Goldwater, Barry Sen

NO MERRI

~ birchers and xian wacko evang

no lnx

bad code

---

NO LNX

Behind the 60-year Republican plot to destroy American democracy

Activist Phyllis Schafly wearing a "Stop ERA" badge, demonstrating with other women against the Equal Rights Amendment in front of the White House, Washington, D.C..

Thom Hartmann April 27, 2025

In a Daily Take here on Hartmann Report, I mentioned Russell Kirk and the origins of today’s hard right GOP. A few people replied with, “Who’s that?” and similar questions; others were incredulous that Republicans actually believed the middle class created by FDR’s New Deal was a bad thing. So, here’s the backstory to what I mentioned.

I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer’s book “None Dare Call It Treason.” The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing.

Ironically, Stormer’s book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.

And it was started by morbidly rich men (it was all men back then) who wanted to use the threat of a “communist menace” to gut the union movement to increase their own corporate profits and CEO pay.

The founding premise of the modern conservative movement tracks back a generation before Stormer’s book to a Republican thought leader named Russell Kirk. He laid it out in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Kirk argued that the middle class was becoming a threat to America; without clearly defined classes and power structures — essentially without the morbidly rich in complete control of everything — he worried that society would devolve into chaos.

The opening chapter of his book was about Edmund Burke, the Irish conservative who wrote, in 1790, that hairdressers and candlemakers should not be allowed to run for political office or even to vote:

“The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person — to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature...”

Kirk and his followers essentially predicted in 1951 that if today’s “hairdressers and working tallow-chandlers” — college students, women, working-class people, and people of color — ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, there would essentially be a communist revolution in the US, handing us over to Stalin and his Politburo.

(Keep in mind, this was when racial segregation was legal and brutally enforced, the voting age was 21, campuses were almost entirely all-male, both abortion and birth control were illegal in most states, and women couldn’t open checking accounts or get credit cards without a husband’s, brother’s, or father’s signature.)

Throughout the 1950s, Kirk and his warnings of the dangers of an activist middle-class developed a small following; the most prominent of his proponents were William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Most Republicans, though, considered him a crackpot.

But when the birth-control pill was legalized in 1961 and the Vietnam War heated up a few years later, those marginalized groups Kirk had warned his wealthy white male followers about began to rise up in protest.

Kids were burning draft cards, women were burning bras, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement for racial justice that the white power structure blamed for American cities burning. Gay liberation was also having a moment.

Meanwhile, the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s had lit the flame of inflation, and unionized workers were striking all over America for wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Wealthy white conservatives freaked out as the morbidly rich promoted the idea that America was experiencing a “moral decline” that could only be fixed by ending the union movement and other “liberal” causes that shared the union movements’ populist goals.

They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night: the “communists” — those uppity racial minorities, women who’d forgotten their “rightful place in society,” students who objected to Vietnam, unionized workers, and gender minorities — were on the verge of “taking over” America.

These five movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, America’s most powerful and well-known conservative commentators (like William F. Buckley Jr.) were telling Republicans that Russell Kirk was, indeed, a prophet.

They’d finally found a politically acceptable “hook” to destroy the wealth of working-class people and transfer trillions into their own money bins: fear of communism and a prophesied social decay caused by an activist middle class.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these five movements represented was put into place in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office: the explicit goal of the morbidly rich white men funding the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg to end the protests of the ’60s and ’70s, restore “social stability,” and increase corporate profitability.

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college across the nation so students would live in fear rather than be willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against their scapegoats, particularly the hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding an end to police killings. They also wanted to outlaw abortion, to put women “back in their place.”

Thus, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. For example, he put income taxes on Social Security and unemployment payments, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people.

He ended the tax deductibility of credit-card, car-loan, and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires from 74% to 25%. (There were only a handful of billionaires in America then, in large part because of previous tax policies; today’s democracy-destroying explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts on the rich.)

Reagan declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s just now beginning to recover from its low of 6% of the private workforce.

