Posted on 03/06/2009 4:35:47 PM PST by yongin
It's CPAC weekend - the grand rallying of the conservative clan here in Washington. It's a season where conservatives from across the country meet to compare notes, share stories, and seek political consensus. The consensus forming this year however is an ominously dangerous one - ominously dangerous to conservatives themselves that is.
Conservatives live in thrall to a historical myth, and this myth may soon cost us dearly.
The myth is the myth of the Goldwater triumph of 1964. It goes approximately as follows:
In 1964, after years of watered down politics, Republicans turned to a true conservative, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Yes, Goldwater lost badly. But in losing, he bequeathed conservatives a national organization – and a new champion, Ronald Reagan. Goldwater’s defeat opened the way to Reagan’s ultimate triumph and the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s and 1990s.
This (the myth continues) is the history we need to repeat. If we can just find the right messenger in 2012, the message that worked for Reagan will work again. And even if we cannot find the right messenger, losing on principle in 2012 will open the way to a more glorious victory in 2016.
The Goldwater myth shuts down all attempts to reform and renew our conservative message for modern times. And it offers a handy justification for nominating a 2012 presidential candidate who might otherwise seem disastrously unelectable. Altogether, the myth invites dangerous and self-destructive behavior by a party that cannot afford either.
What happened in 1964 was an unredeemed and unmitigated catastrophe for Republicans and conservatives. The success that followed 16 years later was a matter of happenstance, not of strategy. That’s the real lesson of 1964, and it is the lesson that conservatives need most to take to heart today.
1964 was always bound to be a Democratic year. The difference between Barry Goldwater’s 38.5% candidacy and the 44% or 45% that might have been won by a Nelson Rockefeller or a William Scranton was the effect on down-ballot races.
Republicans lost 36 seats in the House of Representatives in 1964, giving Democrats the biggest majority in the House any party has enjoyed since the end of World War II. Republicans dropped 2 seats in the Senate, yielding a Democratic majority of 68-32, again the most lopsided standing in any election from the war to the present day.
This huge congressional majority - call it the Goldwater majority - liberated President Johnson from any dependence on conservative southern Democrats. In 1964, only 46 Senate Democrats voted for the great Civil Rights Act; 21 opposed. Without Republican support, the Act would not have passed. (And indeed while 68% of Senate Democrats voted for the Act, 81% of Senate Republicans did.)
While dependent on southern Democrats, President Johnson had to develop a careful, pragmatic domestic agenda that balanced zigs to the right (in 1964, Congress passed the first across the board income tax cut since the 1920s) with zags to the left (the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 which created Head Start among other less successful programs).
Then came the Republican debacle of November 1964. Goldwater's overwhelming defeat invited a tsunami of liberal activism. The 89th Congress elected in 1964 enacted both Medicaid and Medicare. It passed a new immigration law, opening the way to a surge of 40 million newcomers, the overwhelming majority of them from poor Third World countries. It dramatically expanded welfare eligibility and other anti-poverty programs that together transformed the urban poor of the 1950s into the urban underclass of the 1970s and 1980s.
Suppose history had taken a different bounce in 1964. Suppose somebody other than Sen. Goldwater had won the Republican presidential nomination. Suppose his narrower margin of defeat had preserved those 36 Republican seats in the House – or even possibly gained some seats. (The big Democratic gains in 1958 and 1962 were ripe for a rollback in 1964 – and indeed were rolled back in 1966, when the GOP picked up 47 seats in the House and 3 in the Senate.)
Under those circumstances, the legislation of 1965 might have looked a lot more like the more moderate legislation of 1964. The Voting Rights Act would surely have passed, and so too would some form of health insurance measure for the poor – a measure supported by the American Medical Association and health insurers as well as by congressional liberals. But Medicare might never have happened, or might have taken a less costly form. The immigration bill might have been more carefully written so as to achieve its declared purpose: eliminating racial discrimination in immigration without expanding the overall number of immigrants from the modest level prevailing in the 1950s and early 1960s.
