When Hell Froze Over
By RICHARD Tim: elections earlier this month were of enormous importance. They changed greatly the look of Ameri- can politics and reflected large changes in American attitudes. I should like to point to a few of the changes, not in any order of significance but more or less as they come to mind.
1. The Democratic Party in the North has become in effect an American labour party. This does not mean that the unions control it, pay its bills, choose its can- didates, or determine its stand on public issues (though in some places it does these things, and the trend of the moment is toward control and domination), but that labour gives it strength at the polls and that in the predominantly industrial states it is just about unbeatable. Ifi many of these states the Republicans made labour the issue; they campaigned against the unions, not against the Democrats. Labour was aroused, the Republicans Were swamped. 2. The trend was leftward almost everywhere. The right wing of the Republican Party was smashed by the defeat of its last few spokesmen ----Senators Knowland of California, Bricker of Ohio, Malone of Nevada. (One man, the least conspicuous, Senator Goldwater of Arizona, sur- vived.) Of course, there' is still a right wing— there must always be one—but it occupies the ideological ground held a quarter-century ago by the Liberal Democrats. The difficulty now is that just about everyone seems to occupy that ground. Oddly, the only rightward trend has been on the left. The men now known as left-wing Demo- crats are not the fire-eaters they were a few years back. They tend to be more critical of labour and More apprehensive about the growth of state power.
3. Despite the Democrats' great victory and labour's show of power in the Democratic Party, the election showed once more how greatly the lies of party are weakening in this country. Where the issue is fairly clear-cut, as it was in states Where the Republicans sought right-to-work, or °Pen-shop, amendments to the state constitutions, labour will mobilise and will express itself through the Democratic Party. Where this is not the case, anything can happen. Democrats in huge num- bers voted for Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, as Governor of New York. Rockefeller and his °PPonent, Averell Harriman, were tweedledum and tweedledee—a circumstance, some might think, that might lead people to Vote their party loyalties. Quite the contrary. In the Deep South, the Republicans, unexpectedly, held on to the bridgeheads they established four and six years ,,,ago. Maine and Vermont were not supposed to go Democratic until hell froze over. The ancestral Pull didn't work this year — Maine went Democratic in a big way and Vermont sent a Democratic Congressman—it only has one—to Washington. Ticket-splitting is the order of the day, except, as noted, where the workers feel themselves directly assaulted. Thus, while it would appear that the Democrats can hardly miss in the next Presidential elections, it is altogether con- ceivable that an engaging, pro-labour Republi- can could beat a less engaging pro-labour Democrat.
4. An engaging pro-labour Republican has emerged. In Washington, in the first few days after election, sports were offering even money that Rockefeller would be the next Republican President. They would take the short end of 3-2 or 7-5 or something of that sort on his election two years hence. Rockefeller fits neatly into the pattern of the last twenty years of Republican presidential politics. There seems always to have been someone—Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower—who hails from New York, has New York money behind him, and wears an unmistakable look of success. The Atlantic seaboard Republicans pit him against the party wheelhorses, and they always win. Now that Rockefeller has come along, Nixon looks more and more like Taft (hard worker, stout fellow in the party, unloved and misunderstood outside the party), and now he is unhappily identified with defeat. The places where the Republicans won—New York and Arizona, primarily—are the places where Nixon did no campaigning. In New York both he and the President were kept at arm's length and are entitled to no share in the victory.
Nixon, though, is not Taft; he has flexibility, change of pace, hydromatic transmission, and these modern improvements may make a difference.
5. The control of Congress passed from the Republicans to the Democrats in 1954, and the Democrats somewhat strengthened their hold in by-elections and in 1956. But from 1954 to 1958, the margin was narrow—sometimes as slight as one vote in the Senate and twenty in the House. Now they are firmly in control of both houses and are lacking only a handful of votes in both cham- bers to override Presidential vetoes. (Two-thirds is required for this.) From now on, legislation will be a Democratic product, and they will bear the full responsibility.
6. Often in the past, going back twenty years or more, the controlling force in Congress has been a coalition of Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans. This coalition can no longer function—thanks partly to the election and partly to events before the election. For one thing, the northern Democrats by themselves are almost capable of rallying a majority; for an- other, the northern Republicans, with their hard- earned knowledge of the way things are, will be leery of making common cause with the Southerners. In other words, the consensus in Congress for the next few years will be a generally liberal one — anti-racist, pro-labour, inter- nationalist.
7. The South tends now to be more isolated than ever before, and the chances are pretty good that the Southern Democrats will put a candidate of their own into the next Presidential election. This might be good for their pride, but it probably wouldn't have much effect on the results, which in recent elections have been little altered by the vote of the South.
8. The American system has dealt most cruelly with the President. He now has a choice of fight- ing a losing battle or of joining the opposition he has been unable to beat. He can't hope to prevail against Congress without a mighty effort of the kind he has never chosen to make—a campaign, that is to say, among the people—and it R ques- tionable whether even a brilliantly conceived and hard-fought campaign would do him any good in his last two years. If fighting is too hard for him, surrendering is too easy. He looked, at his press conference the morning after elections, an angry, bitter man. He said he was going to see to it that the Democratic 'spenders' don't have things entirely their way. This talk was largely discounted. His own administration is loaded with spenders, and he has never been able to restrain them. Yet there is no doubt of his desire to do so. What a relief 1960 should be to him ! There is• increased talk, now, that he may try to gain the relief earlier by resigning in Richard Nixon's favour sometime in the next two years. That would fix Nelson Rockefeller, but it wouldn't be playing the game, and he is a gamesman.
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