Trump may be a fascist but Dems should be careful about panicking their own selves with that label for him

There is a lot of talk about Donald Trump as a genuine "fascist."

I said earlier that my functional definition of fascism is the same as Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. And I see in the Donald Trump of 2015.

Whether at this stage, "fascist" is a better word or "fascistic," or maybe "fascistoid," I don't know. I'm not sure it makes much difference at this point. (See Dave Neiwert, Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path Orcinus 11/28/2015.

But being a netroots Democrat, I also chronically worried about the timidity of Democrats. If Trump becomes the Republican Party's Presidential nominee, the Democratic candidate could do what LBJ did against Goldwater in 1964: take the chance to build a mandate for actual Democratic policies.

But today's corporate Democrats tend to think very differently. So I'm worried that many Democrats may look at Donald Trump and think, "This guy's a fascist. So we Democrats need to take conservative positions to reduce the chance Trump will get elected."

That kind of thinking leads the Democrats to take the approach of Alison Lundergan Grimes, the losing Democratic candidate for Senate in 2014, whose campaign produced this classically terrible campaign ad:

Alison for Kentucky TV Ad "Skeet Shooting" Alison for Kentucky YouTube 09/15/2015:

Also, the Goldwater movement was just beginning to contest other Republicans for full control of the party. Now the Republican Party generally is more hardline conservative than Goldwater, although not by that much, depending on your perspective.

There was a nasty split in the Republican Party in 1964 that helped produce the landslide for LBJ. It's hard to imagine a Trump victory in the primaries and winning the Republican nomination would produce anything remotely similar to that in 1964. Also in 1964, the Solid South voting for the Democratic Party was still in the process of breaking down. And the Texan Lyndon Johnson could compete effectively in Texas with its large number of electoral votes. Now the South is a Solid South for Republicans, although Florida is closer to being genuinely competitive. Goldwater carried only the state of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. It's nearly unthinkable that a Trump-Clinton or Trump-Sanders race would be that lopsided.

Digby takes note of the indications that today's Republican Party can be expected to be unified behind Trump if he wins the nomination in Sure, he's a problem. But not so much that they can't make the best of it. Hullabaloo 12/08/2015:

For all the hosannas being raised in the press this morning over the likes of Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney condemning the ban on Muslims as un-American, it rings just a bit hollow when most of the other candidates were happy to jump on the idea of only allowing Christian Syrians into the country and they've all stood silent as he endorsed torture and killing wives and children and rounding up and deporting 12 million undocumented workers (who he defames as rapists and criminals) along with their American children.

They're not going to abandon him. He can run as an independent and 68% of his voters say they'll stick with him if he does it. And then they'll definitely lose. No principle is so important to them that they'll knowingly jeopardize their chances.

This is a real opportunity for the Democrats to emphasize how radically today's Republican Party is alienated from values of civic decency and democracy held by most Americans.

Trump has major disadvantages as a Presidential candidate in the general election. But he won't be a weak candidate in the sense Barry Goldwater was in 1964. This is not your grandfather's Republican Party we're dealing with today. Their far more conservative, far more white-racist and xenophobic and as mean as Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney at all levels. And the Republicans can count on a partisan media network unmatched by anything they had in 1964. And the "quality press" in its various incarnations (broadcast, cable, print, online) is far more dysfunctional than it was in 1964.

The Democrats need to fight hard in 2016. Doing what Alison Grimes did, advertise how little you are committed to your own Party's program and lose to the Republican, is definitely not the way the Dems should approach 2016.

Conservatism: a "robust" political philosophy?

"To be fair, conservatism, as a political philosophy, has a robust intellectual history – liberals are unwise to ignore that. But this isn’t the party of Edmund Burke or William Buckley or Barry Goldwater – those men had ideas."

