NEVER TRUST AN APOSTATE

Come back, Barry: The Republican Party continues to abandon small-government conservatism at its peril (Lexington, The Economist, 5/12/05)

THE Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think-tank based—where else?—in Phoenix, Arizona, contains a striking photograph of the young Barry Goldwater, dressed in girlish clothes and accompanied by a tame monkey. The precise meaning of the photograph—was the monkey borrowed, or a permanent part of the maverick Arizonan's household?—is lost to history. But for those with a taste for symbolism the photograph raises an intriguing question: is Goldwaterism anything more than an eccentric side-show in today's Republican Party?

Although he went down to a huge defeat in the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater did as much as anybody to launch the modern conservative movement. Yet everywhere you look, the Republican Party is abandoning his principles.

The senator's conservatism was rooted in small government. But today's Grand Old Party has morphed into the “Grand Old Spending Party”, as the libertarian Cato Institute dubs it. Total government spending grew by 33% in George Bush's first term. Goldwater's hostility to big government also extended to government meddling in people's private lives. He thundered that social conservatives such as Jerry Falwell deserved “a swift kick in the ass”, and insisted that the decision to have an abortion should be “up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the religious right”. For Goldwater, abortion was “not a conservative issue at all”. For many Republicans today, it often seems to be the only conservative issue.

Goldwater was a famous devotee of states' rights. (His opposition to the Civil Rights Act on those grounds earned him a reputation on the left as a racist.) Mr Bush's Republicans have no qualms about trampling states' rights in the name of the greater good. In the Terri Schiavo case, they passed a law to try to take the case out of the state courts and put it in a federal court, with the president flying all the way from Texas to sign the bill.

It is not necessary to be dead to be every liberal's favorite Republican, but it helps. Having lost big is, however, an absolute requirement. Nevertheless, if it really was Mr. Goldwater's position that state's rights are sufficiently important as to trump civil rights while simultaneously being so trivial that abortion can't even be questioned, then he was a jackass. Finally, every conservative knows the one thing Mr. Goldwater did to launch the modern conservative movement.

Posted by David Cohen at May 23, 2005 7:27 PM