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Extremist No More
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 One
conservative praises
Barry Goldwater for being “ahead of his time,” another for
having “won the future” in 1964, when he lost the presidency to
Lyndon Johnson by a landslide.
 These
are odd compliments. Conservatives aren’t supposed to be
“ahead” of their times. They are supposed to hang back,
insisting on the heritage of the past, not because it is old, but because
whatever has endured is likely to have proved its merit and shouldn’t
be discarded lightly in favor of the untried.
At his best,
Barry Goldwater was defiantly behind the times. He was commendably
fad-resistant in opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. How
many conservative politicians are willing to say that in 1998? He disliked the
Tennessee Valley Authority and compulsory Social Security, legacies of the
New Deal.
But he
wasn’t far enough behind. A predilection for the old-fashioned and a
suspicion of novelty aren’t the same thing as principled conservatism.
By the late
1970s Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative,” was voting against
airline deregulation — the most Goldwaterite option that had come
before the Senate in a generation. He also voted for the Lockheed bailout, a
fine specimen of socialism for the rich.
When Ronald
Reagan displaced him as the leader of American conservatism, Goldwater
became spiteful toward those who had once supported him, insulting the
Religious Right, venting his enthusiasm for legal abortion, and joining Bill
Clinton in favoring homosexuals in the military.
Liberals who
had once smeared Goldwater as an American Hitler began to find him a
refreshing contrast to the more effective conservatives who were coming to
dominate American politics by 1980. He settled happily into his role as the
liberals’ pet conservative — “an American original,”
in the words of David Broder of the Washington Post.
Lest we
forget, the term extremist was first deployed by President John
Kennedy in 1962 against the threat of a Goldwater candidacy. The content of
“extremism” was never specified; you were invited to fill in your
own nightmare.
![[Breaker quote for Extremist No More: Illusions and habits]](2007breakers/070621.gif) When
Goldwater got the 1964 Republican
nomination, Jackie Robinson said he now knew what it must have felt like to
be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Such talk was fair game, in the minds of
people who made McCarthyism the eponym for political slander. The most
famous TV ad of the 1964 campaign implied that Goldwater would nuke little
girls.
Cuddling up
to Goldwater in his later years was the liberals’ way of obliterating the
memory of the names they had called him in 1964, names they now found it
expedient to call others.
But
Goldwater was as much a victim of his own ineptitude as of his
enemies’ cynicism. He wasn’t “ahead of his time”;
he mishandled some themes that were already strong, traditional, and
popular, which Reagan would later use with far more skill.
More to the
point, neither Goldwater nor Reagan made nearly as much difference as their
partisans give them credit for. Federal spending doubled in the twelve
Reagan-Bush years; the country is still light years to the left of where it was
under Lyndon Johnson. Only the rhetoric has changed, reflecting the helpless
frustration of Americans with the liberalism that still reigns.
Nobody runs
for office promising bigger government now, but that is because government
is already so much bigger than it was when Barry Goldwater ran against Big
Government.
We have
lost our illusions without changing our habits. So even though our political
rhetoric is more conservative today, power keeps accumulating in
Washington as steadily as if a Socialist Party were the dominant electoral
force. Conservatives who think they have “won” because Bill
Clinton now adopts anti-government poses are like sheep congratulating
themselves because the wolf has been forced to wear sheep’s
clothing. It might be reassuring, if only the old wolf weren’t still eating
so well.
Barry
Goldwater could claim to be the founding father of the conservative
revolution if only there had been one. But there hasn’t. There have
merely been a few Republican victories when the Democrats got a little too
far ahead of their time.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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