Goldwater vs. History

...they demonstrated the fact that our economic life had grown into national proportions, and that the authority of individual states was no longer able to regulate it...

...Miller charges that ADA is a half-way house to socialism, which is in turn a half-way house to Communism...

...That fact is symbolic of the truth that a healthy democracy adjusts itself to new realities without necessarily compelling the members of the various classes to disavow their interests and perspectives...

...The Supreme Court is charged by the Constitution to interpret the law, but its decisions, whether on civil rights or prayers in the public schools or legislative redistricting, are also under attack and are described as "unconstitutional...

...But we began with reference to the Goldwater revolution and must return to it...

...His favorite charge is that his opposite number for the Vice Presidency, Hubert Humphrey, was a leader in the ADA, which was organized in the '40s as an antiCommunist interventionist group...

...the new nations of Africa face it in a more serious form, not to speak of Canada's old and new problem with Quebec...

...How did it emerge...

...The two Republican candidates both belong in the category of hypocritical moralists...

...For them, the supremacy of the Federal power is "a power grab," and responsible Federal officiais, incidentally including all the main candidates, are described as power-grabbers and self-seekers...

...Nothing could be more simple for these "terrible simplifiers...

...but there is a general understanding that equality is the regulative principle of justice, and that an equilibrium of social and economic power is as necessary an instrument of justice as the authority of the national government is a necessary instrument of order...

...Since the nature of the political struggle involves a center of power, greater than any in the world, this cynicism might be justified, if equally applied to both contestants by the electors...

...European democracy needed the whole of the 19th century to accomplish this radical shift in the equilibrium of economic power, consonant with the equalization of political power inherent in the right of suffrage...

...This perhaps refutes not only Locke and Hobbes but also our great "realist" James Madison, who was wise in putting a system of checks and balances in our Constitution, yet was certainly unwise in his excessive fear of "faction...

...Now all these problems are considered, together with wages, hours and fringe benefits, and are subject to mutual bargaining by fairly equal partners...

...I could not help remembering that in the '20s, men over 40 could not survive the Ford "speed-up" assembly line...

...It is worth recording that the grandson of the bigoted founder of the "new industrialism" and of the Ford empire is among the prominent businessmen who have announced their support of the ticket of the Democratic party...

...The note of hysteria is natural among these pseudomoralists who are wittingly or unwittingly ignorant of all the nuances and adjustments which have grown in our developing free political order...

...The latter have themselves profited greatly from the delicate balances of our democratic order, but are afraid that some other group, such as the Negro—perhaps the only genuine American proletarian—also will profit...

...They include the Southern racists who are pious about States Rights, Strom Thurmond for instance, oil millionaires, and unfortunately many young suburbanite executives...

...Free governments are interested in justice as well as order, however, and free governments can only preserve order as they unceasingly establish justice among the competitive economic and racial forces in the community...

...On the positive side, the process supported Locke's view that free governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed...

...It is derived partly from self-righteousness, from the failure to comprehend the universality of mixed motives in all human nature...

...These Court decisions, representing the "unwritten constitution" of our country, expressed the realities of our history...

...Being richer than the European nations, we in this country could afford the injustices of the industrial order a little longer...

...That development changed the whole course of Western democracy, and not only refuted Communism but made us immune to its virus of rebellion...

...If this be cynicism, make the most of it...

...Thank God, for the time being only modest and no threat in the coming election, if the polls are to be relied on...

...but it is only fair to state that the Civil War was followed by a series of common-sense adjustments, in which Supreme Court decisions enlarged the scope of two clauses in the preamble to the Constitution: the "general welfare" clause and the clause allowing the national government to "regulate interstate commerce...

...The Marxist indictment of "capitalism" had its momentary relevance in these dismal facts...

...Goldwater's words at Memphis, Tennessee are significant...

...and what are the reasons for its modest "success...

...The question is simply whether we affirm the process of gradual democratic adjustment which has given us a modicum of economic justice and promises more racial justice, or whether we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by a group of Yahoos who do not understand—or claim they do not understand—the genius for justice in a free society...

