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PHILIP RAHV
politics that is beginning to tum into a flirtation with radicalism will
be answered increasingly from the Right, and by men more impressive
and not less dangerous than Goldwater.
PHILIP RAHV
Quite a few years after the prophets of "the end of ide–
ology"-by which they really meant the voluntary demobilization of
the Left and grateful acceptance of the status quo-have established
their sway among the intellectuals, we are witnessing the emergence
of Goldwaterism as a major force on the political scene in effective
control of one of our big national parties. The Republican party has
now been turned into a movement, European style, an ideological
movement through and through. Thus ideology comes
to
minatory life
on the far Right after it has been all but abandoned by the Left. The
vaunted pragmatism of American politics and the assumed supremacy
of "the moderate consensus" are shown up to be very limited notions,
partial and precarious truths at best. And among the conditions favor–
able to the rise of Goldwaterism has been the complete absence of
organized pressure from the Left; free from such pressure, the
J
ohn–
son Administration moves to the Right and conservative opinion is
lured by Rightist adventurers. As for the so-called Negro revolt, what
it mainly represents is an attempt to break into the present system, not
to shatter it. Yet even so, without the resentment it has inspired among
whites, Goldwater would command no such following as he does today.
The Senator from Arizona, who plays up to the most backward
elements in American life, is a naive idealist of foolish ideas, mostly
taken from those extreme groups on the Right (like the little Politbureau
on the
National Review,
Buckley, Burnham, Myers,
et al)
who com–
bine a defense of the nineteenth-century model of Capitalism with an
attack on Big Government and, above all, with endless and loud
clamor on the theme of the ''Communist menace." What it all comes
to, objectively speaking, is an alibi for conquering state-power. It should
be obvious that what with the Sino-Soviet split, a split we did not
promote but of which we are the chief beneficiaries, and the growing
independence of Moscow's satellites in Eastern Europe, Communism is
far less of a threat now than it was only a decade ago. Our hard-nosed