He Was Right

Looking back at the Goldwater moment

Glenn Garvin from the March 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Perlstein is equally merciless when it comes to Vietnam. Goldwater, he notes, insistently and correctly argued that Kennedy and Johnson had gotten the United States far more deeply involved than anyone realized, that we were sliding into an impossible "defensive war" that neither Congress nor the American public had ever authorized. Johnson replied, straight-faced, with the most notorious lie in the history of American politics: "We are not going to send American boys nine or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." As he spoke, his best and brightest advisors were putting the finishing touches on a deployment plan that would have nearly 200,000 American soldiers in Vietnam within a year.

Of course, on Election Day in 1964, Johnson won 43 million votes to Goldwater's 27 million. Perlstein takes unholy delight in quoting the post-mortems in which the usual gang of Washington idiots, from Scotty Reston to Arthur Schlesinger, pronounced the Republican Party officially dead and the Goldwaterites banished to the wilderness. They were absurdly, comically wrong. It didn't take long for Americans to recognize that Goldwater had been right about Vietnam (it was a war) and civil rights (you really couldn't make people like each other by passing a law). The GOP made a strong showing in the 1966 congressional elections and retook the presidency in 1968. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, who first emerged as a national political figure with a wildly popular nationally televised pro-Goldwater speech in the final days of the '64 campaign, would be elected president.

There was one strain of the Republican Party banished into the wilderness after 1964 -- the patrician Eastern liberals that Goldwater so despised. (Though the controversy over the martyr act of Vermont Sen. James Jeffords last year shows that a few tattered survivors still remain, like Japanese soldiers holed up in the caves of the Philippines.) The two currents that Goldwater brought into the party, the libertarians and the Southerners, coexist uneasily. If there were any doubt in which of them Goldwater himself felt more at home, it was resolved when he famously suggested that Republicans ought to "kick Jerry Falwell right in the ass."

Perlstein, surveying all this nearly four decades later, concludes: "Here is one time, at least, in which history was written by the losers." If only. It's fair to say that Goldwater won a permanent place in America's political debate for libertarian ideas. But few of them have triumphed. Taxes consume a higher percentage of national income than ever, and George W. Bush managed to pass a tax cut last year only with the Keynesian argument that it would stimulate a lagging economy, not because hundreds of congressmen started sporting TAXATION IS THEFT buttons.

The drug war has become the new Vietnam, consuming an ever-larger share of resources and lives. New groups demanding entitlements disguised as civil rights, from non-smokers to the handicapped, pop up with depressing regularity. Even the Reagan Revolution was mostly imaginary. The Energy and Education Departments are still standing, and federal expenditures and the federal deficit climbed steadily throughout his administration. Even the much-ballyhooed reductions in force in the Washington bureaucracy during Reagan's first year in office amounted to less than four-tenths of a percent of the federal workforce and were quickly swallowed up by new hiring.

What we really wound up with was not history written by libertarians, but the acid punch line of a joke that made the rounds in 1966: They told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we'd have a war in Southeast Asia, civil and racial unrest, and a ruined economy. I went ahead and voted for him anyway, and it turned out they were absolutely right.

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Pingback| 4.11.10 @ 4:41AM

Inside the Mind of David Toyne » Blog Archive » Turning Point links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…million Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian men, women and children.  Who was the extreme warmongering psychopath again? At least Goldwater wanted to get in and leave quickly or get out altogether. An interesting article in Reason discusses the Goldwater movement and how, after the political beating he got in the election, a joke about Goldwater went: They told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we’d have a war in Southeast…

|5.19.10 @ 11:31PM|#

Cursed with two plundering, rapacious younger sisters, I grew up with a highly developed sense of private property (it's my room, get out) and freedom of association (I don't want to have a tea party with you and Mrs. Flopsy). This did not always put me in good stead with my parents, or with an angry sixth-grade teacher who insisted that no decent human being could question the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My doubts -- if you own a restaurant, aren't you entitled to decide who can eat there?

It's good to see that you carried your childhood thinking forward and are applying it to your adult thinking.

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