Word: consensus
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...only necessary to "reason together," for in a democracy it is always possible to find a majority that will agree on some compromise. This means that the compromiser should never state things too boldly-should, in fact, blur the edges of most big questions, unless, of course, a popular consensus has already chosen the bolder course...
...consensus does require that the President point to some greater good in togetherness than the reward each follower sees as the end of a separate path. A series of racial riots met by tough police suppression in coming years would make it doubtful that the present consensus based on the prospect of a Great Society could endure...
What, then, if Goldwater's stratagems to hold party machinery succeed yet nothing appears that would make it possible for him to topple the Democratic consensus? The country would be left for a while with the kind of one-party predominance that has visited the United States from time to time: government which has the deceptive appearance of the "factionless" dream which some of the Founding Fathers entertained...
...answer is not foreordained: it must depend partly on Johnson's skill in maintaining the consensus; partly on the course of racial and foreign crises; and partly on whether groups to the right and left of Democratic center succeed in formulating realistic alternatives to centrist policies. So far, the capacity to think out such policies is something that neither side has shown any signs of developing...
...liberal, I won't challenge the liberal consensus: Hubert Humphrey is different. Unlike Johnson today and Kennedy in 1960, Humphrey is not simply the lesser of two evils. He is a positive good, the best candidate since Adlai--no, better than Adlai, because he can talk to folks without the crutch of irony. He fights harder than Wayne Morse, yet smiles. He dreams bigger than Chester Bowles, yet does his homework. He is a male Eleanor Roosevelt...