The "liberal hour," according to John Kenneth Galbraith (who borrowed the phrase from Adlai Stevenson), is "the moment just before presidential elections when even the most obsolete men become reconciled, if briefly and expediently to the machine age."

What this amusing little concept means I suppose, is that the same republicans who one convention night cheered wildly and sincerely for Barry Goldwater could the next day embrace platform and a candidate that will accomplish as little of what Goldwater really wants as will the Democrats. The embrace is indeed brief and for most observers came away from the Chicago convention with a wrong impression that Goldwater, and Eisenhower or Nixon, was the centimental hero of the Republican (I hesitate to call them ).

Some have gone so far as to say that the delegates, if given their free (something which, it would seem, convention delegates rarely are given), would have nominated Goldwater, just so many Democrats would personal have preferred Adlai Stevenson to John F. Kennedy, Stevenson and Goldwater occupy analogous positions in their respective parties. They are the poles to which the "real" Democrats and the "real" Republicans naturally gravitate. They are poles, however, which independent voters and practical politicians apparently find offensive, and both were rejected this year politically unusable. Stevenson and Goldwater got the cheers; Kennedy and Nixon got the nominations.

If reactionary Republicans experience a "liberal hour," it may well be that radical Democrats undergo a corresponding "conservative hour" each election year. If the obsolete man must electoral purposes accept the twentieth century, the extreme liberal must similar purposes swallow an unattractively large dose of nineteenth century Horatio Alger. In the national conventions, both parties seem to take decisive and conscious move toward the center, leaving on the one flank disappointed Goldwaterites and on the other disgruntled Stevensonians. It matters very little that both heroes have closed ranks with their parties; the "real" Republicans and the "real" Democrats are still not satisfied and will support Nixon and Kennedy only half-heartedly. One of the major tasks for the Democrats this year is to make sure that these half-hearted votes, which count as heavily as whole-hearted ones, get up enough conviction to go to the polls.

Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, written before his personal triumph and practical defeat at the Chicago convention, was based on the belief that the parties are not drifting toward the center but that the bulk of the American people are conservative in the Goldwater sense--a very special sense, as I shall indicate below. Chester Bowles' The Coming Political Breakthrough, on the other hand, refers in its title to a new national political consensus on extremely liberal lines, which Bowles believes is about to take shape in the 1960 Presidential campaign. Neither Goldwater nor Bowles, I think, is correct in his evaluation of the current American political temperament.

Goldwater's case was rejected by his own party at Chicago, when it adopted a platform containing virtually none of the Arizona Senator's proposals. It did so, according to some critics, less out of conviction than from a belief that Goldwater's views were unpopular with the voters. Goldwater's Conservatism (always with a capital "C") is, after all, a rather extreme brand. It is based, pre-eminently, on the strictest possible construction of the Constitution, a concept most voters don't even understand, much less enthusiastically embrace.

For this reason, most of Goldwater's rank and file support comes from the South, where any fool knows that strict construction means that the 1954 desegregation decision is invalid. On the integration issue, in fact, Goldwater goes even further, explicitly questioning whether the Supreme Court's decision is even to be considered "the law of the land."

On similar Constitutional grounds, he rejects Federal aid to education ("no powers regarding education were given to the federal government"), for agriculture ("No power over agriculture was given to any branch of the federal government") and all welfare programs ("The government must begin to withdraw from a whole series of programs that are outside its constitutional mandate--from social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal and all the other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals.") Goldwater goes on to denounce the graduated income tax as "immoral" ("I do not believe in punishing success.") He proposes a series of foreign policy moves that includes virtual withdrawal of support (if not membership) from the United Nations, cessation of foreign aid to all but reliable allies, encouragement and actual prosecution of military action against "vulnerable Communist regimes," and withdrawal of diplomatic recognition from all Communist states.

