total dependence upon Washington, he may yet be able to swing the electoral tide in favor of the Tories...

...And for those who do not read editorials, this influential weekly featured a cartoon with the Statue of Liberty sinking beneath the seas (of the Goldwater tide, presumably), while only the UN building, topped by an sos flag, remains above the water that has engulfed the rest of the United States...

...Alexander Hamilton had this view of conservatism...

...And make no mistake: The same prosperity will assure that Goldwaterism is amply financed...

...I am not following their [the Birch Society's] line...

...We strangers can only watch and wait...

...Goldwater has been under assault from the European press— and from the man in the street as well—as no American public figure has been since McCarthy...

...he would prefer to be left alone with his hobbies...

...While this reaction may seem a bit overdone to many Americans, it is fairly typical of the effect that the Arizona Senator's nomination has had upon the European press...

...The Southwest oil industry has been coddled and protected by a paternalistic state through import restrictions (which reduces the flow of cheap Middle East oil), through tax depletion allowances, and through Federally-backed regulatory agencies that set production "allowables" so that not too much oil will be drilled, thereby driving prices down...

...Yet as everyone has pointed out, the Goldwater delegates were welldressed and well-scrubbed—thoroughly prosperous and respectable Americans...

...But the odds are that just as the Communists ended up with a paper organization in the Progressive party, while the liberal movement reconstituted itself more powerfully without them, the Birchers will find on November 4 that they have captured themselves...

...From now until election day, state and local Republican organizations are going to be engaged in the process of assessing the implications of Goldwaterism...

...But the London Sunday paper found so many "disquieting similarities" between the Republican party's nominee and the fascist dictator—among them a "willingness to use violence on a mass scale to fulfill their dreams"—that its faith in American leadership of the Western community seems to have been sent reeling...

...Clearly the junior Senator from Arizona, who has called NATO "the greatest bulwark ever erected by free nations," has so terrified the European allies by his nuclear naivete, his political innocence, and his ideological fanaticism that the disintegrative forces within the alliance itself have been greatly speeded up...

...In $544 million spent on work for propulsion systems, two Western firms (North American and Aerojet) accounted for 65 per cent of money spent...

...The major target, however, has been the GOP'S standard-bearer himself...

...It is sick for the old simple faith in a cosy national god...

...On arriving at Logan Airport in Boston, he delivered himself a string of excommunications worthy of a reformation Pope...

...Goldwater's nomination is a ticket good for this ride alone...

...By and large, but with conspicuous exceptions (George Humphrey, for one), the Goldwater movement appears to get its financial support from the "new" money and new rich of the West and Southwest...

...The two questions are interconnected, and I would venture four observations about the nature of Goldwaterism: 1. The triumph of Goldwaterism is a measure of the feebleness, rather than the strength, of conservatism in the United States...

...The pro-Labor Daily Mirror found that "the corpse of much that is decent and wise and tolerant in American society is in the coffin, although the lid has not yet finally been screwed down...

...Lord Home, who is getting to sound more like an Anglicized Gaullist every day, has thus been handed a golden opportunity to attack Labor at its most vulnerable spot...

...4. A final irony is that although Goldwaterism is synonymous with superpatriotism, the Presidential chances of its champion in November largely depend on events that would be catastrophic to the nation...

...Still, it does seem an uncomfortable paradox that those who are on a patriotic crusade stand to profit politically from the national disaster of a civil rights debacle during this long, hot summer...

...I happen to think that Goldwater himself is no demon, but the hypocrisy of his position is absolutely shameless...

...McCarthy had carried all but one of the district's 11 counties...

...Triomphe reactionnaire au Palais de la Vache" proclaim the French papers, lending a note of surrealism to an action that still seems vaguely unreal...

...It is Henry A. Wallace in 1947 discussing the role of the Communists in his movement—and I have simply substituted the Birch Society where Wallace mentioned the Communists...

