CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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The Goldwater campaign introduced into Republican rhetoric a whiff of apocalypse that would hang in the air for decades. His famous assertion that "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice" was still audible in Buchanan's declaration of culture war--extremism in the pursuit of tradition--at the 1992 convention. But now that the smoke of '64 has cleared, it's evident Goldwater struck the themes of smaller government that would eventually bring his party to power. Struck them too hard, perhaps, and too soon, but still. In the meantime, however, the New Right lacked an electoral majority to compare with the Democratic alliance of labor, white Southerners and middle-class progressives. A marriage of ideological mismatches, that coalition was to politics what the bumblebee is to aerodynamics: a creature that in theory can't fly. But it did, and Republicans had no weapon with which to bring it down.

Very soon they would find it in plain sight. It was race. In 1956, one year after dispatching troops to integrate the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, Eisenhower won 40% of the black vote. But by 1960, despite the civil rights plank agreed to at the Rockefeller meeting, Nixon was already subtly bidding to the white, conservative South. During the campaign, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Atlanta, Nixon resisted advice to make a supportive phone call to King's wife Coretta. A brief call from Kennedy, made at the urging of his advisers, was enough to shift a sizable part of the black vote to the Democrats.

For most of his presidency, Kennedy would be no more than a hesitant ally of the civil rights movement. But in his last year he enraged the segregationist South by introducing the bill that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Though Goldwater described himself as personally opposed to segregation, he opposed any federal efforts to enforce basic rights for blacks. Five months before the 1964 election, he was one of only 27 Senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act. At that year's G.O.P. Convention, the civil rights plank was voted out of the platform. The South noticed. In addition to his home state of Arizona, Goldwater carried just four others: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina.

The G.O.P. noticed back. Four years later, Nixon rode to victory over Hubert Humphrey partly on the strength of a Southern strategy devised to move the Dixiecrats permanently into the Republican camp. While remaining formally committed to racial equality, Nixon made clear he would go slow on the federal enforcement of voting rights and integration. For his '68 campaign he also recruited prominent Southerners from the Goldwater circle, including South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, an early defector from the Democrats. Meanwhile, under the pressure from the long hot summers of racial riots, the antiwar and black-power movements and the gleefully patricidal youth culture, the New Deal coalition fractured further. Not just white Southerners, but also blue-collar ethnics, tradition-minded by instinct, realized they were Republicans after all.