Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (11 page)

It is unlikely that the speech changed many minds about the election, but it did present the conservative vision in what later became familiar as the classic Reagan style. There was always a concreteness to Reagan’s rhetoric, and he was always trying to advance an argument. He blended the telling (if often misleading) statistic with the cheerful quip and the homely parable.

“Well,” he said, deploying his favorite word to signal his informality,
“the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

“Actually,” he said at another point, “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

These were Reagan classics. But he also pioneered many arguments—about government spending and government power—that the right would use into the present day. “Welfare spending,” he said, is “10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty.

“Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family,” he added, and then offered the sort of light little dig that became his trademark: “It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.” Statistics of this sort (arresting but also misleading because they lumped so many different forms of spending together) would be cited again and again by critics of the welfare state—right on through to Paul Ryan in the Obama years.

Reagan’s criticisms of Social Security would be heard again when George W. Bush pressed—unsuccessfully—to privatize part of the program. “A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary—his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that
would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65,” Reagan said. “The government promises 127. He could live it up until he’s 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security.”

“A Time for Choosing” is largely Reagan speaking to the conservative faithful, yet there were glimpses of how he would later move the country as a whole by putting the rhetoric of the New Deal with which he was so familiar to work on behalf of its unraveling.

His warnings against the onset of socialism under the name of liberalism were clear enough. “Last February 19th at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, ‘If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States.’ ” And then the clincher: “I think that’s exactly what he will do.” Barack Obama was not the first Democrat to be accused of socialism.

There was Reagan the Warrior, echoing
The Conscience of a Conservative
by putting life in second place behind liberty, but in terms utterly accessible to a broad audience. “You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery,” he said, dismissing those who believe that “nothing in life is worth dying for” and asking if Moses should “have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs.”

“Should Christ have refused the cross?” he went on. “Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain.”

He closed with an echo of FDR, almost shocking in the context of the rhetorical war on his legacy that Reagan had just waged. “You and I,” he declared, “have a rendezvous with destiny.” And then the formulation that would serve him well for the next two decades: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

Reagan, history would show, made his career with that evening’s broadcast. But in its time, “The Speech” was a sermon of affirmation for the faithful,
not a closing argument that would assuage widespread doubts about Goldwater. Reagan lifted himself up, but there was nothing he could do for his candidate.

Goldwater’s defeat was so comprehensive that the smart punditry of the time assumed the right wing was buried for good.
“No modern precedent exists for the revival of a party so badly defeated, so intensely discredited, and so essentially split as the Republican Party is today,” Gilder and Chapman wrote, reflecting a widespread view.

In light of the polemics around race and politics during the Obama years, it should be noted that in the more progressive regions of the party, loud cries of alarm were raised at the prospect of the GOP becoming the party of southern reaction. In 1966, Edward W. Brooke, the forty-seven-year old Republican attorney general of Massachusetts, published
The Challenge of Change,
a liberal Republican manifesto. He was direct about the dangers of a white southern
takeover of the party:

Personally, I would be deeply discouraged were the Republican Party to alter its position in order to accommodate itself to the attitudes of the traditional deep South. For that would mean a realignment of all of our thinking, a rejection of the better part of Republican ideals and tradition. Republicanism oriented toward segregation and racism would have nothing in common with the origins and history of the party. Still—the argument goes—it
would
have a permanent base of political support, and we cannot afford to ignore practical political considerations in favor of our personal penchants.

The argument was, indeed, personal for Brooke, who would go on that year to become the first African-American to be popularly elected to the United States Senate. In his book, Brooke challenged the Southern Strategy on practical as well as moral grounds.
The conservative southern votes the GOP right was seeking, he argued, would prove to be “fool’s gold” because an appeal to the Old South would eventually hurt Republicans in the region’s
rising (and moderate) metropolitan areas. Brooke’s argument would not prevail, but it would finally win some vindication in 2008 when the metropolitan areas of Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina tilted those states toward the country’s first African-American president.

Theodore H. White, the master chronicler of presidential campaigns, used a down-to-earth metaphor to describe the
“desperate condition” of the party:

Someone had said that an American political party is so low-grade a zoological organism that, like a worm, if it is chopped in two, one or the other half can wriggle away and thereafter regenerate itself. In 1964 the Republican Party has indeed chopped itself in two—yet in all the months since then, to the day of this writing, no one can tell whether the two halves can sew themselves together, or whether enough vitality remains, in one or the other half, to find a direction in which they can invite the American people to move.

