Au-H20, again

Suddenly, everyone in the Drum/Yglesias/DeLong blog clique is reading or re-reading Rick Perlstein's great 2001 book about the Goldwater campaign, Before the Storm. If your interest has been provoked by this lively interchange, you might be interested in the review I wrote of the book at the time.

In part of my review, I made the somewhat idiosyncratic point that Goldwater's politics lead to Reagan and to Bush/DeLay, sure, but they lead more directly to John McCain, who holds Goldwater's Senate seat, and is similarly thin-skinned, unpredictable, and while not liberal or even moderate, nonetheless admirably independent, rational, decent, and outraged at corruption or cheap hate politics. Pearlstein shows Goldwater's fight as largely against the Republican establishment -- the pro-civil rights, entitled, Northeastern establishment of Prescott Bush -- just as McCain's was against an establishment that had become much more rigidly right-wing, corrupt and hate-mongering.

I had to argue hard to keep two paragraphs on this point in the review, because the implicit point of the book, and most readings of it (including Kevin's, Matt's and Brad's), was that the Goldwater defeat laid the groundwork for the right-wing takeover of the Party and country. Even though Perlstein wrote almost nothing about events after election day 1964, the book has been read mostly as a parable for the situation of the Democratic Party 40 years later. That can be taken in several ways: The first is to see abject defeat as the beginnings of renewal, in some unmediated Cycles-of-History or Alcoholics Anonymous theory under which you can only begin recovery by reaching rock bottom. A second reading is to see the intra-party insurgency built up for Goldwater's 1964 campaign, and his bracingly ideological speeches as providing the ideological clarity that a party needs. In other words, Goldwater was the Howard Dean of his day, giving the party not a president, but a spirit. Another is to see the conservative movement taking a deep look into its soul after the 1964 defeat, and from that point forward, building out the think tanks, grassroots organizations, media outlets, and state-level operations that ultimately led to sustained success. George Packer put this interpretation well in April 2001, writing in the New York Times:

In a new book, "Before the Storm," Rick Perlstein shows how grass-roots Republicans responded to Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964 -- not by trying to install new party leaders, but by forming think tanks, training activists, knocking on doors and electing true believers to local offices. Conservative Republicans, who knew what they were about, refused to be discouraged by a mere 16-million-vote defeat. Instead, they took it to mean that they could move the country in their direction. By 1980 their new Goldwater had emerged as president.

I don't think the first reading holds up. (A journalist told me the other day that he'd called up Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recently and asked, "Whatever happened to the Cycles of History?," and that Schlesinger said something like, "Good question, I've been wondering about that myself.") The second interpretation doesn't quite comport with history, since for the next 16 years, the Republican party's presidential nominees, as well as its governors and congressional leaders, were mostly from the moderate, establishment wing of the party. The third reading, Packer's, while extrapolated from the book, is probably the closest to the truth, and certainly the most useful to current circumstances. (This is also the argument Paul Waldman makes today. (I can't get this written in time to contribute to the discussion if I keep stopping to read these things.)

DeLong has a fourth argument:

in the short run Goldwaterism had other consequences: the damage it did to Republican congressional power were the only things that made the Great Society possible: the Johnson-era expansions of the social insurance state and the Nixon and post-Nixon-era expansions of the regulatory state were possible only on congressional foundations that had been created by Goldwater's Samson act directed against the Republican establishment.

To make possible the Great Society--and then to cheer when Ronald Reagan rolls back 10% of it--Goldwaterism was the greatest own-goal and act of political delusion by conservatives in the twentieth century.

The first point -- that the Great Society was made possible by Goldwater's polarization of the electorate, which increased the Democrats' congressional majority to 68 in the Senate and 295 in the House, the largest majorities since Reconstruction -- is plausible. But if LBJ had faced one of the establishment candidates of 1964 -- Rockefeller, Scranton or Romney -- his margin would not have been as wide but he would still have won and might easily have brought two Senators and 45 House members with him, and the conservative Southerners (all Democrats until Thurmond endorsed Goldwater and changed parties) weakened their own hand by their defection on civil rights.

And it is also true that the conservative assaults on Great Society government have mostly been turned back: Nixon, it is now fully understood, governed as a domestic-policy liberal; Reagan fixed Social Security and did roll back no more than 10% of the Great Society without too much damage, and the Gingrich revolution, which set out to at the very least, if only for symbolic reasons, eliminate at least one cabinet department, accomplished nothing of the kind. Today, as DeLong points out in either an earlier version of this post or another one, Social Security is as big as ever, Medicare was just expanded, etc.

Now, I have two reactions to that. The first is that the persistence of big government is not the same as liberalism. I have no interest in the Medicare program being of a certain size. I want it to work. Similarly, if it includes private accounts, Social Security will be vastly bigger than ever, but will provide less social security. And these unpopular, arbitrary programs will leave people even more discontented with government, a discontent which will further undermine liberal arguments.

Second, I think the Bush/DeLay assault on the Great Society (and the New Deal) is based on learning a key lesson from what they see as the failures of Reagan and Gingrich: You only have a brief moment, and don't waste it attacking the edifice of liberalism itself. Undermine its foundations. Thus, strip the government of revenue, and eventually the programs will collapse. Install "Constitution in Exile" judges with a pre-New Deal view of the Commerce Clause, and eventually the federal government will lose the ability to regulate anything.

Both these tactics show a recognition of the insights of political scientists Hadley Cantril and Lloyd Free (not to be confused with the Lloyd Free who became "World B. Free" as an NBA star of the late 70s) based on their survey in 1964. Cantril and Free argued that Americans were generally "operational liberals" and "ideological conservatives," and they specifically diagnosed the Goldwater defeat in those terms:

Republican Senator Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election, Free and Cantril argued, because he was an in-your-face operational conservative. He traveled to Tennessee, for example, to make a speech blasting the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). "As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was high, wide, and handsome," they wrote. "But the moment he discussed issues and programs, he was finished."

The paragraph above is from Michael Nelson's 2000 election post-mortem in The American Prospect.

What the think tanks and grassroots groups and Karl Rove and Frank Luntz figured out over the 36 years after Goldwater was how to retain the language of ideological conservatism, leave unchallenged the facade of operational liberalism, and use that combination to exercise power long enough and aggressively enough to destroy every future prospect for operational liberalism. I think they have scuttled much of the strength of real conservatism in the process, but I don't think that's anything for liberals to be glad or complacent about.