Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (10 page)

“Goldwater,” Will declared, “lost 44 states but won the future.”

But in a 1982 essay, Will took sharp issue with aspects of Goldwater’s approach, singling out a passage in
Conscience
laying out a conservative ideology that was, on principle, unresponsive to social and economic changes. “The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline,” Goldwater wrote. “The principles on which the Conservative political position is based have been established by a process that has nothing to do with the social, economic and political landscape that changes from decade to decade and century to century.”

To which Will replied: “ ‘Nothing’? Surely most conservatives would insist that conservatism has everything to do with prudent accommodation to perpetually changing social, economic and political landscapes, and that the essence of unconservative approaches to politics is the attempt to apply fixed doctrine to a world forever in flux.”

Will questioned Goldwater’s assertion that conservatism’s overriding concern “will always be:
Are we maximizing freedom?
” No, Will argued, “the distinguishing virtue of the conservative mind is suspicion of politics organized around one single overriding concern.” And he criticized those “who fancy themselves conservatives and who cherish the cozy purity of the ‘movement’ (as they understand it) more than they desire influence and responsibility.”

The differences between the two essays reflected a movement in Will’s own thinking over the years from a communitarian and traditionalist brand of conservatism to a much more robust libertarianism. But the shift was also representative of changes within conservatism itself. If Bill Buckley gave the world a book called
Up from Liberalism,
a conservative writing at the end of the Bush years or during Obama’s term might well pick the title
Back to Goldwaterism.

In 1964, at least, Goldwaterism was anything but popular. Goldwater’s pronouncements in
Conscience
and many of the other positions he took—he called for privatizing Social Security and said of Medicare, “Where in the Constitution is the federal government given the right to become a Federal doctor?”—gave Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats all the ammunition they would need to win one of the great landslides in American history. For many conservatives it was an instructive experience, simultaneously dispiriting and exhilarating. Vin Weber, who would be elected to Congress in 1980 at the age of twenty-eight and was one of Newt Gingrich’s closest allies, was captivated by Goldwater and jokes that it was a sign of “a dysfunctional childhood that I formed a teenage Republican club when I was 11 years old.” He read Goldwater’s books and campaigned hard for him, but also learned the limits of his hero’s appeal, even within his loyally Republican family. When he tried to get his great-aunts to put Goldwater signs in their yards, they were not enthusiastic. “Well, we’ll put something out that says ‘Republican,’ but not ‘Goldwater,’ ” they told him. Why? “He says that he would cut Social Security,” they explained. Weber calls it his earliest lesson about “the perils that conservatives face if they really produce an undistilled conservative ideology.”

The surge rightward that de Toledano and Rusher had predicted did not materialize. On the contrary, the surge went the other way. Goldwater’s 27,177,838 votes reflected a loss of nearly 7 million ballots from Richard Nixon’s total of 34,106.671 four years earlier. The complete collapse of the Republican vote in New England and the Northeast was beyond anything imagined even by conservatives who had been prepared to write off those regions. Vermont and Maine, two of the most loyally Republican states since the party’s formation in 1854—only they had held out against Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide—were indicative of the mass exodus of moderate Republicans. In Vermont, Nixon won 98,131 votes, 59 percent. Four years later, Goldwater won just 54,942 votes, 34 percent. The Republican story was even worse in Maine, where the GOP tally went from 240,608 and 57 percent for Nixon to 118,701 and 31 percent for Goldwater. More than half of the Republican vote in Maine disappeared. There were steep drops all across the Northeast and Midwest. In the rest of the country,
Goldwater salvaged only his home state of Arizona—barely, by a single percentage point.

Republicans were decimated in Congress, dropping from 176 to 140 seats in the House, and from an already paltry 34 seats in the Senate to 32. No wonder George F. Gilder and Bruce K. Chapman, two young progressive Republicans (they would later become Reaganites), titled their book on the 1964 election
The Party That Lost Its Head.

