154 ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

determined for itself. Where is the spontaneity our society once knew?
he asks. Why must the bright child be sacrificed at the altar of mass
education? Have the bold impresarios of business and commerce
closed their shops and forever fled? Is there not a labor leader in the
country today willing to take off his Brooks Brothers suit and man the
barricades? In changing American life, have we in fact condemned it
to lifelessness?

It is not William Buckley or Walter Lippmann speaking but David
Reisman who decrys the "other-directed man, " the man who in dis-
covering adjustment loses his soul, and now the issue takes on a fas-
cinating irony with tremendous implication. It is not the critic but
the author who tells us the work is unworthy. It is not the receiver
but the giver who articulates the evil. It is not the OUTS trying to
depose the INS that's causing the ruckus but the INS trying to find the
way out that mocks the progress of two generations and sends tremors
of doubt reverberating through the Great and Hollow Society. "Ameri-
cans have no great nostalgia for the past, " proclaims Professor Andrew
Hacker of Cornell, but the Liberal Establishment is not so sure that a
little going back might not prove helpful and that a little purposeful
rest and reconsideration might not prove revitalizing.

What good are revolutions if we are swallowed up by them? For
how long can innovation masquerade as substance? Has our nation's
talent for acquiring wealth left its people impoverished? In this dilem-
ma of spirit and conscience, the impassioned liberal begins to sound
like the ardent conservative, images become blurred. The left moves
to the right and the right moves to the left until suddenly they are no
longer miles apart but standing face-to-face. An era of experimenta-
tion, innovation and accommodation nears its end. Consolidation is
the theme of our times. The day of reconciliation has arrived!

And now a sleeping giant, the Republican Party, stirs. For fifty-six
of the seventy-two years prior to 1932 he ruled the land but in only
eight of the past thirty-five years has he been more than a wayfaring
stranger to the highest post of power. In the words Stephen Vincent
Benet used to describe the first settlers, our Republican giant was "dis-
inherited and dispossessed. " His legions accounting for thirty-eight
percent of voters in 1940 slipped to twenty-five percent by 1964, and in
that year he fell in battle suffering almost mortal wounds. Rejected by
a society he had helped to build, scorned by a people he had served and
served well, unfamiliar to a new generation with little reverence for the
past, he seemed like the dinosaur well on his way to wherever the fittest
go after they survive no more.