Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (9 page)

A conservative feels sympathy
for
the Southern position which the Liberal, applying his ideological abstractions ruthlessly, cannot feel. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be the indicated, though concededly undemocratic, course. It is more important for the community, wherever situated geographically, to affirm and live by civilized standards than to labor at the job of swelling the voting lists.

Buckley suggested that the South could strengthen its case if it applied “voting qualification tests impartially, to black and white.” It could then be accused of being undemocratic, but not racially discriminatory—and being undemocratic, in Buckley’s eyes, was by no means the worst sin: “The democracy of universal suffrage is not a bad form of government; it is simply not necessarily nor inevitably a good form of government,” he once wrote. “Democracy must be justified by its works.”

Buckley later said that he and his magazine had been mistaken in opposing civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, and he endorsed the idea of a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., whom he came to admire. But resistance to civil rights in the name of states’ rights and even white supremacy was both mainstream on the right and central to the reorganization of conservatism in the 1960s. It is a key to grasping what would come later. Richard Nixon is credited with successfully executing the “Southern Strategy” in his 1968 and 1972 campaigns, and he did. But that strategy was outlined first by those touting the electoral promise of Goldwaterism before the 1964 campaign.

In the February 12, 1963, issue of
National Review,
William A. Rusher, the magazine’s publisher and a leader of the Draft Goldwater movement, offered an article titled “Crossroads for the GOP.” It was republished for
separate distribution, and
Rusher proudly noted in his memoir that it “became one of the most popular reprints ever published by
National Review.
” Rusher’s opening assumption was that any Republican could carry “the GOP’s Midwestern heartland, and such peripheral fiefs as northern New England and certain mountain states, accounting in all to perhaps 140 electoral votes.” This proved wildly optimistic in light of Goldwater’s actual performance in 1964. But his next point was key: “Goldwater and
Goldwater alone
 . . . can carry enough southern and border states to offset the inevitable Kennedy conquests in the big industrial states of the North and still stand a serious chance of winning election.”

Already, then, conservatives were intent on writing off the northeastern states, which had been part of the Republican coalition from Lincoln to Dewey to Eisenhower, and replacing them with a southern bastion. This would have the advantage for conservatives of replacing their northeastern liberal foes inside the GOP with conservative former Dixiecrats who would be their allies. It was a form of political reengineering that would permit the virtual southern takeover of the Republican Party.

In
The Winning Side,
de Toledano offered his own case for the Southern Strategy by way of explaining why Goldwater would be a stronger candidate than New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. By de Toledano’s estimate, Rockefeller would lose to Kennedy in the Electoral College, 371–153. But by sweeping most of the Deep South, Goldwater would beat Kennedy, 284–248. (For some reason, he didn’t call the state of Delaware, leaving out three electoral votes.) De Toledano’s final numbers bore no relationship to the outcome of the Johnson-Goldwater election,
yet his map (while slightly too optimistic for Republicans in some places and too pessimistic in the South and border states) was prophetic—and remarkably close to the final outcome of the 2004 election, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry, 286–251. The Goldwater dreamers were on to something.

Goldwater and Reagan, both as historical figures and as heroic ideological symbols, must be seen in the context of the politics roiling the right in the
1960s, a time when both were viewed in much the same way as today’s Tea Partiers are. But where the Tea Party has been fighting an Establishment that is essentially conservative, the Goldwaterites were pushing the Republican Party away from an Establishment that reflected the liberalism of Nelson Rockefeller and the moderate brand of conservatism preached by Dwight Eisenhower.

The central goal of the new conservative movement was preventing Eisenhower’s ideology, which he came to label as “Modern Republicanism,” from becoming the party’s dominant disposition. Buckley was particularly scornful of Ike.
“It has been the dominating ambition of Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism to govern in such a fashion as to more or less please more or less everybody,” Buckley said. “Such governments must shrink from principle: because principles have edges, principles cut; and blood is drawn, and people get hurt. And who would hurt anyone in an age of modulation?” The “Eisenhower program,” Buckley went on, is “an attitude, which goes by the name of a program, undirected by principle, unchained to any coherent idea as to the nature of man and society.” Notice that for Buckley, “modulation” was a grave sin.

As for Rockefeller, he was beyond the philosophical pale and uninhibited in taking the fight to the internal enemy. He condemned those he labeled as “extremist groups, carefully organized, well-financed, and operated through the tactics of ruthless, roughshod intimidation.” Republicans, he said, were “in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed and disciplined minority.” If he mentioned “well-financed” twice, it wasn’t just because his own wealth made him conscious of such things. Then, like now, the right had plenty of money.

The Goldwater who later supported the Panama Canal treaty that Reagan opposed during Jimmy Carter’s presidency—and who came to speak in moderate tones about abortion and homosexuality—was not the Goldwater who excited Schlafly and Rusher, de Toledano, Buckley, and Thurmond. The Goldwater who set off a convulsion in the Republican Party laid out the new conservative creed boldly—and, for a future presidential candidate, recklessly—in his 1960 book,
The Conscience of a Conservative.
Ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, Buckley’s brother-in-law, it would make good reading at any Tea Party gathering in 2015. Indeed,
The Conscience of a Conservative
provided
the movement with its talking points and principles for the next half century. To read it now is to realize how much of the intellectual arsenal of today’s Tea Party and how many lines from the campaign speeches of the typical conservative candidate in 1994 or 2016 were provided by Goldwater.