True, the liberal triumph of 1964 set in motion the train of disasters that laid liberalism low in the 1980s. But those disasters followed from choices and decisions that liberals made – not from some multiyear conservative grand strategy for success in 1980. It was not Goldwater who made Reagan possible. It was Carter. Had Carter governed more successfully, the Goldwater disaster would have been just a disaster, with no silver lining. And there was nothing about the Goldwater disaster that made the Carter failure more necessary, more inevitable.
And anyway, as the years pass, the consequences of Reagan’s victory look more temporary and provisional, at least in domestic policy – while the consequences of Goldwater’s defeat look more enduring and more consequential. The Reagan tax cuts are long gone. Medicare is still here.
It’s important for Republicans to absorb and remember this history as they prepare to make their next political choices. Right now, Republicans are gripped by a strong martyr complex. They want to stand up for their beliefs, damn the consequences – in fact the worse the consequences, the more it proves the rightness of our beliefs. If this mood persists further into the 2012 cycle, we will pay a heavy price. 2010 is already shaping up as an inhospitable year for Republicans, especially in the Senate, where the map favors the Democrats. 2012 could be much better – unless we doom ourselves by our own bad choices.
It is this alternative possibility of success or failure down the ballot as well as up that makes it so urgent to disenthrall ourselves of the 1964 myth. Goldwater’s defeat was a prelude to nothing except defeats on the floor of Congress in 1965-66. As the next presidential cycle begins, our priority should be to identify presidential candidates who can run strongly in every region of the country – not because we expect to win every region of the country, but because we want to help elect Republican congressional candidates in every region of the country. Our present strategy is one that is paving the way not merely to another defeat at the presidential level, but to a further shriveling of our congressional party –and an utterly unconstrained Obama second term that will make LBJ’s ascendancy look moderate and humble in comparison.
As to the congressional coatails for LBJ, I don’t think that mattered too much (ick Tom Foley elected), his crap probably would have passed anyway. in 1966 the GOP rebounded big time.
The lasting damage from 1964, his vote against the Civil rights act with taken as racist by blacks though it wasn’t in the case of the few northern Republicans who voted against it, and they’ve voted 90% (more for Obama) rat since due to whole thing turning into some kind of “GOP is racist” meme virus. If they only got 70% of the black vote, they’d never win.
Fieldmarshaldj told me the rat in 1980 ran to his right.
In 1992 he was backing rat Karen English for congress for some silly residency reason allegedly (or abortion, suspected reason).
Yeah, Bill Schulz ran to the right on the pro-life issue. Goldwater lied to pro-life activists that he wouldn’t go against them.
He backed English in AZ-6 over Doug Wead, the Republican, because Wead was one of “those” (Religious Conservatives).
“Yeah, Bill Schulz ran to the right on the pro-life issue. Goldwater lied to pro-life activists that he wouldn’t go against them.”
Not good.
But If that was the only thing I would have still backed Goldwater. Schulz was a Republican and switched I read, one wonders what he was thinking switching to the rat party, I’d be more sympathetic to lifelong pinto dem.
Backing English was inexcusable especially if he lied about the reason. I’m sure he backed AZ newcomer John McCain in 1986.
As it turned out, Johnson's management of the war resulted in the deaths of 58,226 American troops and 304,000 wounded out of the more than TWO MILLION AMERICANS who served there.
Things might be very different today if JFK still lived. MLK was frustrated with JFK dragging his feet over the Civil Rights Bill. JFK needed Southern Dems to support him on other issues. Northern GOP Senators opposed JFK for the sake of being partisan. The GOP Senators supported the Civil Rights Bill due to goodwill on JFK’s death. If JFK didn’t die, the Civil Rights Bill may have not passed during JFK’s term. MLK would have grown frustrated with the Dems and given the GOP another look. As result, blacks wouldn’t be addicted to the Dems.
