He was right: Looking back at the Goldwater moment. . - Culture and Reviews - Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus - book review

Reason, March, 2002 by Glenn Garvin

It might be easy enough to dismiss this as labor-bashing grandstanding (and Perlstein certainly tries), but there was a stubborn consistency to Goldwater's critique of American politics. At a time when Eisenhower was hugely popular and Goldwater desperately needed his support for a shaky reelection bid, the Arizonan nonetheless went to the Senate floor and unleashed a scorching tirade against the president for succumbing to "the siren song of socialism" in preparing his record-setting 1958 budget. Soon after, he ripped the farm subsidies so dear to the hearts of Midwestern Republicans. He sneered at the passion of both parties for technocratic reformers: "I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size."

Nor was Goldwater's philosophy purely political. He stressed both personal liberty and personal responsibility, and warned against the propensity of modern liberalism to see society as a collection of groups: "The conservative knows that to regard men as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery....Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being."

Goldwater, in short, was a politician of ideas, not knee-jerk reaction or pork-barrel plenitude. His ideas appealed to a large segment of the population (Goldwater called them "the forgotten Amen sans")-- instinctively wary of the growing power in Washington and the elite class that wielded it-that had long been without a political voice. Their elation at the end of their isolation showed in their wild response to Goldwater's speeches, though he was generally a humdrum speaker who only occasionally drifted u into the oratorical jetstream where Ronald Reagan would later cruise.

He appealed not only to traditional conservatives but to young Americans harboring quiet worries that their lives were being put together on a social assembly line over which they had no control. Goldwater's cry against conformity struck a chord, loudly, with them. Later, as he ran for president, the news media would delight in caricaturing Goldwater as a reactionary loon trying to rub out an entire century of American history. (Editorial cartoons frequently showed his supporters carrying signs reading "Goldwater in 1864.") But his fears about the loss of individuality to the madding crowd were on the razor edge of the social debate on America's restless college campuses, and shared much with the early manifestos of Students for a Democratic Society.

Every coffee-house folksinger in the country was droning Malvina Reynolds' song "Little Boxes" about a cookie-cutter society in which suburban commuters and their houses, wives, children, and martinis were indistinguishable from one another: "And they're all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same." No dorm room's bookshelf could be without David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, along with Aldous Huxley, George Qrweil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ayn Rand. It was fertile ground for Arizonan's message, and the initial boomlet for a national Goldwater candidacy --as Richard Nixon's vice-presidential candidate in 1960--owed much to a spontaneously formed Youth for Goldwater group.