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resources for future use. Page 1247 The outcome of this struggle, which still goes on, is one in which civilized people can afford to be optimistic. For the newer wealth is unbelievably ignorant and misinformed. The National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms although the process was concealed, as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans. Page 1248 The two parties should be almost identical so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method: we must remain strong, continue to function as a great World power in cooperation with other Powers, avoid high-level war, keep the economy moving, help other countries do the same, provide the basic social necessities for all our citizens, open up opportunities for social shifts for those willing to work to achieve them, and defend the basic Western outlook of diversity, pluralism, cooperation,and the rest of it, as already described. Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it every four years by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies. The capture of the Republican National Party by the extremist elements of the Republican National Party in 1964 and their effort to elect Barry Goldwater with the petty-bourgeois extremists alone, was only a temporary aberration on the American political scene and arose from the fact that President Johnson had pre-empted all the issues so that it was hardly worthwhile for the Republicans to run a real contestant against him. Thus Goldwater was able to take control of the party by default. The virulence behind the Goldwater campaign, however, had nothing to do with default or lack of intensity. Quite the contrary. His most ardent supporters were of the extremist petty-bourgeois mentality driven to near hysteria by the disintegration of the middle-class and the steady rise to prominence of everything they considered anathema: Catholics, Negroes, immigrants, intellectuals, aristocrats, scientists, and educated men generally, cosmopolitans and internationalists and, above all, liberals who accept diversity ad a virtue. This disintegration of the middle classes had a variety of causes, some of them intrinsic, many of them accidental, a few of them obvious, but many of them going deeply into the very depths of social existence. All these causes acted to destroy the middle-class by acting to destroy the middle-class outlook. Page 1250 In the earlier period, even down to 1940, literature's attack on the middle-class outlook was direct and brutal, from such works as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Frank Norris's "The Pit," both dealing with the total corruption of of personal integrity in the meatpacking and wheat markets. These early assaults were aimed at the commercialization of life under bourgeois influence and were fundamentally reformist in outlook because they assumed that the evils of the system could somehow be removed. By the 1920s, the attack was much more total and saw the problem in moral terms so fundamental that file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/me/Des...ey,%20Carroll%20-%20Tragedy%20and%20Hope.txt (127 of 129) [14/06/2005 11:42:40]