Mr. Moderate

Mr. Moderate is old. In fact, I’m old enough to have supported Barry Goldwater for President back in 1964. In those days, you had to be 21 to vote, and I was younger than that. But I still supported Barry. I watched him give his 1964 acceptance speech live. There were things he might have said but didn’t, because it was only 1964, and the civil rights movement had not yet generated the violence which would force America to examine a whole host of issues centering around what “equality” really means. Barry was unfairly labeled a bigot because he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In fact, he has a long and distinguished record of advocating for racial equality, including prompting the full and complete integration of the Arizona National Guard long before President Truman issued orders to integrate the regular military forces.

Goldwater’s brand of conservativism was a balance between libertarian ideals and a pragmatic recognition that order was necessary for a civil society, and the purpose of government was to establish the rules that created order and maintained or even enhanced civilization as we know it. The justification for a civil law was to remedy an obvious injustice. But for Barry, the limit of the federal government was established by the Constitution of the United States, and he would not vote for any law, necessary or not, if it would cross over the line of limited Constitutional government as he viewed it. That is why he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964: he strongly felt that the law, however good it was in the abstract, stepped over the line limiting federal powers from interfering in the rights of the several states to manage their own affairs. In 1964, the view was that the federal government had no business messing in the affairs of local school districts. Since that is exactly what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 proposed to do, Barry wouldn’t vote for it.

If we fast-forward 3 decades, in the 1990s, shortly before he died, Barry came out in favor of gay rights (on libertarian grounds; the government had no business telling somebody who they could have in their bed) and a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion (also on libertarian grounds; the government had no business interfering in the private medical decisions a woman might make). These sorts of positions made Barry almost persona non-grata within his beloved Republican Party. You see, the Republican Party of the 1990s had been taken over by a strange coalition of fundamentalist Christians and pro-business economic libertarians. Barry viewed the former as anti-Liberty and the latter as anti-Order (or anti-Justice).

The fundamentalist Christians wanted to eliminate personal liberties which offended their particular religious moral standards. Those would include outlawing all forms of “pornography” (which would include even the mildest mens’ magazines like Playboy), outlawing all forms of contraception (on the grounds that contraception is used to prevent babies from being born), and outlawing all forms of “devient sexual practices” (which would be, by their definition, almost anything other than sex for the sake of procreation, preferably only in the Missionary Position).

The pro-business economic libertarians, on the other hand, wanted to eliminate as many regulations of business activities as possible. If they had been able to fully implement their desired program, there would not have been any restrictions whatsoever on what businesses could or could not do. Their watchwords were “deregulation” and “downsizing” of government. If there were no government regulators, then there would be no new regulations, and certainly no enforcement actions based upon existing regulations. So, their program was all about cutting the budget for every kind of governmental employee which might in any way cause any business to be unable to act exactly as it would prefer to act.

These two groups of Republicans had very little in common with each other and with the traditional progressive Republicans of the Teddy Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller types. While Goldwater clearly viewed himself as more conservative than Rockefeller, he was still closer to the Rockefeller wing of the 1960s Republican Party than he was to either of the two wings of the 1990s Republican Party.

What has happened in US politics since 1964 is that the modern Republican Party has swung so far to the “right” that formerly extreme-right politicians like Barry Goldwater would now be viewed as moderate Democrats. Barry Goldwater’s politics are much closer to Bill Clinton’s politics than they are to the politics of George W. Bush. Barry was known as “Mr. Republican” in his heyday. But today, I doubt that he would have anything at all to do with the modern Republican Party. The mere fact that Barry was pro-choice would be enough to merit expulsion from today’s Republican Party. And the fact he was in favor of some degree of regulation for businesses would have caused the other main wing of the modern Republicans to renounce him. I often wonder if he were alive today, would Barry re-label himself as “Mr. Democrat?”

As I’ve made clear before, I don’t like either the Republicans or the Democrats. But for the 2008 election at least, the Republican Party needs to be taken out of power and forced to re-assess its commitment to the progressive principles that made it great for over a century. This is an important enough objective to force Mr. Moderate to hold his nose and vote for the socialist candidate for President, Barack Obama.