Essay: WHATS NEW FOR THE GRAND OLD PARTY

NEARLY a year has passed since Senator Goldwater by no means singlehandedly turned the Republican Party into what was inevitably described as a shambles. Now a new national chairman is trying to tidy up; a new House leader struggles to present “positive alternatives” to the Great Society; task forces and study groups have produced dozens of party position papers; and here and there, like forget-me-nots pushing up through the rubble, Republican candidates are catching the public eye—and valiantly striving to grow into political sunflowers. And the state of the party is—a shambles.

There is a lot going on in the G.O.P.—and on the surface most of it sounds like trouble. In California, where Democratic Governor Pat Brown appears vulnerable for next year, there is a veritable chasm between the so-called left and right wings of the Republican Party, and some Republicans are saying, and sounding as though they meant it, that they would rather vote for Brown than for a primary-winning Republican of the other faction. In New York City, Conservative William Buckley now figures to get about 12% of this year’s vote for mayor, a considerable part of it at the expense of Republican and Liberal Party Candidate John Lindsay. Michigan’s Governor George Romney, who refused to support Goldwater, now has national aspirations of his own, and is traveling about the nation making inspirational speeches about party unity; many unforgiving Republicans are positively smacking their lips in anticipation of the revenge they will take on him for his defection in ’64. In Miami, Pennsylvania’s Governor William Scranton recently urged Republicans to isolate the “radical fringe,” presumably meaning the John Birch Society. In Arizona, a syndicated columnist named Goldwater said that he thought the party might do better to exorcise its “left side.”

Carried to its extreme, this Republican demonstration of the admirable belief that a true conviction should be stoutly upheld can lead only to the loss of elections. The fearful prospects led Richard Nixon, the one active Republican leader who seems acceptable to all factions, to lecture that “the liberals have got to stop trying to read the conservatives out of the party, and the conservatives have got to stop reading the liberals out of the party.” On the other hand, the ferment within the party, brought to the right conclusion at the right time, could result in a stronger party on a better road toward strength and even power.

The Cruel Statistics

It will not be an easy road to find. Smothered under the blanket of Lyndon Johnson’s father-of-all-the-peopleism, the G.O.P. is statistically so far behind that many years may go by before it gets its head up. Top Republicans talk publicly of picking up 40 House seats next year; they would happily settle for 20, which would bring the Democrats down to a still overwhelming majority of 275 to 160. Only by a turnover that surpasses imagination could the G.O.P. gain a bare majority of the Senate; Republicans would have to beat all 19 Democratic Senators up for re-election next year while holding the 14 Republican seats that will be risked. In their field of greatest strength, the governorships, the Republicans conceivably could add half a dozen or so to their present 17; they could just as conceivably drop a couple.

As for the big job, Robert J. Donovan, in The Future of the Republican Party, projects Democratic occupancy of the White House through 1988, with Johnson’s re-election in 1968, followed by two terms for Hubert Humphrey and two for a Kennedy. Such projections are based on a cruel reality confronting the G.O.P. It is the minority party, and it is growing more so all the time. In 1940, with memories of the ‘Republican Depression” still harsh in the minds of millions, 38% of U.S. voters still identified themselves as Republicans v. 42% as Democrats. Today, 53% consider themselves Democrats, a beggarly 25% as Republicans. Such is the Republican plight that some pundits—including a few Democrats awash in enough tears to float a couple of crocodiles —have bewailed the imminent end of the two-party system. Already, wrote Richard Rovere, the U.S. has come to “a one and one-half party system.”

Is some Whiggish end at hand for the Republican Party? Hardly. For its traditions include a deep sense of the role of a U.S. political party as embracer of many opinions, more pluribus than unum; and its ideological arguments can well turn into a source of intellectual strength as well as dissension; and vast changes in U.S. life are spreading out opportunities for leadership to whatever party can discern and seize them.

