America's Respectable Leftism

...At present, some 15 Presidential task forces are preparing recommendations on the whole range of programs that the President is likely to request when Congress convenes in January...

...He said the results are forcing him to reconsider his conservative philosophy: "If the people don't like the way I've been voting, then I'll have to change...

...This is the great contrast with John F. Kennedy...

...his speeches range from unpretentious simplicity to downright banality...

...Their struggle for social and economic standing was fought out in terms of the agrarian frontier that has now passed...

...The prevailing argument is that America has given a mandate to the middle and has rejected the doctrinaire Rightism of Goldwater...

...In terms of Lubell's analysis, the Republican party could hardly have picked a more disastrous candidate than Goldwater, the very personification of negation, nostalgia and irrelevance...

...Civil rights, how to balance the interests of the newly emergent labor power against those of the rest of society, the yearning for security against another depression, the hunger for social status of the climbing urban masses—these are do-or-die problems for the elements of the Democratic coalition...

...No doubt this quality will make Johnson less appealing to the intellectual...

...He persuaded millions of Republicans that the best way to save their party was to vote Democratic...

...he represents the area where Joe McCarthy was born and where Alabama's Governor Wallace ran strongest in his racist primary campaign last spring...

...It is his special gift to make the needful seem natural, to domesticate the exotic and lend an air of infinite respectability to the novel...

...The words of Samuel Lubell, one of the wisest of American political commentators, are worth quoting...

...Seen in longer perspective, the outcome only confirms again that there is a basic Democratic majority in the United States, and that a Republican can capture the White House only if he can attract a dissident segment of the Democratic coalition...

...Shadeburg similarly was defeated in the liberal wave that engulfed the homeland of McCarthyism...

...This amiable lunacy will not have much effect on President Johnson...

...There is one instinctive Republican program, in whose favor all doubts are resolved —to turn the clock back to an earlier era...

...It is proper to speak of the entire period in U.S...

...At the same time, the voters did for Johnson what they were unwilling to do for any American President since FDR in the '30s...

...After a century of radical agitation, yesterday's heresies have become today's tenets of moderation...

...Ironically, conservatives who were arguing before November 3 that Johnson was a radical Socialist are now saying that his victory can in no circumstances be considered a mandate for liberalism...

...It was fitting that the only fragment of the Democratic coalition that Goldwater could attract were the racists in the rural Deep South—one faction of nostalgia gravitating to another...

...Let me make this clear," he said in accepting the nomination at Atlantic City, "I ask the American people for a mandate, not to preside over a finished program, not just to keep things going...

...history since 1932 as the Democratic era, just as the era after the Civil War was a Republican epoch...

...Even more revealing are the results in specific Congressional races...

...The state's 30th Congressional district has never, in this century, elected a Democrat...

...Kastenmeier has strongly favored disarmament, was a leader in the fight to enact the Civil Rights Bill, and has even voted against the House Un-American Activities Committee—and he got 63.6 per cent, his best showing in four races...

...I've always thought that I was in Congress to reflect their views, not push my own.' When a conservative Congressman representing a hidebound rural district in upstate New York is reduced to meditating the possible merit of liberalism, then surely one is entitled to speak of an insurrection...

...Yet in the end, I suspect, he may prove an enormously effective President at a time of profound readjustment at home and complex shifts abroad...

...Therefore, Lawrence implies, Johnson has an obligation to imitate the policies of the man he has just defeated...

...Yet the result was so close that a recount was necessary to determine whether a neophyte Democrat had unseated King...

...I ask the American people for a mandate to begin...

...These latter elements remain rooted in business interests, which suffered comparatively less in the depression...

...Reuss is known as the first advocate of the Peace Corps—he received 75.9 per cent of the vote...

...Here was a Southerner who got an unprecedented 95 per cent of the Negro vote, a country boy who swept the urban Eastern states by a lopsided 69 per cent, a Protestant who did better among Catholic voters than did John F Kennedy four years ago...

...Van Pelt was beaten by an unknown named John A. Race, who by occupation is a machinist...

...He did not make a single significant error during the campaign, and by an act of necromancy unmatched in modern American politics, he managed—like Janus—to look Left and Right at the same time...

...In a mood of rueful confession, King blurted to a New York Times reporter, "Boy, when I make a mistake it's a real whopper...

...Yet it is the genius of Johnson that even his most novel innovations will be presented as thoroughly non-controversial expressions of the American consensus, as chips floating in the mainstream of politics...

...Today it is within the Democratic party that the issues of our times are being fought out, for better or worse," Lubell has written...

...Americans had the diverting spectacle of President Johnson being hailed in Madison Square Garden as the liberal champion of the sweating urban masses, while Humphrey was being applauded in Houston by an audience of conservative businessmen...

...David Lawrence contends—with audacious ingenuity—that the President did so well because many people have the impression that he is a conservative at heart...

