A new documentary gives a history lesson on American ideology.
By Dana Goldstein
Thursday September 21, 2006
A couple nights ago, I sat down with three other young, progressive journalists to watch "Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater." The HBO documentary, which aired on Monday, traces the career of the (in)famous founder of the modern conservative movement—the pro-interventionist, nuclear-weapons loving, Arizonan author of Conscience of a Conservative, Sen. Barry Morris Goldwater (yes, George Allen, he was half-Jewish, too). The film is directed by Goldwater’s granddaughter, CC, who was five years old when her grandfather ran for president. “Mr. Conservative” is more of a loving tribute than a work of objective journalism, but it nevertheless captures the enigma that was Goldwater and his significance over three decades in national politics as a yard stick against which changes in the conservative movement could be measured.
Goldwater was obliterated by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. He had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming that southern states and businesses would phase out segregation on their own once they realized it was economically damaging. He recommended the deforestation of Vietnam using nuclear warheads and said the life of one American soldier was more valuable than the entire population of Hanoi. Democrats capitalized on Goldwater’s rabidly anti-Communist foreign policy with the "Daisy" television ad, which suggested the world might suffer catastrophic nuclear war if Goldwater was elected.
Young conservatives live and breathe the myth of Goldwater: his candor, sense of humor, and Western self-reliance inspired politicians from Ronald Reagan to John McCain. Young progressives are less familiar with him. But all four of us saw something admirable in the iconoclastic leader.
Sure, his ideas about America’s role in the world are anathema to any progressive internationalist who believes our foreign policy should be based on human rights and social justice. And there’s no excuse at all for his reactionary stance on civil rights, or his opposition to New Deal programs such as Social Security and welfare. But on other domestic social issues—reproductive rights, gay rights, and the role of religion in public life—Goldwater stood athwart the tides of the conservative movement, yelling "stop!" His own daughter had an abortion at the age of 20, and his grandson is gay. Both testified in the documentary to his total support and sympathy. Goldwater’s first wife, Peggy, was a founder of Arizona Planned Parenthood. Goldwater realized, in many cases through life experience, that the difficult moral issues around sexuality and gender should be decided by individuals and families, not by the religious right. At a press conference toward the end of his life, Goldwater told journalists he would like to give the religious right a swift kick "below the hip," which, by Goldwater’s clear-talking standards, amounted to a delicate euphemism.
If I had been alive in 1964, I bet I would have been more like the jeans-clad young people demonstrating against Goldwater outside the 1964 GOP convention (their signs read "Bigot Water,") than the Goldwater Girls, who wore poodle skirts, cowboy boots, and wide-brimmed hats (Hillary Clinton was one!). But the impression I had after watching "Mr. Conservative" wasn’t just disgust with aspects of Goldwater’s politics, but rather sadness at the profound shift in our national conversation since 1964, a shift of which Goldwater was as disapproving as any contemporary progressive.
Goldwater was right in 1964 when he predicted that people with his political ideology might one day be called “liberal.” But it’s not that Goldwater became a liberal over time. Rather, American conservatism embraced the agenda of the religious right so wholeheartedly during the Reagan and Bush eras that any politician who opposed the incursion of the agenda of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson into public life came to look like a moderate, regardless of their positions on foreign policy, taxes, or a host of other issues that used to occupy center stage in our national political conversation. Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, was a fellow libertarian Arizonan who Goldwater helped place on the Supreme Court in 1981. As O’Connor relates in the documentary, she faced right-wing opposition to her nomination because of concern that she was not sufficiently anti-abortion. Once on the Court, O’Connor often voted to limit federal government power, but was widely hailed as a moderate upon her retirement, largely because she split the difference on social issues like abortion, even as she over-ruled protections for workers, civil rights, and the environment.
But the libertarian politics of Goldwater and O’Connor aren’t responsible for the current conservative ascendancy. Yes, it was Goldwater, the paradigmatic Western Republican, who brought the South into the GOP camp for the first time since the Civil War. His opponent, fellow Westerner Lyndon Johnson, chose to continue the Kennedy administration’s desegregation agenda, and accepted that Democrats would thus lose the support of most white Southerners. But as “Mr. Conservative” explains, in order to further solidify its control over the South, the Right embraced intrusive governmental policies regarding women’s health and sexual orientation. Bush-brand expansion of federal power has turned red Western states purple: Traditional Goldwater Republicans are horrified by expansions of government power such as the PATRIOT Act, the proposed anti-gay marriage amendment, and the expensive prescription drug benefit. And unlike Southerners, Westerners aren’t evangelical in large numbers: According to the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life, nearly half of Southerners believe the Bible is literally true, while only 24 percent of Westerners do.
Goldwater would certainly be turning over in his grave if he knew the movement he spawned had unleashed such horrors on the country he loved. As we struggle hopelessly against an insurgency in Iraq while neglecting Al-Qaeda, the genocide in Darfur, and North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, Americans continue to obsess about contraception, abortion, and gay rights at home, so that our two major national conversations—as long as the conservatives in power set the agenda—are about terrorism on one hand, and sex on the other. There’s little time left to debate the challenges of globalization, environmental degradation, or economic and social inequality. I doubt I would have agreed with Barry Goldwater on these issues, but at least, unlike present-day conservatives, he would have wanted to talk about them.
--------
Comments
Leftists are the ones constantly dragging “sex” and “abortion” into public discourse, in fact, they beg to have sex enter the public dialogue evertime they have another parade about it, and then send out press releases to tell the rest of us. Pull the log out of your eye, before you chastize me about the stick in my own.
— Ryan - Sep 30, 12:15 AM - #Why the scare quotes around sex and abortion, Ryan? Are you uncomfortable with these issues to such a degree that you have to segregate them with special punctuation? These issues are important to millions of Americans as well as to people all around the world to whom your desire for silence and bastardization of biblical epistles may be tantamount to a death sentence. Get over your squeamishness and learn to accept that there are other ways of life in the world and that fact is not a bad thing to be feared but a wonderment to be appreciated.
— Biff Spaceman - Oct 1, 03:43 AM - #venting vending solution proactive machines
— proactive solution vending machines off - Sep 19, 05:36 AM - #venting vending solution proactive machines
— proactive solution vending machines off - Sep 19, 05:36 AM - #“And there’s no excuse at all for his reactionary stance on civil rights” Let me say Mr. Goldwater’s No vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was the most courageous vote in Senate History. Ask yourself, has this piece of legislation ended racism in this country? What was needed then is still needed today: a social shift from hatred and ignorance to enlightenment. Laws can’t do for individuals what individuals must do for themselves. The civil rights Act of 1964, while noble in its intention, ended up creating more problems for blacks than it did in helping them.
— Marc Parella - Oct 19, 02:05 PM - #loan nursing student forgiveness florida
— programs loan forgiveness student nursing - Jan 7, 04:19 AM - #Biff, Ryan wasn’t trying to “silence” liberals and stop them from bringing up sex and abortion. He was responding to the author’s claim that it is conservatives who keep these issues at the forefront of political debate. You should work on your reading comprehension!
— Dan Yanofsky - Apr 20, 01:22 AM - #