Word: levinson
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James Lardner's hard-nosed man-of-the-world reproach to the Kearns-Levinson article in the New Republic ("Brass Tacks" -- no less!) exhibits the kind of sophomoric bunk that I do not usually associate with the CRIMSON. The rhetoric is fair but he didn't read the article. And if he did, then he's guilty of the gar greater sin of twisting the gist thereof to best fit his private beat. Shortly stated, Lardner's paraphrase of what Kearns and Levinson wrote is that the best way to dump the chief is to a) start a third party...
...nominated? Or, if an unacceptable nominee emerges, and if Johnson has not changed his War policy, do we all get drunk on election day? The most iniquitous form of self-indulgence is a refusal to think seriously about political strategies that might help change an unacceptable "reality." Sanford V. Levinson Tutor, Department of Government
...Levinson and Miss Kearns, both graduate students in Government, acknowledge the electoral risks of forming a new party. They seem to have assimilated the fact that independent candidates for President--from Teddy Roos-evelt to Robert LaFollette to Henry Wallace--have accumulated a steadily diminishing percentage of the vote. The real function of a third party, they insist, is "to demonstrate the existence of a block of voters for whose support a major party must bid; to force major parties to alter stands on certain issues and to serve as bridges for movement of the discontented from one party...
...they point out about the effects of third parties is for the most part unquestionable. But all previous efforts have been launched in the hope of electoral success, however that was defined. To run an independent candidate with any impact at all requires a degree of enthusiasm which the Levinson-Kearns argument fails to inspire. And when the votes come in, the enthusiasm collapses in spades...
...characterize the left." In truth it is precisely "the intrinsic drama and importance of a challenge on the presidential level" which can best foster "the fragmentation and frustration that now characterize the left." The Wallace campaign, though forged in the same spirit of ostensible unity that pervades the Levinson-Kearns article, contributed to the collapse of the left in the '40's as a potent political force. Maybe it contributed as well to the rise of McCarthyism...