Here was
the heart of Goldwaterism:

I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.

He backed this up with
plenty of specifics—enough to cause him no end of trouble when he faced LBJ in 1964. Goldwater called for an end to the farm program, an end to grants-in-aid to states (he called them “a mixture of blackmail and bribery”), an end to the graduated income tax (it was, he said, “repugnant to my notions of justice”), and steep and regular budget cuts (“The root evil is that government is engaged in activities in which it has no legitimate business”). On foreign policy, the goal was victory over communism without any fear of risking war. “A craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness,” he wrote. He insisted that Americans “must affirm the contrary view”—begging the question of what exactly was the “contrary view” of fearing death. The cornerstone of our foreign policy, he said, should be this: “that we would rather die than lose our freedom.” This meant ridding ourselves of our terror over nuclear war, so he proposed to “perfect a variety of small, clean nuclear weapons” that could be used on a battlefield.

The book was a sensation—helped along by wealthy businessmen, including members of the board of the John Birch Society. Perlstein notes that just as the book was being readied for public sale, Bozell dropped by a Birch Society board meeting to encourage bulk sales. Fred Koch, father of the brothers who would become famous as bankrollers of the Tea Party and other right-wing and libertarian causes,
immediately ordered 2,500 copies “to be circulated to every library, newspaper and VIP in Kansas.”

To ignore how genuinely and fearlessly radical Goldwater was, for his time and for ours, is to miss the whole reason he inspired such passion, why he created a vast movement—and why he suffered such a crushing defeat in 1964.

Decades before “compassionate conservatism” made its appearance, Goldwater objected to the idea that there was anything wrong with conservatism that required corrective adjectives or nouns. In the first paragraph of the book’s first chapter, he specifically targeted statements by his party’s two most important leaders: the incumbent president, and the vice president who would be its presidential candidate the year the book was published:

I have been much concerned that so many people today with Conservative instincts feel compelled to apologize for them. Or if not to apologize directly, to qualify their commitment in a way that amounts to breast-beating. “Republican candidates,” Vice President Nixon has said, “should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart.” President Eisenhower announced during his first term, “I am a conservative when it comes to economic problems but a liberal when it comes to human problems.” Still other Republican leaders have insisted on calling themselves “progressive” Conservatives. These formulations are tantamount to an admission that Conservatism is a narrow, mechanistic,
economic
theory that may work very well as a bookkeepers’ guide, but cannot be relied upon as a comprehensive political philosophy.

Goldwater begged to differ.

Of the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision in
Brown v. Board of Education,
he declared: “I am firmly convinced not only that integrated schools are not required but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the Federal government in the field of education.” While he said he believed it “both wise and just for negro children to attend the same schools as whites,” he added: “I am not prepared to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what pace should be kept in striving for that goal.” The white voters of Mississippi and South Carolina would later return his graciousness.

Other themes that would, again and again, be touted as new departures in conservatism were already there in Goldwater’s canonical book. In the 1990s and once more in the Tea Party years, the right would invoke the Tenth Amendment as a broad mandate to dismantle the federal programs and agencies that had proliferated since the Progressive Era. The amendment reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” For Goldwater, its mandate was unmistakable. The Tenth Amendment, he said, was “a prohibitory rule of law.”

“Nothing could so far advance the cause of freedom as for state officials throughout the land to assert their rightful claims to lost state power,” he wrote, “and for the federal government to withdraw promptly and totally from every jurisdiction which the Constitution reserves to the states.”

If the habit of labeling Barack Obama a “socialist” seemed bizarrely inappropriate in light of the roaring comeback of capitalism and stock market prices on his watch, seeing all liberals as “socialists,” in fact if not in name, was central to Goldwater’s argument. He is at pains in
Conscience
to argue that while socialists had acknowledged “the bankruptcy of doctrinaire Marxism” and of direct government ownership of “productive property,” their new approach was actually more insidious because it could prove to be more effective.

“The collectivists have not abandoned their ultimate goal—to subordinate the individual to the State—but their strategy has changed,” he wrote. “They have learned that Socialism can be achieved through Welfarism quite as well as through Nationalization.” Goldwater added: “Socialism-through-Welfarism poses a far greater danger to freedom than Socialism-through-Nationalization precisely because it
is
more difficult to combat.”

Decades later, conservatives would warn against the Clinton and Obama plans to expand the federal government’s role in health insurance because they feared these programs would become popular and entrenched—precisely what happened with Medicare, which both Goldwater and Reagan stoutly opposed in the 1960s.

One mark of how today’s American conservatism has reverted back to Goldwaterism is the contrast between two views of
Conscience,
separated by
twenty-five years, offered by George F. Will, perhaps the most influential conservative columnist of his generation. Will’s 2007 introduction to a new edition of Goldwater’s book published by Princeton University Press was almost entirely laudatory. “He knew that popular government rests on public opinion, which is shiftable sand,” Will wrote of Goldwater. “With this book, and with his public career that vivified the principles herein, he shifted a lot of sand.”