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GOLDWATER
603
Cold Warriors are interested in Communism, which they would
be
forced to invent if it did not exist, principally as a means of frightening
the electorate and creating an artificial popular demand for their own
elevation to power.
As for the agitation against Big Government, in so far as it is
not merely a tactic on the part of the racists with their transparently
opportunist embrace of States' Rights, it is taken seriously only by the
more simple-minded and provincial zealots. For the Republican can–
didate's ideological mentors it is no more than a means to an end.
If
they succeed in grasping power-a success which is possible though not
probable-they will surely expand rather than contract the sway of
the Federal government, and the danger is that they might well see to
it that this year's election is our last free
e~ction.
Once in control of
the executive power, they are unlikely to surrender it. Devotees of
the McCarthyite strategy of smear, intimidation and purge, they might
well attempt
to
disorganize and then outlaw the opposition.
If
your
dogma is such as to equate liberals with socialists and socialists with
Communists, and at the same time you have a vast police and spy
apparatus at your disposal, then the way is opened for large-scale
purges of the Hitler and Stalin pattern.
Goldwater and his zealots are not conservative in any intelligible
sense of the term. They are out-and-out reactionaries. It takes very
little political sophistication to see that Goldwater is not in the least a
replica of the late Senator Taft, who was genuinely a conservative. His
movement represents a recrudescence on American soil ,of precisely those
super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in
Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions
dead. No wonder Europeans, with that experience back of them, re–
gard Goldwater with horror.
The basic illusion that the Goldwater reactionaries manipulate is
that of American omnipotence. Even though they know consciously
that the cost of a nuclear war is wholly unacceptable, when it comes to
the emotional and psychological realization of this fact they simply
black out. For such a realization would mean the collapse of their
system of assumptions, pf their entire political world-view. Hence they
are now trying to bluff us with their theory of bluff. Their story is
that
if
you push the Russians hard enough they are certain to give up
without fighting all the gains they made in the Second World War.
But what if at some point they stop appeasing us and decide to resist
no matter what the consequences? The Goldwater theory of bluff is
grotesque and in the last analysis almost criminally irresponsible.