In 1964, the Republican Party nominated the very conservative Barry Goldwater as their Presidential candidate, an event which is generally considered the beginning of modern American conservatism. Goldwater was a smart, principled man who immediately blundered in his acceptance speech when he uttered the colossally stupid line that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” (Extremism is almost always a vice.) This allowed his opponent, Lyndon Johnson, to paint him as a lunatic, turning Goldwater’s campaign slogan “In your heart, you know he’s right” into “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.” In the 1964 election, Goldwater suffered an epic defeat, getting only 38 percent of the vote and winning a paltry 6 states.
It took a long time to recover, but in 1980 along came Ronald Reagan. He was nowhere near as smart or as principled as Goldwater, but he was a better politician. Reagan learned to use the racial dog whistles – his patently false story of the black welfare queen who drove a shiny Cadillac; his infamous speech proclaiming his support for state’s rights (code for ‘we get to make our own laws to discriminate as much as we want’) in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three ‘meddling’ civil rights workers were murdered in 1964– that Goldwater disdained. Reagan won in 1980 and again in 1984, and the modern conservative revolution really began.
There is a long history of conservative thought, stretching from Plato to Burke to Nietzsche to Strauss. But for me, conservatism is best summed up by the English scholar Michael Oakeshott, who considered it a “disposition” more than an ideology and described it this way: “To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant.” Reading this, one can see the value of having conservative voices in a democracy. There are times and situations that call for a conservative disposition because progress is uneven. Change is risky – it can go down the wrong path, it can go too far too quickly and it always leaves damage in its wake. We can never know how the future will play out. Conservatism is the voice in our head telling us to slow down and think for a while.
The Reagan revolution went off the rails almost immediately because Reagan and his acolytes weren’t traditional conservatives, they were what we now call neoconservatives, and they were far more radical than Goldwater was accused of being. Instead of working within the framework of an economy that had worked very well since World War II, they wanted to remake it with supply-side economics (aka trickle-down economics), a complete failure that haunts all of us to this day. They didn’t just think unions had gone too far, they hated the very idea of unions. They didn’t just think taxes were too high, they hated the very idea of taxes. They didn’t just think government had overreached, they wanted to shrink it so much that they could “drown it in a bathtub.” Republicans championed never ending tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, untrammelled free trade and scattershot deregulation, which all worked to erode the working middle class and left more and more people sinking into economic hardship. The Republican alliance with slimy televangelists and fanatical Evangelical simpletons forced them to oppose every social change, even modest and undeniably beneficial ones like no-fault divorce, women’s employment rights and birth control. This left the GOP looking completely hypocritical - the leadership rarely adhered to the social standards that they espoused - and always seemingly 20 years behind the times.
As the failures mounted, the GOP got deeper into the mud, playing further to the lowest common denominator. The party relied on stoking fear; Reagan, fear of communism; Bush I, fear of violent crime; Bush II, fear of Islamic terrorism; Trump, fear of hordes of invading immigrants. And underneath all this lay a thick coat of racism and jingoism. The racial dog whistles became shriller. The US entered war after war, often on flimsy or false pretenses. In psychology, the term grooming is used to refer to how predators manipulate their victims so they are easier to exploit and abuse. The conservative-leaning electorate has been groomed for decades. All that fear and failure has left an angry, embittered 'base' that no longer feels like it has anything to lose.
What do today’s Republicans believe in? Almost nothing, other than the hatred of liberals and the holding of power. They certainly don’t believe in democracy, as the fallout from the 2020 election loss has proven. The GOP has lost the popular vote in 5 of the last 6 presidential elections and instead of tailoring policies to what voters might want, they would rather prevent their opponents from voting at all. At the same time, they moronically push the same disastrous policies, such as yet more tax cuts when governments are already dangerously underfunded and unable to provide even threadbare services (as I write this, another bridge has collapsed, a perfect illustration of what's happened).
The party and its leadership are now so desperate they repackage the delusions of their dumbest and craziest supporters and run with them. There are conspiracy fantasies to explain away every Republican failure – the loss of an election, Trump repeatedly and flagrantly breaking the law, the inept and delusional response to the Covid pandemic. The Covid vaccines were developed during Trump’s administration, and he is eager as always to take credit. When he tries, he gets booed and jeered by his own supporters. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump wannabe, is pushing a law that would essentially prevent teachers from talking to students about racism and slavery, because apparently it makes some people angry to have to confront reality. Clearly, the inmates are now running the asylum.
While Goldwater was considered an extremist in 1964, by today’s standards he is not even a Republican – he had a strong record supporting civil rights, voting rights and even favoured allowing gays in the military at a time when almost no one else did. In 1989, Goldwater complained that the GOP had been taken over by a “bunch of kooks”. He grew even more disillusioned in the 90s, after the ultra-loathsome Newt Gingrich took over the de facto leadership of the party. (Gingrich led the impeachment of President Clinton for having an affair while at the exact same time having an affair of his own. He then told his wife he was leaving her right after she was diagnosed with MS. Family values, amirite?) Similarly, Reagan would be an outcast in today’s GOP. He supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, he signed off on 8 major tax increases between 1982 and 1988 and he was a proponent of certain international environmental agreements, such as the Montreal Protocol. Today, these actions would get him roasted on Twitter by this collection of chimps.
In his classic book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay wrote that “Men…go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, one by one.” The Republican denial of reality has already left a lot damage in its wake. As the party drifts further into authoritarianism, the worst may be yet to come.
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