Posted by Brad @ 1:20 am on March 2nd 2009

The Goldwater Myth

David Frum has a very provocative column up about the Goldwater Myth, essentially that Goldwater’s loss was, in the long run, a huge gain for conservatism down the road that ultimately justified and perhaps vindicated Barry. Frum’s counter is that the ultimate conservative movement ascend was more a matter of happenstance than an inevitable offspring of Goldwater’s groundwork, and that in the meantime, Goldwater’s disastrous presidential campaign helped create the Great Society, and with it all kinds of things like Medicare and Medicaid. Money quote:

The myth is the myth of the Goldwater triumph of 1964. It goes approximately as follows:

In 1964, after years of watered down politics, Republicans turned to a true conservative, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Yes, Goldwater lost badly. But in losing, he bequeathed conservatives a national organization – and a new champion, Ronald Reagan. Goldwater’s defeat opened the way to Reagan’s ultimate triumph and the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s and 1990s.

This (the myth continues) is the history we need to repeat. If we can just find the right messenger in 2012, the message that worked for Reagan will work again. And even if we cannot find the right messenger, losing on principle in 2012 will open the way to a more glorious victory in 2016.

What happened in 1964 was an unredeemed and unmitigated catastrophe for Republicans and conservatives. The success that followed 16 years later was a matter of happenstance, not of strategy. That’s the real lesson of 1964, and it is the lesson that conservatives need most to take to heart today.

1964 was always bound to be a Democratic year. The difference between Barry Goldwater’s 38.5% candidacy and the 44% or 45% that might have been won by a Nelson Rockefeller or a William Scranton was the effect on down-ballot races.

Republicans lost 36 seats in the House of Representatives in 1964, giving Democrats the biggest majority in the House any party has enjoyed since the end of World War II. Republicans dropped 2 seats in the Senate, yielding a Democratic majority of 68-32, again the most lopsided standing in any election from the war to the present day.

This huge congressional majority – call it the Goldwater majority – liberated President Johnson from any dependence on conservative southern Democrats. In 1964, only 46 Senate Democrats voted for the great Civil Rights Act; 21 opposed. Without Republican support, the Act would not have passed. (And indeed while 68% of Senate Democrats voted for the Act, 81% of Senate Republicans did.)

While dependent on southern Democrats, President Johnson had to develop a careful, pragmatic domestic agenda that balanced zigs to the right (in 1964, Congress passed the first across the board income tax cut since the 1920s) with zags to the left (the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 which created Head Start among other less successful programs).

Then came the Republican debacle of November 1964. Goldwater’s overwhelming defeat invited a tsunami of liberal activism. The 89th Congress elected in 1964 enacted both Medicaid and Medicare. It passed a new immigration law, opening the way to a surge of 40 million newcomers, the overwhelming majority of them from poor Third World countries. It dramatically expanded welfare eligibility and other anti-poverty programs that together transformed the urban poor of the 1950s into the urban underclass of the 1970s and 1980s.

I can’t find a lot there to deny, really.

As a very interesting addendum, Doug Mataconis coins The Myth of the ‘94 Republica Takeover. Given Frum’s lead, you can probably make a roundabout guess as the gist of that one.

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2 Comments »

  1. And the ‘Goldwater Myth’ was Paul’s best hope for relevance.

    Although I don’t buy what Frum said regarding the historical aspect. It seems to me that in 1964 the country was, in part, re-electing the dead JFK and the GOP was getting hammered whatever they did. I do agree, however, that trying to repeat intellectual and political history of the sort Frum describes as the “Goldwater Myth” is foolish regardless of the truth of the historical interpretation.

    You need to abstract from history in order to distill a strategy from it. In this case, I would say “enough newness to appear new and enough of the old to get there”. That’s Reagan, that’s Clinton, that’s Obama. There’s no point trying to raise Reagan, Obama was wise not to try to raise Clinton and when Obama’s done, assuming the memory of him is happy, there won’t be any point trying to raise him when, at some stage down the road, the Democratic Party re-enters the political desert.

    Comment by Adam — 3/2/2009 @ 4:25 am

  2. I think that one of the most important points that Frum makes in the article is this one:

    [T]he liberal triumph of 1964 set in motion the train of disasters that laid liberalism low in the 1980s. But those disasters followed from choices and decisions that liberals made – not from some multiyear conservative grand strategy for success in 1980. It was not Goldwater who made Reagan possible. It was Carter. Had Carter governed more successfully, the Goldwater disaster would have been just a disaster, with no silver lining. And there was nothing about the Goldwater disaster that made the Carter failure more necessary, more inevitable.

    And anyway, as the years pass, the consequences of Reagan’s victory look more temporary and provisional, at least in domestic policy – while the consequences of Goldwater’s defeat look more enduring and more consequential. The Reagan tax cuts are long gone. Medicare is still here.

    This all goes back to the idea that the historian Robert Higgs put forward in his book Crisis & Leviathan — once the government expands, it never retracts back to where it was.

    Comment by Doug Mataconis — 3/2/2009 @ 9:29 am

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