That quote comes from Sean Illing in Really, it’s time to shut down the GOP: A deeply unserious party, hijacked by lunatics and Fox News, is driving us all into a ditch Salon 07/21/2015 that otherwise harshes on today's Republican Party in a sensible fashion. For instance, he has this observation about how in many ways the Party has become a prisoner of its own rhetoric:

These people [in particular, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and Herman Cain] exist in the Republican Party for a reason: the GOP sold its soul to Fox News and the broader conservative mediascape years ago. Republicans are now constrained by these forces, which manufacture unhinged, absolutist narratives that dominate discourse in the party. Republicans, as a result, can’t afford to compromise or propose realistic policies – the zealots won’t let them. Worse still, any Republican who dares to step out of line gets pummeled on Fox News for weeks on end. In the face of such pressure, is it any wonder the GOP has become what it has? [my emphasis]

But here I want to focus on the idea that "conservatism, as a political philosophy, has a robust intellectual history" as embodied by Edmund Burke, Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater.

Edmund Burke (1730–1797) was a flaming reactionary. His pragmatic recognition that the British effort to keep the American colonies was unrealistic makes his image usable as a talisman image for American of sufficient literacy and intellectual pretensions to identify him as a predecessor.

Ian Harris describes the fundamentally reactionary nature of Burke's thought in his article, Edmund Burke Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010):

The intellectual counterpart of this prudent conduct, namely the refinement of our existing ideas, rather than replacing them, is what he had done in his revisions of the idea of sovereignty.

This style of thinking gave Burke a very lively sense of the corrosive power of new ideas. Even new questions could have unpleasant results. When the innovations of the British government unsettled the colonists, ‘then ... they questioned all the parts of your legislative power; and by the battery of such questions have shaken the solid structure of this Empire to its deepest foundations.’ The proper way to avoid such shakes to civil society was to ‘consult and follow your experience’ ..., for ‘experience’ according to Burke's philosophy of language was a condition of continuity of mind, and, on the basis of mind, of a sustainable practice. His was therefore a philosophically conditioned attitude to practice, and one that was very sensitive to the hiatus that speculation could cause in the latter. Burke's sensitivity can produce apodictic language in order to persuade people to make use of the ideas they have inherited, by urging ‘a total renunciation of every speculation of my own; and… [by recommending] a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors’ ... Indeed, Burke can be found, sometimes, on rational grounds, deprecating all explicit appeal to speculation of whatever hue, if it had a disturbing effect: ‘reason not at all—oppose the ancient policy and practice of the empire, as a rampart against the speculations of innovators on both sides of the question’ (italics added [by Harris]) ... [my emphasis in bold]

Bill Buckley (1925–2008) was a defender of segregation and Joe McCarthy. Charlie Pierce refers to Buckley's National Review as "the longtime white-supremacist journal National Review." A tradition Buckley himself started and which continues to this day. Buckley was a talented rhetorician and debater. But the "robust intellectual" part of his work largely remained well concealed. William Hogeland (The Racism-Conservatism Link: 'National Review' Firestorm Over Racism Calls Up William F. Buckley's Troubling Legacy Alternet 04/23/2012) gives an example of his polemic/rhetorical talents discussing Buckley's supposed apology for taking segregationist positions:

But the aged Buckley was renouncing a position entirely different from the one he'd actually advanced in the 1950s.

Writing in 1957 in defense of jury nullification of federal voting laws, Buckley insisted that whites in the South were "entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, where they do not prevail numerically," because the white race was "for the time being, the advanced race." In 2004, asked whether he'd ever taken a position he now regretted, he said: "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."

Nicely done. Where in '57 he'd asserted a right even of a minority of whites to impose racial segregation by literally any means necessary, including breaking federal law, in '04 Buckley expressed regret for supposedly having believed only that segregation would wither away without federal intervention.

Stupid the man was not. He gets credited today with honesty about his past and with having, in his own way, "evolved up." Modern conservatives, more importantly, get to ignore the realities of their movement's origins. [my emphasis]

Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) is considered by today's Movement Conservatives as the Founding Father of their movement. He gained the 1964 Republican Presidential nomination as a warmonger and defender of segregation - but only on "states rights" grounds, of course! The two main issues in that campaign were the Vietnam War (Goldwater wanted to send in the troops and massively bomb Vietnam immediately) and civil rights for African-Americans (he was against them).

