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RICHARD POIRIER
pretty far out-who'd initiate discussions of policy in terms outside
the now accepted areas of public debate. Such
8.
man, exceeding what
are assumed to be the realistic alternatives of national policy, would
perforce appear to be "unintelligent." In fact, the sign played quite
directly on the not absurd suspicion that the truth must be in our
hearts because it cannot be in our heads, filled as they have been on
various occasions with childish lies, many of them later contradicted by
other lies, about the Bay ·of Pigs, about China and Vietnam, about the
details of the assassination, about our preparedness, about Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, and Batista, about the number of racial murders
in Mississippi, where the search for the three murdered Civil Rights
workers happened to stumble over a couple of unexpected Negro
corpses as a sort of fringe benefit.
In accounting for the appeal of Goldwater it doesn't matter that
he's intellectually incapable of telling even himself the truth about his
stand on most issues. What does matter is that Goldwater has recognized
the drift of many people toward some radical reassessment of the way
we are conducting ourselves. Those liberals who scoff at such a
development should remember the recent history of some of their
friends. Surely the mental processes that can lead to a vote for Gold–
water ought to be appreciated by those who in 1948 found
it
pos–
sible to justify a vote for Wallace. The kind of reasoning behiRd a vote
for either of these men involves a desire to make American politics
something more than a form of management. And Wallace, humanely
on the side of that abstraction called humanity, was as out of touch
with any kind of reality as is Goldwater whose only issues are abstrac–
tions. Goldwater's appeal has little to do with anything dignified by
the term "conservatism," and his wretched showing in the primaries
should dissuade any but the most hysterical from jowl shakings about
"the American people," those Others, with their love of violence, their
desire for easy solutions, etc., etc., etc., all the brutal platitudes. Gold–
water's popularity represents nothing so much as a deep boredom with
politics that infects the nation and that infected his Republican op–
position before California, sapping what energy and power they had
left after years of trying to smuggle an identity from the Democrats.
This same pervasive boredom makes even those anxious to vote for
Johnson feel unsure that he won't turn into a heavy fog bank before
November. Remembering Truman's defeat of Dewey can't give a
Democrat much comfort these days. Truman campaigned, much as
will Goldwater, as a loner against the Establishment. He brilliantly
exploited what he recognized even in 1948 as an ever ready contempt in