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GOLDWATER
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Stone and others have been maintaining. It seems to me that there is
very little substance to the apocalyptic vision that is being urged upon
us of an America that is about to show its fascist colors under the
charismatic leadership of a Goldwater, aided and abetted by the John
Birch Society, the White Citizens Council and a power clique of
frustrated Air Force generals. In contrast to McCarthy, whose
in–
satiable longing for power and whose ruthlessness were seldom con–
cealed, Goldwater seems an almost Chaplinesque figure who appears
to inspire affection rather than awe in his followers. It is
sympatico
Barry rather than ideologue Barry who is now winning the hearts of
Americans long frustrated in their desire for a politician they can both
like and trust. Except for Eisenhower, the Republican party has done
poorly by its followers in this respect. Frigid Tom Dewey, tricky Dick
Nixon,a wooden and ascetic George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller
with his glacial smile and his heartless wife-snatching have, none of
them, inspired the kind of personal allegiance that Harry Truman, for
example, did for Democrats in 1948. For Republicans and others who
are now flocking
to
him, Barry Goldwater is a new political "flavor"
expressly suited to the taste of a great many politically "unchurched"
Americans.
One of the great imponderables in any calculation of how well
Goldwater may do in November is the question of just who these
Americans are. A few things, however, do seem fairly clear. Those
most active in Goldwater's support are what are generally called "solid
citizens" : responsible, articulate, thoroughly presentable men and
women. They differ from their Republican predecessors and Demo–
cratic counterparts in their youthfulness, their prosperousness and their
newness to politics. This very affluent class of disaffected Americans
represents the hundreds of thousands of so-called small or family busi–
nesses across the nation. These "small" businesses are actually very
substantial and their assets, like those of the Goldwater stores, frequently
run into the millions. To them the complex hierarchical world of the
large corporations, the labor unions, the government bureaus and the
national political parties have traditionally been a foreign territory which
they have vaguely identified with "the East." The source of their dis–
affection lies in the very prosperity that they have recently been
enjoying, and in their resentment that, wealthy and powerful as they
are on the local scene, they are still forced to "heel" before the unions,
the national corporations, the money marketeers of Wall Street and
their minions in the Washington bureaucracy and on the national party
committees. For them a return
to
States' Rights and "home rule" would