The line from Goldwater 1964 to the Iraq War, Dick Cheney's torture program, voter suppression laws, massive domestic spying, an overblown military budget, today's prison-industrial complex and anti-immigrant agitation is a pretty straight one. Yes, he repudiated the John Birch Society. But the Koch Brothers pretty much operate on Bircher ideas and they are scarcely pariahs in today's Republican Party.

It's likely that part of what made Goldwater grouchy about some of the right-wing factions whose policies he generally shared was that his parents were Jewish converts to Protestant Christianity. Barry himself was raised Christian. But he was undoubtedly aware of the level of anti-Semitism among characters like the Birchers. And he took some "libertarian" ideas more seriously than authoritarian Birchers do. He didn't much like Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. And he made that clear publicly. He also was in favor of allowing gays to serve in the military. This side of Goldwater was captured well in this 1993 news report (Goldwater advocates gays in military Arizona Republic/A********d P***s 01/11/1993):

Goldwater said in his article [an op-ed in the Washington Post] that after 50 years in politics and the military, he still marvels that people can get upset over nothing.

"Lifting the ban on gays in the military isn't exactly nothing, but it's pretty damned close," wrote the salty-tongued Republican.

He qualified his position slightly on the [Larry] King show.

He told King that gays would cause no problem in the Air Force but that "there might be some question" about service in the Army, where homosexual and heterosexual soldiers would have to share foxholes.

Goldwater is a conservative who supports abortion rights and has challenged the Christian fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party, as he did in the last election when he backed Democrat Karan English over a GOP candidate supported by the religious right. English won an Arizona seat in the U.S. House.

Goldwater said conservatives who supported the military ban were ignoring their movement's core principle, "that government should stay out of people's private lives."

He said that studies have proven homosexuals are not security risks and that the ban ultimately will be lifted anyway.

"I think it's high time to pull the curtains on this charade of a policy," he wrote. [my emphasis]

Note that his supposedly bold, nonintuitive stand on gays in the service in 1993 was qualified by a comment that he wasn't so sure about having them in the Army. And that his argument on that point reflects typical antigay arguments.

That report is also a reminder that his distrust of the Christian Right didn't just apply to Falwell and the Moral Majority. I'm guessing that the anti-Semitism that is pretty painfully obvious in those movements had a lot of do with it. Even if its wrapped up with varying degrees of sophistication in a "Christian Zionist," nominally philo-Semitic political-religious ideology. See also: Lloyd Grove, Barry Goldwater's Left Turn Washington Post 07/28/1994; the headline doesn't fit very well with the content.

But that 1994 headline is a small example of the kind of Beltway Village groupthink that has long since hardened into dogma, or maybe taken flight into delusion. And a key element of that groupthink is the notion that there are always sensible moderates out there, and that the Democratic and Republican parties are ideological mirror images of each other. So a grumpy burst of good sense from Barry Goldwater in 1994 got spun into a "left turn" on his part, when it was nothing of the sort.

Back around 1983, I heard George McGovern give a talk in which he talked about the need for responsible conservatism, which he defined as the perspective that "we should make haste slowly." He wasn't advocating that position himself! He was making the point that responsible debate can produce a better result than actions which haven't been sufficiently critically examined. One case where conservative cautions later seemed more prescient to liberals than they once did was the federal Independent Counsel statute, of which Cass Sunstein wrote in 2001 (Unchecked and Unbalanced The American Prospect 11/16/2001):

The institutional design of the Independent Counsel is designed to heighten, not to check, all of the institutional hazards of the dedicated prosecutor; the danger of too narrow a focus, of the loss of perspective, of preoccupation with the pursuit of one alleged suspect to the exclusion of other interests." Thus wrote Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia nearly a decade ago, echoing the warning of three attorneys general, two of them staunch Republicans. In his dissenting vote to hold the Independent Counsel Act unconstitutional, Scalia objected that the supposedly independent counsel is a novel and dangerous means of law enforcement: a prosecutor who is effectively accountable to no one and entirely focused on a single person.