...The party is vulnerable to conquest...

...now the essentially non-ideological majority of the Republican coalition must pay for its incompetence, for the amateur hour that Rockefeller, Romney & Company sponsored at the Convention...

...I had been here before...

...if they work through the saints, the regular organization will abandon ship...

...What became quickly apparent in the Cow Palace is that the Senator's followers really did not themselves take Goldwater's ideas very seriously...

...Turning to the first point, it must be readily apparent to everybody that Goldwaterism has about as much in common with traditional conservatism as Huey Long had with traditional liberalism...

...But the self-destroying factionalism within the Republican party—a phenomenon familiar to the Europeans from their own politics—the ineffectuality of the liberal wing, and the pathetic spectacle of a boyish Scranton sent out to do a giant's job, now all appear to be acts of an incomprehensible tragedy performed in a strange tongue...

...Obviously this is not Barry Goldwater—if it were, this article would be pointless...

...He has captured the nomination, and some local parties in the states, but you can't capture (except in symbolic terms) something that does not exist...

...His man had won and he immediately appointed himself the Grand Inquisitor of New England Republicanism, which was patently deficient in Grace...

...France-Soir, the nation's biggest daily, said the Arizonan's nomination was "a step backward which will supply arguments to the Communists, who doubt the spirit of détente of the U.S., and to the Europeans, who do not have confidence in the solidarity of American friendship...

...The British reaction was mild, if anything, compared to opinion on the Continent...

...These are the two most immediately relevant questions in light of the Cow Palace Thermidor which has "conservatized" (as Governor Wallace put it) the Republican party...

...But why Goldwaterism...

...Unable to present itself as a frankly conservative party led by patricians like Lodge, Scranton and Rockefeller, the Grand Old Party has floundered around in search of folksy substitutes who would give a popular air to the party of business...

...Faced with the rise of extremism in America, the Europeans would like to shrug off U.S...

...stability for granted...

...It is not surprising that Europeans are apprehensive over the appearance in the United States of what Patrick O'Donovan has described as an extremist philosophy of the kind that "used to be called isolationism...

...Through four administrations there has been a continuity of U.S...

...Specifically, there was a by-election in Wisconsin's rural Ninth District in 1953, less than a year after McCarthy's re-election to the Senate...

...This faculty creates problems on occasion (I am always suspicious when 1 come up with some seemingly original notion and go carefully through the literature to make sure I have not unobtrusively borrowed a remembered formulation from an unremembered source...

...I admire their utter devotion to a cause they think is just...

...Goldwater is the Henry Wallace of the American radical Right with a striking collection of Wallace's characteristics...

...This characterological similarity works itself out in other ways...

...indeed, a vote on the very kind of country we chose to be...

...in prosperous times, he is able to vote his prejudice...

...Meanwhile, the Conservative Daily Mail has heretically hailed de Gaulle as being right in saying that Europe could not depend on America for its defense, and has called for Britain to join France in building an independent European deterrent...

...Just as there was no liberal organization—no structured monolith —for Wallace and his supporters to capture, there is no Republican party, but rather 51 Republican parties (50 states and the District of Columbia), each with its own personnel, who are not responsible except in liturgical terms to the Presidential nominee...

...Without impugning the motives of those involved, and without indulging in dark conspiratorial theories of the Goldwaterite variety, it is easy to understand why those dependent on these defense contracts are worried about a détente...

...Admittedly, in many sections of the country Goldwaterism reflects the genuine conviction of local Republicans...

...Milk prices were declining and beef cattle prices were reminding farmers of the dark days of the Depression...

...What seems most puzzling to the Europeans is the position of President Eisenhower, whose reputation has been severely compromised by his embarrassing vacillation and timorous refusal to fight for the principles of moderation and internationalism with which he has been associated...

...Since Labor's defense policy rests upon abandoning the British bomb and putting full faith in Washington, the Conservatives can now argue that Harold Wilson's policies would put the future of Britain into the hands of Barry Goldwater...

