TIMES CHANGE. Jonah Goldberg has an interesting column on the somewhat random subject of efforts to wield Barry Goldwater's views as a cudgel against social conservatives. Roughly speaking, Jonah's argument is that Goldwater became more libertarian over time, but that at the time Goldwater was leading the nascent New Right movement, he was, in fact, a social conservative. In other words, it's Goldwater who changed, not conservatism.
That seems plausible, though I don't really have the chops to assess it. What I will observe is this. People often take up what I think is a fairly confused attitude toward the rise of organized, politicized Christianity in this country. They observe that it wasn't a major factor 40 years ago, that it is a major factor today, and thus conclude that we're in some kind of march to theocracy (if you don't like social conservatives) or else headed for an awesome moral revival (if you do like them). The truth, however, is that you didn't have "Christianist" politics in 1964 because you didn't have secularist politics in an important way back then. It's fairly clear that liberals, rather than conservatives, were the ones who fired the first shots in the God wars -- the Supreme Court case on prayer in public schools, and the various causes associated with feminism and the sexual revolution. Social conservatism as we understand it didn't exist in the �50s and early �60s because everyone was socially conservative (everyone who mattered politically, that is; there were always libertine-minded intellectuals and so forth) so there was nothing to mobilize around.
Instead, you had culture mobilization primarily around race and race-linked topics. Once liberals put a more robust conception of a secular state on the table and feminists began demanding serious revisions in traditional gender roles, then you saw a meaningful political movement in defense of older ways that, previously, had been conventional wisdom rather than a political cause.
--Matthew Yglesias