How to Be One of Two

In The Federalist No. 10, Madison wrote that “liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment, without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life.” Historically, such liberty could have led to splinter-party chaos; the U.S. instead channeled the political urge into two institutionalized parties. In their adversary relationship, they act as delicate checks upon one another, capitalizing on the deep American fear of unrestrained power. Though few voters would switch solely for the abstract value of “saving” the two-party system, many can be influenced by a subtle sense that a particular party has achieved too much power —and that it’s time for a change. This is the heart of the case for a strong opposition party. It should be challenging, creative, critical—always watching the party in power with a clear eye and offering the serious possibility of alternative government.

If a party is to be one of only two, it must necessarily be broad, a place where many kinds of people can find political shelter. In his little classic, Parties and Politics in America, Cornell’s Clinton Rossiter writes of “the deep overlapping of the beliefs and programs and even voters of the parties. They are the creatures of compromise, coalitions of interest in which principle is muted and often even silenced. They are the vast, gaudy, friendly umbrellas under which all Americans, whoever and wherever and however-minded they be, are invited to stand for the sake of being counted in the next election.”

In rough effect, the political party must win the approval of a consensus that includes not only the party loyalist but the estimated 40% of the electorate in the political spectrum’s middle span, people whose vote, regardless of nominal party affiliation or inclination, is changeable. This consensus shuns rigidly doctrinaire extremes that have brought upon the system its most tragic failures, notably the Civil War. British Political Scientist Denis Brogan points out that “the immediate cause of the greatest breakdown of the American political system was the breakdown of the party system, the failure of the party machinery and the party leaders to remember their national function, which, if carried out, was the justification of the varied weaknesses and absurdities of the party organizations and policies. Not until the party system broke down, in the dissolution of the Whigs, in the schism of the Democrats, was war possible.” Similarly, it has been when one or another party isolated itself from the consensus—whether by reason of the cross-of-gold dogma of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 or the simplistic moralisms of Barry Goldwater in 1964—that the party system has been thrown into great inbalance.

Thus party stands must be stated in generalities, and party differences must be perceived as tendencies. Both parties, for example, will invariably favor compassion in public welfare combined with stern fiscal responsibility, but as Rossiter puts it, “Look deep into the heart of a Democrat and you will find plans to build 400,000 units of public housing and to ship 300 tractors to Ghana (whether Ghana wants them or not); look deep into the soul of a Republican and you will find hopes for a reduction in taxes and for a balanced budget.”

Given the two parties’ community of aims, Democrats place more reliance on federal solutions, while Republicans stress individual opportunity. Democrats tend to favor the managed economy, while Republicans espouse more of a market economy; Democrats are likely to believe that spending and deficits create prosperity; while Republicans still worship at the shrine of the sound dollar. None of these are absolutes; in the attempt to win the consensus, parties gladly let their values overlap and intertwine.

The Comeback Trail

Within these broad bounds, a Republican comeback begins to seem plausible. By and large, the national Republican Party still holds to Lincoln’s thesis: “In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” Today, as in Lincoln’s time publican emphasis is based on a faith in the individual’s right to go as far and as high as he can within the limits ot his own abilities; the Republican credo includes a certain freedom from government interference in that effort. Yet modern Republicanism also recognizes, as Lincoln did, that the individual cannot do everything for himself, that in certain areas, government—first local, then state, and finally federal—has a requisite role.

Often concern for individualism fits right in with concern for public welfare. Thomas E. Dewey said that it must have been “a very clumsy Republican” who thought it clever to pin the “welfare state” tag on Democrats, for the fact is that “anyone who thinks that an attack on the fundamental idea of security and welfare is appealing to the people generally is living in the Middle Ages.” Even more emphatically, nothing in their distrust of federal solution need keep Republicans from recovering from another great missed opportunity—the one that came in 1954 when a Republican Chief Justice, appointed by a Republican President, wrote the school decision that started the Negro revolution. Justice, political sense and Republican tradition dictated that President Eisenhower assume a leading role in civil rights. But as with the missed chance to build up the party, which he regrets in his new book Waging Peace Ike made the least of it. The South is, of course, the G.O.P.’s area of greatest growth, and there is enough in legitimate Republican philosophy to maintain the growth. But if the party’s image is to be neo-Confederate, then the gams in the South will be ephemeral and the effect elsewhere disastrous.

