by Gore Vidal
Recently one of the CED’s members, Herbert Stein, now chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave us the elite’s latest view of McGovern’s tax reforms. “All such plans count on the willingness of the non-poor to give money to the poor. There has to be such willingness because the non-poor greatly outnumber the poor and dominate the political process.” Elegant sophistry. The not-so-poor do outnumber the poor but if the not-so-poor who are nicked heavily by taxes were to join with the poor they would outnumber the elite by 99 to 1. The politician who can forge that alliance will find himself, at best, the maker of a new society; at worst, in a hole at Arlington.
To maintain its grip on the nation, the Property Party must keep actual issues out of political debate. So far they have succeeded marvelously well. Faced with unemployment, Nixon will oppose abortion. Inflation? Marijuana is a halfway house to something worse. The bombing of North Vietnam? Well, pornographers are using the mailing lists of Cub Scouts. Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.
It will be interesting to see what happens to George McGovern. Appealing to the restive young, he came up with a number of tax reforms which threatened to alter the foundation of the Property Party. The result was a terrible squawking from the Alsops and the Restons. We were told that McGovern is the Goldwater of the left (a good joke since Goldwater represented the reactionary country club minority while McGovern would represent the not-so-poor to poor majority), but then any hack journalist knows that his ink-drugged readers will not stand for pot, abortion, amnesty. Now that McGovern is the candidate they have decided that he is, thank God, a pragmatist (i.e. a Property Party opportunist) and so will move where the votes are and where you can bet your sweet ass the Sulzbergers and Schiffs, the Luces and Grahams are.
With each passing day, McGovern will more and more come to resemble a Property Party candidate. This is fair enough, if not good enough. But what happens when he is elected? Then we will know—too late, I fear—to what extent he was simply exploiting the people’s deep inchoate hatred of the Property Party in order to become that Party’s loyal manager. This would be sad because 1972 could have been the year for a counterparty or for a transformation of the Democratic wing of the Property Party. But barring catastrophe (in the form of home-grown apple-pie fascism), the early response to McGovern (and Wallace, too) is the first indication we have had that there now exists a potential American majority willing to see its best interests served not through the restrictive Constitution of the elite but through the egalitarian vision of Daniel Shays and his road not taken—yet.
The New York Review of Books, August 10, 1972
*Fats Cats and Democrats: The Role of the Big Rich in the Party of the Common Man by G. William Domhoff; Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington by Bella Abzug; The Washington Pay-off: An Insider’s View of Corruption in Government by Robert Winter-Berger.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GORE VIDAL was born at West Point in 1925. In 1943 he graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy and enlisted in the army. While in the Pacific, at the age of nineteen, he wrote the much-praised novel Williwaw. Among his other novels are The City and the Pillar, Julian, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckinridge and Two Sisters.
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