"Goldwater Challenges the ‘4‐Party System’" The seed of a realignment, in 1964, which was also sought by the New Left. Today the Republicans are truly the party of Goldwater. [nytimes.com]

BEHIND the drive for Barry Goldwater is a plan to fashion a drastic change in the shape of American politics. Right‐wing strategists hope to face the voters this fall with the sharpest choice between liberal and conservative policies that the nation has seen in at least 50 years.

The intention is quite plain. Tired of “me, too” Republicanism that — as they see it — merely imitates the liberal Democrats, these strategists want to mass the nation's conservative strength in one party. They do not really care which party, but at this point the G.O.P. seems the best vehicle for their hopes because of the availability of Barry Goldwater.

“Let's get the people who think alike in this country,” Senator Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota has said, “and who think conservatively and in terms of a modification and limitation of the powers of the central government ... into some kind of political party or political apparatus or political association or political instrumentalities so that they can vote alike for the same candidate on the same ticket regardless of what the party label is or where they live geographically.”

In Goldwater's candidacy we are witnessing a dramatic effort to tighten and discipline party lines across the nation, to polarize popular public opinion and catalyze party alternatives into clearly opposing camps. His vote with the Southern Democrats against the civil rights bill is an important step in this direction. Would this strategy actually pay off for Goldwater and his fellow conservatives this fall? Would it be good for our two‐party system in the long run? Above all, would it be good for the nation?

THE answers are not so simple as the right‐wing planners may think. Their strategy would probably benefit the liberal cause this November rather than the conservative; would probably strengthen the two‐party system to the disadvantage of the conservatives; and—paradoxically—may be good for the nation in ways that right ‐ wing thinkers cannot foresee, or if they could, would doubtless abhor.

By the same token, liberals may have more to gain in the long run than they think from a reordering of the party battle. (I am defining liberalism here as the willingness to use government, and especially the National Government, to protect and broaden social welfare and individual opportunity). Certainly a victory for Senator Goldwater in San Francisco next month could touch off political developments that would fundamentally alter the present pattern of political power.

The conservative strategy for this fall is two‐pronged. One prong is aimed at the party regulars. By offering a Presidential nominee and a party platform that sharply oppose the Democrats instead of “echoing” them, the conservatives hope to activate Republican stalwarts so that each man's strength would be as ten. For the first time in a generation hard‐core Republicans would have something to fight for; they would arouse millions of other voters who had shunned the “meaningless” party battles of the past; and hence they would win as cleanly in the nation this fall as Goldwater won in California earlier this month — and for the same reason.

The second prong points toward the South. Right‐wing leaders assert that a host of Southern whites would rally to the cause of a man who, while favoring civil rights in principle, would leave their protection to the states. For decades, according to this view, Southern conservatives have been imprisoned in the Democratic party because their only alternative to a Truman‐type Democrat has been a Rockefeller‐type Republican. Goldwater would liberate them by offering a real choice. And he would carry the South just as Republican Senator John Tower carried Texas in 1961 and several Republican Representatives have won Southern districts.

BOTH these hopes are ill‐founded. Millions of Americans do, of course, fail to vote, but for many reasons besides lack of a real party choice. There is no evidence that an increased turnout of the regulars would compensate for the moderate Republicans and the independents who would switch to Lyndon Johnson.

A tremendous conservative effort, moreover, would stimulate previously apathetic Democrats and liberals to vote against

Goldwater. The conservative planners seem curiously blind to the possibilities of a counterstrategy that would exploit the threat that Goldwater poses for many middle‐of‐theroad Americans. Some Republican regulars admit that Goldwater might arouse a tremendous labor counterattack, as the Ohio “right‐to‐work” candidates did in 1958, but a rightist crusade could alienate other groups too. Polarization works both ways.

NOR is the South lying open ripe for the plucking. There is not one South but several “Souths”—the blackbelt heartland with its racist politics and heavy Democratic percentages (of those who can vote); the states with their mountain Republicans and more diversified economies; and the more industrialized areas with their urban labor unions and suburban Republicans.

