cold war conservatives


When I was in High School, there were a lot of knee-jerk bleeding heart liberals who were so stupid they irritated the crap out of me. Being perverse, I decided to argue against them, and in the process, I tried out the conservative point of view. Frankly, at this point, I think trying to mash everything into one platform is stupid, and I think that while the democrats have remained an annoyingly bad party, the republicans have slid from also an annoyingly bad party down into abysmal.

However, I still have some vague notion that there used to be two parties in this country that mostly didn't suck, that tended to overlap in the moderate middle, and, while they had some really lousy politicians, they also had some that weren't awful. In some sort of nostalgia for that time, which may or may not have ever existed, I went to a lecture at the Altadena Library this evening, by Barry Goldwater Jr. Note that the presidential candidate was his father, who passed away in 1998. The occasion for the lecture was the publication of Pure Goldwater, whose credited authors Barry Goldwater Jr and John Dean (of Judas to Nixon fame) belie the fact that the book is 60 years of journals that Barry Sr kept, which span his entire political career. Barry Jr, by the way, is also a retired politician.

One of the main reasons I thought this talk might be interesting was that I was impressed by John Dean's earlier book, Conservatives Without Conscience which was very critical of the direction the modern republican party has taken towards the "authoritarian," and also cited some attitudes of Barry Goldwater Sr that sounded fairly sensible to me... in fact, the title is intentionally a commentary that the Bush era has lost what Barry Sr wrote about in The Conscience of a Conservative in 1960.

I was, unsurprisingly, not completely sold on a Goldwater-style conservative view, but I find it much, much more appealing than the current republican nonsense. Since this was largely about Goldwater Jr describing the policies of Goldwater Sr, I'm not going to try too hard to make distinctions between them. Apparently, the Goldwater version of "conservative" included fiscal responsibility, in terms of avoiding deficit spending, and many of the positions that were associated with the libertarians a few years ago (although they seem to have wigged out a bit recently): reducing government regulation, individual freedoms, and right to privacy. He also, apparently, felt that the point of a strong American military was defensive and deterrent, and shouldn't be used frivolously. He favored being respected over being well-liked, but felt that using culture for influence and diplomacy was preferable to military adventurism. On the other hand, he also apparently believed pretty strongly that if we were to decide to go to war, we should plan to win decisively.

Much of this talk was devoted to hypothetical "what would Barry Goldwater have thought about..." questions. Barry Jr speculates that his attitude toward post-cold-war foreign policy would be very different than the current administration. He feels that his father not have favored the Middle East actions currently underway, and would have questioned the post-cold-war value of having troops in Europe and South Korea. I got in the last question of the evening, where I asked what he thought his father's response would have been to 9/11, and his answer (roughly) was that he thought he would have wanted to decisively go after Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but wouldn't have rolled over to other areas of the Middle East, and he also mentioned that his father would have had better advisers to help make that decision. I'd been hoping that he'd also say something about leveraging the international solidarity that arose after 9/11, which W seems to have squandered, but he didn't mention that (although since it was the last question, I think he might have gone into a bit more detail had the library folks not been pushing for a quick end to the lecture portion.)

For what it may or may not be worth, Barry Jr prefers McCain to either democrat, but endorsed Ron Paul in the primaries. He largely feels that the whole election process is flawed because of the huge monetary inputs, though, He'd prefer that campaigning be limited by law to 6 months, which is an interesting idea, but seems hard to implement/enforce. He also explicitly criticized the Newt Gingrich republicans for fiscal irresponsibility and implicitly the neocons for, well, generally sucking. And described "conservative-christian" with the claim that "conservative shouldn't be hyphenated."

Also, apparently RG Sr and JFK were friends to some extent, and were looking forward to RG challenging JFK for his second term. In fact, JFK ostensibly asked RG "You want this F****** job?" (censorship RG Jrs). More significantly, though, JFK and RG had agreed that they would tour the country together while campaigning, and make appearances where they would debate each other at every point along the way, modeled on the Lincoln-Douglas debates. That seems to stand in stark contrast to the attitudes of the modern political process, although frankly I'd love to see Obama and McCain try that for a few weeks.

He expressed some other positions that I find appealing in some ways, not to the exclusion of progressive positions but as a balance. Two related philosophical ideals are that individuals are more important than groups, and that the default behavior should be to allow freedom with responsibility rather than applying restrictions. He said that some regulations and safety nets should exist, but that it's largely preferable to support individuals and private enterprise because the government frequently doesn't know how to regulate things in a sensible and efficient way.

I think these are two areas where we are now horribly out of balance in our political system. The democrats certainly seem to succumb frequently to the "we need to regulate and redistribute and tax-and-spend on programs that we've been convinced are progressive," while the post-Nixon republicans, and to some extent the corrupted democrats, have perverted the same regulatory systems and tax-and-spend approach to be bribed by special interests into using regulations and subsidies to support the greed of corporations. Admittedly, there is quite a bit of evidence that laissez-faire capitalism leads to unchecked short-term greed and long-term damage to the country, so I don't mean to argue that we should chuck this and go back to pre-depression big business. What I did realize, though, is that at some point some republicans were a counterbalance to this that legitimately tried to steer private industry and individuals toward providing positive results for the country, rather than to add more and more corruptible regulator apparatus. Neither approach is perfect, but no one is advocating responsible freedom-- the republicans give it lip-service in terms of "privatize everything," in action they mean "deregulate only the parts that are in the way of the greed of our allies, and keep the regulatory systems where it benefits them," leading to unfair competition (or lack of competition) rather than streamlining.

Also, of course, the republicans have completely abandoned individual rights, privacy, and a sense of responsibility (fiscal, environmental, foreign relations) in favor of special interests. BG Jr explicitly mentioned the PATRIOT act and other erosions of privacy that the Bush administration is perpetuating (BG Jr authored the Privacy Act in 1977) and mentioned the Jefferson quote about "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." (which the Jefferson Library website says is misattributed, actually.)

I'm not really intending to say, in all this, that I'd prefer to be an "old school conservative," just that this has really driven home how broken the modern republican party, and consequently the modern American 2-party system, has become. I find many of the progressive ideas of the political left appealing, but I'm concerned that the right once, but no longer, served to be a motivator to remember the lessons of the past and keep a pragmatic realization that ideals, ideas, and plans are sometimes wisely tempered by lessons from the past and a grounding in the idea that some new notions don't work out as planned. I think that's a loss in some abstract way for the entire system, whether one identifies more with the left or right.

This strays off what was talked about, but I think that the revisionist history, moral mandates, and general posturing while disrespecting what's kept the U.S. working well (more or less) for two centuries, into which the christian fundamentalist influence has pushed the republicans is not conservative at all, it's radical change. It's not progressive in the sense of making progress, but it's moving to a revisionist, rather than solid and known and historical "what has worked for a long time," direction. The Bush republicans also seem to have no respect for tradition, history, or responsibility. I've become so used to hating the current republicans, I hadn't much considered that at one point they served a purpose, but now I'm concerned that the purpose they served may have been important.

I don't agree with Barry Goldwater Jr that electing McCain and then fixing the republican party is a wise or viable strategy, but I think fixing or replacing the republicans to bring back a political force that plays the role that they're lacking now would be good for the country.

I encourage my bleeding-heart pinko commie friends to critique this as you see fit, of course... but keep in mind that close-mindedness is supposed to be anathema to liberal and progressive thought.