Reading that Arizona Senator Jeff Flake has penned a reprise, of sorts, of his predecessor Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative got me thinking about a variety of things and sent me off on a little Googling adventure. One place I landed was on an old essay on Goldwater written by Louis Menand for the New Yorker in 2001. There are several elements in this essay that have extra saliency in light of the election results of November 2016.
Technically, this article is a book review of Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, but it doesn’t in any way restrict itself to a treatment of Perlstein’s work.
This first excerpt is interesting because it shows the similarities and crucial differences between Goldwater and Trump, while also reminding us that the Washington establishment changes very little over time.
Goldwater was an enemy of the establishment. That term was coined by another eminent British journalist who covered American politics, Henry Fairlie. Fairlie first used it to refer to the network of power brokers in English life, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the editor of the T.LS. In America, it came to refer to the suits—the Washington lawyers, the New York bankers, and the university presidents, along with their academic and journalistic epigones—upon whose wisdom elected officials were accustomed to rely, and without whose approbation no public policy could be expected to succeed. The great virtue of this group from the late nineteen-forties through the early nineteen-sixties was also its prime vulnerability: it believed itself to be above partisanship and self-interest. Its watchword was “consensus,” and its instrument was the federal bureaucracy, whose vast resources it undertook to direct in a pragmatic manner conducive to the welfare of all. The establishment was liberal in the sense that it believed in the power of government to solve social problems and improve the quality of life. But it was deeply vested in the status quo as well. Its members had no inclination to question the assumptions of a social and economic dispensation of which they were the most privileged products.
Goldwater’s hatred of the establishment and its workings was, at its deepest level, not very different from the New Left’s and the counterculture’s: he believed that top-down managerial liberalism was a threat to individual autonomy, and he despised the notion that ideology didn’t matter. He would not have put it quite this way, but he was haunted by the same spectre that has haunted many other critics of the liberal welfare state: the spectre of soul death. Like Holden Caulfield, Mario Savio, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem, Malcolm X, Randle McMurphy, Captain America and Billy—like almost any iconic figure of the era you can name—Goldwater just didn’t like being told what to do.
It’s one of the reasons he was such a terrible candidate. The more he alienated his audiences, the more certain he became that he was on the right track. He had no great personal ambition to be President; he saw himself as the spokesman for a set of principles, and he had little interest in bending them to suit the wishes of even his admirers.
It’s an important insight that Goldwater became associated with a kind of desperate reactionary effort to preserve the status quo (a reputation earned by his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his subsequent victories in the Deep South), but was also in fact pursuing another angle on a more general anti-establishment revolt. In some sense, Goldwater pursued a Honey Badger strategy of saying whatever he wanted with little regard for the politics. It’s this habit that reminds us of Donald Trump, along with the establishment targets of his ire. The difference is that Goldwater had a deep set of principles, while President Trump does not.
And the next excerpt might help explain why Trump won and Goldwater was crushed:
Still, the tragedy of Barry Goldwater is also, in a sense, the tragedy of American conservatism, even in its moments of triumph. Goldwater’s mistake was to believe that he could run for President on a program of political abstractions. People don’t vote for abstractions. They vote their hopes and their fears, and they tend to see those in concrete terms. Twentieth-century American conservatism of the kind that Goldwater represented is the view that individuals, businesses, and local communities should have more control over their own destinies, and should not be subject to the bureaucratic dictates of a central government. As a proposition in political philosophy, there is no doubt much to be said for this view. Its appeal as a piece of campaign rhetoric obviously has everything to do with which bureaucratic dictates voters think you are talking about. What Goldwater discovered was that, in 1964, the philosophical language of conservatism was read by many voters as code for resistance to forced integration, and in the end he could not disentangle himself from an alliance that he had not desired. Many conservatives have found themselves in the same box. A political philosophy is not going to get very far without voters. As Goldwater observed, in politics you have to hunt where the ducks are. Most ducks are not interested in philosophy.
