Almost President (28 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Barry Goldwater

1964

The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please, as long as they don't hurt anyone in the process.

By the 2000s, a time of seemingly unprecedented political polarization, many Americans wondered what had become of bipartisanship? Part of the answer lies in Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. Though it ended in a landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson, Goldwater's run dramatically accelerated a partisan realignment that left Republicans and Democrats with less in common than perhaps at any time since the Civil War. Goldwater's candidacy was the tipping point that remade the Republicans into a fundamentally white, conservative party with virtually no liberal and few minority members, while the Democrats were converted into a fundamentally liberal party that draws heavily on the overwhelming support of racial and ethnic minorities.

Such stark ideological and demographic divides between the two parties are without precedent in American history. Before the changes wrought by Goldwater's candidacy, the two major parties were “big tent” parties, and each contained considerable ideological diversity. Each had a liberal wing that advocated for a strong and vital federal government and a conservative wing that sought to limit federal authority, especially in economic affairs and in regulating social relationships.

In those earlier times, bipartisanship was more readily achieved when members of the respective wings of each party would form a coalition, liberal or conservative, which was based on ideological principles rather than partisan identification. Bipartisanship is difficult to achieve when a fundamentally conservative Republican Party can find few conservative Democrats willing to cross party lines to support its agenda and a fundamentally liberal Democratic Party can find even fewer liberal Republicans to help advance its programs.

One issue truly caused this realignment—not tax policy, defense policy, or even abortion. Those issues—and many more—became important partisan markers later on. The initial catalyst for party polarization was the issue of race and whether the federal government has a role in promoting racial equality.

Before Goldwater, the Republican Party platform, dating to the time of Abraham Lincoln, had consistently argued the federal government had such a role. After Goldwater, the GOP began to argue such a role was improper. This had been the Democratic Party's position until shortly after World War II when, under the leadership of men like Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey, Democrats began to advocate federal expansion and protection of the civil rights of African Americans.

This switch meant that the Republican Party lost what was once the substantial support of racial minorities, particularly African Americans. What the Republicans gained in return was the allegiance of white Southerners who had previously been devoted to the Democratic Party for generations. Both changes in allegiance can be dated to Goldwater's 1964 campaign.

The idea of realigning the two parties so that one party was fundamentally liberal and the other fundamentally conservative did not begin with Goldwater. Franklin Roosevelt, for one, had tried and failed to force a similar political realignment while president. He tried to purge Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party after his court-packing scheme failed in 1938. He then tried to lure liberal Republicans into the Democratic fold in 1944 by suggesting that Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate Roosevelt had defeated in 1940, rejoin the Democratic Party, perhaps as Roosevelt's running mate. FDR had thought economic issues alone had the power to force a change in party loyalty, but economics did not trump culture. Southern whites were not yet ready to leave the Democratic Party, and Willkie and other liberal Republicans were not ready to come in. Goldwater, then, would achieve in a landslide loss a feat that a man elected president four times could not, providing one of history's great examples of how losing campaigns, even ones defeated overwhelmingly, can have greater consequences than winning ones.

A number of prominent Republicans, since and including Goldwater, have argued that race was not the issue that turned the South from the center of Democratic power to a bedrock of GOP electoral strength. They instead cite Goldwater's role in founding the modern conservative movement, which reached its apex in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan. That is certainly a huge part of Goldwater's legacy, but it, too, is rooted in the issue of race. Surveys by the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center suggest, in the words of authors Thomas and Mary Edsall, that the issue of race was still so powerful in the South in 1964 that it “actually produced an
ideological
conversion of poor Southern whites from a deeply held economic liberalism to economic conservatism.”

The role race played in prompting this conservative conversion was masked because Goldwater could speak to “white backlash”—white resentment at the assertion of minority rights—in ways that were understood by his audience but that were not overtly or condemnably racist. Goldwater's use of “new political images and code words of racial antipathy,” his biographer Robert Alan Goldberg points out, unfortunately, still remains the roundabout way race is generally discussed in our society.

In the half-century after Goldwater's campaign, the Republican Party failed to attract much support from minority groups, not just African Americans. In recent elections, for example, Republicans failed to win even a third of the Hispanic vote. By 2008, the GOP was receiving so little support from Hispanics and African Americans that a Republican candidate for president would need to win 60 percent of the white vote to win election. With non-Hispanic whites scheduled to be in the minority for the first time in the nation's history by 2045, these demographic changes pose a significant long-term challenge for Republicans.

The seminal event in turning the white South from Democratic to Republican was Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators to oppose the measure, which passed the Senate by a seventy-three to twenty-seven vote. The legislation was favored by virtually all Republican congressional leaders plus the most recent GOP presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, and the early frontrunner for the 1964 Republican nomination, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. This landmark legislation, which had dominated national news coverage for more than a year before it was finally approved on July 2, 1964, banned racial discrimination and segregation in public education, employment, and in the use of public accommodations. The bill was a pet project of Lyndon Johnson that was promoted as fulfilling the legacy of the martyred president John Kennedy.