On the other hand, my stomach gets a little queasy at associating myself in public view with Antonin Scalia. So I also listen to my (literal) gut instinct on these things, too.

A current instance where I find myself somewhat attracted to conservative arguments is Obama's agreement with Iran, which I support. This article from the generally insufferable Walter Russell Mead, Obama Lights Firestorm on Capitol Hill The American Interest 07/17/2015, cites some arguments from two Democrats, Sen. Ben Cardin and Congressman Steny Hoyer, both representing Maryland, about Congressional powers that resonated with me on first glance. But Republicans these days hardly regard those two guys as conservatives. And both parties in Congress have been so irresponsible in not adequately restraining Presidential war powers that I find it hard to take arguments they make from broad principle applied to specific issues completely seriously.

But such instances are few and far between. Because if you have to hold up segregationist-warmongers Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater as examples of the "robust intellectual history" of conservatism, that's a sign of how hard genuinely sensible conservatives are to find in US politics these days.

Paul Krugman has been chronicling this process for years. In Cranking Up for 2016 New York Times 02/20/2015, he wrote:

So what does it say about the current state of the G.O.P. that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?

The answer, I’d suggest, runs deeper than economic doctrine. Across the board, the modern American right seems to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality out there, even if it’s not what your prejudices say should be happening. What are you going to believe, right-wing doctrine or your own lying eyes? These days, the doctrine wins.

Look at another issue, health reform. Before the Affordable Care Act went into effect, conservatives predicted disaster: health costs would soar, the deficit would explode, more people would lose insurance than gain it. They were wrong on all counts. But, in their rhetoric, even in the alleged facts (none of them true) people like Mr. Moore put in their articles, they simply ignore this reality. Reading them, you’d think that the dismal failure they wrongly predicted had actually happened.

Then there’s foreign policy. This week Jeb Bush tried to demonstrate his chops in that area, unveiling his team of expert advisers — who are, sure enough, the very people who insisted that the Iraqis would welcome us as liberators.

And don’t get me started on climate change.

Along with this denial of reality comes an absence of personal accountability. If anything, alleged experts seem to get points by showing that they’re willing to keep saying the same things no matter how embarrassingly wrong they’ve been in the past. [my emphasis]

Barry Goldwater and 2012 Republicanism (2)

Digby calls attention to a passage in Elias Isquith's article Paul Ryan's Debt to Barry Goldwater—Who'd Be Mortified by Paul Ryan 10/05/2012 that talks about the hawkishness that Goldwater 1964 and Paul Ryan 2012 both share. Isquith:

The Republican Party's antipathy toward the welfare state is well known. Less appreciated is the fact that what really defined Goldwater in the public's eye was his comfort with, or even celebration of, the violence of the state. Goldwater on foreign policy was more Bill Kristol than Ron Paul; as historian Thomas Sugrue put it, Goldwater wanted "a strong military ready not just to contain but to trample its Communist enemies."

I would argue that Papa Doc Paul's outlook also celebrates the violence of the state in both domestic and foreign policy. It's just couched in a superficial libertarian and Old Right isolationism notions. In one of the Republican Presidential debates, Papa Doc let it slip that he might not even cut the military budget if he were President, he would just pulls troops and base out of overseas locations.

And massive political violence in opposition to the civil rights movement was very much occurring in 1964. And there were two major issues in that Presidential campaign: the Vietnam War, in which Goldwater advocated immediate, radical escalation; and, civil rights, in which Goldwater sided clearly with the segregationists in the form of advocating "states rights", i.e., opposing action by the federal government to insure a "republican form of government" in the states. Goldwater's position was to let the anti-democratic voter suppression laws and the extralegal threats and violence of groups like the various Ku Klux Klan groups and the White Citizens' Council continue without federal interference. And it's well known that the police in many Southern states were willing to use violence, both technically "legitimate" and otherwise, to maintain the segregated "Suthun way of life."