Goldwater’s comments about hunting ducks was in reference to the then-existing habit of Republicans to court the black vote, especially in the South, since the Democratic Party there was so clearly hostile to their interests. Goldwater was saying that southern whites were naturally conservative and a richer vein to tap. It was advice that Richard Nixon intuitively understood and pursued with vigor, and the success of this strategy explains pretty much everything that came after for the conservative movement, including both its successes and its failures. Goldwater wasn’t a segregationist but he did quickly find that segregationists were drawn to elements of his philosophy like no other interest group. Nixon was eager to entangle himself in the moral quagmire. Reagan brought in the post-Roe evangelical right, consolidated the Wallace Democrats and won two landslide victories.
Looking at what Sen. Jeff Flake says went wrong with the conservative movement is instructive here.
This is a long time in coming. I got here in Washington in 2001. … And we got [President George W. Bush’s education overhaul law] No Child Left Behind, which was, I thought, big federal overreach into local education policy. And then we got the prescription drug benefit, which added about $7 trillion in unfunded liabilities. I didn’t think that was a very conservative thing to do.
When we couldn’t argue that we were the party of limited government anymore, then that forced us into issues like flag burning or trying to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, things that we wouldn’t have done otherwise if we would have been arguing about true principles of limited government or spending.
George W. Bush understood that Goldwater conservatism was too abstract and lifeless and frankly cold-hearted, which is why he and Karl Rove pitched a new “compassionate” conservatism. Part of that compassion was an actual commitment (however misguided in their implementation) to public education and a desire to make sure that seniors have access to life-saving and life-extending prescription drugs. For Sen. Flake, these were deviations from conservative principles. Once abandoned, the party was left to appeal to the religious right, jingoism, and (although unstated) white racial resentment.
But this is a bad misreading of history. These disparate elements of modern conservatism confounded Goldwater from the beginning. They were woven together by Nixon and expanded by Reagan. And even as George W. Bush abandoned some of the more libertarian elements (both domestically and in foreign affairs), he also considered his father’s electoral defeat largely in terms of his failure to sufficiently bind the racists and the religious right to his bosom. Poppy Bush had broken his “read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes, but he had also invited a Buchananite cultural values revolt. Dubya sought to head both threats off at the pass by making tax cuts his first priority and insisting that Jesus Christ was his favorite political philosopher. The Terri Schiavo case should also be considered in this context, along with his creation of an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
This wasn’t a deviation from principle on Bush’s part. It was a carefully considered exercise in coalition building. Bush didn’t actually win the election in 2000, but he came close enough. And he could not have come so close without his pandering to the religious right or his tax-cutting promises or his efforts to soften the hard edges of Gingrich’s brand of conservatism.
What Trump did differently was dial down the pretense of compassion and dial up the racial resentment and religious insecurity. It turned out that that these things could be adjusted and still even out in the end. But what really worked for Trump was his full-throated attack on the establishment. The more he insulted the Republican leaders and the media and the elite’s cultural expectations of decency, the better he performed in the primaries. And it worked just well enough in the general election to win in the areas he needed to win.
What I’d say to Sen. Flake is that it’s true that Trump is an abomination but the solution to Trump is not going to be found by tinkering with the dials so that there is less boorishness and anti-intellectualism and more attacks on the federal bureaucracy. Trump is extreme and in many ways unrepresentative of the conservatism that has come down to us from Goldwater, but the sin of modern conservatism was there from its inception. It was there with Goldwater’s biggest backer, William F. Buckley, making excuses from Jim Crow based on white supremacy in the pages of the National Review. It was there when Robert Bork and William Rehnquist convinced Goldwater that he had to oppose the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds despite his instinctual distaste for racial politics.
Sen. Flake wants to know how things got so bad for the Republican Party, but they’ve been bad. At the root of this is the problem Goldwater faced at the outset, which is that his limited government ideology had limited appeal as a bloodless political philosophy and could only gain power by being wedded to a politics of grievance and resentment.
