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SOME COMMENTS ON
SENATOR GOLDWATER
We invited a number of people to make brief comments on
"The Significance of Senator Goldwater's Nomination for President."
The contributions are in reply to aur letter, in which we said:
"You are of course free to comment in any way you choose, but we
would suggest an emphasis less on your personal reactions to Goldwater
than on the nature of his appeal. Does he represent a new phenomenon
in American politics? Can he be accommodated to the accepted alterna–
tives of political debate in America? Does his popularity represent a
temporary dissatisfaction on the part of voters or is it a more permanent
consolidation of native conservative and reactionary elements in Ameri–
can society?"
DANIEL BELL
The Goldwater phenomenon is a confluence of two streams
in American life: one, the element of moralism, an aspect of the na–
tional style; the other, the emergence of the well-to-do "dispossessed."
There has always been a moralizing streak in American life.
It
is a
fundamentalist view of the world in terms of sin, not in which all men
are sinners, but in which there are "good guys" and "bad guys," the
righteous (and self-righteous) and the sinners. This moralism was most
evident in the attempt to regulate spheres of private conduct-Sunday
blue-laws, censorship of books, etc. With some significant exceptions,
this moralism was rarely carried over into the national political arena.
The national arena, until the thirties, was a small one. The
"actors" were from a homogeneous cultural and religious background–
small
town
Protestant-and the issues and interests were primarily