Volume 11, Number 6 · October 10, 1968
Where Do We Go From Here?
By Christopher Lasch
Ever since the Cold War began, the Center in American politics has increasingly had to adopt the policies and outlook of the Right. Thus the Truman Administration, after first ridiculing the rightist myth of an internal communist conspiracy, set up a loyalty program based on the premise that this myth was a reality. Similarly, the Eisenhower Administration outmaneuvered Joseph McCarthy by making his anti-communist crusade official policy, in the form of Attorney General Brownell's security program. In foreign policy, liberals of the Center adopted as their own the theory that militant communism, bent on world domination, had to be contained by armed force, even though the policy of containment, as originally formulated by George F. Kennan, had not been intended to be exclusively military in its emphasis. When right-wing politicians launched their hysterical attack against Castro, Kennedy obliged them, in spite of his own last-minute misgivings, with the Bay of Pigs. When Goldwater demanded the liberation of South Vietnam, Johnson denounced him as a demagogue while secretly (and later not so secretly) putting Goldwater's foreign policy into practice.
Feature, 2498 words
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