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Often concern for individualism fits right in with concern for public welfare. Thomas E. Dewey said that it must have been "a very clumsy Republican" who thought it clever to pin the "welfare state" tag on Democrats, for the fact is that "anyone who thinks that an attack on the fundamental idea of security and welfare is appealing to the people generally is living in the Middle Ages." Even more emphatically, nothing in their distrust of federal solution need keep Republicans from recovering from another great missed opportunity—the one that came in 1954 when a Republican Chief Justice, appointed by a Republican President, wrote the school decision that started the Negro revolution. Justice, political sense and Republican tradition dictated that President Eisenhower assume a leading role in civil rights. But as with the missed chance to build up the party, which he regrets in his new book Waging Peace Ike made the least of it. The South is, of course, the G.O.P.'s area of greatest growth, and there is enough in legitimate Republican philosophy to maintain the growth. But if the party's image is to be neo-Confederate, then the gams in the South will be ephemeral and the effect elsewhere disastrous.
In his 1962 Godkin Lectures at Harvard New York's Nelson Rockefeller offered a guiding strategy for balancing the modern demands of individualism and welfare with the three levels of government, a kind of federalism providing room for both infinite variety and creativity in all sectors of national life." He called for strengthened state and local powers. "If the states ignore or evade their responsibility to act, there will be no alternative to direct federal-local action. The problems of urbanism have outrun individual local government boundaries, legal powers and fiscal resources. And the national Government is too remote to sense and act responsively on the widely varying local or regional concerns and aspirations. The states—through their relations with local governments and their closeness to the people and the problems—can and should serve as the leaders in planning and the catalysts in developing cooperative action at local-state-federal levels." In this spirit several current Republican Governors—among them Rockefeller Scranton, Ohio's James Rhodes, Rhode Island's John Chafee and Washington's Daniel Evans—have taken the lead in providing showcase state-sponsored programs for education, mental health, highways and poverty-fighting.
Yet neither a broad philosophy nor a workable operational strategy will revive the Republican Party if it fails to take into account not only the exigencies of the present but also the tidal waves of the future. "In the decades just ahead," writes New York University's Peter F. Drucker, "our domestic politics will be dominated by unfamiliar issues —not only new, but different in kind from the things we have been arguing about since 1932. They will be concerned not primarily with economic matters but with basic values —moral, esthetic and philosophical. Moreover, the center of our political stage is now being taken over by a new power group: a professional, technical and managerial middle class—very young, affluent, used to great job security and highly educated."