E.B. White on the Destructibility of Democracy

"To The Editor:

Senator Goldwater has occasionally used the phrase 'obviously guilty,' referring to criminals. This is a very unsettling thing. Nobody is 'obviously' guilty in this country – a man is innocent until the court decides otherwise. Goldwater appears to believe that it's more important to catch a criminal than to preserve the principle of search and seizure, which is a bedrock of our jurisprudence, safeguarding our homes.

The NEWS is my morning paper and I crack it every day with interest. Lately it has been of very special interest because of the heat and importance of this campaign. I've been reading the Goldwater books and studying the Goldwater record, as every citizen should do, and I find his fundamentalist philosophy both absorbing and alarming. He would have us return to the verities, which is fine by me. But the pattern of this journey back into our better selves closely parallels the classic pattern of authoritarianism and the police state: discrediting the court, intimidating the press (I can still hear those boos and catcalls when the press was mentioned in San Francisco [the Republican National Convention was held in the Cow Palace] – a truly ugly sound), depicting the federal government as the enemy of the people, depicting social welfare as the contaminant in our lives, promising to use presidential power to end violence, arguing that the end justifies the means (catch the thief, never mind how), promising victory in an age of delicate nuclear balance, slyly suggesting that those of opposite opinion are perhaps of questionable loyalty, and always insisting that freedom has gone down the drain.

Your correspondent William Buckley reminded us the other day, via Tocqueville, that democracy is destructible. It is, indeed. It can be destroyed by a single zealous man who holds aloft a freedom sign while quietly undermining all of freedom's cherished institutions."

E.B. White. Letter to the Bangor Daily News, October 8, 1964.