...Indeed, Goldwater's acceptance speech—which might have been subtitled "My Life and its Meaning"—ranks favorably with the following abstract ruminations delivered by Wallace on December 16, 1947, when he announced his mission: "We have assembled a Gideon's army—small in number, powerful in conviction, ready in action...

...Only the Franco-controlled Spanish press has found any comfort in Goldwater's victory at San Francisco, unless one counts the jest of Fidel Castro, who said a few months ago: "I'm for Goldwater because I think that's a good way of making him lose votes...

...It's legitimate to be frightened while we wait...

...but it also has its virtues...

...Either way they are whipsawed: If they work through the regular organization, the nominee will be accused of betraying his saints for cheap vote-getting objectives...

...Like Wallace he is rigid, he has no feel for political nuances, for relaxed polemic...

...Goldwater can win: I once held four natural kings in a poker game and was beaten by four natural aces...

...It believes in American omnipotence...

...Goldwater appears to have Wallace's rhetorical liability: His formal speeches are wooden and sententious and his informal ones direct and indiscreet...

...A careful analysis done, by a Boeing economist (Murray L. Weidenbaum) shows that of the missile work performed in 1959, the overwhelming proportion was in Western plants...

...But the Birchers I've met have been very good Americans...

...There can be little doubt, as the conservative Copenhagen daily B.T...

...Only a day after his aides hail the recruitment of Governor Wallace's legions, the Senator himself was reported as deeply concerned about keeping civil rights out of the campaign...

...The middleof-the-road Free Democratic party of Erich Mende has branded Goldwater's policies as "racial fanaticism and wild anti-Communism...

...his victory did not give him jurisdiction over, say, the Massachusetts Republican party...

...As I was watching Barry Goldwater at the Cow Palace and listening to various interviews conducted by "Enemy" newsmen, I had an almost overpowering sense of déjà vu...

...Of the $1.34 billion in work performed on missile assembly and testing, four Western aircraft companies (Boeing, Convair, Douglas and Lockheed) accounted for 71 per cent of money spent...

...This obsession ruined my sleep for two nights and then the answer came to me in a literal moment of truth and, at four in the morning, I grabbed two books from the shelf and began to read...

...The Maine GOP, for example, has already turned down a bid for power by Goldwater's local missionaries...

...Indeed, it has succeeded in good part because there is no authentic American conservative tradition to puncture the pretension of this populist travesty on Burke and Disraeli...

...or that "Goldwater is the best possible prophylactic against a recrudescence of McCarthyism...

...These are patriotic men, in their own lights, just as Goldwaterites are patriotic in insisting that the U.S...

...This is as true of the Democrats as of the Republicans...

...politics and somehow detach themselves from it...

...he has been utterly eclipsed by Jefferson and Lincoln...

...Even though willing to assume that "Goldwater as President would behave utterly differently from Hitler as Chancellor," the Observer found cold comfort in the "very idea of Barry Goldwater in the White House, at the controls of the most powerful State of all history...

...The rise of the radical Right as the official opposition party has raised ugly doubts of the kind expressed by the pro-NATO Information of Copenhagen, which said that "Goldwater and his clique are totalitarian in their fashion and their methods...

...But the implications of a Goldwater Administration—and even of the Goldwater nomination—are so momentous that they cannot do so: Their lives, too, depend on the wisdom and restraint of the man who occupies the White House...

...The only national institution of any consequence that a party has is its nominating convention every four years...

...in effect, to a peddler's grandson—surely a fit successor to the druggist's son from Whittier and the smiling general from Abilene...

...Traditional European conservatism springs from a reverence for received tradition, from the feudal afterglow of a Crown and Court, and from an acceptance of social inequality...

...The third way in which the Government has built up the new industries in the West and Southwest is through the Defense budget...

...should at once reduce spending and increase the arms budget...

