The MAGA New Right

Barry Goldwater

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Barry Goldwater (1909–1998)

United States Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987); 1964 Republican presidential nominee; “first political apostle of fusionism” (Lee Edwards); the figure whose 1964 campaign — built on The Conscience of a Conservative (1960, ghostwritten by L. Brent Bozell Jr.) and ending in landslide defeat — both established the fusionist framework as the dominant idiom of American conservatism for the next half-century and laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s political career; central also to the wiki’s John Birch Society case study, where Goldwater followed William F. Buckley Jr.’s playbook of repudiating Robert Welch personally while courting Bircher rank-and-file.

Why He Matters Here

Goldwater is the political pivot between Frank Meyer’s intellectual fusionism and Reagan’s electoral fusionism. He is the man who turned a magazine-and-think-tank movement into a national political force capable of (eventually) winning the presidency. He is also a key empirical case for the wiki’s Counterrevolution thesis: the canonical “responsible conservative” of 1964 spent the campaign managing — not expelling — the conspiratorial right-wing base.

The Conscience of a Conservative

In 1959, a group of conservatives led by Clarence Manion (a Bircher contributor to National Review) commissioned Bozell to ghostwrite a “pamphlet on Americanism” under Goldwater’s name. The result, The Conscience of a Conservative (April 1960), sold 3.5 million copies and became the most influential political manifesto of postwar American conservatism. Edwards: “rivaled in American political history, perhaps, only by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.”

The book canonized the Frank Meyer fusionist synthesis in political form: traditionalism (man as a “spiritual animal”), libertarianism (anti-leviathan, tax limitation, states’ rights), and anti-communism (“Why not victory?”). It supplied the political vocabulary the conservative movement used for the next thirty years.

The wiki’s structural reading of the book is shaped by Bozell’s authorship: the canonical fusionist manifesto was ghostwritten by the same author who, two years later, would publish the foundational anti-fusionist essay arguing that the free society’s priority over the good society “is the story of the decline of the West.” See L. Brent Bozell Jr..

The 1964 Campaign

For the convention itself see 1964 Republican National Convention (event page). Goldwater won the Republican nomination on a platform that “might have been drafted by Frank Meyer” (Edwards). Key elements:

  • The “ordered liberty” passage of his July 1964 acceptance speech — written by Harry V. Jaffa (who wrote the entire speech in a single overnight session; see My Father and the Birth of Modern Conservatism): “freedom made orderly for the Nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature’s God; freedom — balanced so that order, lacking liberty, will not become a slave of the prison cell; balanced so that liberty, lacking order, will not become the license of the mob and the jungle.” This is the constitutional theology of mainstream Republican fusionism, written by the man who would later become the West Coast Straussian patriarch (The Claremonters, Declarationism).
  • “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The defining slogan of the campaign and of the 1964 GOP convention. Galvanized conservatives; alarmed moderates and the press; was widely (and intentionally) decontextualized by media coverage that reduced it to “extremism is no vice.” What was unknown for decades: Jaffa drew these lines directly from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail — deliberately placing Goldwater on King’s rhetorical shoulders at the moment when Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act. Goldwater “never would have said [the words] if Goldwater had known what he was saying” (Philip Jaffa). Jaffa kept the King source secret for over fifty years.
  • The platform. Anti-Social-Security, anti-subsidy, pro-privatization, “law and order,” “morality in government,” “Why not victory?” against communism. The first national articulation of an unembarrassed conservatism after thirty years of New Deal-Era Republican accommodation.
  • Demographic strategy. Goldwater explicitly listed “the lazy, dole-happy people who want to feed on the fruits of somebody else’s labor” as voters whose support he did not want. The campaign was the prototype for later Republican coalition strategies that traded racially encoded resentment for working-class white support.
  • The result. LBJ won 61% of the vote, 486 electoral votes, 44 states. Goldwater won six states: the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina) plus Arizona. James Reston: “Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election yesterday but the conservative cause as well.”
  • The actual long-term effect. The Deep South sweep marked the beginning of the realignment that would bring the South into the Republican Party for two generations. Reagan, brought to national attention by his 27 October 1964 televised speech for Goldwater (“A Time for Choosing” — see Ronald Reagan), inherited the apparatus. Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) formalized the Deep-South realignment as a national strategy.

