Still, the folks at The Corner all seem to repudiate opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and lionize Barry Goldwater, as does the blogospheric right generally, so while I am sure there are conservatives out there who take the contrary position, it is both possible and widely practiced to think of Barry Goldwater as an icon even while explicitly repudiating his stance on race.
If only.
Look, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much conservatives and libertarians have rebuked Rand Paul on this point -- Brink Lindsey's and George Will's comments come to mind, although Mitch McConnell's recollection of watching his then-boss John Sherman Cooper help bring the votes together to get the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed has to be the most moving.
The point that I was trying to make yesterday (and I think Dave Weigel was trying to make the same one) is that things like FDR's internment of Japanese Americans and JFK's wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. are seen by liberals as departures from liberal principles, not failures of liberalism (not that liberalism doesn't have its failures), like when conservatives criticize George W. Bush for not governing as a conservative.
With Goldwater, his ideology -- the one Friedersdorf and other conservatives lionize even as they distance themselves from his onetime position on race -- is based on conservative principles. That's fundamentally a different issue. Liberals didn't move on from Japanese internment or MLK's wiretapping and decide to organize their movement around the principles that led to those decisions.
-- A. Serwer
