Breaking with the past

KP Nayar

Strategic Analyst

Of all the plots and sub-plots in the US election drama that unravelled throughout last week, the most consequential was the way Arizona, the fountainhead of modern-day American conservatism, voted. It was a historic divorce from this state’s more than half century-old marriage to the deep right.

When Arizona’s voters dented Republican invincibility that had been taken for granted in successive presidential elections, it brought closure to childhood experiences which left me troubled as a schoolboy. During the 1964 election, Arizona’s high priest of conservatism and its senior Senator, Barry Goldwater, was the Republican candidate challenging President Lyndon Johnson. One of Johnson’s TV advertisements showed a little girl in a field counting daisy petals. While she was counting 1, 2, 3…, with each petal she plucked, another voice in the background, scary and menacing, could be heard counting downward from 10, drowning out the girl as he approached zero. The girl reached 10, and simultaneously the voice reached zero. Suddenly, there was a nuclear explosion and a mushroom cloud spread over the screen. At this stage, President Johnson, who approved the campaign commercial, lent his voice: ‘These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God’s children can live or go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.’ Goldwater was an open advocate of a nuclear war against enemies of the US.

There was no TV yet in Kerala, where I grew up, but this commercial was shown in cinema theatres in Trivandrum by disarmament advocates. It became a talking point in progressives’ circles, including my father’s drawing room. Nehru’s efforts for elimination of nuclear weapons had caught the imagination of Indians at that time. As a boy, I was glued to radio and tuned in daily to broadcasts from overseas stations. I have disturbing memories of Goldwater’s racist speeches. They left me uneasy as a boy just as John F Kennedy’s presidential orations were comforting and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address was inspirational.

When I lived in the US. I made time to research the life and work of this Arizona Republican. I found the full text of a Goldwater speech, which had disturbed me at an impressionable college-going age. It says in part that ‘extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.’ It is a threshold every civilised society must guard against.

Not surprisingly, only six of the 50 states were for Goldwater in the Electoral College in his presidential bid challenge against Johnson. The President won handily. But what does it say about Arizona which elected Goldwater five times to the Senate, depicting him in the state’s likeness in Washington for 30 years?

Fast forward to the new millennium. What Goldwater was to Arizona in the 1960s and 1970s, became John McCain’s destiny in the decades that followed the poison-spewing Senator’s retirement in 1986. McCain filled the Senate seat from Arizona. He was invincible in the state as long as he lived and was elected six times to the Senate. Before that he won two elections to the US House of Representatives from Arizona’s first district, which is famous for its electoral composition as having the highest number of native Americans for any House seat. In 2008, he was chosen by the Republican Party as its candidate to run against Barack Obama, who handsomely won that election and became America’s first black President.

The US has a severe shortage of heroes in its public life in the modern era, so much so it had to turn to Ronald Reagan and make him into one. So it was easy for McCain to become another hero by saying the right things at the right time and he had a knack for cultivating the media.

The Washington Post once wrote a hilarious op-ed on how McCain and another Senator, a Democrat, would be waiting daily near their phones for calls from hosts of prime time TV news. Both the Senators would be ready with appropriate sound bites, ‘concerned’ or ‘horrified’, etc., depending on the enormity of the day’s events. How much more cynical can any politician get! But such stratagems got McCain to where he wanted to be.

Notwithstanding McCain’s friendly exterior, easy accessibility and probity in public life, he was an Arizonan typical of his time and no different from Goldwater, except for an unerring ability to cover up his dark sides. In his convictions, especially on foreign policy, he was potentially more dangerous than Goldwater because the capacity of big powers for destruction is much more now than when Goldwater was running to be President.

McCain was a warmonger of the worst kind and that appealed to voters in Arizona. Had he become President, and had he been allowed to carry out the policies he believed in, humanity would have been plunged into a third World War with consequences that one shudders to imagine. In all probability, President McCain would have started the war in West Asia.

Last week’s victory of Mark Kelly, an astronaut who campaigned as an ‘independent pragmatist’ with Democratic Party support, is a hopeful sign that Arizona is turning its back on the likes of Goldwater and McCain, who had the potential to commit crimes against humanity, had they been elected to executive offices. Kelly will fill the Senate seat held by McCain until his death in 2018.

His election and that of another Democrat to the Senate two years ago will be the first time in almost 70 years that Arizona will not be represented in the Senate by Republicans. Together with a resounding rebuke administered to President Trump in his re-election bid, indications are that Arizona may be readying itself at long last to bury the ghosts of its past which nearly destroyed my faith in goodness and fair play as a child.