sharply defined constituency: the New Class of academics, social planners, welfare bureaucrats, social psychologists, professionals, progressive lawyers, and media people that has become a formidable, though minority, grouping during the past couple of decades. Public expenditure in this sector runs into tens of billions of dollars and involves millions of people. This constituency has vast interests to protect, and Udall has proved incapable of protecting them.
As the weakness of the Udall candidacy became manifest, however, Hubert Humphrey began to position himself to inherit that constituency. Humphrey conspicuously defended "Washington," in this context a code word for the sprawling social welfare bureaucracy. He branded as "racist" those who attacked Washington—meaning, in this context, Carter. Humphrey was signaling the New Class constituency that its huge stakes would be well looked after by HHH.
The demise of Udall must give Humphrey an opportunity novel in his career. For the first time he has privileged access to this New Class constituency, which now has no place else to go. Humphrey can now hope to add it to his normal sources of strength among regulars and union members and thus fashion a much more powerful coalition than anything available to Henry Jackson.
As far as Jackson is concerned in New York—his key state—much of his support was soft, and all too plainly waiting for Hubert.
The real Democratic fight therefore will tilt Humphrey against Carter. Much "uncommitted" and "favorite son" support will actually be Humphrey strength in disguise. Ditto for Jackson delegates.
As the Convention approaches, however, look for Carter to make a potent attack on Humphrey's strategy of ducking the primaries. Carter will charge that Humphrey feared to face the voters and pinned his hopes on the bosses and brokers in the back rooms, and has always been a loser anyway. Despite Carter's smile and rhetoric about love, things seem likely to get very rough.
Carrier Admirals
Venetians bet the galley
Would always conquer sail; When steam soiled the horizon.
Some said it's sure to fail. And when the battlewagons
Belched forth in World War II, The brass said not to worry
If bombs fell through the flue. With missiles getting smarter,
I wonder if it's wise To build those floating hangars
In monumental size?
W. H. von Dreele
On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan—with about 45 per cent of the vote in Wisconsin, where he did not campaign—continued to expose President Ford's vulnerability. As North Carolina indicated earlier, the voters are at least very uneasy about the fruits of detente. Campaign Manager Rogers Morton's remarks in California about the highly finite tenure of Secretary Kissinger suggest that Kissinger may be the next body to be flung from the Ford sleigh, and also constitute a sure sign of nervousness in the Ford camp. Those Soviet combat pilots reported to be in Cuba arc not going to help Ford one bit. On the Republican side, then, the next test of strength will come in Texas. There, too, things may get rough.
Finlandization from Within
". . . // is not just the prestige and the billions of dollars of the past decade that must he salvaged, nor the honor of 16,500 American soldiers now committed to Vietnam that must he redeemed there. Really at stake is the ability of the West, and particularly of the United States, to withstand the third major form of aggression attempted by Communist nations since World War II."
Thus the New York Times, 1963. These words are cited by Norman Podhoretz in the April Commentary, in a thoughtful essay entitled "Making the World Safe for Communism." Podhoretz observes that liberal Administrations have supplied the really potent opposition to the spread of Communism over the last three decades, whereas nominally conservative ones, despite their bellicose rhetoric, have made it their business to disengage the U.S. from the global struggle, whether in Hungary or in Indochina. At the risk of oversimplifying his point, one might say that present American isolationism is bipartisan. Furthermore, that stance has coughed up a morbid rationalization for our national weakness:
"What we see in this newly tolerant, and even benevolent, attitude toward Communism is the slow erosion of our own sense of political value in response to the Communist challenge—an accommodation in the sphere of ideas to match the accommodation we have been making in the sphere of power. Our own political culture has always held up liberty as the highest political value, while the political culture of Communism has always scoffed at and denigrated liberty as a bourgeois delusion. Therefore our unwillingness or inability to condemn their crimes against political liberty—which they of course do not regard as crimes at all—can fairly be described as a symptom of the surrender of our political culture to theirs. . . .