...Cheap power, financed by Federal funds, has made the West attractive to industry...

...For it would be delusion to think that the campaign will be fought on the economic ideals of Goldwaterism—it will be a referendum on civil rights...

...The effect of Goldwater's nomination has been to throw into question the whole basis of the relationship between America and Europe, a relationship which for the past 20 years has rested upon European trust in American political responsibility...

...One hedges with "seems" because Goldwaterism is as slippery as it is dogmatic—just where does the Senator stand on the graduated income tax or on breaking relations with Moscow...

...It is a mood, not an ideology, that unites this pseudoconservative crusade—and it is clearly a mood of racial hostility, sectional animus and status rancor...

...The Social-Democratic Neue Ridir Zeitung accused the Republican nominee of representing "theories of foreign policy which would lead to world war," and charged that "his program is a mixture of fascist dreams, world imperialism, and of Far West romanticism...

...It is really intolerable that the barons of this industry should lecture the rest of us on the delights of competition (and then use the tax laws to write their political propaganda as philanthropic public education...

...Whatever happens between now and November, "nothing can undo the fact," as the Sunday Times pointed out, "that one of the two great parties in the strongest country in the world has, with near-unanimity adopted Goldwaterism as their chosen way ahead...

...He is no more of a "Fascist" than Wallace was a "Communist...

...Here are some of the passages, slightly changed for reasons that will appear shortly, that had lived on in the human equivalent of the computer databank: "I'm no expert on the John Birch Society...

...This feeling was echoed by the anti-Gaullist Le Monde, which remarked editorially that "The unanimous reaction on this side of the ocean to the ascension of the Senator from Arizona shows that despite the intimacy of their long alliance the two shores of the Atlantic world do not necessarily live in unison...

...Even in a country that refuses to take ideas very seriously, the Senator's muddled utterances represent a new low...

...In short, he has that same combination of abstract chiliasm tempered by acute boredom with "practical politics...

...Hamilton, Woodrow Wilson once tartly observed, was a "great man but not a great American...

...That shot has never been put to rest in the European mind, and in the supporters of Goldwater they see the forces which applauded Kennedy's assassination...

...The late C. Wright Mills once shrewdly remarked that the U.S...

...The situation in Massachusetts provides a classic example...

...The Ku Klux Klan flourished in the '20s, and was hurried to its demise by the Great Depression when economics displaced race as the dominant issue...

...The American experience suggests that movements like Goldwaterism flourish in good times and wither in bad...

...Goldwater may never get any closer to the Presidency than the Cow Palace, yet the fact remains that the Republican party has made him its standard-bearer and with rare exceptions the Republican moderates have made Goldwaterism respectable by accepting the candidate and the humiliating platform he so mercilessly inflicted upon them...

...We have said with Gideon, 'Let those who are fearful and trembling depart.' For every fearful one who leaves there will be a thousand to take his place...

...in 1953, the voters elected the first Democrat (Lester Johnson) ever to represent the district in Congress...

...WHITHER THE NATO ALLIANCE...

...We face the future unfettered by any principle but the general welfare...

...A disciplined minority pulled off a masterful coup at the Cow Palace...

...When they deal with the Republicans in New York, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts, will they do business with the regulars, or with the Goldwater rebels...

...Some of the more ardent spirits, however, particularly the Yahoo element in the South, seemed to savor the possibility of trouble...

...In Paris, the influential Le Monde predicted that "the electoral campaign promises to reactivate the most noxious echoes of McCarthyism and to unleash the worst excesses of nationalism, racism and the spirit of the crusade...

...It is Goldwater's official endorsement by the Republican party that has been so shocking, for it reveals the face of a different kind of America that most Europeans did not know—or preferred not to know —existed...

...The Goldwater candidacy will have exactly the same divisive impact on the Republican party that Wallace's crusade had on the liberal movement...

...Hence the vast ideological emptiness in the Republican party, the party associated with wealth...

