The Goldwater Show
From MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK
TtlIS city remains the national centre for trade fairs. The annual appearances of United States Senator Barry Goldwater as em- bodiment of the militant American Right have thus, in New York's atmosphere, taken on the curious quality of product displays. What he calls his conservative revolt, if it exists at all, is a vendee, mostly by rhetoric, against the big Eastern cities fomented in the middle-sized Western ones. Any drums that beat for the Prophet Goldwater sound very faint across the sprawl from Texas to the Eastern Seaboard; New York, where politics is a branch of commerce and entertainment, sees only the Salesman Gold- water.
For this year's Goldwater model show the Young Americans for Freedom, his movement's Junior Executive Training School, leased Madi- son Square Garden, the city's largest arena and a symbol whose temporary occupation is proof that an enterprise prospers.
Senator Goldwater's desire to rescue his nation is all channelled by now into his anxiety to per- suade the Republican Party to nominate him for President, a desperate enterprise whose main hope is to establish the conviction that he re- presents a great surging of American indignation at their betrayal by every national administration since President Hoover was dispatched by the Jacobins in 1932.
That illusion of passion was a total casualty of the four hours of his New York display. It drew 18,000 votaries; all night long, in the dis- traction of their boredom, they fashioned paper aeroplanes from leaflets distributed by the Ameri- can Nazi Party warning them against betrayal by the Jew Goldwater, and sent them swooping over the platform in a continual languid flotilla.
The paper aeroplane is the escape of inattentive school children. Their languor corrupted every effort to attend to what was being said on the platform and every impulse to think of the con- servative revolt as a thing of consequence. Barry Goklwater's welcome to New York was over- produced, overpicketed and, as entertainment certainly, overattended, but, most of all, it was underfed at the heart.
Its audience, as George Orwell once said of all modern crowds, was more a flock than a mob. One cause of its torpor was the retooling which, market analysis has convinced its leaders, h necessary if their 1962 model is to run at all Two years ago, there was only the New Ameri. can Right. The John Birch Society has split i1 now into two wings, that one disreputable and this one respectable; and animal vigour is usualls the first sacrifice to respectability.
The respectable leaders of the Right have been made frightfully conscious of the beast which lurks within the mass of any movement whose logic is that America has been betrayed by othet Americans. The ultimate moment of exaltation for persons so convinced comes when they can sit together and roar their distaste for some in dividual enemy; yet this audience was denied even the mention of the name of Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, once a standard signal for a collective howl of hatred; the omission of this section of the litany was plainly policy.
Itihibitions of this sort are a heavy chain foi a movement which otherwise functions essen. tially through muscular spasms induced by the hammer-taps of the Enemy. The New Con. servatism dislikes the United Nations; conse. quently it loves Moise Tshombe merely because the United Nations dislikes him.
In pursuit of its habit of acting by reacting, the Goldwater movement had, in fact, invitee Tshombe to Madison Square Garden as the newest product for display : the State Depart. meat refused him admission, but still the Katanga Freedom Fighters were loudly honoured in his absence. Now Goldwater is a particulai favourite of Southern segregationists; and Senator Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina who is the last true representative of the Con. federacy in Congress, was another guest ol honour at this year's show. One felt as though the Emperor Jones, pursued by the drums in the jungle, had been cheered by the sudden message: 'Stand fast; the White Citizens Councils are coming.'
It is the essence of the New Conservatism that it is anti-State in principle, but, in practice; admires no instrument of government more than the House Committee on Un-American Activities which asserts that the State has the right to summon a private citizen for an inquisition on his political opinions.
Still principle is cherished in all save practice; and the Goldwater movement feels compelled over and over to remind its vulgar faithful that they represent a renaissance of American apprel dation for the traditions of conservative caution and for the values of the intellect. Under thit illusion, the audience was offered Professof ,Ludwig Von Mises, the pearl of the Austrian economists, who arose to proclaim his gratitude; that his lonely struggle against Ferdinand Lasalle; had at last been crowned; he stood among pigs in the market place and cries of 'louder' came down from the galleries.
What Party Congresses call the theoretical analysis was offered at the customary length 135 W. Brent Bozell, who was once Senator Joe McCarthy's speech-writer, and has returned from a year in Spain with a renewed faith in the resurgence of Catholic values. Bozell's exposition of the perils of gnosticism baffled his auditors; the paper aircraft reached proportions excessive at a Red Army display. The Goldwater Revival fundamentalist Protestant everywhere else, is Catholic in the Metropolitan East, where esiab- lished Catholicism is a Puritan sect. Still it is a mistake to offer any serious theological exposi- tion to any audience of New York Catholics, who are graduates of Catholic schools which never teach doctrine because they know how produc- tive of heresy it can be. Thus a sudden silence Prevailed through most of Bozell's presentation, to be broken at the end with wild cries at the Slogans of the party programme; 'Prepare for an immediate landing in Havana'; 'Tear down the Wall.'
Their patriotic endurance was rewarded then by the appearance of Senator Goldwater. When he came, it was plain that he was more for seeing than for listening; as he started his mes- sage, the aisles began filling with the departing faithful, carrying balloons; the buses were load- ing to take them to all points save Havana. Senator Goldwater did not mention the Wall or Havana; he talked of the conservative resurgence only as a force worthy of the respect of profes- sional politicians; it was sad somehow to think of persons engaged in a great moral revolt sitting four hours and then, at the climax, hearing the president of the company report that last year's sales were higher than the year before. We had come down at the end to the tone of the small businessman.
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