He Knew He Was Right
Louis Menand, The New Yorker, March 26, 2001 (essay-review of Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus); the canonical synthesis of the Goldwater-as-premonition thesis — Goldwater not as the last gasp of the old right but as the first articulation of a backlash politics that Reagan would human-face and Trump would inherit.
Why It Matters Here
Menand’s review is the single cleanest English-language statement of the wiki’s structural reading of Barry Goldwater: the 1964 campaign as part of the wave (alongside the New Left and the counterculture, all responding to the same managerial-liberal “establishment”) rather than as an anachronism. It supplies the wiki’s key facts about the 1964 RNC and the campaign — Civil Rights Act vote, Bork’s seventy-five-page concurrence, Rehnquist’s “unconstitutional” verdict, “hunt where the ducks are,” the Reagan “Time for Choosing” telecast, and the Kevin-Phillips Emerging Republican Majority paradigm shift.
Core Claims
- Goldwater was a man of the sixties. The Conscience of a Conservative sold next to Catcher in the Rye in college bookstores. The era was up for grabs; “first it veered left, but in the end it went right.” John Wayne, Buckley, and Young Americans for Freedom occupy the structural slot usually given to Ginsberg, Marcuse, and SDS.
- The shared enemy was the establishment. Goldwater’s hatred of “top-down managerial liberalism” was, “at its deepest level, not very different from the New Left’s.” Both sides were “haunted by the spectre of soul death.”
- The Civil Rights Act vote. Goldwater voted no on June 19, 1964, two weeks after sealing the nomination by winning California. He was “not a segregationist, nor was he any kind of racist” (Phoenix school desegregation, NAACP member). He voted no on constitutional grounds — advised by Robert Bork (75-page concurrence) and William Rehnquist (Phoenix attorney; “unconstitutional”). “He was a shaken man afraid he was signing his political death warrant.”
- The Southern realignment. Goldwater carried five Deep South states (Mississippi 87%) plus Arizona. Eisenhower had taken 40% of the Black vote in 1956; Nixon 32% in 1960; Goldwater 6% — “Goldwater’s longest-lasting political legacy was to drive African-Americans out of the party of Lincoln.”
- “Hunt where the ducks are.” Goldwater told Georgia activists in 1961 that Republicans should stop chasing Black votes and “go hunting where the ducks are.” His 1964 slogan — “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right” — was “an arrow aimed directly at” white Democrats in revolt against integration. “A clear allusion to a prejudice that dared not speak its name.”
- Reagan as the human-faced sequel. Reagan’s 27 October 1964 telecast for Goldwater (“A Time for Choosing”) was “in every other way a complete imitation of a Roosevelt fireside chat. He even used the New Deal phrase ‘rendezvous with destiny’ to apostrophize the conservative crusade to end the era of New Deal-style government.” Reagan was the actor; Goldwater was not — that one personality difference is what bridged the 1964 debacle to the 1980 landslide.
- The structural lesson. Goldwater’s tragedy is that “the philosophical language of conservatism was read by many voters as code for resistance to forced integration, and in the end he could not disentangle himself from an alliance that he had not desired.” A philosophy “is not going to get very far without voters.” Most ducks aren’t interested in philosophy.
Important Facts the Wiki Inherits
- Bill Middendorf (campaign finance chair) entitled his memoir A Glorious Disaster — the conservative-insurgent self-understanding of 1964 was already that the loss was generative.
- Phyllis Schlafly’s self-published A Choice Not an Echo (several hundred thousand copies, summer 1964) framed the convention as an insurgency against “secret kingmakers in New York.”
- Daniel Schorr’s CBS report alleging a Goldwater-German-right linkage (based only on a planned Bavaria vacation) was the moderate-establishment smear that solidified Goldwater delegate loyalty rather than dissolving it.
- Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) was the first explicit paradigm formalizing what Goldwater’s 1964 sweep of the Deep South had revealed.
Cross-References
- Barry Goldwater — the subject
- 1964 Republican National Convention — the event
- Rick Perlstein — author of the book Menand is reviewing
- The Conscience of a Conservative — the manifesto
- Ronald Reagan — “A Time for Choosing” launched here
- Phyllis Schlafly — A Choice Not an Echo
- Robert Bork — wrote the 75-page constitutional concurrence
- Louis Menand — author
- How the 1964 Republican Convention Sparked a Revolution From the Right — Perlstein’s later short version of the same argument