Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy by Timothy Shenk

Author:Timothy Shenk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

McCarthyism was just one part of the revitalized conservative movement. Lippmann was a favorite target for activists on the right. (Sometimes literally: college Republicans used pictures of him for dart practice.)119 “The most alarming single danger to the American system,” William F. Buckley Jr. declared in the first issue of National Review, bible for the nascent movement, “lies in the fact that an identifiable team of Fabian operators is bent on controlling both our major political parties—under the sanction of such fatuous and unreasoned slogans as ‘national unity,’ ‘middle-of-the-road,’ ‘progressivism,’ and ‘bipartisanship.’”120 They couldn’t have conjured up a more fitting antagonist than Lippmann, a former card-carrying member of the Fabian Society turned arbiter of the American consensus. He stood for a politics that was simultaneously radical and devoid of principle.

Backlash to the civil rights movement gave the resurgent right its next major boost. Lippmann was a late-arriving supporter of the campaign for integration, and he was taken aback by the passions it elicited. “It is only the parvenu, the snob, the coward who is forever proclaiming his superiority,” he sniffed, as if white supremacy were just a marker of ill-breeding.121 Racial equality rarely figured in his books and appeared in only a handful of the hundreds of columns he wrote between 1931 and 1957. One of those columns sided with Southern senators who were filibustering an anti-lynching law, arguing that “a minority must never be coerced unless the reasons for coercing it are decisive and overwhelming”—the minority in question being white senators, not African Americans.122 When the push for equal rights gained momentum in the 1950s, Lippmann assured his readers that Southern politicians would preside over a peaceful transition to equality. “We need not doubt,” he predicted after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board, “that the states will accept loyally the principle of the law.”123

When the decision was instead met with a coordinated campaign of massive resistance spearheaded by the Southern elite, Lippmann began to suspect that he had miscalculated. His anxieties heightened as incidences of violent retaliation against African Americans multiplied. “The whole civil rights affair,” he fretted in 1964, was “an explosive thing under our society.”124

But Lippmann had faith that the center would hold. In the run-up to the 1964 campaign, he all but dared the GOP to nominate the conservative icon Barry Goldwater. “We have been hearing for a generation that the Republican candidate is never a real Republican, and that’s why he doesn’t get elected,” he grumbled. “They might as well get something out of their system which they need to get out of their system.”125 He was less sanguine during the campaign, calling Goldwater a “radical reactionary who would … dismantle the modern state” while turning “the party of Lincoln into the party of white supremacists.”126 But after Lyndon Johnson trounced Goldwater, Lippmann said that it offered “indisputable proof that the voters are in the center,” leaving Republicans “with virtually nothing more than a handful of states, won by racist votes”—a striking bit of moralizing from a columnist who once defended filibusters of anti-lynching laws.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.