Jonah Goldberg Goes William F. Bucklely On Us

[Valin]

Postmodern Conservative:

Pete Spiliakos

1/16/13

 

I can’t quote chapter and verse, but sometime after Barry Goldwater’s defeat, William F. Buckley wrote that the political problem for conservatives was that there were not enough political conservatives. Whatever Goldwater’s flaws as a candidate, and whatever the difficulties that any Republican presidential candidate would have faced in 1964, the truth was that not enough people agreed with Barry Goldwater for Goldwater (or someone ideologically like Goldwater) to be elected president. Conservatives were outnumbered in the country. Conservatives had to be evangelical if they were going to win.

 

That was true in 1964-1965, but it was somewhat less true by 1984. Conservatives had assembled a latent center-right political majority made up of the majority right-leaning elements of the 1964 Republican party and the the partly overlapping categories of the majority of Southern whites, some urban working class whites who were largely Catholic and/or Eastern and Southern European, and white suburbanites whose parents had been Democrats. The issues that held this majority together were lower taxes (relative to the Democrats), greater defense spending (relative to the Democrats), and cultural conservatism (with crime maybe the most salient issue in this category but there were many others.)

 

(Snip)

 

Jonah Goldberg tells us that, in one crucial way, we are back to 1964. There is no longer a latent center-right political majority out there. The median voter no longer has the context to understand and sympathize with much of what conservatives are saying. Getting the Reaganite band back together won’t work. Romney did better among white voters than any Republican in twenty-two years but he still lost by almost four percent. This doesn’t mean that assembling a new center-right political majority is impossible but as Goldberg says:

 

thanks in part to the myth that all that stands between conservatives and total victory is a philosophically pure GOP, party leaders suffer from a debilitating lack of trust — some of it well earned — from the rank and file.

 

But politics is about persuasion, and a party consumed by the need to prove its purity to its base is going to have a very hard time proving anything else to the rest of the country.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Ironically, the institution in which conservatives had their greatest success is the one most besieged by conservatives today: the Republican party. To listen to many grassroots conservatives, the GOP establishment is a cabal of weak-kneed sellouts who regularly light votive candles to a poster of liberal Republican icon Nelson Rockefeller.

 

This is not only not true, it’s a destructive myth. The Rockefeller Republicans were purged from the GOP decades ago. Their high-water mark was in 1960, when the Goldwater insurgency was temporarily crushed. Richard Nixon agreed to run on a platform all but dictated by Rockefeller and to tap Rockefeller’s minion Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate. When the forebears of today’s tea partiers threatened to stay home or bolt the party in 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater proclaimed, “Let’s grow up, conservatives!”

 

It’s still good advice. It’s not that the GOP isn’t conservative enough, it’s that it isn’t tactically smart or persuasive enough to move the rest of the nation in a more conservative direction. Moreover, thanks in part to the myth that all that stands between conservatives and total victory is a philosophically pure GOP, party leaders suffer from a debilitating lack of trust — some of it well earned — from the rank and file.

Jonah Goldberg