Treading Goldwater
A rebuttal to the Arizona Republican’s alleged progressive legacy.
By Justin Elliott, Brown University
Monday September 25, 2006
The day a good progressive pines for Barry Goldwater, as Dana Goldstein did in her Campus Progress piece last week, is a day to review some history.
Because history is always better from the source itself, I won’t dwell on the new documentary on Goldwater produced by his granddaughter CC. You can’t get a clear view of the Arizona senator and his record filtered through interviews with Hillary Clinton and George Will.
Read, instead, the 1964 piece "Goldwater rallies an odd tribe for a strange war," by the great crusading journalist I.F. Stone (you can find it in his 1967 collection In a Time of Torment.) Stone described the Goldwaterites as “rich, powerful, fortunate beyond any dominant class in history, yet afraid” and summed up the movement: “A merger of the worst Southern racists, the right wing military and the obsessed inveterate anti-Communists, with those elements which have never reconciled themselves to the New Deal.”
Dana’s main point is that Goldwater, with his libertarian streak and his support for abortion and gay rights—in short, his brand of Western Republicanism—would be a welcome alternative to the ascendancy of the Christian Right. But if you read Stone, if you peruse a Goldwater biography, and if you then look at the Republican Party, you’ll see that Goldwaterism is alive and well. The Republicans today, in ideology, even in style, are very much the heirs of Goldwater. And there’s almost nothing admirable about his legacy.
I can appreciate Goldwater’s distaste for the clout of Evangelicals and their imposition of dogma on politics. And given the choice, I don’t think any of us would spend an evening with Jerry Falwell or George Bush over Goldwater. The senator was by all accounts a charismatic man with a taste for bourbon and a genuine interest in Native American culture.
But who was the real Goldwater?
First, a note on his style: In politics, he cultivated a boots, Levi’s, and cowboy hat persona and eventually parlayed it into big-time national status. That image of Western self-reliance has had remarkable staying power on the right; we’ve seen permutations of it in Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and John McCain (who holds Goldwater’s former senate seat.) Even George Allen, the half-Jewish, California-born Virginian, has a fetish for cowboy boots. The cowboy candidate is supposed to be, all at once, a straight-shooting maverick and an American he-man who will protect you and your family, be it from the Reds or the Islamofascists. The cowboy image is almost always a sham. It should be calmly deconstructed, as Stone did in 1964:
“The Goldwaterite picture of themselves, as of their hero, is as distant from reality as the rest of the private universe they are defending. The frontier virtues they claim to embody are as synthetic as the frontier they inhabit. Their desert is air-conditioned and landscaped; their covered wagons are Cadillacs; their chaps are from Abercrombie & Fitch; their money, like their candidate’s, is mostly inherited from grandpappy, or acquired with their wives. In their favorite campaign photos, on that horse and under that 10-gallon Stetson, looking into the setting sun, is no cowboy or even rancher but a Phoenix storekeeper.”
Goldwater was, in fact, born to a department store owner and married into even more wealth. The senator’s great business creation was “antsy-pants,” men’s underwear printed with large red ants, that, Stone quips, “he advertised some years back in the wide open spaces of Manhattan through The New Yorker magazine.”
Scarier than the phony cowboy image, though, were Goldwater’s very real ideas.
Goldwater was, in many ways, the paradigmatic militaristic Republican. His affinity for nuclear weapons was not an eccentric quirk; he blamed scientists for their “guilt complex” and their “humanitarian distaste for the bomb.” He argued we must “persuade the enemy that we would rather follow the world to Kingdom Come than to consign it to Hell under Communism.” He was a peddler of the same old war-for-peace line that’s landed us where we are in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Despite the senator’s clashes with the Christian Right late in life, he was never a social liberal. Goldwater sponsored legislation to ban pornography in the mail and he was a longtime backer of school prayer, even co-sponsoring a constitutional amendment to allow it. His biographer Robert Goldberg writes: “To repair family and society,” Goldwater believed, “women should leave the work force and return home to raise their children.”
It’s hard to say whether a traditional Goldwater Republican, as Dana asserts, would be “horrified” at expansions of government power such as the PATRIOT Act. Goldwater, for all his rhetoric about individual liberty, went so far as to personally pass along tips to Joseph McCarthy’s staff about fellow-travelers in Arizona. In 1954 on the eve of the Senate censure of McCarthy, Goldwater defended his friend: “To remove such a man from honor and influence in America at this juncture,” he told the Senate, “would be a strong victory for Moscow.” It’s worth noting that L. Brent Bozell, the man who actually wrote Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, had also authored with William F. Buckley, Jr., “McCarthy and His Enemies,” a defense of the Un-American Activities Committee chair.
Goldwater was no George Wallace racist, but in the early 1960s there he was issuing a laughable call, in response to the violent Southern oppression against African-Americans, for “voluntarism not compulsion” on civil rights,
His presidential campaign literature grouped with criminals the black protestors “who take to the streets in violation of the law[,] dishonor their cause, default their leadership and defame this nation.”
