To the Future

Six months ago it looked as if Harry S. Truman and Robert A. Taft would be the nominees for the presidency. Instead of these familiar quantities, the country now has to reckon with two men relatively new to national politics, both clearly able, both clearly capable of springing lots of surprises. The two meetings at the stockyards proved that fresh winds are badly needed.

Different as the two conventions were, they had one striking feature in common: intense conservatism. The Democrats' eyes were turned back to 1932. A more popular character even than F.D.R. in Democratic Convention oratory was the sheriff foreclosing the old mortgage. The party mascot no longer seemed to be the donkey, but the 2-c--a-lb. hog. The almost unanimous party line was contained in the phrase "20 years ago." The Democrats' hope is to stimulate the fear that the Republicans would (in the words of the official campaign song) "take it away." At times it seemed as if the Democrats had nothing to cheer but fear itself.

The Good Old Days. Conservatism, which has been defined as the worship of dead revolutionists, was present in the factors that led the Democrats to pick Stevenson. He was selected in spite of rather than because of the fact that he is a new face with a new line of talk. What the real leaders of the Democratic Party wanted was a man who could repair the North-South damage and the mink-coat damage of the Truman regime and thereby put the party back where it was when Franklin Roosevelt died.

If the Democrats worshiped a dead revolution, a good many Republicans, at their convention two weeks before, seemed to worship a dead counterrevolution. Too much Republican oratory hankered for a "return to" something--return to the good old days of fiscal stability, low taxes, cheap steak.

If the conventions are considered as a debate between the parties, the Democrats came out ahead. Backward-looking though their line was, it was coherent, consistent and easy for the voter to understand. But the Republicans were not really arguing with the Democrats; the Republicans were arguing with each other. In the deeply earnest conflict over political principle that raged at the Republican Convention, it was expedient for both sides to sound as conservative as possible, and, as a result, the party as a whole sounded far more conservative than it is.

The Better New Days. What was strangely missing from both conventions was a sense of the modern American Revolution, that marriage of political freedom and technology which promises to Americans and to all men the ever-growing hope of better things to come. The Democrats are hypnotized into complacency by the advances over "20 years ago." This dangerous smugness shows in their foreign (as well as their domestic) policy. "Containment" is what a diplomat says when he means "Don't let them take it away."

Despite the great material prosperity, Americans are not feeling smug. Their grousing may spring from something deeper than the price of steak (or mink). They may sense that the future depends on how the U.S. plays its part in the world crisis and that this, in turn, depends on what goes on inside the U.S. A better American life--and not merely what the Democrats mean by better--could resolve the international deadlock.

The Democratic leaders are blind to that kind of opportunity. They shot their bolt "20 years ago" and have no dynamic approach to the future. If the Republicans get lost in the "20 years ago" debate, they will not grasp the opportunity either. Me-neitherism, not me-tooism, is the Republican pitfall.

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