From a tactical standpoint, I'm all for liberals From a tactical standpoint, I'm all for liberals recapturing Goldwater's legacy (as they have Nixon's) and using it to dramatize the sharp rightward drift of the country. As Dana writes, Goldwater's "significance over three decades in national politics as a yard stick against which changes in the conservative movement could be measured." And yardsticks are useful. But if Goldwater's radicalism now looks tame, that's not proof he wasn't really a radical, but a sad signifier that the political center has veered towards crazy in the period since. I fear that some folks, however, are mistaking the two, and assuming Goldwater a somehow more honest or constructive opposition than we currently have:
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.
I highly doubt it. Goldwater was as fervently nostalgic for the Gilded Age as anyone to ever stride the American political landscape. Given his penchant for occupying the outermost edge of rightwing thought, Goldwater today probably wouldn't be a principled libertarian (as he often wasn't then), but an aggressive demagogue. It's a fairly good question whether radicalism is always the honest endpoint of an independent thought process, or just as often a personality trait. My read with Goldwater was that it was a worrying mix of the two, and efforts to reclassify him spend too little time weighing the context of his moment.
You have to think: Here's a guy who basically running against the New Deal, not to mention in opposition to Johnson's plans for Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, and all the rest. He was running in a time where poverty, urban despair, and senior decline were much more serious than they are today, and he was specifically arguing against programs that would provide the elderly and the poor with health care and income. He occupied a perch on the right that was far more dangerous and effective than anything we see today, where even the most conservative of politicians feel obligated to support the massively popular elements of the entitlement state. And while Goldwater is currently lionized for occasionally opposing the religious right, truth is they and their politicians are much more interested in aiding the poor than the orthodox free marketeers who preceded them. Indeed, judging from Rick Warren and Sam Brownback and First Things, it's this new breed of religious Republican who may actually be willing to discuss social and economic inequality, not Goldwater.
On a related note, folks have read this, right?