This undated article from the Mississippi Civil Rights Project, The Murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, describes one of the most notorious incidents of violence during the year that Goldwater was running for President defending the segregationist position.

Today's Republican Party not only has made segregationist voter-suppression laws in the states a key part of their longterm strategy. They are also undisturbed by far-right loudmouths like, say, NRA board member Ted Nugent, mouthing off about the need for people to have weapons to fight tyranny - i.e., to shoot cops and soldiers with. And especially when it comes to the anti-abortion movement, one of the most potent contributors to violence-prone fanaticism today, they are especially indulgent of such rhetoric. The notion that aborting a fetus in the first two trimesters is taking a human life and therefore a form of murder has become a standard position for Republicans. As long as not only extremist activists but "respectable" politicians and ministers actively promote that notion, it's hard to see how the anti-abortion movement won't keep breeding political violence.

Tags: barry goldwater, radical right, violence

Barry Goldwater and 2012 Republicanism (1)

I've been puzzling over how to construct a post on political violence that addresses some current issues without using the proverbial "30,000 foot" clichees. Maybe it's just not a one-post concept.

Because Digby hits on one of the key points that has become increasingly central to our political life, as it has been for African-Americans for decades thanks largely to the "war on drugs": the legitimate and illegitimate violence of the state. Her post is Goldwater to Ryan to what? Hullabaloo 10/07/2012. She takes off from this thoughtful piece by Elias Isquith, Paul Ryan's Debt to Barry Goldwater—Who'd Be Mortified by Paul Ryan The Atlantic Online 10/05/2012.

But before I get to the violence issue, there's another point I want to deal with.

Isquith's piece touches on one of my pet peeves in political analysis and commentary of "movement conservatism" and the far right. That's the habit of going back 15 or 20 years or so and pointing out that some conservative hero of the earlier moment seemed to be far more enlightened, pragmatic and sensible than those occupying more-or-less the same political space in the present moment. I trace it to historian Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in American History and Other Essays (1965). It appeared in book form in 1965 (link is to that essay only) after its publication as an essay in Harper's of November 1964. It's generally an excellent, insightful essay. But it appears to be the only remotely theoretical piece most of our Pod Pundits ever heard of - it would be to much to expect they had actually read it - dealing with the far right in American politics. As I wrote a couple of years ago,

In an essay in that book on the 1964 Goldwater campaign, Hofstadter compared Goldwater unfavorable to Sen. Robert Taft (1889-1953), who was a leading Republican conservative circa 1950. (On Taft as isolationist, see my post Old Right isolationism, then and now 07/22/2007.) Since he claimed rhetorically to accept New Deal innovations like Social Security, Hofstadter set him up an a sensible conservative foil against Barry Goldwater's radical image.

Frank Annunziata made a similar argument in 1980 in "The Revolt against the Welfare State: Goldwater Conservatism and the Election of 1964" Presidential Studies Quarterly 10/2 (Spring 1980):

Barry Goldwater's critique of the welfare state deviated substantively from that of Dwight Eisenhower or Robert Taft. Both Eisenhower and Taft were advocates, if reluctant ones, of various aspects of the federal government's role in promoting social justice. The crucial difference is that they knew the welfare state could not be repealed. They attempted to halt, but not reverse America's drift to welfare state policies. Whatever their rhetorical similarities with Goldwater, Eisenhower and Taft never considered repealing the Sixteenth Amendment or the Social Security Act nor did they deny the federal government's role in education reform. Senator Taft conceded a federal role in securing every family housing, medical care, welfare payments and education subsidies. He successfully championed public housing legislation. He did not oppose minimum wage laws nor recommend abolition of farm price
supports. He wanted to expand the Social Security program and once informed President Eisenhower that the "best way" to stymie bureaucracy "and at the same time help people would be to have the federal government pay a flat fee to the states for every child in school, and automatically to send out a monthly pensi" Eisenhower characterized Taft as being "twice as liberal as I am" with views "miles away from those of some self-described 'Taft stalwarts'." Taft "did not shrink" from required governmental action to preserve liberty."