". . . And . . . rarely does one hear it said, either in America or in the other Western democracies, that liberty is a blessing in itself, quite apart from the many blessings which have flowed from it wherever it has been given a chance.
April 30. 1976 A**
"A European intellectual recently characterized this kind of spiritual surrender as 'Finlandization from within.' "
Samuel Johnson remarked that mankind more frequently needs to be reminded than informed, and Podhoretz' words come at a moment of frightful moral amnesia in the West. In barely a decade, "liberty" has slipped from its status as what Richard Weaver called an "uncontested term" to a highly questionable one that hardly figures in our geopolitical reckonings. To affirm its value now is to invite the charge of being a "cold warrior," and to raise perspiration in the editorial offices of most of our respectable publications. As witness the Times's recent comment on the Cuban military presence in Africa (the very idea of which is still a startling—and humiliating—novelty):
"They may be there for no good purpose; but they have as much right to be there as do the United States military assistance missions scattered over much of the globe."
The Watergate Aesthetic
Concerning Richard Nixon, one fact is beyond dispute: he is one of those rare public figures capable of inspiring transcendent hatred, hatred beyond the measure of his accomplishments and malefactions, hatred morbid, per-during, and obsessive, fastening on his private character rather than his public acts, and satisfied with nothing short of personal annihilation.
With the publication of the new Woodward-Bernstein volume and the simultaneous release of the film based on their first book, it becomes clear that Nixon-hatred has got itself respectably institutionalized. In spite of the carefully factual tone of book and film, they draw their energy from a deep desire for more: more intimate and preferably disgraceful details, more and more ceremonial re-enactments of that glorious moment of New Class triumph over the Nixon menace, which is commonly linked (and sometimes explicitly identified) with subversion of the Constitution, McCarthyism, Hitlerism, and other sinister illiberalisms. So well understood is the symbol-cluster that it is unnecessary to amplify or even to spell out the evil of Nixon. The starkly objective surface vibrates with its tacit currents of meaning. The gloating is tactfully, even solemnly subdued. Nobody this side of I. F. Stone would be so coarse as to suggest, for example, that Resignation Day be made a national holiday. It is enough that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are chosen to impersonate the Woodstein nemesis: say no more!
In one limited sense, Nixon brought even the excesses of his enemies on himself. A stranger to dignified reticence throughout his career in politics, he made it a point to exploit his own private relations and emotions for his profit: Pat's Republican cloth coat, Checkers, his love of football, his lonely moments making hard decisions—all these were cloyingly familiar, and the man who puts his heart on his sleeve invites ridicule, never more so than when it transpires he has lied to the public he professed to take into his confidence.
It is therefore understandable that his enemies should adopt his own standards of indecent display. But it is no more edifying to watch them at it than him, and nothing Nixon ever did surpasses the sanctimony with which those who hate him congratulate their own self-indulgence as a service to the Republic.
If Mr. Carter Goes to Washington
Jimmy Carter's attacks on Washington as the home of all that is "bloated," "wasteful," and "unmanageable" have scored well with the public and caused Washington's liberal Establishment to shudder uncontrollably as he piles up the delegates. Wondering whether Jimmy Carter the campaigner is an accurate preview of Carter the President, Wall Street Journal reporter James P. Gannon examined Carter's record and found that the Washington Establishment has nothing to fear. There would be some reorganization, says Gannon, but "the bureaucracy would be working overtime to carry out Mr. Carter's big ideas: a sweeping, soak-the-rich tax overhaul; a new national welfare system; a comprehensive health care program; an enlarged federal education plan; a gun registration plan; and a jobs-for-youth program."
Carter, a brilliant politician, has perceived the electorate's anti-Washington mood and has built his campaign around it, carefully camouflaging his own deep faith in the Federal Government. But when asked, Carter admits he isn't planning any reduction in overall spending: "A reduction in the bureaucracy doesn't neces-
/Hfi National Review
