Subscribe...he must stay away from any local, state, federal or foreign elected official, or current candidate. He must also undergo a mental health evaluation and treatment, if necessary. Bremer is not to leave the state without the express written permission of the Maryland Parole Commission, and he must submit to electronic monitoring.The first might do much to improve the mental health of most anyone, yes?
...Only those truly interested in the complete Wallace -- someone like Lowery, for example -- also recall the governor's apology in 1982: "I did stand, with a majority of white people, for the separation of the schools. But that was wrong."The Segregationist and the Intergrationist
...At a memorial for the civil rights movement, Wallace "met us in a wheelchair," Lowery said. "And he apologized for what had happened 30 years earlier."
The cynical journalist asks: Do you really think he was sincere?
"Yes, I do," Lowery said. "I wasn't going to stand in the door blocking his way to repentance the way he stood in the door of the University of Alabama blocking us. Can you imagine, there was a photograph on the front page of the New York Times of George Wallace and Joe Lowery holding hands and singing 'We Shall Overcome.'"
[The survival of American democracy] is threatened from two different quarters. It is threatened by the Wallace movement, which in its appeal to a perplexed and frightened primitivism is the American version of Fascism, and it is threatened by the irrelevance, as far as the substance of policy is concerned, of choosing between Humphrey and Nixon.
... the policies Wallace has espoused—carefully couched for the time being in democratic language in order to avoid alienating prospective voters—are incompatible with the principles and practices of liberal democracy. A victorious Wallace would try to establish a totalitarian democracy in which a self-perpetuating majority, unconcerned with individual and minority rights, would have a monopoly of political power.
The next president, whoever he may be, will be faced with the task of restoring the unity of the nation, now impaired by large-scale disaffection at the bottom and the top of the social pyramid. Two methods are at his disposal: radical reforms which will satisfy the elemental aspirations of the disaffected and thereby make an end to their disaffection; and the imposition of the government's will by force which will make an end to the outward manifestations of this disaffection. While these two methods can be separated for the purpose of intellectual analysis, they coexist in the practice of governments. What distinguishes a liberal from a tyrannical regime is the relative weight assigned to the free interplay of social forces and the organized violence of the state. There can be no doubt that Wallace would minimize the integrative role of freely given consent induced by social reforms and rely mainly upon the power of the majority to be used for the purpose of imposing by force upon recalcitrant minorities a pattern of conduct submissive to the will of the majority.
... In the short run, the Democratic Party, tainted by failures at home and abroad and paralyzed by the irrelevance of its leaders, is unable to perform the traditional task of the opposition party to present itself as an alternative to the party in power four years hence. The opposition party is the Wallace movement, and the fate of the Republic will be decided not by the number of votes Humphrey can garner in defeat as compared with Nixon's, but by the strength Nixon can muster against Wallace. Nixon's strength is Wallace's weakness. Thus the defense of liberal democracy requires a huge popular mandate for Nixon to pursue a conservative policy in the spirit and within the institutional framework of the liberal-democratic tradition.
There are two pitfalls, which could nullify the prospects for Nixon's defending liberal democracy; there is an opportunity, which could enhance them. Nixon may feel compelled to compete with Wallace for the support of the potential fascist vote, as Eisenhower, Nixon, and Dulles competed in the Fifties with Joseph McCarthy. The choice of Agnew may be a harbinger of a general appeasement of the radical right. Such appeasement may or may not take the fascist wind out of Wallace's sails, but it will make the Republican Party fascist. If Nixon should fail to provide, by whatever policies he may choose, an alternative to Wallace acceptable to large masses of the American people—and here is the other pitfall—it is possible that liberal democracy in America has played its last card and lost the game. Many of the millions who in 1968 either remain faithful to the Democratic Party out of conviction or traditional loyalty, or vote for Nixon as the lesser evil and as an acceptable conservative choice, may yet find Wallace proved right in his rejection of the two traditional parties and may turn to him as the only available savior.
Yet regardless of whether Nixon succeeds or fails, they might also turn to a savior from the Left, provided one is available. It is characteristic of the volatility of large sectors of the American electorate, not only in their party affiliation but also in their general position in the political spectrum, that many of the people who voted for Wallace in 1964 and are likely to vote for him in 1968 voted for Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy only a few months ago. They want a charismatic leader, the repository of their troubles and the incarnation of their aspirations, and they will still want such a leader in 1972. If Nixon should by then have failed, Wallace would have the field all to himself, provided the Democrats cannot counter his charismatic leadership with one of their own.
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This should be fun to watch.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 9:33 PM on November 9, 2007