As Charlie Pierce might say to this whole be-nice-to-Robert-Taft theme: Honky, please! That would be the Sen. Robert Howard Taft to whose name we refer when the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 is mentioned, one of the most notorious pieces of anti-labor federal legislation and one still on the books. He was a bitter opponent of the New Deal and a pre-Second World War isolationist. He bitterly criticized, even campaigned against, the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, a truly dubious cause for which he was rather bizarrely celebrated by fellow Sen. John F. Kennedy in his famous Profiles in Courage (). It was to appeal to Taft supporters that Dwight Eisenhower shamefully softpedaled Joe McCarthy's attack on George Marshall. Time magazine's obituary for him, with the not very creative title "An American Politician" 62/6 08/10/1953, described his politics this way:

Taft was against the spread of federal power; his welfare bills gave jurisdiction to the states. He stood in the way of collectivists of all varieties,-from the creeping to the rampant. He was against their kind of progress.

"When I Say Liberty." Taft stood for individual liberty. "And when I say liberty," he wrote, "I do not mean simply what is referred to as 'free enterprise.' I mean liberty of the individual to think his own thoughts and live his own life as he desires to think and live . . . liberty of a man to choose his own occupation, liberty of a man to run his own business as he thinks it ought to be run, as long as he does not interfere with the right of other people to do the same thing . . . Gradually this philosophy has been replaced by the idea that happiness can only be conferred upon the people by the grace of an efficient government. Only the government, it is said, has the expert knowledge necessary for the people's welfare."

Taft was known as "Mr. Republican," and he was the generally accepted leader of Republican conservatives and as such was Eisenhower's main rival for the 1952 Presidential nomination.

Taft's support for Social Security was along the lines parodied by Franklin Roosevelt and remembered by Jenifer Granholm in Granholm: ‘Get up, dig in and fight on!’ The War Room 10/04/2012. He didn't openly attack it directly because he knew it was way too popular, as President Obama is finding out in the current Presidential election.

As I wrote a couple of years ago (Richard Hofstadter, Broderized 03/01/2012), it was reasonable - though, I would add, dangerously superficial - in 1965 to think that an age of Broderian Centrism had arrived:

So it actually made sense in 1965 that Sacred Centrism had prevailed and that real reforms like the Great Society could happen because the Democrats and Republicans had respectively walled themselves off from the toxins of the fringes. Hofstadter's analysis was far more sophisticated than that, but that's pretty much what High Broderism assumes to this day.

But applying that model to today's politics makes about as much sense as saying that this snazzy new invention of color television is just as cool as the latest version of the iPhone. The Democrats today are almost as desperate to wall themselves off from New Deal/Great Society ideas as the Dems back then were to avoid Communist associations of any kind. While the Republicans have such a symbiotic relationship with the crackpot radical right of the Birchers and the Birthers and the Tea Partiers that it's hard to picture how they could cut the cord.

Isquith focuses on Goldwater's criticism of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s to say that Goldwater would have disapproved of Ryan. And it's true that Goldwater criticized Jerry Falwell and the Christian Right generally, and they returned the favor. But Goldwater's criticism was largely a faction fight among the far right. Goldwater was irritated by the idea of ministers mixing in politics in particular because of clerical activism against the Vietnam War. Goldwater's parents were also Jewish converts to Christianity, and a not-so-underground portion of Goldwater's quibbles with the John Birch Society (JBS) in 1964 surely owned something to the Birchers' suspicion of his "Jewish" background. Another reason for him to cast a skeptical eye on the rise of the Christian Right. But, as Kurt Schuaparra pointed on in an article on the Goldwater campaign in southern California, "The JBS, ... while clearly supporting the Senator, did him the favor of foregoing a formal endorsement; but members discreetly worked hard for him during the campaign." ("Barry Goldwater and Southern California Conservatism: Ideology, Image and Myth in the 1964 California Republican Presidential Primary" Southern California Quarterly 74/3; Fall 1992)

Barry Goldwater had some aspects that were attractive for liberals, like his disgust with the Christian Right. But he's no model to be holding up today as a foil to show how silly today's "Goldwaters" are.

