Political balance is restored
Local editorials from 50 years ago are being reprinted every Monday and Tuesday in this column. This editorial appeared in the Evening Standard, a predecessor of the Herald-Standard, on Nov. 21, 1966.
Conservatives make a mistake if they conclude that the Republican resurgence at the polls heralds a grassroots movement to their side of the political spectrum and a reversal of national direction.
The fact is that Americans have always been conservative in their politics in that they eventually redress any alignment of power representing an extreme, whether of the right or of the left. If nature abhors a vacuum, the American electorate abhors any long-sustained imbalance in the relative strength of its two major parties.
Thus the election results of Nov. 8 represent not so much a swing toward the right as they do a strategic withdrawal from the left — an instinctive attempt to regroup nearer the center, which has historically been the ideological home base from which politicians of both parties have operated.
In 1966, liberalism seemed a little too strongly in control of the nation’s affairs. It was a little too enthusiastically concocting too many nostrums for the nation’s manifold ills.
And all this had come about because of another instinctive reaction, perhaps an over-reaction, two years before — that time to a rigid conservatism that seemed dangerously out of touch with modern realities.
Trimming the Democrats to size in the congressional elections of 1966 no more guarantees a Republican victory in the presidential elections two years hence than did the elections of 1946. In 1968, as in 1948,, Americans will be looking for the man and the party they deem best able to lead the nation in the direction historical necessity dictates.
America in the 20th century is like a man walking into new and uncertain terrain — striking out with one foot and then the other, now vigorously and now more cautiously, pausing occasionally to take his bearings.
But because he has a left foot and a right foot does not mean that one is for advancing and the other for retreating. Both are needed to carry him forward and to give him balance. This year’s elections have simply restored that balance between strides.