The conservatives could appeal to the black belt only with an anti‐civil rights platform, but this would alienate countless Northern Republi cans who want at least a moderate civil‐rights program. The conservatives might appeal to Southern business interests with pro‐business taxation and labor policies, but these interests cannot supply the votes that would overcome the heavy Democratic majorities. And the conservatives could not appeal to Southern Negroes at all.

This is no invitation to complacency. The fact that Goldwater forces have made such a strong drive for the nomination, in the wake of electoral defeats in New Hampshire, Oregon and elsewhere, testifies to the vitality and shrewdness of the conservative leadership. But the history of American politics and the pattern of American politics are against Goldwater.

IF he won both the nomination and the election, it would result from the same random and unpredictable developments that have marked the campaign so far, such as Rockefeller's divorce and remarriage and the strange failure of nerve and unity among Goldwater's opponents in the Republican party. If moderate Republicans and Democrats maintain their nerve and unity during the inevitable domestic and foreign crises of this summer, the conservative strategy is likely to fail in the fall.

What about the long run? Some conservatives grant that 1884 is not a propitious time for their cause. They are wilIing to discount Goldwater's chances against President Johnson, but they want to start now the long process of a national realignment into a liberal and a conservative party. Eventually they would win, they contend, and with a candidate as conservative as Goldwater but more discreet. The first step is to get control of the Republican party apparatus this summer — and keep control of it in the years ahead.

Here again the conservatives misjudge the American political system. The Republican party is not a unified, centralized organization that men can capture and hold indefinitely, in the way that a group of stockholders can seize control of a corporation. It is a loose association of office holders, party leaders, and factional groups who coalesce every four years in order to monopolize the party symbols and exploit the traditional party vote. There is no single national “machine” to take over.

If Goldwater wins in San Francisco this next month and loses in the fall, the Republican nomination for President in 1968 would be as open as it has been in recent decades. And the moderate and liberal Republicans would have proved their point that the G.O.P. could not win with a right‐wing candidate.

PARTY realignment, moreover, would work two ways. Any prolonged effort to polarize the conservative vote in the G.O.P. would produce counter‐strategies that would ultimately broaden and consolidate the liberal vote in the Democratic party. Let the right wing not deceive itself. Democrats would not stand by idle while the Republicans concentrated on the conservative vote.

They would see this and the coming elections as the finest opportunity in a generation to activate the liberal vote of the nation. Johnson is ideally equipped to stretch his appeal along a wide are from moderate Republicans to strong liberals and laborites. And he could attract a host of independent voters who would fear the damage that Goldwater could do to our bipartisan, internationalist foreign policy.

Given a sweeping mandate this fall, Johnson might carry into Congress enough liberal Democrats to redeem his campaign promises and party platform pledges. Franklin D. Roosevelt won a top‐heavy Congress in 1936, but failed to exploit his rank‐and‐file support on Capitol Hill. Johnson, a protegd of Roosevelt's and an old Congressional hand, would have both the authority and the skill to convert a sweeping election victory into a historic leeislative one.

BUT Johnson could go further — and this is where the conservative strategy might backfire dramatically. The great strength of the conserNatives has not been in winning Presidential majorities, or even Congressional ones, but in keeping control of key committees and other strongpoints in Congress.

Given a strongly liberal Congress, Johnson through his Congressional leaders could engineer a series of Congressional reforms such as Senator Joseph S. Clark of Penn sylvania and Representative Richard Bolling of Missouri have long been urging. Closure could be strengthened, the Rules Committee shorn of its obstructionist power in the House, and committee chairmen prevented from condücting legislative stall‐ins.

Such Congressional modernization would not merely change machinery. It would bring major political transformations over the long run. Once the Democrats can systematically enact programs instead of merely promising them, they can consolidate the support of labor, ethnic groups, big‐city blocs and low‐income voters, who generally favor legislation that has long been held up in Congress. Such a change would also hasten the departure of Southern conservatives from the Democratic party, for without the power and privileged sanctuary that their Democratic affiliation has given them in Congress, these conservatives eventually would turn to the party that was closer to their ideology.