Tags: barry goldwater, radical right, violence

Confederate "Heritage" Week 2012, April 18: Barry Goldwater and segregation

It's a common tactic in political campaigns to taunt the other side with positions their party once took that they now seemed to have abandoned. We hear it in the 2012 Presidential race, when commentators suggest that Ronald Reagan would have been too liberal for today's Republican Party. Actually, Reagan generally pushed as conservative of policies as he could get away with. But it makes good politics.

Unfortunately, it also can make for bad history. Barry Goldwater was the leader of what came to be known as "movement conservatism" in 1964, when he won the Republican nomination for President. His brand of conservatism was crushed in the election of 1964, in which the two primary issues were the Vietnam War (Goldwater was for escalation, Lyndon Johnson against it) and desegregation in the South (Goldwater against, Johnson for). Goldwater's disgust for ministers in politics later found him trading insults with Christian Right leaders like Jerry Falwell. But the Goldwater brand of conservatism is what now dominates the Republican Party.

Jason Morgan Ward in Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965 (2011):

Goldwater churned out a manifesto in 1960, but with much more fanfare. Published and distributed by the senator's influential right-wing supporters, The Conscience of a Conservative shot up the summer bestseller charts. Ghostwritten by William F. Buckley's brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, the slim volume summed up Goldwater's stance on a variety of political issues, from government spending to "the Soviet Menace." But nothing encouraged southern conservatives more than the successive chapters on states' rights and civil rights.

The subjects required separate chapters, Goldwater argued, because the civil rights struggle had both obscured and dramatized a much broader issue. Blasting attempts "to disparage the principle of States' Rights by equating it with defense of the South's position on racial integration," Goldwater championed the concept as a bulwark against growing federal power. Goldwater, who had voted for civil rights measures as a sitting senator, reassured southern conservatives by criticizing Brown [v. Board of Education] and arguing for limits to racial reform. He criticized the "extravagant and shameless misuse" of civil rights, a blanket term he accused liberals of expanding to include "human" and "natural" rights not granted by the Constitution. So Goldwater could be for "civil" rights such as voting while still maintaining that "the federal Constitution does not require the States to maintain racially mixed schools." Whether or not Goldwater liked segregation did not matter. In a concise and carefully worded chapter, he declared white opposition to integration a perfectly legal and downright American stance. "It may be just or wise or expedient for negro children to attend the same schools as white children," Goldwater argued, "but they do not have a civil right to do so." [my emphasis in bold]

This is the same brand of conservatism and "libertarianism" that we hear today in different forms from the Ron "Papa Doc" and Rand "Baby Doc" Paul, from the Ludwig von Mises Institute and these days more and more often from the Republican Party generally. Though retroactively agreeing with Goldwater's opposition to the landmark Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 is still a little risky for Republican candidates to say out loud.

This is why it's worth listening carefully to Republican warnings about "tyranny" and so forth today. Ward also relates:

Barry Goldwater bucked his party leadership, and his own voting record, by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A week after the cloture vote ended the southern filibuster, the presumptive Republican nominee voiced his "constitutional" objections to the bill. Declaring his opposition to "discrimination of any sort," Goldwater warned that the bill authorized "the creation of a federal police force of mammoth proportions" and encouraged "an 'informer' psychology" among citizens. "These ... ," Goldwater declared, "are the hallmarks of the police state and landmarks in the destruction of a free society." If the public "misconstrued" his vote as a defense of segregation, Goldwater concluded, he would accept the fallout. [my emphasis]

When Papa Doc Paul and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney talk about their devotion to the Constitution and their opposition to federal oppression, they are speaking from the same segregationist perspective from which Barry Goldwater spoke in 1964. The segregationist ideology of 1964 is thriving today, alive and well in the Nixonized, Reaganized, Bushized Republican Party.

Tags: barry goldwater, confederate heritage month 2012, segregation, white racism