Yet White acknowledged that it was hard to know which aspects of the election might “intrigue future storytellers.” He added that “looking back, they might find in the election of 1964 the seed-names of some entirely new era.” Reagan, of course would be most important of those, but countless young conservatives—Vin Weber and George Will (twenty-three years old that year) among them—would be inspired by a glorious defeat that would change history and provide the right with templates it would use for the next half century.

The era saw the first start-ups in creating alternative means of communication for conservatives—through books, broadcasts, and mail. The core ideas laid out in Goldwater’s short book would mark the movement, too: ideas about liberalism as a path to socialism, about free markets and individual liberty, about the need for militancy against the communist threat. The political power of white backlash first became obvious in 1964, as Brooke feared it would, and the Republican Party began the long transition that would make it the champion of a new Solid South. The paranoid style of the farther reaches of the right and the popularity of conspiracy theories would endure, as well. Republicans and the broader conservative movement would continue to be torn, as the GOP was at the 1964 convention, between their obligations to
resist extremism and the temptation to harness the political energy of the far right.
“The future of the Birch Society and the radical right will very largely be shaped by the way business, conservatives, and the Republican Party police the boundaries of their movement,” Alan F. Westin, a Columbia University professor, wrote in 1962. Those boundaries were to become quite porous with the rise of the Tea Party.

But Goldwater’s experience was also a cautionary tale, not only for Republican politicians but also for conservatives themselves, as the eleven-year-old Vin Weber had noticed. It was not possible to ride roughshod rhetorically over government programs that were firmly rooted in American life. In this sense, New Deal liberals had become the party of conservatism, measured as the preservation of a status quo that included many benefits from government. Goldwater had characterized farm programs as a “mess of oppression”—and he was trounced in traditionally Republican farm states. As White put it, “Forced to choose, the American farmer went along with what government had given him.” The elderly, as Vin Weber’s great-aunts had taught him, did not welcome a form of “economic freedom” that would leave them without Social Security. And in a nuclear world, Americans were uneasy with a politician who spoke of the utility of smaller nuclear weapons and was so quick to say “that we would rather die than lose our freedom.” In a pinch, most Americans might well believe that. But it was a choice they preferred to avoid.

And so conservatives would go through a long two-steps-forward, one-step-back period. They would hold to Goldwater’s creed but learn from his mistakes. They might compromise a bit, here and there. The compromises would never sit quite right with many of the rank and file and would, over time, feed a new sense of disappointment. But the conservatives were also realists, and did not want to reproduce Goldwater-size margins of defeat, election after election.

Workaday Republican politicians recalibrated. They came to accept that conservative activists were now an important part of their party even as the party regulars worked to prevent the right-wing enthusiasts pushing the party toward the father shoals of unelectability.

The two politicians who learned these lessons best—from very different starting points—were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Nixon, once an Eisenhower-style Modern Republican, could count votes. He knew that conservatives could block his last chance at the presidency, and he moved shrewdly to co-opt them where he could and to defeat them where he had to. He also understood that white southern votes were up for grabs, and he intended to make them his.

Reagan had an ideologue’s faith but a practical temperament. He would always be the movement’s hero, but he would not let the movement dictate his choices, either over how to reach power or on what to do once he secured it.

In succession, Nixon and Reagan would seek practical ways of bringing to life the conservative majority that de Toledano, Rusher, and the South’s Charles Wallace Collins insisted was there for the creation. Both of them, Nixon especially, would also leave many of the conservatives’ dreams unfulfilled.

“Government hasn’t been radically rolled back. The Reagan gains are pretty evanescent from a certain point of view.”

If Barry Goldwater’s campaign began the transformation of the Republican Party and American conservatism, its short-term effects were catastrophic for scores of Republican politicians, who went down to defeat in the LBJ wave. American was clearly not yet ready for the new conservatism. But 1964 was a very good year for Richard Nixon. He was the one Republican who figured out precisely where to position himself in relation both to the new conservative movement and to the older middle-of-the-road part of his party that would be searching for a savior four years later. Nineteen sixty-four was also the breakthrough year for Ronald Reagan. For many conservatives, the eventual disappointments of the Nixon years came as no great surprise. Those of the Reagan era did, which is why they try to overlook them.

Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory and, even more, his 1972 landslide were the
first harbingers of what his lieutenants labeled, quite simply, “the New Majority.” Since Republicans won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, Nixon’s partisans were not deluded in thinking they created something new. A brilliant young Nixon campaign aide named Kevin Phillips assembled all the numbers, charts, and maps to make the case for what was coming in
The Emerging Republican Majority,
published a year after Nixon’s victory. It was shrewd and persuasive—and it petrified Democrats.