Mississippi was about as Democratic a state as you could find when Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act. In November 1964, Mississippi gave the Republican Goldwater eighty-seven percent of their votes. That’s where the entangling began, and everything since then for the conservative movement has just been a postscript.
It’s true, as Louis Menand wrote in 2001, that the idea that “local communities should have more control over their own destinies” has a lot of merit. What it doesn’t have and has never had is enough intrinsic appeal to overcome politically the people’s desire for a robust federal government without making common cause with racists and religious fundamentalists.
Flake is right to bemoan this situation but incorrect to think that Trump represents a true break or that the elements that make up the conservative coalition can ever prevail without each other. What Trump does signal, though, is that as the Republicans continue to lose greater and greater percentages of the non-white vote, the only solution for them is to gain more of the white vote. And Trump showed how to accomplish this, to his everlasting shame.
Has Flake actually, you know, DONE ANYTHING, to push back against Trump, other than talking a bit louder than other mostly useless lumps like Graham?
You read that he’s a Republican, right?
Jesus Christ, spare me the lamentations over the “abomination” of Trump, Senator Flak, as you vote to advance the insanity of Trumpian health insurance reform. That’s a “conservative” principle that Goldwater, Flak and Der Trumper could all agree on, I guess. Of course big gub’mint has no bizness in health care or insurance!
But that’s sure not the only one. As a post up at Balkinization recently observed, Trumpism is merely the distillation of movement conservatism’s worst pathologies. In no particular order these are: 1) It’s always the right time for tax cuts; 2) Rage at the lyin’ lib’rul media (i.e. “fakenews”); 3) Abolition of regulation by administrative agencies, especially environmental; 4) Hatred and banishment of science and technical expertise in gub’mint, and 5) The fanning of racial resentment in white people.
Obviously Der Trumper advocates all of these, in spades. Obviously, movement conservatism doubled down on all of these, post Bush-pocalypse. Movement over Country became the final motto.
So Flak really is lamenting the final triumph of the “conservative” movement under its logical endpoint, Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. But the idea that the Holy Principles and Temple of Conservatism have been hijacked and befouled by the obscene likes of Trump is pretty much BS. All this shit has been there right from the beginning, whenever the hell one wants to date that. For a movement of governmental incompetence, Der Trumper is a perfect culmination.
Thus today’s “conservatives” (AZ or otherwise) are perfectly willing to dispense with niceties like “rule of law” in order to achieve the ACTUAL tenets of conservatism. But I guess they want to engage in some pious hand-wringing over it as part of the show!
If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear?
If you look at memeorandum.com, the discussion sublinks show only mainstream (NYT, NPR, VOX) or left-leaning (TPM, Mother Jones) media outlets.
If stuff like this gets the silent treatment in the right-wing/conservative media bubble, it’s like it was never spoke.
It’s getting picked up by some of the usual suspects among right-wing blogs and websites (e.g Townhall, Legal Insurrection, Gateway Pundit). General impression I get is that they are not amused. More to the point, they’ll gladly rip him a new one.
There’s no merit in the ‘local control’ issue whatsoever. That concept is just replacing ‘states rights’ as the code term for ‘I hate paying taxes to educate other people’s kids and I hate even more having to be courteous and fair to blahs, sluts, gays, sick, and poor.’
Conservatism is basically a selfish, greedy, nasty, authoritarian ideology that attracts selfish, greedy, nasty, authoritarian people. William F Buckley, as you correctly point out, was the archetype. What he brought to the game and then later Reagan and others was misdirection.
Whether it’s big words (sounding like a stupid person’s idea of a smart person), smiling (Reagan/Kemp), or smooth lying (Bush/Cheney), the Republican shtick has always been bait and switch. The switch is to tax cuts for the wealthy and service cuts for everyone else.
