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GOLDWATER
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much experience not merely in organizing partisans but in meeting
the practical problems of state. Goldwater is now creating a party
dominated by an uncompromising minority faction of uncommon
discipline and dedication, and led by a millennial dreamer, a visionary
without experience in solving any of the real problems of ,our public
life. Despite Goldwater's apparent post-Convention concessions to the
Republican moderates, he has already made the Republican party
into a front organization for a minority point of view.
Control of a major party brings
to
Goldwater and his peculiar
notions a measure of respectability and legitimation that they have
not had before, and gives him a platform from which he can maximize
the effect of right-wing views. It also gives
rum
a strong position from
which to form a new kind of political union, which will be based on
jingoism, economic ultra-conservatism, and racial animosity. Of the
primary emotional forces upon ' which he depends-social resentments,
economic greed, and messianic idealism-it is the last which is most
dangerous, for Goldwater draws upon a deep millennial strain in the
American consciousness, and mobilizes all ,our impatience with the
maladies of modernity and the innumerable constraints of the con–
temporary world. His most ardent followers respond not to his sup–
posed conservatism, which is shallow and meaningless, but to the
allure of his utopian visions, embracing on one side a return to long–
vanished entrepreneurial conditions and on the other a total victory
(sans
casualties and
sans
income tax) in the cold war.
I believe that Goldwater's rise to prominence, far from being a
momentary thing, rests upon forces constantly at work in our society,
clearly visible at least since the Korean War, and now intensified by
the racial crisis, which itself seems to be unresolvable. For this reason,
a defeat in the election, unless it is overwhelming, probably will not
go far to dislodge Goldwater's grip on the Republican party. Such a
defeat would have to be followed by an extraordinarily united and de–
termined effort on the part of the Republican moderates, of which
they do not appear today to be capable. It is still possible, then, that
Goldwater, if beaten, could re-take the renomination in 1968, per–
haps under circumstances more auspicious for his election. Ten years
ago, assessing the impact of McCarthyism and related tendencies in
an article on "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," I observed that, in
a political culture like ours, "in which it is possible to exploit the
wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least
conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active and well-financed