Moderates versus extremists

1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater's support for ultra-conservatives contrasted with the long tradition of Republican moderates. In the cartoon above Herb Block depicted these moderates as drowning.

In Northern Ireland we have seen many model moderate politicians - constitutional and conciliatory - summarily vanquished by the extremist who practices the most inflexible and pitiless declension of unionism or nationalism.

By contrast in the United States of America, the moderate has often out-played the extremist. As I said in the Huffington Post here:

"Let's look at the DUP. These are the political offspring of Ian Paisley, Ireland's answer to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton. Foaming religious fundamentalists. Except none of these reactionaries made any serious in-ways into political office. Unfortunately ours did."

The American editorial cartoonist Herb Block captured the tension between the moderate and the extremist (as in the cartoon above) and was ruthless in his pictorial destruction of the mad-men politicians. I looked at how Herb Block helped to ridicule McCarthyism here.
 

The moderate commentator Herd Block saw the 1964 Republican candidate for the White House, Barry Goldwater, as ruthless and extremist - just as many Americans did. Barry Goldwater's support for ultra-conservatives contrasted with the long tradition of Republican moderates. In the cartoon above Herb Block depicted these moderates as drowning. In his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination on July 16, 1964, Goldwater said:

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

The moderate prevailed. The nation overwhelming went for the Democratic candidate, Lyndon Johnson.