Trump just nakedly amplified every Republican ideological point with very, very little of the bait. McConnell and Ryan have been doing exactly that (no bait, go straight to the mugging) since the ni-clang took office.
Now they realize that they can’t move off the nastiest parts of their program without losing their razor thin, ill gotten congressional majorities. And therefore have nothing to offer to non-Republicans except accepting their unconditional surrender. Suicide, however, is not an attractive option for non-Republicans no matter how much Republicans want it.
After 36 years of political appeasement the Democrats have finally reached a consensus that has awakened to this fact. Reid was a breath of fresh air – read his comments about Scalia and Greenspan going back 15 years. He was better than Tom D. Pelosi has been much better than Gephardt.
Anyway, until Republicans acknowledge that they have some responsibilities to society at large: public education, infrastructure, and moderating inequality, they’ll just have to stick with the racism, sexism, and nasty authoritarianism.
All true. Now add in a dose of Christian Right and preaching about a woman’s reproductive organs and hate for the other and add in some militarism and war to keep us all engaged and let’s not forget the immigrants, especially Musliims. And let’s us all preach about the free market and how we are all reposnsibke for our lives. Now you got modern day republicans, a little fascist, racist, authoritarian Christian movement.
Conservatives can never go back to what they were. What are we going to have originalist conservatives…trying to drag us back to 1776 for a do over? The current ideology is completely devoid of policy. Flake needs to be asked to explain what went wrong in KS?
Kansas? My guess is the liptards ruined it all.
Ironically I have been driving in Kansas today. I found myself listening to AFA Radio with a show that has Brian Fisher as the host.
He raised Flake’s appearance on Meet the Press yesterday and was deriding Flake as an establishment Republican and was really put out with his citing “wedge issues” and pointed to the Terri Schaivo case.
The conservative Christian radio shows are really off the charts far right. Of course he was on fire about social issues.
He does concede Trump needs some work on his behavior but they seem to believe he was brought here by God to return us to the Founders vision of a christian nation. The listeners were more interested in the Bible study group that has been organized that some cabinet members are participating in.
Radio choices are generally right wing talk of some sort or bad music here in Kansas, I ended up turning the radio off.
Gave up on radio when I lived in the region a number of years back, largely for the same reasons.
That would be the Old Testament God. How they confuse themselves and others is by calling themselves Christians. They loathe all the new fangled peace, love, turn the other cheek nonsense. Smite they love. IOW, they’re too conservative to embrace the New Testament and Jesus Christ.
Huh? There’s a well known group of people who don’t embrace the New Testament and Jesus Christ, and they’re not known for their conservatism. They’re called Jews.
Do they call themselves Christians and listen raptly to rightwing christian radio? That was the conversation — another one that you were unable to follow in your eagerness to find someway to dump on another Marie3 comment.
BTW and since you introduced that other religion into the conversation, you seemed to have overlooked that the conservative adherents of it are currently good buds with the US fundies. Given another hundred years those two may also be aligned with their Muslim counterpart. (Bibi and King A are working on that.)
I posted a year and half ago comparisons to Goldwater and Trump. The Goldwater of 1964 was amazingly similar to Trump. Racial animus came from every fiber of Goldwater’s campaign. Goldwater attacked Social Security, and made statements about the USSR so dangerous as to dwarf anything Trump has said.
In 1964 Goldwater was every bit the nutbag that Trump is.
And so it was that Nelson Rockefeller took to the podium at the convention in 1964 and said words that precisely frame the question facing Republicans:
Read the speech – it is amazing in its relevance.
http://rockarch.org/inownwords/nar1964text.php
These words, now 53 years old, define the GOP today. Except the extremists have won. It took time. Reagan failed in ’68, and the relative sanity of Nixon (HAH) prevailed. But they have come to power now.
Viewed in a longer time frame Trump is not outside the mainstream of the GOP, he is in fact squarely in the middle of it.
Most decent Republicans left long ago, and those that remain are trapped between a rabid and fascistic base and their own knowledge of the true nature of this base.
