Vol. 31 No. 4 1964

596

HANS

MORGENTHAU

publican day-dream out. It is this appearance that constitutes his

charisma. It evokes the enthusiasm of his supporters and the fearful

doubts of more sophisticated Republicans for whom Republican ro–

manticism is acceptable only as long as it

nothing more than a

spurious incantation incapable of disturbing a satisfactory status quo.

This romantic activism of Goldwater is given an opportunity for

action in the emergence, extraordinary in American history, of a genuine

nationwide conservative position, in contrast to the spurious literary

conservatism on which so much debate has recently been wasted. That

is the position of the segregationists North and South, intent upon pre–

serving the status quo ante 1954. The transformation of a sectional

conservative position into a nationwide one, coincident with the rise

of a romantic activist as a national leader, constitutes the ominous

novelty of our situation.

Goldwater should win, his victory will bring to power not the

romantics who can dream of the golden age yet are prevented by the

stubborn facts of the contemporary world from returning to it, but the

conservatives who in the status quo of segregation have a concrete

political goal susceptible of political action. Yet since the conserva–

tive segregationists are a permanent minority, they could govern the

nation only as they govern most of the Southern states: not with the

consent of the governed but with violence over them.

Goldwater

should lose, the Republican party will >sink into the impotence of a

virtually permanent minority party, a threat to the democratic order

rather than to the Democratic party. Both Goldwater's victory and de–

feat, then, conjure up a threat to the democratic order, that is, the

threat of fascism in America.

WILLIAM PHILLIPS

The Goldwater campaign has few aspects that are not grim.

But we might at least find some satisfaction in seeing that the Right

seems to have almost as much trouble getting anywhere in this country

as the Left.

I do not mean that the Right is as small or as weak as the Left.

But up

now, it is only when the Left or Right has accommodated itself

to the now' accepted patterns of American thinking that they have had

any effect-or meaning. America is, of course, the great land of the