Goldwater was opposed to unions, supported apartheid and aggressive military action in Vietnam, was wrong on social security (he wanted the program to be voluntary), and dead wrong on the environment, at the bottom of conservationist rankings even as he captured the natural beauty of Arizona with his camera. So forgive me if my eyes begin to drift away from abortion and gay rights, two specks floating in the heady brew of Goldwater’s reactionary record.
Dana theorizes that “Goldwater would certainly be turning over in his grave”—as if that were a bad thing—“if he knew the movement he spawned had unleashed such horrors on the country.” The problem is, the more one reads about Goldwater and his record, the more Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld seem like his rightful heirs and the less convinced one becomes he would object to their agenda. With 2008 in view, progressives should be concerned, not heartened, when John McCain says in the new documentary, “I’d love to be remembered as a Barry Goldwater Republican.” Let the Right have Goldwater—his militarism and his false cowboy image—and let progressives strive to dismantle his legacy.
Justin Elliott is a senior at Brown, concentrating in history and classics.
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This article is false on several fronts. To make sure that he got the rsults he wanted Elliott goes to quote IF Stone for his “truth”. But Stone was a very far Left writer and one the Soviets themselves called an important “agent of influence” for them. They didn’t mean he worked for them directly but that he pushed their agenda. And it is absurd to say Goldwater supported apartheid. He opposed the boycott of SA. To oppose the boycot of Cuba, as I do, is not the same as being pro-Castro. There is a case to be made that the boycott actually extended the life of apartheid. It was dying on the vine on its own and very quickly. I know I was there. Areas like Hillbrow, of which there were many, were fully integrated as were most private businesses. To oppose the boycott is not to support the regime.
— J.Peron - Sep 26, 04:51 AM - #It’s obvious that you’re confused about libertarianism and the libertarian movement. One can be Pro-Defense, like Goldwater, and be a principled libertarian.
Goldwater, no doubt, would have been a fierce opponent of the rising tide of Islamo-Fascism, and would have seen it as a threat to our individual liberties.
Goldwater is the Godfather of the modern libertarian movement. We libertarians love him and love all that he has done for our movement.
www.mainstreamlibertarian.com
— Eric Dondero - Sep 26, 09:02 AM - #Goldwater on apartheid after touring South Africa with his wife: “I feel very strongly about this apartheid thing, not that I am 100 percent in favor of it or that I think it should be extended into eternity, but I do think the United States is making a dreadful mistake in not allowing the thing to be tested [in South Africa].”
— Justin Elliott - Sep 26, 10:54 AM - #(from Robert Goldberg’s 1995 biography)
Mr. Dondero’s URL, “mainstreamlibertarian”, suggests that he himself is confused about either the meaning of mainstream or of libertarian: the juxtaposition is a nearly perfect archetype of oxymoronia.
— T. Powers - Sep 26, 08:29 PM - #While I certainly agree that Goldwater was NOT a progressive liberal, he certainly would not be comfortable in the present Republican party. I think that was the point of the documentary – that over time political boundaries and definitions move. Even so, I think you can do better than quote from the liberal press of the 60’s when characterizing Goldwater’s wealth, image, politics, etc. I don’t think that is part of the argument. A better question: Where would he fall on the specturm today? That is more interesting. Sure, the Left painted him in harsh terms. That the left hated him is hardly surprising. Then again, I don’t think anyone is arguing that he was a Progressive liberal in 64. Besides, if you bother to watch the documentary – you will find that it focuses far more on Goldwaters Progressive views on US Social policy than it does International Relations, militarism, and US nuclear weapons which seem to be the crux of your argument. I think even today the lines on those issues are not exactly skewed left or right. There are Progressives who are also hawks. Regardless, Goldwater was a libertarian Republican with Progressive leanings on social policy that got more Progressive with time. At no point in the documentary did they claim Goldwater’s 64 run was Progressive or liberal in nature. That came later. I urge you to stop erecting strawmen to dismantle in the name of leftist politics. It doesn’t work and doesn’t impress anyone. What is wrong with recognizing and admiring Goldwater for the Progressive stances he did take?
— T. Geiger - Sep 29, 01:14 PM - #T. Geiger – I couldn’t have written it better myself. Great post.
— moonsha - Sep 30, 01:36 AM - #The issue is not the construction of straw men as Geiger et al propose; rather, the issue is the desire that the Democratic Party has for an image of strength and a longing for a time when the right, as embodied presently by the GOP, was not as overtly authoritarian and extreme. There once was an opponent one could almost respect, unlike the hypocritical mercenaries of the post-Reagan world. The present GOP with the complicit media owns all branches of government, making the US a one party state with strong authoritarian leanings as the recent legislation on torture and the USAPatriot act demonstrate. Goldwater, for his faults, is revealed after his death to have been a human being with faults and a capacity for compassion, which the present Right cannot even emulate and the self-described Libertarians eschew. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are sociopathic authoritarians who believe that what they say and do are not only appropriate but correct despite the lukewarm dissent of the courts. 9/11 was our Reichstag fire, and the slow slide into fear, uncertainty, hatred, and militaristic bombast is as fervent among the GOP and liberal hawks is little different from the events depicted by Shirer if slower in execution.
— Biff Spaceman - Oct 1, 02:55 AM - #