1964 was always bound to be a Democratic year. The difference between Barry Goldwater's 38.5% candidacy and the 44% or 45% that might have been won by a Nelson Rockefeller or a William Scranton was the effect on down-ballot races... While dependent on southern Democrats, President Johnson had to develop a careful, pragmatic domestic agenda that balanced zigs to the right (in 1964, Congress passed the first across the board income tax cut since the 1920s) with zags to the left (the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 which created Head Start among other less successful programs). Then came the Republican debacle of November 1964. Goldwater's overwhelming defeat invited a tsunami of liberal activism... Suppose history had taken a different bounce in 1964. Suppose somebody other than Sen. Goldwater had won the Republican presidential nomination. Suppose his narrower margin of defeat had preserved those 36 Republican seats in the House -- or even possibly gained some seats. (The big Democratic gains in 1958 and 1962 were ripe for a rollback in 1964 -- and indeed were rolled back in 1966, when the GOP picked up 47 seats in the House and 3 in the Senate.)On the one hand, he says that 1964 was bound to be a Demwit year, but on the other, says that the Demwit gains in 1962 were ripe for a rollback in 1964. He's exactly correct about this: "Goldwater's overwhelming defeat invited a tsunami of liberal activism." Republican candidates in 2010 will be less conservative than ever before, because they saw what happened in 2008 -- count on it. The public perception is always that the Pubbie is a conservative, or at the very least more conservative, than the Demwit; since that was a miserable failure, there's no way there will be deeply conservative candidates in the primaries and general in 2010. But whomever runs won't be able to raise money, won't be able to count on volunteers, won't win. To some extent that will be true of all Republican candidates in 2010, but it will be particularly true of conservative ones. Count on it.
Democratic Debacle (1964 convention, repercussions today)
America Heritage | July 2004 (cover date) | Joshua Zeitz
Posted on 07/27/2004 9:59:49 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1179981/posts
That meshes with the theory that LBJ himself was a player in the JFK assassination. There's some pretty good overall evidence to support that in a book by Barr McClellan (estranged father of one of W's WH press secretaries) titled "Blood, Money, and Power."
I'm not accusing him of being a 'Rat in GOP clothing, but his Republican credentials aren't all that formidable, other than his two years or so as a speechwriter in the W White House.
I understand he's a transplanted Canadian, possibly a dual national.
I went to the YAF convention in New York which resolved to draft Goldwater.
The little girl plucking the daisy petals was the pinnacle of the Left's attack on Goldwater.
Johnson was beseeched by the Joint Chiefs November 1965 for permission to mine Haiphong and bomb Hanoi--he cursed them and shooed them out of the White House.
Johnson did as much as anyone to damage the nation--as much as anyone in its history--before the Islamo-Communist from Kenya.
Frum has an odor about him--he smells like surrender.
I don’t believe that to be the case, but there’s a creepy thing in some kind of bio of or memoirs by LBJ, that he felt like a “vulture” hovering around JFK when he was standing and JFK was at the desk in the Oval Office.
Growing up in Texas, I'm familiar with LBJ's shenanigans. There was the infamous case of Box 13 and the Duke of Duval County, and of course, the claims made by Billy Sol Estes. Of course, the thing about Billy Sol was you'd better count your fingers after shaking hands with him. Is it true? I dunno. I know LBJ was crooked as a dog's hind leg, but so was Billy Sol Estes.
Thanks for the ping!
That's the first I've heard of any of that. I think GOP Senators supported the bill because they were for it.
Thanks justiceseeker93.
True.
Also, Goldwater would have run a lot better against Kennedy (from Massachusetts) than Johnson (from Texas).
He would have carried some of the Plains and Mountain States and maybe even Texas itself.
He wouldn't have won, though, as he basically wrote off a very large chunk of the country with his "sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea" comment.
He was honest, certainly, but his attitude turned a lot of voters off.
As much as I dislike Frum, it would be a mistake to think that we should only speak to those who are already on our side or to mount a highly regional campaign in 2012.
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