the center
In their conclusions the White House betrayed a constellation of unspoken assumptions about race relations — about social relations — in the United States: introduce bold legislation and the troublemakers would quit, like kidnappers who had been paid their ransom. Theirs was an almost desperate belief that America wad by definition a placid place, if only “extremists” could be kept in check. That didn’t just mean the racists that perpetrated the violence — but also those who “disturbed the peace” on the other side by protesting racism. The assumption was shared alike by Birmingham’s “moderate” mayor-elect, who proclaimed the citizens of Birmingham “innocent victims”; and by Jackson, Mississippi, cops who charged pistol-whipped folks with disturbing the peace. All of them implied that everything had been just fine before irresponsible people began stirring the pot. It was the zeitgeist. “Responsibility” was a mantle even militants craved. Barry Goldwater was one of the very rare politicians who actually welcomed identification as a partisan. But his supporters in the Los Angeles Republican Central Committee called themselves the “Responsible Republicans” — to distinguish themselves from Howard Jarvis’s breakaway Conservative Party. “Americans for Democratic Action are more extreme than we are,” Young Americans for Freedom’s Richard Viguerie assured a reporter. Colonel Laurence E. Bunker, General MacArthur’s old aide-de-camp, now a Birch leader, was quoted in the New York Post in a series called “Far Right and Far Left”: “We’re right down the middle. Some groups advocate violence, others shrug their shoulders and read a book. We don’t believe in either.” The editor of The Worker, the paper of the American Communist Party, was quoted as saying: “This is the headquarters for the resposible left. Over there–” pointing downtown in the direction of the office of the Trotskyite Progressive Workers Party — “is the irresponsible left.”
— Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm, 206-207