So people like Flake are trapped by some need to express a notion of decency and their own party’s complete rejection of that notion.
The modern Republican is a nihilist. They have no principle other than power.
The modern Republican politician is a prisoner of that nihilism.
You write:
I don’t really know enough about their similarities to get all scholarly here, but I do know about their differences.
Primary difference: Goldwater got swept; Trump won.
Duh.
So the question is…why did he win?
It wasn’t because LBJ was a particularly good…or particularly lovable and certainly not particularly trustworthy…candidate.
It was because they felt secure in their economic position.
Now? Things have not been working really well for the white working and middle class…a large, very voting-prone segment of the U.S. population…during the previous two UniParty presidencies. They felt betrayed by both parties, with good reason. When Goldwater ran…I was there, I watched it and lived as a boy and young man right smack in the middle of that group of working, white Americans…when he ran, if those people had a job they easily could buy a house, a car or two, raise a family and not worry overmuch about the next bank payments. Not many people were interested in “fixing” things, because they didn’t appear to be broken.
Run the film forward 55 years and what is happening? Everybody except the wealthy is scared shitless!!! Scared enough to vote for a pariah like Trump who promised to clean out the DC swamp as opposed to an ultimate public position/private position insider like Hillary Clinton. They fell for his line but were repelled by hers.
At least it was new…
Not true, but new.
AG
The word “they” above does not necessarily refer to the candidates; it refers to the “white working and middle class” in the next paragraph.
Sorry.
Late night post.
AG
And that is the key difference: the ’64 electorate was very different. It was dominated by those that had personally seen and experienced the Great Depression and WWII. Those born before 1912 (+-3 yrs) could hear the echoes of Herbert Hoover in Goldwater’s spiel, an antidote to the general propensity of people shift right as they grow older. Those born before 1928 (+-3 yrs) had lived through the deprivation of the depression, even if only as a child, and the WWII that they experienced was hardly as glorious as subsequently depicted. With US war deaths over 400,000 and many more injured/maimed for life, it directly impacted most people. (In the ’64 campaign, Goldwater was the warhawk and LBJ was less so (yes, he lied.)
2012 – age 65 and older (16% of the electorate) (born almost exclusively between 1929 and 1947) favored Romney 56:44. They favored Trump by a smaller margin 54:45. In 1960 (age>50) they favored Nixon 54:46 and (as with all age demos) Goldwater disfavored 41:59.
IMO the likes of Jeff Flake, Lindsay Graham and their courtiers in the pundit classes, like Andrew Sullivan and Bobo Brooks, are only “upset” at Trump’s clear incompetency and general unfitness for this job, combined with his boorish, bullying, “unseemly” behavior.
Frankly, they all – all of them – LOVE and stand squarely behind what Trump is doing. And the politicans, like Flake and Graham, scurry quickly to do his legislative bidding most of the time.
These so-called “high minded” greed-heads like to pretend that they’re “offended” and “upset” by Trump’s rude, loud-mouthed, uncouth behavior, which has rendered him a pariah on the international stage.
Yeah, yeah, they built the GOP to poop out just such a “politician” as Trump. Trump was inevitable, and none of these whining creeps had the slightest bit of “concern” about ginning up all the isms – racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, mysogyny, bigotry – as long as it got them votes and paychecks.
Cry me a river.
Trump won for many different reasons, but one of them is that he was unafraid to bellow out what Hate Radio, Fox, “Christiany” Broadcasting has been bellowing out for the past 40 years or more. Trump is just Rush with a yuuuuuger bully pulpit and louder megaphone.
The GOP has been paying homage to Rush for decades now.
What’s the frickin difference between Rush and Trump other than where they bellow from?
That, plus GOP voters are entranced and delighted that they perceive that Trump is massively kicking Librul butt. For many, many, many GOP voters, their main Raison D’etre is to see Librul butt being kicked. The end.
Jeff Flake lives up to his name daily.