Nation: To the Right, March

WAS Barry Goldwater four years ahead of his time? Every reading of the nation’s temper suggests that he was. Tetchy, confused, aggrieved and a little fearful, the American electorate has moved sharply rightward since Goldwater’s conservative banner waved for naught in 1964. Today the “silent center” of which Richard Nixon speaks is by no means silent—or content with the center.

The moods and motivations of U.S. voters in 1968 fit no single, simple doctrinaire definition of conservatism. Some respond to rational calls for decentralizing federal functions, an old creed with new relevance in the day of ever larger supergovernment. Others, the most vocal and vehement evangelists of the New Right, can be said to be preaching agin-ism, or negativism, or even law-and-orderism—and, in the case of George Wallace’s most fervent followers, neo-Know-Nothingism. Above all, Americans seem to be swept up in a strong if disordered tide of feeling that the times are out of joint, that the future can take care of itself if only present irritations are corrected.

No Freak Flowering

The issue of crime on the streets, which got Goldwater nowhere, now bulks large in politics under the law-and-order label. One national poll re ports that 81% of the public believe that “law and order has broken down in this country.” The same survey finds ‘ that the public blames rioting Negroes and conspiring Communists in almost equal measure. The G.O.P. has been the minority party for many years, but all signs point to a Republican victory in November. George Wallace attracts a fifth of the votes in opinion polls, and shows no indication of fading. Regardless of how many citizens actually vote for Wallace, the significance of the rightward trend can hardly be ignored or marked off as merely a freak flowering of kooks and fanatics. Rather, the New Right, like the New Left to which it reacts, has been draining off strength from the old middle and depositing it at various points to the right of center. For years to come, the impact may be felt in the form of polarized politics.

What gives conservatism its new wal lop numerically — and carries the Wallace movement beyond the South — is backing among white working-class families long identified with the Dem ocratic Party. Add some farmers, lower-middle-class white-collar workers and small businessmen, and the Wallace base is broadened, but not complete. In the South, particularly, Wallace’s support cuts across economic and social lines to include bankers, professional men and others. Generally, however, his following is heaviest among those with lim ited education and modest income. Richard Nixon appeals to the more polished Democratic defectors.

The United Auto Workers has the most liberal leadership in Big Labor. Yet last week a U.A.W. local in Flint, Mich., voted to endorse Wallace. In Columbus last May, the United Appeal announced that it was going to feed and house some transient participants in the Poor People’s March; 500 factory workers canceled their regular donations to the charity drive, and signs appeared urging, DON’T DONATE, INVESTIGATE UNITED APPEAL. Policemen in suburban Cincinnati are circulating petitions that demand nullification of Supreme Court civil liberties decisions. Frustrated cops and gabby cabbies may not be the most accurate social sensors, but they have become the most visible and audible diagnosticians of the trend to the right. In Pasadena, Texas, the local Wallace chairman is Jimmy Alcocer, a member of the pipefitters union. “We’re sick and tired,” he says, “of labor bosses dictating our vote.”

The right is sick and tired of many things: high taxes, militant Negroes, the inconclusive war in Viet Nam, peace demonstrators, student rebellions, ghetto riots.

That blue-collar workers, many of them Roman Catholic, should be moving rightward is hardly astonishing. In the age of affluence, the old bread-and-butter issues that made the Democratic Party so attractive a generation ago have long lost political relevance. The demand for skilled men seems endless. Pensions, workmen’s compensation and job security are accepted facts of life. The dream of home ownership and other accouterments of middle-class life have been realized by many. Now they have material possessions and prestige to conserve. Now those who would chal lenge the status quo—as the unions did 30 and 40 years ago—are the enemy.

The fact that the disturbers of the peace are often black or, even less fathomable, white college kids who blow marijuana smoke in the face of the middle-class dream, adds emotion to the situation. The challengers, with their strange ways and incessant demands, put into question all the values and achievements on which the middle class has thrived. Further, open housing and integrated schools have an infinitely greater impact on working-class neighborhoods than on more expensive residential areas.

A Clash of Values

Private interests in the U.S. have frequently enjoyed Government largesse in one form or another: farm subsidies, rights of way for railroads, canals, dams and other public works that can make a community’s future, defense contracts that cushion both businessman and worker. Yet ever-growing welfare costs and a troubled antipoverty program that has yet to buy civil peace smack of something for nothing. The unemployed, over-fecund recipients of the taxpayers’ generosity seem ever less grateful, ever more pugnacious—just as organized labor grew more militant with each advantage gained. Where will it all end? ask many uneasy Americans. Will the second car or the boat be sacrificed to higher taxes? Will Daughter be raped or robbed by a black-nationalist hoodlum or move in with a beaded, bearded white hippie? Will Junior’s college career—the dividend of long years of saving—end on a picket line organized by anarchists who wave Viet Cong flags and spit on the Stars and Stripes that Dad fought for in World War II? In fact, blacks are by far the most frequent victims of black criminals, and there is no real political answer to youthful excess. Nonetheless, racial fear and generational disapprobation—on both sides—are potent forces in the politics of resentment. This is so not only among blue-collar workers. More and more, the clash is over fundamental value systems rather than public policy. The New Conservatism has not sprung full-blown from one social-economic group in 1968. It has been growing for years, and in disparate directions.

There are important differences between the gospel according to Goldwater and that preached by Wallace. Goldwater was, and is, an ideological conservative with rather classic ideas about limiting the activities of Government. While opposing certain civil rights laws, Goldwater never opposed racial integration. He admired conservative intellectuals like William F. Buck ley and Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago. Wallace, while making an essentially emotional appeal, is a functional conservative concerned with such specific issues as segregation and states’ rights (but not economy in government; for a Southern Governor, Wallace was a big spender). While the Goldwaters and the Buckleys disdain Wallace and accept the pragmatism of Richard Nixon, there is a large overlap among those who knew in their hearts that Barry was right and those who stand up for America with George. Government has grown so large and social change has been so swift and pervasive that the temptation is to ignore the complex reasons.

Nightsticks and Nostalgia

The New Right, despite its love of simple answers, does not want for contradictions. It bases its appeal on protecting the hectored individual against the encroachments of Government, but attacks the Supreme Court when it acts to protect the individual against the Government’s police powers. One of the more revealing Gallup polls of recent months asked whether citizens wanted new appointees to the Supreme Court to be conservative or liberal. The response was pro-conservative, 51% to 30%. The economic group strongest for this view was the $3,000-$5,000 bracket—the very segment that would seemingly benefit most from a liberal court’s decisions on criminal procedures.

Sadly, the drums and fifes of the right’s march drown out the very voices that might contribute most to a conciliation of the nation’s conflicts. The problems confronting America today all demand hard thinking and constructive debate. They will not be solved by the nightstick or by nostalgia for more tranquil times. Moreover, a determinedly retrogressive body politic could inflame forever the sores that merely irritate it today.