Neal Freeman has published a fascinating article in the National Review. Mr. Freeman is a veteran of the magazine and the former campaign manager of William F. Buckley’s 1965 New York mayoral campaign. In this piece, Freeman acts as a kind of official magazine historian, as he retells the internal debate they had in early 1964 about whether they should endorse Barry Goldwater or Nelson Rockefeller. As he notes, endorsing Rockefeller would have been received much like an endorsement of Michele Bachmann by the Washington Post would be received today. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t seriously considered.
The reason that this subject came up is that Karl Rove has opened up a debate within conservative circles about something called the “Buckley Rule.” The rule was first articulated at the end of the debate over Goldwater and Rockefeller, when Buckley announced to his staff that “National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.”
By this, he meant Goldwater.
The rule grew until it became legend, and then it became something of an orthodoxy. Yet, it was never quite clear what Buckley meant by ‘viable.’ The exact wording is important, but so is the context in which the words were spoken.
Buckley did not say “the most viable.” He also didn’t say “the most electable.” That’s because he didn’t mean either of those things. Freeman explains that Buckley saw Goldwater as viable in the sense that he could carry the conservative message. He quite possibly saw Rockefeller as a viable Cold Warrior. In any case, his determination wasn’t that Rockefeller wasn’t viable, but that Goldwater was, and that he was the more rightward of the two.
Freeman’s case for this interpretation is bolstered by the context of the deliberations. President Kennedy had been assassinated only weeks earlier, and there was a “halo effect” around Lyndon Johnson. None of the conservatives at the National Review seriously considered it possible that either Rockefeller or Goldwater could win. In Freeman’s telling, the NR contingent favoring a Rockefeller endorsement did base their argument largely on considerations of electability, but the gulf in the polls undercut that argument.
In the end, it was easy to endorse Goldwater precisely because Rockefeller could do no better than to lose less badly.
The trend in history is to see in Goldwater the southward and westward shift in the GOP that became the precursor to the Southern Strategy and the rise of conservatism culminating in Reagan’s great 1980 victory. But, Avik Roy questions the adequacy of that history, which tends to unequivocally vindicate the first iteration of the Buckley Rule.
This “Goldwater’s defeat begat Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement” thesis is common among a certain vintage of conservative thinkers, all of whom are wiser than I. But it’s worth pointing out that the landslide defeat of Goldwater to Lyndon Johnson led to the enactment of the Great Society, and most notably, Medicare and Medicaid. In other words, the very fiscal crisis we face today — for which, at our most courageous, we recommend but modest reforms — was a direct result of the disastrous Goldwater campaign.
We may all prefer the policies of Goldwater to those of Rockefeller. But it’s at least debatable whether or not the conservative movement was better off, or worse off, for having nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. Indeed, the 1964 election may be the most salient example of what happens when we don’t pick the most conservative candidate who can win.
Roy’s argument probably is not that Rockefeller would have won. I believe he is saying that Goldwater did so much worse than Rockefeller would have done that it caused the loss of a lot of seats in Congress. And the loss of those seats in Congress made the passage of Medicare and Medicaid possible, which was a catastrophe for conservatives that might have been avoided.
I’d have to research the 1964 congressional elections and the voting in committee and on the floor of the Medicare bill before I decided if Roy has a point or not. It is probably the case that LBJ could have created Medicare and Medicaid with considerably fewer votes than he actually got.
The overall point is that the Buckley Rule is a not a rule for the Republican Party, but a rule for the conservative movement. The National Review didn’t endorse Goldwater because they thought he could win, or even because they thought he could minimize their losses. They picked him to advance the conservative cause, which he did. They accepted a short term loss in the hope of future gain, which they received.
Yet, it seems to me that the number one priority for conservatives should be to never allow the Democrats to gain complete control of the government because, when they do allow it, the Democrats do big things like Social Security and Medicare and ObamaCare that can’t be undone.
For all their efforts, conservatives have never rolled back the progressives achievements. All they’ve done is run up debt and cause systemic banking failures. Even today, they’ve done little more than retard progress and keep taxes low.
‘Viable’ may not mean the same thing as ‘electable,’ but maybe that was the problem all along.