On the Right

New York, Feb. 20—A great deal of copy is devoted, during presidential campaign years, to analyzing the character of the major participants, but never enough, in my judgment, to the strange acceptance by society of the X Factor; that factor is the communicability of pride. We know that pride is listed as among the seven deadly sins. So that it ought no more to surprise us, say, that Mr. Carter is a prideful man than it should have surprised us when, in 1976, he confided (if that is the right word for it) to Playboy that he experienced lust. What is strange isn’t that Mr. Carter wants to be President another four years; it is strange that armies of men and women are devoting themselves to keeping him in office. It is pride that causes him to wish to stay in the White House. What is the X Factor that makes so many people collude in that venture in pride?

Loyalty? There are two kinds, personal and institutional. The first is very easy to understand, and that in the case of Mr. Carter as in the case of almost everybody probably would amount to a few hundred people at the most, who have experienced Mr. Carter at a personal level and have grown so devoted to him as to desire that he should achieve what he wants. To be sure, among these are the job seekers whose own professional futures depend on the success of their prince; but leave that factor out for purposes of this analysis. Institutional loyalty derives from a sense of fidelity to policies with which the prince is identified. In the case of Carter, this loyalty, if analyzed, is mostly negative in character. That is to say, the proCarterite is probably best understood as someone who is anti-Republican, and antiKennedy. But we have not entirely isolated our X Factor.

New York, Feb. 20—A great deal of copy is devoted, during presidential campaign years, to analyzing the character of the major participants, but never enough, in my judgment, to the strange acceptance by society of the X Factor; that factor is the communicability of pride. We know that pride is listed as among the seven deadly sins. So that it ought no more to surprise us, say, that Mr. Carter is a prideful man than it should have surprised us when, in 1976, he confided (if that is the right word for it) to Playboy that he experienced lust. What is strange isn’t that Mr. Carter wants to be President another four years; it is strange that armies of men and women are devoting themselves to keeping him in office. It is pride that causes him to wish to stay in the White House. What is the X Factor that makes so many people collude in that venture in pride?

Loyalty? There are two kinds, personal and institutional. The first is very easy to understand, and that in the case of Mr. Carter as in the case of almost everybody probably would amount to a few hundred people at the most, who have experienced Mr. Carter at a personal level and have grown so devoted to him as to desire that he should achieve what he wants. To be sure, among these are the job seekers whose own professional futures depend on the success of their prince; but leave that factor out for purposes of this analysis. Institutional loyalty derives from a sense of fidelity to policies with which the prince is identified. In the case of Carter, this loyalty, if analyzed, is mostly negative in character. That is to say, the proCarterite is probably best understood as someone who is anti-Republican, and antiKennedy. But we have not entirely isolated our X Factor.