But there was one consolation: the Deep South delivered for Goldwater, just as his strategists had predicted. Georgia voted Republican for the first time in its history; Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina did so for the first time since Reconstruction; Louisiana, which had voted for Eisenhower in 1956, voted Republican again. And these still overwhelmingly white electorates—the Voting Rights Act was not to pass until the next year—gave Goldwater overwhelming majorities: 87 percent in Mississippi, 70 percent in Alabama, 59 percent in South Carolina, 57 percent in Louisiana. Only in Georgia, where Goldwater won 54 percent, did LBJ come close—and not that close.

Few at the time realized that the Goldwater rout would be the New Deal coalition’s last hurrah. Just four years later, Richard Nixon would take the White House, facing a Democratic Party torn left and right by the Vietnam War and civil rights.

For the conservative movement—and for the long-term trajectory of American politics—the most important things that happened in 1964 were, with a single exception, not obvious to anyone except the conservatives.

The exception was the decisive southern realignment, too big for anyone to miss. Here Rusher’s 1963
National Review
article was largely on target. He had asked
whether the GOP would be best served by “turning its back on the new, conservative and increasingly Republican South and gumming blintzes with Nelson Rockefeller” or “by nominating a candidate who—win or lose—will galvanize the party in a vast new area, carry fresh scores and perhaps hundreds of Southern Republicans to unprecedented local victories, and lay the foundations for a truly national Republican Party, ready to fight and win in 1968 and all the years beyond?” He wanted them to skip the blintzes. They did, and reaped their southern dividend.

Turning the interplay between morality, race, and crime into political capital was another contribution of the 1964 Goldwater campaign to the
American right. In Salt Lake City on October 10, Goldwater gave the speech that won him an unambiguous
New York Times
headline:
GOLDWATER HITS U.S. MORAL “ROT.”

“With your help and with God’s blessing,” Goldwater declared, “I pledge my every effort to a reconstruction of reverence and moral strength, those great pillars of human happiness in our land.” Rehearsing themes that would be heard from conservatives for the next half century, Goldwater condemned the U.S. Supreme Court for its ban on prescribed prayer in public schools—and the Democrats for failing to mention God in their platform. “You will search in vain for reference to God or religion in the Democratic platform,” he said. “This is a matter of even greater regret, when we realize that this platform, with its utter disregard of God, was written to the exact specifications of Lyndon Johnson.” Exactly the same issue would be raised against the Democratic Party’s draft platform in 2012. After an outcry, President Obama’s operatives got the convention to put God into the document before it was adopted.

Calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court decisions, Goldwater said that “nothing is more tragic than to speak of drift and decay in your native land.” Crime and what he called the “erosion of the honor and dignity of our nation and of the individuals who compose it” were caused by the “rot and decay” in the nation’s moral fiber and by “something basic and dangerous” that was “eating away at the morality, dignity and respect of our citizens, old as well as young, high as well as low.” He condemned the “recent wave of rioting”—“much of it of a racial character,” as the
Times
diplomatically noted—and concluded: “My fellow Americans, is this the time in our nation’s history for our Federal Government to ban [the] Almighty?”

The Goldwater campaign’s most extraordinary contribution to the politics of morality and race blew up in its face. Goldwater had authorized two of his lieutenants, Russ Walton and F. Clifton White—the brilliant architect of the original Draft Goldwater movement—to produce a half-hour documentary to highlight what he called the “morality issue.” What they came up with by late October was at once crude and sophisticated, appalling in its appeal to base instincts and far ahead of its time as a video production destined to stir strong emotions.
They called it “Choice.”

