1962: Extremists warned in vain against socialism & surrender

One last shot from 1962 and then I am finished.

We started out two weeks ago by encountering the tragically shortened term of Gov. Donald Nutter, who had gained fame the previous year by refusing to proclaim United Nations Day in Montana, declaring it instead to be United States Day.

If you want to give yourself a headache, just try to imagine how much better the world would be today if the United States had not surrendered its hard-earned moral authority to an international body of rogues and thieves.

But, of course, Gov. Nutter didn’t manage to persuade many people to re-examine America’s relationship to the United Nations, and even if he had lived past the first year of his term as governor, he wouldn’t have had any more luck. Back then, they called people like Nutter — people who put their country first — extremists. Come to think of it, they still call them the same thing, and sometimes just for good measure they call them dangerous extremists.

One such extremist was prominently featured on the editorial page of the Daily Inter Lake, along with Gov. Nutter, in the Feb. 11, 1962 edition. He was a syndicated columnist, and just as Thomas Sowell is considered a crackpot by some of our contemporary readers, so too was this columnist considered a crackpot as well. His name was Barry Goldwater.

Sen. Goldwater, a Republican from Arizona, was then in his second term in the U.S. Senate and was noted for his 1960 book “The Conscience of a Conservative,” which helped set the agenda for the Reagan Revolution 20 years later. Although Goldwater became the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, his loss against Lyndon Johnson was inevitable following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

But two years before, with Kennedy in between the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the October Missile Crisis, Goldwater was a well-reasoned voice for staying tough on communism. His column in that February newspaper was an impassioned plea for his country not to abandon him and go soft on this worldwide enemy.

“In my travels throughout the country, I find more and more conscientious Americans wondering why this nation does not declare victory over the forces of international communism as our cold war purpose,” he wrote.

“I find growing dissatisfaction with a foreign policy based on the optimistic but naive, conception that we can have peaceful coexistence with an enemy which has sworn to destroy us. I find open resentment at the insistence of foreign policy spokesmen that a national program of foreign aid, disarmament and extreme deference to the United Nations is sufficient to the challenge which faces freedom in the world today.”

Imagine that. A politician who doesn’t simply spout feel-good bromides, but demands solutions that actually match the significance of the problem. Worldwide communism was THE existential threat to freedom in 1962, and Barry Goldwater said so. He was also smeared for saying so, just as today Michele Bachmann is smeared for saying that the existential threat to freedom in 2012 is Islamic jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Goldwater wrote, “I am disturbed when our leaders attribute this concern solely to the work of radicals and extremists. This is not the time to decry an excess of patriotism among the American people.” How very disturbed then must Goldwater have been to hear his Republican successor, Sen. John McCain, call Rep. Bachmann’s warning about the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood “specious and degrading.”

What is degrading is a United States senator who won’t face up to the possibility that enemies of our country will use any and all methods to demoralize us, to divide us, and to destroy us.

For the final perspective on this, let’s turn to Mr. R.O. Waller, who wrote a letter to the editor in the Feb. 11, 1962, edition, entitled “What About Super Patriots?” Perhaps Mr. Waller, as a former chairman of the Republican Central Committee in Flathead County, was himself tired of being called an extremist — or maybe he just didn’t like what people were saying about Gov. Nutter and Sen. Goldwater.

In any case, Waller began his letter like this:

“Maybe what we should do first is to define what we mean by ‘extreme’ right and ‘extreme’ left in our country’s make-up. Just who are the ‘extreme’ righters and who are the ‘extreme’ leftists?”

This was, of course, merely a rhetorical flourish, as Mr. Waller was just setting up his target. In the extreme left, he lumped Americans for Democratic Action, the Farmers Union, “the more radical labor unions,” and finally “some of the college eggheads who advocate government control of our free enterprise system and the expansion of the welfare state, deficit government spending and increased taxation.”

This set of “extreme” left-wing goals sounds uncomfortably familiar to an observer of 21st century politics — and it doesn’t sound so extreme anymore. In fact, it sounds mainstream. Government control of free enterprise? Expansion of the welfare state? Deficit spending? Higher taxes? Aren’t those all part of the Democratic agenda — and too often the Republican agenda?

Mr. Waller went into much more depth about the platform of the “extreme” right — mostly opposition to what he called “unwise government policy” that in general gave more power to the president and to international bodies and less power to Congress and to the people. He challenged higher taxes, the United Nations and a power structure that showed favor to “questionable subversive elements in this nation” and thus made it extremely difficult to “obtain conviction of known enemy agents working against the U.S. government.”

This all sounds deadly familiar today, as does this warning that concludes Waller’s letter: 

“Some people are tempted to accept ‘federal aid’ in one form or another — in the mistaken belief that they are getting something for nothing. Citizens should remember that politicians cannot give them anything from Washington that has not first been taken ‘from them (the taxpayer) in taxes... The hour is late — but, it may not be too late to save our form of government and our way of life, our freedom and all that goes with it, if thoughtful men and women in all walks of life and political beliefs will act in unison in opposition to socialistic government trends.”

The hour is later still today, and if those citizens who oppose “socialistic government trends” have indeed banded together in the form of the Tea Party movement, they have been met full force by the “Occupy” movement and by those who support socialism.

In these two movements, we see that the same battle that consumed Sen. Goldwater and R.O. Waller is still under way 50 years later. The outcome is far from settled. But if you are confident that you don’t need to do anything to protect and defend our Constitution — if you are sure that your liberty will be preserved by the government without your insistence or participation, then we are all one step closer to losing that Constitution and that liberty.

Maybe we have at last gotten to that point which Benjamin Franklin foresaw when he warned us in 1787 that the Founding Fathers had given the American nation a republic... “if you can keep it.”