In his 1962 Godkin Lectures at Harvard New York’s Nelson Rockefeller offered a guiding strategy for balancing the modern demands of individualism and welfare with the three levels of government, a kind of federalism providing room for both infinite variety and creativity in all sectors of national life.” He called for strengthened state and local powers. “If the states ignore or evade their responsibility to act, there will be no alternative to direct federal-local action. The problems of urbanism have outrun individual local government boundaries, legal powers and fiscal resources. And the national Government is too remote to sense and act responsively on the widely varying local or regional concerns and aspirations. The states—through their relations with local governments and their closeness to the people and the problems—can and should serve as the leaders in planning and the catalysts in developing cooperative action at local-state-federal levels.” In this spirit several current Republican Governors—among them Rockefeller Scranton, Ohio’s James Rhodes, Rhode Island’s John Chafee and Washington’s Daniel Evans—have taken the lead in providing showcase state-sponsored programs for education, mental health, highways and poverty-fighting.

Yet neither a broad philosophy nor a workable operational strategy will revive the Republican Party if it fails to take into account not only the exigencies of the present but also the tidal waves of the future. “In the decades just ahead,” writes New York University’s Peter F. Drucker, “our domestic politics will be dominated by unfamiliar issues —not only new, but different in kind from the things we have been arguing about since 1932. They will be concerned not primarily with economic matters but with basic values —moral, esthetic and philosophical. Moreover, the center of our political stage is now being taken over by a new power group: a professional, technical and managerial middle class—very young, affluent, used to great job security and highly educated.”

In 1960, the average American age was 291, and today it is 28. One-fourth of all Americans go to school; by the early 1970s, that fraction will be about one-third. There are already 35 million potential voters 35 or younger, and that number will shoot up as the great war-baby crop continues to turn 21. No party can ignore the shift in the political center of gravity, for around this center will swing political success in the future. To be sure, parental conditioning plus ethnic background still give many youngsters their political set. But in the greatest numbers ever, young people who feel no party allegiance are becoming part of the electorate. They are mostly unencumbered by the political possessions and prejudices born of the Depression and its New Deal remedies. Technical, managerial and professional skills entitle new voters to security and affluence and therefore independence. They care most deeply about the quality of their lives, about the matters that most directly affect them. They are often community activists who mean to have a significant say-so in their own affairs In its own instructive stress on individualism, the Republican Party would seem to have among such younger voters a rich field for future bumper crops.

Opportunity in the Megalopolis

Another great area of political opportunity lies in the steady conversion of the U.S. into an overwhelmingly urban nation. Soon, 73% of all Americans will live in 200 metropolitan areas. Nearly two-fifths will be citizens of just three great megalopolitan complexes—one ranging from Boston through New York, Philadelphia and Washington to Norfolk; another comprising all the territory between Milwaukee and Cleveland; the third taking in the California coast from San Francisco to San Diego. The cities and the suburbs that comprise the megalopolis have a vital mutuality of interest in housing, transportation, schooling, crime problems and employment.

It is remarkable how few professional Republicans, for all their philosophical emphasis on government at the local and state levels, seem to realize the city’s significance. One who does is Ford Foundation’s Malcolm Moos, Eisenhower’s best speechwriter and a man who comes perhaps closer than anyone today to fulfilling the function of Republican ”thinker.” Says Moos: “The great urban areas represent places which the Republican Party can homestead. Let’s take the carbon monoxide out of the air, let’s solve the water shortage, let’s clean up the rivers, let’s move against corruption and crime, and let’s put our schools in shape. The most conspicuous political failure in the U.S. is in the governing of our cities, and the Democrats are in control of those cities. It’s their fault. They’re saddled with it.”

In a more certain sense, the G.O.P. is likely to benefit most from the erosions in Democratic strength that come from complacency and accompanying corruption, as well as from the electorate’s natural suspicion of a party that keeps too much power for too long. If this is all the Republican Party counts on, its reason for being is far less than it should be. It must aim for much more. With a tradition that can appeal to a broad consensus, with residual strength on which to build a valuable and meaningful opposition and with a young, undoctrinaire society to draw support from, the Grand Old Party can develop quite a few new opportunities.