A new look at Goldwater and the GOP

What if Barry Goldwater wasn't the father of today's Republican Party? What if the patriarch were Joe McCarthy instead? That's the provocative idea by Neal Gabler writing in the Los Angeles Times:

...there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

Arizonans are blindly proud of Barry, and I'm not immune. But a school of revisionism is well overdue. It's true that Goldwater would have no use for the religious-based extremism and corporate kleptocracy of today's Republican Party -- which has come to dominate Arizona, too. Yet he was a product of the Intermountain West as it existed in my grandmother's lifetime, particularly the first half of the 20th century: tamed and made livable by the federal government, with a relatively small population and ample room.

His background and temperament, informed by and informing his philosophy, made him too impatient for the complexities of governing an advanced nation in the space age. He lacked any executive experience, beyond running a department store. Reagan had been governor of a large state, and a generally effective one, operating from the center. Barry was an individualist and a rabble-rouser. He didn't even particularly want to run in 1964, but was infuriated by the "Eastern establishment" Republicans. As president, he wouldn't have blown up the world. He would have been bored, jumping Air Force One for the first chance to sneak off with his cameras to the Navajo Nation. About the only thing Goldwater has in common with today's conservatives is a philosophy incompatible with effective government.

So let the argument begin...

Comments

[Buford]

It has always seemed to me that a valid definition of conservative is 'living in the past' or at least viewing some moment in the past as a golden age to be preserved and emulated at all costs. This is as short-sighted and doomed to failure as expecting to achieve a liberal utopian future.

I'm not against keeping the good things we have from the past any more than I am automatically for anything new because it is different.

[mike doughty]

It seems to me that all the Goldwater Republicans joined the Libertarians after giving up on Reagan and Bush.The last 8 years have definitely had McCarthy-like scare tactics used to the max.

[soleri]

Goldwater's 1964 campaign presaged Nixon's Southern Strategy. His ad hoc alliance with crazy militarists like Curis LeMay also anticipated the way Republicanism became synonymous with extreme hawkishness. Goldwater himself defended McCarthy, and while there may be stylistic differences between the two, their conservatism both tended to anti-intellectualism and paranoia.

So why do we like Goldwater and dislike McCarthy (and his successors)? Because Goldwater was much more like us than not. He was, by instinct, a modern man. He belonged to the Urban League and Planned Parenthood. He even self-identified as a Jew and his best friends were often Jewish. His family included gays. He was, in short, a cosmopolitan.

Conservatism today is a reaction to modernity. It's a blind alley in which every fear and remorse about the new is stoked for political gain. The Kabuki theater of culture-war politics made Ronald Reagan an ideal spokesman, even though he was a divorced man with ultra-modern children who made his money in evil Hollywood. John McCain, a serial philanderer, also became a poster-child for anti-modernists.

Conservatism today is little more than the perfume of nostalgia. It's why conservatives can spend recklessly and attack Constitutional liberties. It's simply too vaporous to have ironclad principles. Aside from animosity to certain minorities and reproductive freedom, there's nothing there. Conservatives might love to argue about which principles are non-negotiable but this is the idlest form of self-pleasuring.

[edward jackson-johnson]

Hey, Jon, off the subject, but how come you have not weighed in on the Gannett bloodbath that is going on with the layoffs all across the board? The Republic, as a big fish, should be pretty hard hit...I know there is no love lost there, on your part, but it is your hometown and your hometown paper and you still are friends with some of the folks there.
Anyway, just curious.

[Emil Pulsifer]

A classic: LBJ's anti-Goldwater "daisy" commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVn9k6d1og