Right from the start, viewers knew they were watching something different. It might have been called “postmodern” if the term had been popular at the time. The first several minutes of the film is all quick cuts with a jazz track appropriate for a strip club. “Choice” opens with images of a reckless, speeding Lincoln Continental careening down a road, and the film keeps coming back to the car. It was intended to symbolize Lyndon B. Johnson’s power-hungry carelessness, and lest there be any doubts, at one point an empty Pearl beer can flies out of its wondows. It was a reference most viewers probably got, since Johnson had received some very bad publicity for an episode in March during which he led journalists on a 90-mph tour of his ranch, sipping a Pearl beer as he went. When
Time
magazine published an account of the episode, the historian Robert Dallek noted, it “strengthened the impression of him as a Texas wheeler-dealer who played fast and loose with the rules and gave less thought to the national well being . . . than to his own self-indulgence.”

National self-indulgence was the theme that “Choice” drove home again and again in black-and-white. It was soft porn as politics, with rapid-fire cinematography showing partiers doing the twist, many of them pretty women, occasionally in bikinis, sometimes half naked, with lots of shots of gyrating bottoms. There are cuts to a criminal resisting arrest and to a civil rights protest. Back and forth the images go, portraying a country that, in the eyes of God-fearing (and white) Americans at least, is obviously falling apart. Then the scene changes to images of patriotic comfort: hundreds of very cute boys and girls reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, shots of the Statue of Liberty and the Constitution, and finally an announcer who gets to the point.

“Now there are two Americas,” the actor Raymond Massey intones off-camera. “One is words like
allegiance
and
republic.
This America is an ideal, a dream. The other America is no longer a dream but a nightmare. Our streets are not safe. Immorality begins to flourish. Violence pits American against American. We don’t want this.”

And on and on it goes, rehearsing themes that would become part of the conservative campaign canon for the next generation. Always there was the contrast between the old, rugged Christian America and the dissolute, undisciplined nation that was coming to be. “Brave men passed on a revolutionary code of justice, morality and freedom. . . . Virgin land—they cut it, built it, marked it with a Cross.”

But suddenly “the bottom began to fall out across America.” Over scenes of black rioters, the announcer speaks of “demoralization, chaos.” And: “Over eight short months, there are more riots in the United States than in the last eight years.” The country was threatened with “mobocracy”—and the courts were siding with the lawbreakers. “By new laws, it is not the lawbreaker who is handcuffed. It is the police.” Thus: “Justice becomes a sick joke.”

The outcry against “Choice” was such that Goldwater, who didn’t see the film before it went out, wound up denouncing his own campaign’s production as “sick” and “racist.” The ad and the way it was handled hurt Goldwater in 1964. But a template was created. “Choice” was a preview of coming political attractions. Almost all of its themes would become a permanent part of conservative demonology—and a resource for the makers of countless thirty-second campaign spots for decades to come.

The most consequential moment of the Goldwater campaign had absolutely no impact on the outcome. It was an event that the gifted journalist Theodore H. White didn’t even mention in
The Making of the President, 1964,
the second volume of his popular and innovative series of campaign books.
Goldwater’s key moneymen had amassed a large sum in a separate campaign account called “TV for Goldwater-Miller.” They insisted, against the wishes of the Goldwater hierarchy, that some of the money be used to put an actor named Ronald Reagan on national television for half an hour, offering what had become known in right-wing circles as “The Speech.” And since they controlled the cash, they got their wish.

Even before Reagan had opened his mouth, an important milestone had been reached. The TV account was flush in part because some of the long-form ads it sponsored closed with an appeal for donations. The Goldwater faithful were eager to send their checks to a post office box in Los Angeles. It was the beginning of the small-donor world. But it was something else as well: long before the campaign money system was first reformed and then deregulated by the Supreme Court, long before the age of the Super PACs and superdonors, Goldwater’s rich business backers were in a position to insist that they have their way. The era of the campaign within a campaign had begun.

It is in no way an exaggeration to say that Reagan’s speech, titled “A Time for Choosing,” changed the course of history. When Ronald Reagan appeared
in conservative living rooms on the night of Tuesday, October 27, 1964, a week before Goldwater’s coming rout, millions in their ranks realized that they had found the leader who would pick up where Goldwater left off—and could deliver their message far more powerfully than the man they were about to vote for.