The Civil Rights Act Vote (June 19, 1964)

Per Menand: Goldwater “was, in fact, a lifelong opponent of racial discrimination” — led the fight to desegregate Phoenix public schools as a city councilman; first staff assistant in the Senate was a Black woman; NAACP member. He voted against the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds, advised by Robert Bork (then a Yale Law professor; wrote a 75-page concurrence) and William Rehnquist (then a Phoenix attorney; advised the bill was unconstitutional). Menand: “He was a shaken man afraid he was signing his political death warrant, convinced that the Constitution offered him no other honorable choice.” The wiki’s structural reading: Goldwater’s personal anti-segregationism plus his constitutional anti-Civil-Rights-Act vote is the prototype of the contemporary movement-conservative bind in which racial-formalist legal arguments produce racial-substantive political effects.

”Hunt Where the Ducks Are” (1961)

Per Menand: 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, in Menand’s reading, “an arrow aimed directly at” white Democrats in revolt against integration. “A clear allusion to a prejudice that dared not speak its name.” This is the cleanest single artifact of the early demographic-coalition strategy. The same logic, six decades later, runs through Limbaugh’s September 7, 2016 broadcast denouncing the GOP-establishment “Hispanics are natural conservatives” pitch — see The Shaming of the Never Trumpers.

Black Republican Opposition

Per Delmont: Jackie Robinson, a Nixon-1960 supporter, broke with the Republican Party over Goldwater. Robinson backed Rockefeller and Scranton in the primaries, then organized Republicans and Independents for Lyndon Johnson. Robinson’s post-1964 diagnosis — “If Goldwater has been defeated, but Goldwaterism remains triumphant in GOP councils, America faces a difficult future” — is, six decades early, the wiki’s Counterrevolution thesis. MLK’s contemporary statement: Goldwater’s nomination is “both unfortunate and disastrous… not himself a racist” but articulating “a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to racists.”

The Black-Republican Cliff

Eisenhower 39% (1956), Nixon 32% (1960), Goldwater 6% (1964) — no Republican candidate has reached 15% since. Menand: “Goldwater’s longest-lasting political legacy was to drive African-Americans out of the party of Lincoln.”

The Bircher Episode

Goldwater is central to the wiki’s John Birch Society case study:

  • The 1962 Palm Beach meeting at the Breakers, with Buckley and Russell Kirk. Goldwater pushed back against Kirk’s call for full repudiation: “Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society… I’m not talking about commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks. I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.”
  • The agreed strategy was to attack Robert Welch personally while preserving the rank-and-file. Goldwater followed the script through 1964, denying that Welch’s views “represent the feelings of most members of the John Birch Society.”
  • The 1964 GOP convention voted down a proposed platform plank denouncing the JBS and other extremist groups, then embraced “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
  • September 1965 Goldwater finally went farther, calling on conservatives to resign from the JBS if Welch did not.

The wiki’s reading: Goldwater’s career is the political case study in how mainstream conservatism manages — but does not actually expel — its conspiratorial and racially reactionary base. He is the political precursor to the Reagan-era and Buchanan-era versions of the same management problem, and the canonical illustration of the Dallek thesis that the fusionist boundary was always tactical.

What the New Right Inherits — and Does Not

The contemporary right’s relationship to Goldwater is ambivalent:

  • The constitutionalist-libertarian wing (e.g., the Cato Institute, parts of the Federalist Society orbit) treats Conscience of a Conservative as the touchstone the movement should return to.
  • The postliberals treat Goldwater’s “ordered liberty” rhetoric as nominal cover for a fundamentally libertarian arrangement that has now been exposed as inadequate.
  • The Hard Right treats Goldwater as a hero of unembarrassed white-Southern Republican coalition politics and reads him through “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” rather than the fusionist parts of the speech.

The 1964 campaign’s actual legacy — the Southern realignment, the demographic-coalition strategy, the catastrophist rhetoric of imminent national decline — is more present in the contemporary right than the formal fusionist content of The Conscience of a Conservative.

Later Career

Goldwater served in the Senate again from 1969 to 1987 and grew increasingly heterodox by movement standards. He told Republican leaders in 1974 that Nixon should resign. He criticized the Christian right’s growing influence in the Republican Party in the 1980s (“I am sick and tired of political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are?”). He defended gays serving in the military in his retirement. The Reagan-era movement quietly distanced itself from him; the post-2016 movement has no use for him on these issues.

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