[quote]
BostonBarrister wrote:
I would not be so quick to trust the documentary, which seemed quite interested in what Ted Kennedy and Al Franken were interested in saying about Goldwater.
http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/winter2005/busch.html
hspder wrote:
What the heck have you been smoking, BB?
Did you actually watch it? If so, what parts seem to be untrustworthy?
Seriously, I want specific parts and references proving they are wrong.[/quote]
Goldwater was extremely anti-Big Government from an economic perspective – he was a guy who would have dismantled the Tennessee Valley Authority and probably taken down the rest of the New Deal with it. And if you think any sort of Great Society programs would have gotten out of the box with Goldwater in charge, I’d like to know what you’re smoking?
Is this really the man liberals love?
The guy who ran for President also ran on values – in fact, he was one of the first politicians to legitimize “values” issues on the national political level.
This was the Goldwater who launched the modern conservative movement, and whose direct heir was Ronald Reagan – though Reagan didn’t take the anti-government-spending line as hard as did Goldwater. That Goldwater was also the one who was very against affirmative action and reverse discrimination.
Some Goldwater quotes:
“Is this the time in our nation’s history for our federal government to ban Almighty God from our classrooms?”
“We as a nation are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and people.”
“The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy?. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul.”
“Is moral responsibility out of style? Our papers and our newsreels and yes, our own observations, tell us that immorality surrounds us as never before. We as a nation are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and people?. [The] philosophy of something for nothing, [the] cult of individual and governmental irresponsibility, is an insidious cancer that will destroy us unless we recognize it and root it out now.”
The Goldwater the liberals love is the one who made a habit of criticizing social conservatives in his later years, toward the end of his Senate career and after had left political life. However, this wasn’t the same man who ran for President and was one of the pivotal figures of the modern conservative movement.
This review of a Goldwater bio from 1996 is pretty good, though doesn’t get enough into the changes in Goldwater’s social ideas: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=18581869661038
This quote from that review, from a reviewer whom I am assuming is a left-wing academic, is especially telling:
[i]The last third of Barry Goldwater relates the Senator’s career after the spotlight had faded, and traces his journey from “martyrdom to canonization” as the Republican Party built on the Goldwater message of 1964 to win five of the next seven presidential elections. Goldberg shows, however, that for a growing number of those who called themselves conservatives, the Barry Goldwater deserving of sainthood died in 1964. The Arizonan’s growing apostasy, notably his support of Nixon’s China policy in 1972 and his opposition to Reagan in 1976, diminished him in the eyes of the new “new right.” Finally, Goldberg examines the Senator’s increasing hostility to the moral conservatives who transformed the Republican party in the 1980s. We are left with the image of a crusty Goldwater approaching his ninetieth year. He is forthright in support of a woman’s right to choose, and blasts Clinton’s equivocation on gays in the military. “You don’t have to be straight to fight and die for your country,” he reminds Clinton, “you just have to shoot straight.”
In essence, Goldberg’s Goldwater appears far more attractive the farther he is from political power. As an energetic young businessman in Phoenix, a keen student of native American culture, or, in retirement, as critic of the religious right, Goldwater comes across as the ornery, but honest, conscience of Western individualism. Those on the left who read this volume may have to pinch themselves to remind themselves that, if elected, Goldwater may well have extended the Vietnam War beyond Indochina, and could have delayed voting rights legislation.[/i]
In my mind, the Goldwater fixation is just the most recent example of a solid tradition of liberals (or really anyone who is upset with current conservatives) accusing current conservatives of betraying the “true” conservatives who came before them.
Yet if you look at what people said about those “true” conservatives at the time, they got the same treatment. Goldwater had been said to have betrayed the Right. Gov. Bill Scranton of Pennsylvania suggested that his followers were “extreme reactionaries” and “anything but conservatives.” Goldwater was a far cry from “true conservative” Robert Taft. At least, according to Scranton, along with columnists Richard Rovere and Walter Lippmann.
The contemporary liberal establishment saw Goldwater not as the representative of an honorable political philosophy, but as a manifestation of mass psychosis, the embodiment of “authoritarian personality”.
CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr told Americans that Goldwater was associated with German neo-Nazis. The New York Times ran an ad reporting that 1,189 psychiatrists found Goldwater not “psychologically fit.” LBJ shamelessly bludgeoned Goldwater as a champion of “hate.”
The contemporary intellectuals (saying they were liberals would be redundant) also piled on. An essay in Partisan Review declared Goldwater’s campaign “a recrudescence on American soil of precisely those super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions dead.” Martin Luther King Jr. was more plainspoken: “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.”
Were they right in their hyperbolic teeth-gnashing? No more so than those who hyperventilate now about Bush trending toward fascism, which is to say, Not at all.
But at the same time, the impulse to lionize conservatives of the past to use ideas of those conservatives that are tainted with wishful thinking to bludgeon current conservatives should be avoided – particularly when it doesn’t fool anyone worth fooling anway.
From William F. Buckley, Jr.'s 1998 obituary of Barry Goldwater:
“It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater’s critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene. But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching.”
Perhaps if liberals would spend more energy seeking a return to classical or “real” liberalism we could all have a happier time.
