Treading Goldwater

A rebuttal to the Arizona Republican’s alleged progressive legacy.

By Justin Elliott, Brown University

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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