The Centrism of 1964: A Few Thoughts

Writing about centrism for some years I have consistently emphasized that it is a conservative political philosophy in the classical sense of the term, and moreover rather more conservative in practical policymaking than is generally appreciated. I have also emphasized that it is the conservatism of centrism, not the optimism and reformism associated with the term "liberalism," that has dominated the Democratic Party since the era of the Second World War. Yet there seems to have been a patch in the 1960s, perhaps extending to the 1970s, when the party was less centrist, and more liberal, than that characterization suggests. In contrast with centrists' tendency to treat the left as their enemy, and give the right a pass no matter what it did, called out Barry Goldwater as an extremist in the 1964 election. Centrists are hostile to mass movements, but in this period they supported a mass movement in the civil rights movement. And if centrists stand for a "pluralist," "pragmatic" minimalism in reform that tends to result in doing little to nothing about society's problems, and especially the concerns of the disadvantaged, it proposed, and to some extent pursued, a "War on Poverty." How is all that to be reconciled with centrism as both conservative and dominant?

It is less difficult than one may imagine. Where Goldwater is concerned the issue was less a "liberal" party opposing a figure of the "right" than of, going by Richard Hofstadter's own characterization of the politics of the era, the "true" conservatives of the center standing against a "pseudo-conservative" tendency that, in contrast with the pragmatic and compromise-minded conservatism of the center offered a reactionary type that seemed to many impracticable in its prescriptions to a degree they could not countenance, be it in a foreign policy stance that showed "Goldwater's imagination had never confronted the implications of thermonuclear war" in his "strangely casual about the prospect of total destruction," or his "state's rights"-singing opposition to the civil rights movement, or his desire to undo the New Deal. (After all, it was one thing to oppose the tentative, pragmatic, limited reforms of Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 when this meant change, another to, after those changes had been part of the fabric of American life for decades, try and tear them out of that fabric.) This was all the more the case given that, as the outcome of that particular election demonstrated (a victory for the Democratic Party over the Republicans by a margin of 62-38 percent, to which no presidential election since has come close), Goldwater's positions were hugely unpopular with the public as a whole. Where the civil rights movement is concerned it mattered that the movement's purpose was not changing the system (and certainly not the economic system), but correcting the system's imperfect protection of those rights it grants all citizens--with respect for this incumbent on centrism not just because of the strength of domestic pressure, but the international political demands of a Cold War where opinion in Africa, Asia and elsewhere regarding the West's racial attitudes was important. And it is worth acknowledging that the center undertook a "War on Poverty" at that moment because the centrist lie that poverty had become a thing of the past stood debunked, while amid the political challenge of the Cold War and the bounty of the post-war boom the center was eager to show the country and the world that capitalism could resolve its problems, with the means to do this at acceptable cost seemingly at hand. As a result the limits of centrism were evident in how it came to be in that situation in the first place, while its motivations are entirely consistent with its essentially conservative imperatives (upholding the existing system in the face of leftist challenge, not changing that system, with a war on poverty waged under capitalism, rather than through a shift away from capitalism), all as in any event the project was never allowed to get very far. Indeed, consider the center's response to that combination of mass movement and demand the government make good on its War on Poverty promises, the Poor People's Campaign that Martin Luther King organized but did not live to conduct in its march on Washington. Said campaign was quickly quashed to become a historical footnote as the center (good Anti-Communists that they were) focused on fighting the war they really wanted to fight, the Cold War globally and the portion of it that was a hot war in Southeast Asia particularly (breaking another promise, that the young men America drafted would not be fighting another land war in Asia). Meanwhile in the face of the economic strains just then emerging that showed that the center's limited reforms had not resolved the troubles of industrial society, rather than intensifying reform dispensed with it altogether as the Democratic Party became the party not of Michael Harrington and Irving Howe's Democratic Socialists of America, but "Neo-Liberals" like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. In doing so many regard the party as having betrayed its best traditions. However, at a deeper level it was all too consistent with its principles, which remained the same, even as its application of them changed with the times, to the point of normalizing what had seemed untenable in Goldwater's day--as we are reminded with "duck and cover" returning to American life, while demonstrating that there is nothing the right can do to which it will not, in the end, accommodate itself to the point of insisting upon "unity," "bipartisanship" and "reaching across the aisle."