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TOM KAHN
Tom Kahn
What is happening in America seems to be a retreat on the
racial front combined with a resurgence of economic conservatism, albeit
within the framework of a Keynesian consensus. A sadder conjunction of
forces at this point in our political life is hard to imagine. And it is all the
more tragic because, despite arguments about cycles, it was largely avoid–
able.
When Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick contend that there
has always been a backlash-or that there never was a frontlash-they
are right and wrong. True, the Negro's claims have always been resisted;
and true, the frontlash never went far enough. Still, there is something
qualitatively distinctive about the current counterrevolutionary drift: it
does not bespeak a weariness with the Negro, as did Northern senti–
ment following the Civil War; nor is it a simple surfacing of anti-Negro
raCIsm.
Rather, if the elections are a sign, we are seeing the Negro and the
poor getting the short end of a stick wielded by a curious spectrum of
discontented forces.
On
the one hand are the backlashers. They may have been around in
'sixty-four, but they were smashed politically. This time, they made gains
under the Republican banner-not only in California and Georgia, but
in Illinois and New York. Where they could not vote directly for a racist,
the backlashers simply voted anti-Johnson-against "centralization of gov–
ernment," in Wallace's words, against "moving too fast," in Reagan's.
They wanted to cut Lyndon Johnson down to size.
And in this, they had help from the Left. To say that Stokely Car–
michael and the Black Power advocates caused the debacle is silly; they
don't have that much power. It is enough to say that what they could
do, they did. In the process, they fed a deep social hunger, not for racial
equality and peace but for conservatism and selfishness. Ironically, the
New Left won in California and Illinois but lost badly in Lowndes
County, where 80 per cent of the population is black. Black Power did
not create the riots, but to the extent it justified them, it compromised and
fragmented the civil rights movement-which may be a partial explana–
tion of why one-third of the Negro vote in Alabama reportedly went to
Mrs. Wallace.
Elements in the peace movement also wanted to cut Johnson down
