The Ripon Forum

WITH NIXON well on his way to the White House, it's time to begin looking closely at the Republicans, and more particularly, at the liberal forces within the GOP. The saccharine haze of party unity which has enveloped the party since Miami has tended to obscure the presence of a liberal opposition among the Republicans.

Some ideas about the nature of the liberal opposition within the Nixon Administration can be found in the current issue of the Ripon Forum. The Forum, the publication and essence of the six-year-old Ripon Society, a Cambridge-based group of young GOP liberals, includes this month a series of brief policy papers on Vietnam and the draft, the results of a Ripon poll on the presidential elections, and a guest editorial on Vietnam by the first of the Republican doves, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon.

The Hatfield article is a thinly-veiled attack on Richard Nixon's failure to move to the left of the Administration on Vietnam. Hatfield rather unexpectedly endorsed Nixon prior to the Republican Convention, provoking speculation that Nixon was moving toward a dovish position on the war. Whether Hatfield himself believed this is unclear, but any hopes he may have had were disspelled at Miami Beach, where Nixon aides tried to modify the dovish tone of his seconding speech for Nixon.

AND SO it has apparently become clear to Hatfield that the time has come to begin rallying anti-war Republicans to a position of loyal opposition within the party. Like John Lindsay, the favorite Republican of most Ripon members, Hatfield would have liked to see the GOP seek the support of the McCarthy movement.

McCarthy, in fact, epitomizes the spirit of the Ripon Society more precisely than any Republican. Like McCarthy, Ripon people take a somewhat elitist view of political change, placing great emphasis on compassion and reasonableness on the part of those who govern and tending to distrust both pluralism and the concentration of executive power. These were the instincts that made McCarthy seem so out of place in the traditional Democratic Party.

But the groups which made American pluralism--the workers, the immigrants, the blacks and the poor--are virtually unrepresented within the Republican party, and it is for this very reason that the Ripon Society can stay comfortably within the GOP no matter how conservative the party may become. The Ripon Society can be "policy-oriented" because it represents almost no one: its members are, above all else, disinterested. There are no strong lobbies within the GOP for draft reform, or public housing, or aid to black businesses, or pro-labor legislation, simply because the groups which seek these kinds of programs--the young, the poor, the blacks--do so within the Democratic party. Therefore the motivations of Republicans who pursue these liberal programs are somewhat more amorphous than those of Democrats, and tend to have more to do with personal values of "public service" and "social responsibility."

IT REMAINS to be seen whether the Republican liberals will be able to mount a strong and consistent lobby for progressive government during the Nixon Administration. Already, one major feature of the Nixon platform--the decentralizing "black power" approach to the ghettoes--traces back to a paper prepared by a Ripon member at the Institute of Politics at Harvard. But it is difficult to assess the real meaning of his plan as Nixon expounds it--or the importance the candidate genuinely attaches to it in a year when every presidential aspirant is required to produce some kind of "solution" for the ghetto. Thus the Republican liberals have not yet scored any solid victories for their programs within the Nixon camp.

Whether they are able to exert a continuing influence on policy under President Nixon may prove to be a matter of some importance to the future of this country. Their weak, even marginal, position with the GOP, their political rootlessness within the party of the rich and the wellborn, suggests that the GOP liberals may not have much effect on the crucial decisions to be made on Vietnam, the military-industrial complex, and the problems of the cities. Ultimately, the Ripon people and the Republican liberals whom they represent may encounter once again the fundamental problem facing men who enter politics armed only with ideas and a non-pluralist ethic of public service: they just can't find a lever on power.