Right‐wing strategists would welcome such a realignment on the ground that, basically, conservatives outnumber 1iberals. Here they are most certainly wrong. By every test that we have — Presidential and Congressional election results, party platforms, party registration, opinion polls —this is as surely a liberal epoch as the late 19th century was a conservative one. There is no gimmick, no tactic, no machinery by which the conservatives can overcome this fact.

IF my short‐ and long‐run calculations are correct, a Goldwater victory at the Republican National Convention could speed up a process of party realignment that has been moving jerkily for some time. It could hasten the day when the parties could divide more cleanly on ideological and policy grounds. It could also make a conservative‐dominated G.O.P. the minority party for a long time. Hence, party realignment might not be very good for right‐wing Republicans. Would it be good for the rest of us ?

MANY Americans would say not. They would prefer to see the great liberal‐conservative issues fought out within the two parties rather than between them. In their eyes, the genius of our present party system is that it recognizes the political diversity of the nation and the nondoctrinaire basis of our election struggles. “A federal nation,” historian Herbert Agar has said, “is safe so long as the parties are undogmalic and contain members with many contradictory views. But when the people begin to divide according to reason, with all the voters in one party who believe one way, the federal structure is strained.”

The system is especially effective, many feel, in preventing popular majorities from tyrannizing minorities and hence in preventing class warfare. It tames power by dividing it among numerous party factions and officeholders and hence it frustrates demagogic power ‐ seekers such as Huey Long and Joseph McCarthy. And it endures. While other republics have been too fragile to cope with violence and have succumbed to dictators, ours has been resilient enough to endure the tensions of world war, civil war, depression and cold war.

This is a good theory to the extent that it works out in practice. But it often works badly. The trouble with the cleavages within our two parties is that they have a far more serious effect than in nations such as Britain, where parties can fight out their internal divisions and then present a united front to the voters and in govermnent. For each of our intraparty factions controls a governmental strong point: the conservative Democrats and the conservative Republicans coalesce to dominate the structure of Congress while the liberal wings of both parties alternate in control of the Presidency and coalesce in maintaining bipartisan policies, especially in foreign affairs.

THE lodging of these party, elements in particular governmental positions produces, in effect, a four‐party system, comprising two “Presidential” or liberal parties and two “Congressional” or conservative ones, which make policy through shifting party combinations, much as the French Parliament used to do.

This four‐party system does tame the extremists within government; it does give minorities a chance to denounce and delay government action. But it does so at the cost of determined and steady government that can anticipate emerging problems and cope with them before they become crises. When four‐party government does act, it operates by fits and starts, alternating between "coma and convulsion: ' Because political power and energy is splintered into fragments, leaders cannot act on the mandate of a popular majority but must wait for a crisis situation to produce a broad consensus. And such a consensus may appear only when the hour is fearfully late.

The current civil‐rights legislation is a perfect example of the workings of the system. For years the Presidential Democratic party, with strong backing from the Presidential Republicans, has been calling for moderate but steady action. Roosevelt set up the Fair Employment Practices Committee during World War II, and Harry Truman in 1948 proposed a broad program of civil‐rights legislation that anticipated much of the substance of the present bill.

SIXTEEN years have passed; the civil‐rights struggle has erupted in schools, restaurants and churches; now in the midst of steaming crisis we have gained the consensus that permits action. But is it in time? And we have other needs such as Federal aid to education that have received majority support but not consensus support and hence are put off year after year.

Nor need we fear majority tyranny. In a large nation such as this, majority rule simply cannot produce extremist politics or class warfare. Actually it brings moderate and gradualist action, because no leader who must win and keep the support of 50 million or more voters, with all their diverse interests, attitudes and affiliations, can afford to move out of the “main stream” of American political life. It is minority obstruction, not majority rule, that produces violence and extremism. The long four‐party deadlock over civil rights may have encouraged moderation within government, but it has produced conflict and bloodshed outside it.