...The Industrial Revolution seriously disturbed the equilibrium of power on which democracy was founded, by shifting the power of the craftsmen's skills and tools to the machine...

...Goldwater woos the tobacco farmers of the South with the inference that Federal requirements for health warnings on cigarettes are unconstitutional...

...The element of malice— for malice is literally the "thinking evil of"—is of course present in the method and techniques of the Goldwater campaign, designed to sow discontent and distrust...

...A recent news item is a good symbol of the change, particularly vivid to a former resident of Henry Ford the First's industrial Detroit...

...The contract makes provision for early retirement of the older workers, which is a partial solution of the problem of automatic unemployment...

...All political policies are cynically explained as a "bid for power...

...This authority establishes the power of the government and endows it with that coercive force which even free governments must use to overcome the recalcitrant...

...But the free societies had a common wisdom—transcending bourgeois economic interests—and gradually, though reluctantly, created a new equilibrium of power by giving the workers the right to organize and to bargain collectively...

...and with the proviso that motives are mixed and varied, that no mortal can assess them truly, and that the concept of "sincerity" is irrelevant because, in politics at least, an impure motive may bring objectively good political results...

...The second kind might be defined as hypocritical moralists...

...All this must be said despite some apprehensions of what may turn up in the Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins cases, and what Lyndon Johnson's past in the jungles of politics may or may not have been before tragic history freed the master political broker from Texas to be a leading political force in the nation...

...What would happen if the authority of the national government were destroyed, not by Hobbes' "war of all against all,' but by the divisive loyalties of tribes, factions or states...

...The effort to eliminate pockets of poverty in the most affluent nation of the world is interpreted as a monstrous political bid for the votes of the destitute...

...Our fathers solved it by a series of compromises, involving the very problem of the slavery issue, the remnants of which issue are now before us for solution...

...A lot of my enemies call me simple," said Goldwater...

...Thus, we did not come to terms with a new economic equilibrium until the first third of the 20th century, when that scoundrel (in the lexicon of reaction) Franklin D. Roosevelt accomplished the great transition from pre-industrial democracy to post-industrial economic justice...

...But Locke's conceptions were heedless of the effect of group loyalties on the "consent of individuals...

...Justice is defined by Aristotle as "the disposition to give each man his due...

...This item reports a new contract between the Ford Motor Company and the UAW, after hard bargaining between the two oligarchies of modern democracy, management and labor union...

...The horrible injustices of early European industrialism were the consequence...

...History By Reinhold Niebuhr Up to the time when the Goldwater revolution threw confusion into American politics, it seemed clear that democracy in the whole of Western culture was seeking to solve the problems of both order and justice by gradual common-sense adjustments and consolidations of power...

...While Goldwater wears his conscience on his sleeve, and approaches every political reality with apparent wide-eyed moral innocence, his colleague is a "gut fighter" with a permanent stance of the avenging fury...

...Our founding fathers faced that question in framing our Constitution...

...The answers to America's problems are simple...

...This self-righteousness persuades these "idealists" that some "evil" man or force, whether it be the Pope or the top man in the Kremlin or the Supreme Court, is conspiring against our liberties...

...In a free community no one has ever defined the "due" of each man...

...The note of malice is perhaps more disturbing...

...We can never have a complete "consensus...

...The Civil War solved radically the question about the authority of the national government...

...This process at once fulfilled and refuted the dogmas of the democratic idealist, John Locke, and the "realistic" political absolutist, Thomas Hobbes...

...The trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn't understand simplicity...

...still, there is such a thing as knowing the plus side of a common national interest above and beyond particular interests...

...Most briefly stated, the Goldwater revolution, which is in the process of desiccating an honorable political party embodying the traditions of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, consists of the alliance of two kinds of pseudo-moralists: those too ignorant to understand the creative functions of interest and power in a democratic political order, and those who do not want to acknowledge the interests which they are defending...