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All Head, No Heart
Ouch. Deleting 900 words that took you an hour to write is never fun. But when you're approaching a thousand and you're still not sure if anyone will catch what you're talking about, it generally means your point is muddled and it's time to put the kill on it. So I did. Suffice to say that I'm not a big fan of the Goldwater debate swirling around the blogosphere. I like that Brad and Matt have donned their contrarian capes and swooped down to reality-check Barry's legacy, but I think they're taking a very narrow view of what Goldwater meant.
Goldwater emerged at a very strange moment for the Republican party. They had spent the past 30 years ceding domestic issues to the Democrats and running their campaigns on a combination of red-baiting and, well, more red-baiting. They had no real domestic critique, instead, government was almost a joint custody arrangement, with liberals taking the home-front and moderate Republicans setting the terms of the foreign policy debate. But Kennedy and Johnson proved themselves tough on communism, and suddenly Republicans were robbed of their primary critique.
So Goldwater emerged and smashed the consensus. He created an anti-government message that lost at the outset, but ended the Republican's unilateral disarmament on domestic issues. Democrats crushed him (largely on foreign policy), and then nominated McGovern and ceded their newfound national security strength without ever updating their kitchen table arguments beyond "elect us entitled competent technocrats". That's why liberalism, which now means dull empiricism, has been personified by robotic wonks like Gore, Kerry and Dukakis. Our message is stuck in the 50's, but it exists without any of the advantages we had then, and it cohabitates with the shattered and grotesque husk that is our credibility on national security. Thinking that Goldwater's extremism simply screwed the Republican party is exactly our problem -- it did hurt them by some metrics (though Johnson was going to have major coattails no matter who his opponent was), but it also gave them an intellectual energy that, in very real ways, made their party's ideology whole again. Our analysis is all head while Goldwater's effect was all heart. And, in politics, I'm convinced that heart, not head, wins elections.
Mark Schmitt's corrective to the Goldwater revisionism concludes:
What the think tanks and grassroots groups and Karl Rove and Frank Luntz figured out over the 36 years after Goldwater was how to retain the language of ideological conservatism, leave unchallenged the facade of operational liberalism, and use that combination to exercise power long enough and aggressively enough to destroy every future prospect for operational liberalism. I think they have scuttled much of the strength of real conservatism in the process, but I don't think that's anything for liberals to be glad or complacent about.
Entirely true. Goldwater gave them the energy and ideology that served to power their rhetoric, his loss gave them the motivation to build the institutions that could control the debate and hide their intentions, and the combination of head and heart gave them the full toolset needed to gain total dominance over the government. His run changed the Republican party from a bunch of comfortable technocrats who engaged in a genteel struggle for power into a movement. Meanwhile, liberals are still talking about how reality-based and empirically-sound we are, and now we're beginning to turn on the Goldwater moment as a net negative for Republicans. To me, that looks like an acceptance, even a glorification, of our party's march towards oblivion. Goldwater restored the Republican party's gut, that Democrats were finally looking at him and realizing we need to do the same was the most positive development I'd seen. I'd hate to see us turn trigger-shy now.
Update: Also see Ed Kilgore's take on this.
COMMENTS (17)
anti-government attitudes-- at least against the feds -- in my neck of the woods go back to hatred of fdr and the new deal. some around here still think of him as a socialist and stalin's bitch.
add to this the move toward civil rights for blacks (this place isn't real progressive that way) and you got full on anti-government attitudes.
plus, the gop businesstypes here often remind me of lower-middle-class fools -- rednecks with white collars and ties and shoes instead of blue collar work shirts and boots.
it's a lot bigger and a lot older than goldwater, ezra -- i hate to say that.
Posted by: harry near indy | February 28, 2005 4:27 PM
>> a bunch of comfortable technocrats who engaged in a gentile struggle for power
I do believe you mean "genteel." Although the other is arguably quite accurate as well.
Posted by: Ed Bott | February 28, 2005 6:05 PM
Right you are (on both counts). Good eye.
Posted by: Ezra | February 28, 2005 6:16 PM
Heh, making it rather ironic that those who pine for the 50's are those least likely to support the technocratic Democrats who are most similar to the Eisenhower era...
Posted by: theorajones | February 28, 2005 6:36 PM
his loss gave them the motivation to build the institutions that could control the debate and hide their intentions,
...
we need to do the same
Posted by: dcfs | February 28, 2005 6:43 PM
"...it cohabitates with the shattered and grotesque husk that is our credibility on national security."
Love it.
Posted by: Kate | February 28, 2005 7:56 PM
I think what everyone misses is the funding of the great noise machine by powerful corporations and foundations. Read David Brock's Republican Noise Machine.
Goldwater did bring changes to the party, but money I think overrides anything he did or did not do.
Posted by: bc | February 28, 2005 8:28 PM
Ezra,
You have the right of this argument. Goldwater didn't invent modern conservatism but he sure as hell did give it its heart and its cohesion. Of course he isn't responsible entirely for their ascendance. The latter half of the 20th century was a time of sweeping historical and social change and Goldwaterism is but one piece that contributed to Republican political dominance today.
But Goldwater articulated for the Republican Party an inspirational yet common sense definition of what it means to be a Republican and an American that has spoken to ever greater numbers to people for the last 40 years --- regardless of whether the GOP has to lie and shill to accomodate the attendant cognitive dissonence caused by a philosophy whose adherants have never understood the ramifications of their beliefs.
And even today, if one is looking for some sort of political identity beyond a specific issue or cause, one would naturally look to the Republican party because it's the only one that's offering one.
Jesus, The Democrats are holding contests to see who can come up with the best slogan to explain what the Democratic party stands for. That is sad.
No, we do not need to become hypocritical, rapacious, power mad scumbags in order to win. But we'd damned well better learn that it takes more than a laundry list to inspire people to liberalism. Goldwaterism was about giving people something to believe in and an inspirational cause to join. We could use some of that.
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