...They gave him a commanding majority in Congress, thus eliminating the principal obstacle to enactment of the program to which his party is pledged...

...To some extent, both Reuss and Kastenmeier benefited from recent reapportionment of their legislative districts on a basis slightly more favorable to Democrats...

...I have quoted at length from Lubell's The Future of American Politics because what he says is so remarkably pertinent—and it was written in 1952, before Eisenhower created the illusion of a Republican revival...

...The indications are that it will be the most ambitious agenda laid before Congress since the New Deal...

...This lack of timeliness in its voting elements is the basic reason for the 'negative' Republican attitude to so many major problems...

...THE SHIFTING CENTER America's Respectable Leftism By Karl E. Meyer Washington To study the voting returns in the remarkable landslide that elected Lyndon B. Johnson as President is to compile an anthology in paradox...

...Thus President Johnson had two major advantages denied Kennedy four years ago: an unimpressive opponent and the absence of the religious issue, which drained away so many votes from his Catholic predecessor...

...He won by heavy margins among the old (who are worried about Social Security) and the young (who are concerned about jobs)—and for good measure he was the first Democrat in a generation to win a majority of women voters...

...In upstate New York, another bastion of conservatism, one race produced a revealing remark...

...His Great Society does not seem to set much store on elegance of utterance...

...In almost every case where an incumbent liberal Democrat was running for office (California, where Senator Pierre Salinger lost, was a notable exception) he not only won but generally did better than in past elections...

...Why did it happen...

...First, the voters gave a record 41 million ballots to candidates for President and Vice President who repeatedly emphasized their belief that the Federal government has a positive obligation to assure fair treatment to Negroes, to wipe out the poverty that blights at least a fifth of the country's population, to increase welfare benefits, to provide help for schools, to clean up urban slums, and to use tax policy as a mechanism for regulating economic growth...

...But the same cannot be said of Wisconsin's two most reactionary Congressmen, Henry C. Shadeburg and William K. Van Pelt, both Republicans...

...Seen in shorter perspective, the results also demonstrate that Goldwater ran a wretched campaign and was matched against one of the master politicians of the modern era, a President who is as astonishing in the sureness of his political instincts as he is underrated by intellectuals at home and unknown abroad...

...But this may result in the loss of an essential point—the point that what Americans now consider middle-of-the-road would have been deemed wildly Leftist only a few years ago...

...Wisconsin offers some instructive evidence...

...They are not the issues which agitate most strongly the Republican voting elements...

...How did Johnson get seven million more votes than the 34 million given Kennedy four years ago...

...His running-mate, Senator Humphrey, was no less nimble...

...Three elements in the election, it seems to me, support this generalization...

...Karl E. Meyer, editorial board member of the Washington Post, is a correspondent for the New Statesman, where this article also appears...

...If "Left" is defined as a conscious commitment of state power to obtain social justice, then America's verdict can be viewed as a democratic insurrection with few, if any, parallels in the world today...

...Whereas Kennedy imparted an air of excitement and glamor to proposals (like the Trade Expansion Act) which proved to be far less radical than they seemed, Johnson does just the opposite...

...What has changed in the United States since 1960, when John F. Kennedy could eke out only the slenderest victory over Richard M. Nixon...

...It was the vote for Congress that validated the meaning of the Presidential result...

...Nevertheless, Johnson maximized his advantage to an awesome degree...

...I am aware that this is at variance with conventional post-election commentary...

...For the Republicans, the only constructive result of the Goldwater candidacy was that it served as an emetic and made dramatically obvious the need for a wholesale revision of GOP tactics...

...Yet beyond these obvious points is a stunning, paramount paradox—that a country without a Left political movement has voted by an impressive majority to move left...

...The GOP dilemma does not arise out of a lack of 'leaders' so-called or 'ideas' so-labeled, but out of the fact that the Republicans remain what the Southern Democrats were after the Civil War—essentially a party of nostalgia...

...Without trimming an inch on the substance of the liberal platform adopted by the party at Atlantic City, Johnson persuaded both rich and poor that they would be better off with a Democrat in the White House...

...Not only did Goldwater fail to make significant inroads on the Democratic coalition, but the very violence of his attack cemented the coalition more tightly together and strengthened it with a massive infusion of rebellious Republicans who could not swallow Goldwater...

...If the election were simply a manifestation of personal esteem for Johnson and distaste for Goldwater, then the voters would have hedged their choice (as they did when Eisenhower ran) by giving the opposing party a greater share of the Congressional vote...

...Van Pelt was regarded as an invulnerable Rightist candidate...

...It has been represented by Carleton King, a Rightwing Republican who welcomed Goldwater's candidacy...

...Of the state's 10 Congressmen, the two outstanding liberal Democrats are Henry Reuss of Milwaukee and Robert Kastenmeier of Madison...