Mitt's Father Articulates Republican Principles Before Goldwater

JohnMH127@gmail.com

When it started:
In Thursday's Andrew Sullivan post Dear Barry Goldwater, from George Romney, Mitt Romney's father articulates a passionate plea to Goldwater to disassociate himself, and his party, from the extremism with which the 1964 presidential campaign was beginning to become identified. Sullivan describes its “warnings about the Southern strategy just emerging in Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

As to Goldwater's apparent approval of the possible realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties into “conservative” and “liberal” parties, Romney senior wrote:

We need only look at the experience of some ideologically oriented parties in Europe to realize that chaos can result. Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlock, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress. A broad based two party structure produces a degree of political stability and viability not otherwise attainable.

Romney continues:

You were just about to take a position the 1964 Civil Rights Act contrary to that of most elected Republicans in and out of Congress, and there were disturbing indications that your strategists proposed to make an all-out push for the Southern white segregationist vote and to attempt to exploit the so-called "white backlash" in the North. ...

 
With extremists of the right and left preaching and practicing hate, and bearing false witness on the basis of guilt by association and circumstantial rationalization and with such extremists rising to official positions of leadership in the Republican party, we cannot recapture the respect of the nation and lead it to its necessary spiritual, moral, and political rebirth if we hide our heads in the sand and decline to even recognize in our platform that the nation is again beset by modern ‘know nothings.’ ...

The real challenge for us lies in the expansion of voter support for the Republican party in all parts of the country, urban or rural, North or South, colored or white.

The liberal principle is that no party is, or should want to be, a permanent majority; and that a party not in the majority takes a principled stance as the “loyal opposition.” Anything less would fail the Founders' concept of government by consent of the governed.

It seems clear what George Romney would think of his son's tacit, if not explicit, complicity in modern Republicans' practice of a cynical politics of obstruction, and their habit, from President Clinton onward, of treating any Democratic president as illegitimate. As a usurper.

Sullivan's post contains the senior Romney's complete plea to Goldwater. The whole thing is worth reading.