The Politics of Nostalgia

...He has only the farmers, the retired millionaires, the village (not the "Wall Street") bankers, and the Southern racists, who seek to cover their nakedness with the sacred veils of States' Rights doctrine...

...It was Franklin Roosevelt, too, who beguiled a reluctant nation to assume global responsibilities...

...Democratic or Republican, which have come to represent the "mainstream" of American politics...

...No wonder Governor Scranton tried to boost his belated campaign for the nomination by claiming that Goldwater could not possibly win an election...

...It is still one of the mysteries of the American political process that a man so far to the Right should have become the nominee of a major party...

...This development has taken place under the aegis of the Federal government and has resulted in an "invasion" of the rights of states, though that invasion actually began with the 14th Amendment after the Civil War...

...His nostalgia in this respect puts him at odds with all modern policies...

...Urban Republicanism soon came to terms with the necessities of the welfare state, both as a matter of conviction and as a political necessity...

...in other words, he is opposed to the Welfare State...

...It could be more simply defined as an expression of national nostalgia, as a yearning for the good old days of uncomplicated domestic and foreign issues...

...The 14th Amendment established that the United States had become indubitably integral and ceased to be a mere federation of sovereign states...

...He believes in individual rights after the manner of the Republicanism in the era preceding Theodore Roosevelt...

...It is further illustrated by the fact that a grandson of the late Henry Ford, Henry Ford II, recently declared his conviction that the right to strike was a necessary weapon of labor in the bargaining process...

...The Republican party may have originally expressed the naive individualism of the agrarian and the calculated individualism of the industrialist, each of whom resisted political interference with the exercise of his power, but it was never a party of pure reaction...

...In foreign policy, the devotion of modern urban and Eastern Republicans to the global responsibilities of a nation with power of imperial proportions goes back at least as far as Henry Stimson...

...He would solve our predicament in Indochina by using atomic weapons to defeat our foes...

...In short, he is critical of every situation in which American power is resisted by the great powers—whether Russia or China —which share the globe with us...

...The determining force in this policy is the fact that our nation has become one of the two indubitably imperial nations, whose power and responsibility transcend our boundaries and impinge on the power and sovereignty of both the former imperial nations of Europe and the small nations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East that have achieved independence from their former European masters...

...He believes in States' Rights in pure Jeffersonian terms—or rather, in terms of John C. Calhoun's interpretation of Jefferson...

...The acceptance of the New Deal social gains by Republicans of the large urban centers, both in principle and for reasons of political expediency, is well illustrated...

...He believes in American isolation in terms that might well have outraged Dwight Eisenhower had the latter's belated party loyalty not prompted him to cover all of this nostalgia with the mantle of his adopted Republicanism...

...But while Goldwater's politics of nostalgia found a logical home in the Republican party, it is also rather easy to understand why the party is not quite happy with it—particularly with its dim prospects of electoral success...

...He would like to sell the TVA...

...Perhaps the Goldwater phenomenon shows us that, though the country as a whole is accustomed to its new burdens, possibilities and perils, there remains an undercurrent of nostalgia...

...He wants to make Social Security "voluntary...

...And it is worth recalling that Eisenhower's foreign-policy stance was one of the many reasons for his great popularity...

...In foreign policy the old isolationist nationalism, which interfered as little as possible with the affairs of the world, has given way to a new foreign policy...

...It is an ironic fact that the Eisenhower Administration accepted all the social legislation of the preceding Democratic regimes, and that the General defeated the late Senator Taft, who stood well to the left of Goldwater, on the ground that Taft could not win the election...

...Another aspect of our current national development has to do with the heroic effort—of which the Civil Rights Law is a symbol—now being made to end the "American dilemma" and grant the Negro minority of our community the civil rights it has been denied since the Civil War...

...In foreign policy, Goldwater is uncertain whether or not we should recognize Russia, and he has doubts about our continued membership in the United Nations...

...and the USSR, locked for so long in the encounter of the cold war, now enjoy a precarious peace based on the "balance of terror"— that is, on the equal ability of each to destroy the other...

...This effort necessarily makes use of Federal power in breaking the hold of the white oligarchy of the Southern states which has been intent on keeping the Negro minority in subjugation...

...To the credit of the Democratic party, it must also be said that Roosevelt laid the foundation for the recruitment of the Negro minority in the party...

...It is well known that the party of Lincoln made massive contributions to the Civil Rights Bill, and that without its aid the bill would not have passed either house of Congress...

...Considering the rapid pace of American history, Goldwater is spokesman for those who resist this pace and yearn for simpler days...

...The basic reason is that the Democratic party, since the days of the New Deal, has been the chief instrument for the central development in our domestic and foreign policies— policies that have consistently challenged nostalgic conservatism, which is really a form of moribund 19th-century liberalism...

...Thus, although Goldwater boasts that his nomination now gives the nation a real alternative, he does not seem to appeal to many Republican voters...

...The two imperial nations, the U.S...

...In the urban centers it has policies not much different from those of Tory radicalism in Britain...

...Clearly the Republican party of the urban centers is not dominated by nostalgia for a vanished past...

...It is illustrated not so much by Eisenhower, the war hero, who did not quite know what the issues were, as by Governor Rockefeller's liberal Republicanism and, even more vividly by Senator Javits' liberal policies on both economic and racial issues...

...It was the Administration of FDR which first used Federal power to regulate a Federally integrated industry...

...He is against all of the policies which express or imply a positive attitude toward new responsibilities and powers...

...Despite the Republicans' greater reluctance to establish state interventions in the industrial process, and despite, too, their obvious conservatism compared with the "liberalism" of the modern Democratic party, the Republican party as a whole is not conservative in Goldwater's sense...

...The old isolationist nationalism has thus given way to a new nationalism in which the pride and power of a great nation are creatively engaged in global responsibilities...

...in other words, he is opposed to the mixed economy which is characteristic of all modern democracies that have come to terms with industrialism...

...but it is clearly strong enough, if not to win elections then at least to act as a warning of the weakness at the heart of a strong nation...

...It may not be as strong as some European critics believe...

...In the racial revolution Goldwater is opposed to every assertion of Federal power which seems to limit or defy the traditional rights of the states...

...It is not difficult to explain why Goldwater's brand of political nostalgia should have found a home in the Republican party...

...THE GOP The Politics of Nostalgia By Reinhold Niebuhr In the annals of this nation, surely Senator Barry Goldwater's Republican nomination for the Presidency will be regarded as a strange phenomenon...

...It has been variously defined as an expression of the "radical Right" or of "pure and unadulterated Republicanism...

...Since World War II and the Great Depression, the nation has been forced by the necessities of a developing industrialism to organize a mixed economy and to establish the minimal securities of the welfare state...

...Goldwater's response to these three aspects of our national destiny is very simple...

...It is upon that recruitment that the Kennedy-Johnson Administration has built its whole Civil Rights program...