But here is the engima. If the party realignment promises to produce more effective majority rule, a more sharply aligned two‐party system and a more vigorous and liberal National Government, why do conservatives favor it ? Why would they give up the status quo that helps them deadlock the Federal Government and its regulatory and welfare programs? Is this another rightwing miscalculation?

NOT entirely. For the conservatives are not content with deadlocking government or slowing it down. They want to control it. They want not to stop the clock but to turn it back — back to the time when taxes were low, labor was weak, the Federal Government far away and foreign problems invisible. Despite all their efforts, they feel that they have not really slowed down “creeping socialism” They must cut it out at the roots. Given a real chance to run the Government, whether in the coming year or the coming decade, they believe that they could exorcise the 20th‐century problems that bewilder them.

These are heady aspirations, but of course hopeless ones. The conservatives could not possibly win power with such a goal in mind, except as a result of a series of vagrant events and traumatic national crises that left people hungering for action — any action, whether forward, backward or sidewise.

If the conservatives won, the real danger to the nation would lie not in their attempts to reverse history by repealing the income tax or pulling out of our United Nations commitments. The crisis would come when such efforts failed to solve anything and when the conservatives, frustrated in making headway and embarrassed by their reckless promises to the voters, turned to some dangerous adventure at home or abroad.

CLEARLY, the kind of party realignment planned by the conservatives is undesirable and impossible. Undesirable because the polarization of public opinion and political power into left‐wing and rightwing camps would confront the nation with a cruel choice between two extremes. Impossible because the bulk of opinion is moderate and centrist—or “a bit left of center,” as Franklin D. Etoosevelt used to say—and will not tolerate two parties that war against each other from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Under majority rule, parties must compete to win the great ba1ance of power votes in the center; if the conservatives ignore this fact, they are doomed to defeat for a long time.

But the conservatives unwittingly would help bring about a different kind of party alignment—one that gives voters a clear choice between a responsibly liberal Democratic party and a somewhat rightof‐cenier Republican party.

How could such a party alignment differ from what we have today? If the conservative Southern Democrats shift to the Republican party, as already pointed out, the Democratic party would be freed of its obstructionist wing; it could then move somewhat to the left and prepare to deal with the looming problems that may dominate American politics during the rest of the century — as it is finally doing now on civil rights.

THESE problems would include: automation; massive expansion of the quantity and quality of education; the relation of the Federal Government to recreation, cultural affairs and the mass media; urban deterioration; disarmament; strengthening the United Nations; the world population problem; and a host of others. The Democratic party has been living too long on the old economic issues of the New Deal, partly because its Southern conservatives could stop or delay action.

Thus, realignment would permit the winning party in an election to govern. The conservatives do have a point: whatever the differences between Eisenhower Republicans and Kennedy‐Johnson Democrats in oratory, there seemed Iittle difference between the policies they enacted in practice. Voters want a choice of policies, not merely of promises.

But this is not a counsel of despair for Presidential Republicans. They have won two of the last four Presidential elections and narrowly missed a third. The Democratic party suffers from internal weaknesses that an effective opposition could exploit. The Democratic party has not yet consolidated its grip on middleof‐the‐road voters, but it will do so if the right‐wing Republicans give it a chance.

NOR do moderate Republicans need fear ruin from an influx of conservative Southern Democrats and their allies. Temporarily this shift might strengthen conservatism in their ranks. But soon rightwing Republicans would learn the lesson that right‐wing conservatives long ago recognized in Great Britain—that a clear‐cut party alignment requires conservatives as well as liberals to fight out their battles somewhere near the center of the political arena.

The irony for the conservatives is that the pit they are digging for the liberals is one they will fall into themselves. The danger for the Republican moderates is that they may be pulled into the trap, too. The hope for the nation is that out of this party turmoil will emerge a more vital and meaningful two‐party system.