...All along the Europeans, like the inept professionals of the Republican party itself, took the Goldwater candidacy as a joke which would fizzle out long before convention time...

...It was apparent that people were more worried about Ezra Benson than Owen Lattimore...

...On the contrary, what most Europeans, beginning with those who consider themselves to be "conservatives," fear is that Goldwater's nomination (which only a few weeks ago was said to be "impossible") has released powerful forces of reaction within the United States regardless of whether he wins in November...

...Yet in three ways this new wealth has been underwritten by the central government...

...If they want to follow my line I say God bless 'em...

...And again like the Gideon of 1948, he is a reluctant leader who was dragged into the fray by his supporters and, I suspect, in private moments keeps asking himself, "What the hell am I doing here...

...is a conservative country without a conservative ideology...

...Americans prize private property and display a stubborn affection for institutions (ours is the oldest written Constitution...

...I would suggest that a key reason for the groundswell of support for Goldwater—and for the surprisingly large votes in Wisconsin, Indiana and Maryland for Wallace—lies just in this: prosperity...

...Indeed, to use that jaded term, Goldwater has Wallace's "style" down cold...

...Ironically, this is true in areas of Democratic preponderance (California, Texas, Arizona) rather than in states where the GOP holds power (New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon...

...Thus the full impact of Republican internecine conflict will be felt in areas of greatest GOP power, states where the Goldwaterites will be more concerned with destroying "traitors" and seizing the party machinery than with beating the Democrats...

...It was consonant with his general approach that at San Francisco he berated the Federal government for meddling in local affairs and then seemed to advocate Federal action to eliminate street crimes and switchblades...

...During bad times, the American tends to vote his interests...

...Few share the view of the Sunday Telegraph's Peregrine Worsthorne that "everybody should be thankful for Senator Goldwater's recent triumph—except those who share his views," since "there is no question of his ever reaching the White House...

...For weeks the Europeans had been watching with fascinated horror the steady rise of Goldwater through the mystifying system of primaries to his crowning triumph at the Cow Palace, a place whose very name seems to exemplify everything that is incomprehensible in the American political system...

...And if the prodigious energy of his Right-wing enthusiasts has brought him initial victory, this same zeal will generate countless problems in the months to come...

...Can one really believe that in his movement the Right hand knoweth not what the Far Right hand is doing...

...America's military and political power over its allies, and its hegemony within the Western world, has been accepted with relative equanimity because it has been free from fanaticism and exercised with restraint...

...Thomas Waring, a long-time loser within the state Republican party and a militant "conservative" (he once managed Robert Welch's primary campaign for Lieutenant Governor), returned from San Francisco brimming with fervor...

...I was not interested in making McCarthy and his line of quackery an issue," Johnson said...

...On the contrary, the leaders of that party in Massachusetts are engaged in a war to the knife with Goldwater's local pirates who want to seize the organization—in one sense, the local GOP regulars have a stake in Goldwater's defeat...

...While Gaullists in Paris have seen their policies vindicated by the events in San Francisco, the ruling Tories in Britain—Gaullist in fact if not in name—have now found in the independent nuclear deterrent a potent weapon to attack the challenging Laborites...

...Most of the Goldwater people with whom 1 have spoken insist that they are genuinely distressed by this possibility (and I believe them)—and yet candidly admitted that CORE demonstrators were helping Barry and hurting the Negro cause...

...In this context, the Senator's now-famous animadversions on extremism seem harrowingly unfortunate...

...Now this is good clean fun, but it is not the way to win elections...

...This conforms with a standard political maxim that ideological militance is a direct coefficient of practical impotence...

...He cast out of the True Church just about every significant Republican politician in New England, including the Governors of Maine and Rhode Island and the senior Senator from Massachusetts...

...Indeed, the Senator's crusade against the Federal government will get most of its financial support from beneficiaries of Federal largesse...