The compassionate conservative

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If you want a sense of just how far the conservative revolution has drifted, give some thought to the late Barry Goldwater. In 1964, as the GOP nominee for president, the U.S. senator from Arizona was vilified as a pro-nukes, pro-confrontation crackpot, a perception cemented by President Johnson’s legendary ‘Daisy’ campaign TV commercial, which lingers in the public imagination, although it aired only once. Yet 43 years later, Goldwater begins to look like a visionary, a man for whom conservatism had nothing to do with ‘values voters’ but, rather, with government staying out of people’s affairs. Late in his career, Goldwater ruffled many Reagan-era Republicans by opposing restrictions on abortion and gay rights; when the Rev. Jerry Falwell said Christians ought to oppose the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court, Goldwater famously retorted, ‘I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.’

Goldwater’s perspective can be found in ‘The Conscience of a Conservative’ (Princeton University Press: 144 pp., $14.95 paper). Originally published in 1960, and reprinted with a foreword by George F. Will and an afterword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the book lays out, clearly and succinctly, his uncompromising views. Goldwater held freedom as the highest value in American society: freedom from law, freedom from government, freedom from anybody else’s vision but your own. You can argue with him on the particulars, but there’s something compelling about his quintessentially American notion of self-reliance, the idea that ‘[e]very man, for his individual good and for the good of the society, is responsible for his own development.’ This is the line where conservatism blurs into libertarianism, where the rights of the individual are affirmed over those of the state. These days, that’s a radical concept — perhaps most of all among those who see themselves as Goldwater’s political heirs.

— David L. Ulin 5/04/07