Thursday, December 07, 2006
We need more Barry Goldwater conservatives
I am working on a 15-20 page paper for my Political Theory class and the topic is Barry Goldwater's political philosophy. After reading more than 1,500 pages on the guy, he is an amazing character. Some of the things that stood out:
On liberty:
Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look at only the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature. … Liberals, on the other hand—in the name of a concern of “human beings”—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. (Conscience of a Conservative, pgs. 10-11)
On Communism:
Free enterprise has removed the economic and social conditions that might have made a class struggle possible. Mammoth productivity, wide distribution of wealth, high standards of living, the trade labor movement—these and other factors have eliminated … incentive there might have been for the ‘proletariat’ to rise up, peacefully or otherwise” (Conscience of a Conservative, pg. 69).
On his legacy:
I still get mad at people who say I was Reagan’s political godfather or his prophet opening up the wilderness for him. Both of us are and have been our own men. We are merely symbols of a deeper political movement. I don’t believe that Reagan or I started a conservative revolution because most of our history the majority of Americans have considered themselves to be conservatives. … I began to tap, and Reagan reached to the bottom of, a deep reservoir that already existed (Goldwater, pgs 387-388).
And I found this quote pretty striking from one of the books I read (Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein):
Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, reregulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations— and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of those positions to get taken seriously for their party's nomination.
We need a Barry Goldwater today.
Labels: Greatness