Before casting his “no” vote, Goldwater specifically repudiated the position of segregationists by stating that he was “unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort.” But the problem of discrimination, Goldwater said, “is fundamentally one of [the] heart.” He acknowledged, “Some law can help, but not law that embodies features . . . which fly in the face of the Constitution and require for their effective execution the creation of a police state.” Goldwater said the act was unconstitutional because nowhere in the Constitution is promoting racial equality listed among the functions of the federal government. On the other hand, he said, the federal system outlined in the Constitution did provide the states wide leeway to “nourish local differences, even local cultures.” This seemed an implicit endorsement of the “Jim Crow” laws that enforced racial segregation in the South.

Goldwater was particularly opposed to provisions in the Civil Rights Act that prohibited landlords from refusing to rent to people based on race and that prohibited employers from refusing to hire people based on race. On the campaign trail, Goldwater explained, “No law can make a person like another if he doesn't want to.” A few commentators praised Goldwater's political courage in taking what was perceived to be an unpopular stand on civil rights, while others charged he was intent on returning blacks to near servitude. A politically shrewd judgment came from the occupant of the White House who had pushed the legislation through Congress. In signing his civil rights legislation into law, Johnson told his aide, Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

Goldwater certainly hoped so. He had been mulling such a remarkable political development for quite some time. Goldwater once famously declared, with a self-deprecation that charmed many, “You know, I haven't got a really first-class brain,” but he possessed exceptional political intuition. As early as 1953, having just arrived in Washington, D.C., as a freshman senator, he wrote in his journal that he was detecting “a cleavage that was new” in American politics and that the opportunity for future Republican growth lay in recruiting Southern Democrats “who believe in states' rights and who believe that the federal government should be out of the state and local government picture entirely, and out of the affairs of business as well.”

Goldwater would have observed that South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist “Dixiecrat” campaign for president just a few years before had demonstrated that the civil rights issue had the power to break the century-long hold of the Democratic Party on the South. Thurmond had received only a small fraction of the national popular vote (2.4 percent), but he carried four Deep South states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—that Goldwater would carry as well.

Goldwater further recognized that in the post-war period, the South and the Southwest were the fastest-growing regions in the country, and the regions shared not only an abundance of sunshine, but also an antipathy to a federal government that seemed a distant interloper in local cultures and economies. He began to ponder, in his words, “a realignment of Southern conservative Democrats with Democrats and Republicans of the West and Middle West” united in their opposition to federal authority. The new Republican Party Goldwater helped form would be a fusion of Southern race-based populism with Western libertarianism and the remnants of traditional Midwest conservatism.

Interestingly, the South and the West had both once been hotbeds of populist activism that had
demanded
federal intervention to counter the injustices the regions' residents believed they suffered from railroads, banks, and other business interests. But it was another achievement of the Goldwater campaign that it began a process that redefined populism, replacing traditional populist antipathy toward big business with antipathy toward big government. Where the populism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had seen blacks and whites as suffering from the same economic inequities, the new conservative populism espoused by Goldwater argued that big government was tipping the balance in favor of minorities at the expense of low- and middle-income whites. It was the Democrats' misfortune that where Franklin Roosevelt's “New Deal” had been seen as providing government help based on economic need, Johnson's “Great Society” was perceived as being based on race and providing more benefits to minorities than whites. Goldwater, it was said, had discovered how to exploit the type of populist discontents that “appear in an affluent society, and this he did with unusual self-awareness and clarity,” said historian Richard Hofstadter.

The early 1960s were certainly a time of many discontents. Traditional values seemed under assault. The Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, an Eisenhower appointee, had issued a number of controversial decisions. The court ruled that mandatory prayer in the public schools was unconstitutional at a time when pornography and a perceived decline in sexual morality was a growing concern. The civil rights of accused criminals were expanded at the very time Americans were increasingly concerned about rising street crime.

The push by African Americans to assert their civil rights was perceived as more than just another sign that the traditional norms of society were under assault. An influential study published in 1991 by Thomas and Mary Edsall argues that the high profile issue of civil rights triggered a “chain reaction” that exposed middle class white anxieties on a host of issues, all of which had a racial component—even the surge of rock 'n' roll and the youth culture that frightened many parents was blamed on the infusion of wanton and promiscuous black culture into an otherwise polite white society.

Goldwater saw the civil rights protests, the coddling of criminals, and the increasing burden of the welfare state as all of one package, and he was able to address the collective anxiety around these issues, the Edsalls noted, “without the liability of being labeled a racist.”

As a Westerner from Arizona, Goldwater was not saddled with the South's history on race. It is notable that all the Republican presidential nominees since Goldwater, with the exception of Michigan's Gerald Ford in 1976, have identified themselves as Westerners even as they have built upon the Republicans' so-called Southern strategy. Even both presidents Bush, each born in New England but hailing from Texas, emphasized the Western nature of that state, never its legacy as a member of the old Confederacy. With no Southern vice presidential nominees either, the GOP's “Southern strategy” seems to refrain from placing any true Southerners on the national ticket lest the issue of race become too explicit.