Goldwater, you see, is a rather tall order for almost any voter to accept. To rebut rather sketchily, there is another side to all these Constitutional questions: Senator Goldwater apparently places little stock in the "necessary and proper" and "general welfare" clauses. The wisdom of the ages did not stop accumulating in 1789, and if a nation is to live fruitfully in a changing world, its Constitution must be a reasonably flexible document, laying down a framework for dealing with problems beyond the foresight of the drafters. Why does the Constitution not mention agriculture or education? Because the twentieth century, post-frontier farm problem was something inconceivable to the framers; and because public education was a negligible affair until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The wisdom of 1789 in fact often seems irrelevant wisdom now: Goldwater follows the old line in saying, "Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man's liberty. Government represents power in the hands of some men to control and regulate the lives of other men." This is true, but the past century and a half have brought home another, equally important truth, that undesirable power can rest in private hands, like those of a corporation or those of a union.

Strangely enough, Goldwater is awake to the danger of union power, but not to that of big business. It is almost ludicrous to read, "When the United Automobile Workers demand a wage increase from the auto industry, a single monolith is pitted against a number of separate, competing companies." In practice, of course, it is often management that finds comfort in industry-wide bargaining, which eliminates the risk of one company suffering a crippling strike while its competitors continue business. And if we went Goldwater's way, General Motors might be a pretty impressive "single monolith" pitted against a solitary local union.

Another Conservatism

To me, at least, there seems to be much wrong with Goldwater's argument. Its additional difficulty is that it just won't sell. First, it is too formalistic: the Constitution does not impress the average voter half as much as constructive action. Second, it is too far removed from reality: Goldwater never tells us how various services are to be performed once the Federal government gets its "unconstitutional" nose out. If I were a private individual with several million dollars, what on earth could I do about, for instance, urban renewal, that would not be better done if I turned my money over to the Federal government? Goldwater admits that the necessary initiative is lacking on the state and local levels, but says nothing about instilling this initiative in state and local officials. It is meaningless to say that each state is capable of supplying its own educational facilities, when state legislators lack the courage or vision to impose taxes sufficient to finance an adequate program.

Goldwater's final difficulty is that he underestimates the true conservatism of the American people, the unwillingness to abandon a program once it has been around for a while and is working fairly well. About the only "welfare" program the people have found repugnant enough in practice to repeal was prohibition.

Bowles' belief in a liberal consensus of public opinion suffers from the same basic weakness as Goldwater's notion of the conservative consensus--neither exists--but Bowles' argument at least has some interesting historical roots. Bowles sees a pattern in American political history of recurring "breakthroughs" (or "breaksthrough": this is definitely an adman's word): at the times of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. These breakthroughs occurred when the party in power was no longer able to cope with a situation, and the minority had developed a new and promising approach to the problem. The old minority was then able to form a new consensus (in other words, to get the people behind it) and take over as the new majority. Between these breakthroughs, Bowles says, there may be a fairly long period of doldrums, where the two parties move closer to each other and jockey for office with neither representing any type of national consensus.

There is a lot of value in this historical analysis; the difficulty is that Bowles thinks that the fourth breakthrough is taking place right now. Much as I with that this were true, I can see no evidence for any such contention. Past breakthroughs" have been connected with some major issue or event, like slavery or the Great Depression; although many important problems face us today, nothing so spectacular or disturbing is in the mind of the electorate. It seems to me that we are still very much in the period of jockeying, and that this is an election in which many people will vote with little conviction. Bowles is excessively optimistic in thinking that Kennedy may be elected, but he is much more likely to squeak through than to break through.

This issue of the weekly supplement is devoted to politics. In it are a review of recent books by Senator Barry Goldwater, Chester Bowles, and John Kenneth Galbraith, a photographic feature on disarmament efforts in Boston, an analysis of last Saturday's SANE Rally, and a review of Eugene Black's book, The Diplomacy of Economic Development, on distribution of American foreign aid.

As for the content of Bowles' hypothetical consensus, it follows the general line of Democratic platform and campaign, with the same virtues (concern for all the necessary things Goldwater would abandon) and faults (an eagerness to disguise the fact that public programs cost money and a corresponding failure to stress the fact that the country can and must afford this money). Bowles writes in amazingly short, terse paragraphs, and too often appears to be offering the reader an oversimplified first primer in American politics, history and economics.

A Literate Economist