He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and negotiated NAFTA, which Clinton signed and thus opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while radically cutting corporate labor costs and union membership.

And, sure enough, Reagan’s War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and median wages by more, over a couple of decades, than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s and ’30s.

The billionaire’s investment in taking the middle-class down a peg was paying off by orders of magnitude.

Had Reagan not destroyed the nation’s unions, the median American income today would be well over $100,000 a year, minimum-wage households would have a family income of $86,000, and a single wage-earner would still be able to buy a house, a car, send the kids to college, and have a decent retirement (as my dad did, working a union job for 35 years in a tool-and-die shop).

Instead, CEOs today keep all that money for themselves and their investors.

And Reagan’s War on Colleges jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today saddled with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt: as predicted, many aren’t willing to jeopardize it all by “acting up” on campuses.

The key to selling this campaign of impoverishment to the American people to help out the billionaire class was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, grant women equal rights, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, conservatives said, all of those things were aspects of “socialism.” And if America embraced socialism, we may as well be ruled by the Soviet Union.

As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, government “socialist” programs were not the solution to our problems, but instead were the problem itself.

He ridiculed the formerly-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.

He even told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, throughout the 1970s and 1980s Republican billionaires built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify Reagan’s message that government supports of any sort for poor or working-class people were simply gateway drugs to socialism and, inevitably, communism.

It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from billionaire-funded groups like the Heritage Foundation. Billionaire-owned Fox “News” today carries on the tradition.

It had been a pretty good scam for the billionaires who owned the GOP and wanted, back in the 1950s, to stop the union movement that was forcing them to share their profits with their workers.

First, they terrified Americans about communism and socialism, then convinced about half of us that those things came straight out of “liberal” social and economic movements.

Unions, feminism, acceptance of the queer community, civil rights, minimum wage increases, and even regulation of corporate behavior would, they told us, all lead to Soviet-style tyranny.

So, to save America from herself, Reagan gutted the American middle class, transferring over $50 trillion in wealth from working class people into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

By 2016, Americans were starting to figure out that they’d been screwed — and that Hillary Clinton’s husband had been in on it by continuing Reagan’s policies and doubling-down on free trade — and were loudly demanding change.

Into this maelstrom walked Donald Trump, proclaiming himself the savior of the country. In the GOP primary he pointed out how corrupt his opponents were, particularly Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and destroyed them, one after the other.

For the general election in 2016, he changed his tune and ran on what was traditionally a Democratic platform, saying he was going to bring jobs home, end so-called “free trade” policies [TPP], raise taxes on the rich so much that “my friends won’t talk to me anymore,” and make sure every American had free or low-cost healthcare and access to an affordable college education.

They were all lies — something Trump had become adept at during his business career — but they worked and sucked in disaffected workers who knew they’d been screwed but weren’t sure who did it to them or why.

So here we are.

We have an open fascist and apparent friend of authoritarian Russia as president after being convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 felony charges, having previously been adjudicated as responsible for sexual abuse (the judge called it “rape”) and fraud.

He’s putting into place people and policies that could turn America into an authoritarian nation like Russia or Hungary, and apparently wants to re-align the United States away from NATO and the EU and toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

We are literally facing the authoritarian future that John Stormer was warning us about back in 1964. Only instead of “communists” in the State Department, it’s a billionaire president with the avowed goal of ending union rights and locking up or using the Army with live ammunition against those who protest his policies.

And it all tracks back to wealthy conservatives funding a project in the 1960s to scare Americans about socialism and communism so they could stop the union-fueled growth of wages that were cutting into their profits.

Perhaps none dare call it treason. But I do.

NOW READ: The man-babies of MAGA never grew up because they never had to

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https://www.alternet.org/pat-robertson-2661178558/

Thursday, June 8, the Rev. Pat Robertson — a far-right Christian fundamentalist and the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and the Christian Coalition ...— died in Virginia Beach at the age of 93. Robertson was a controversial figure in U.S. politics and within Christianity, but he was also highly influential. And he helped shape the radi... late conservative Sen. Barry Goldwate ;(R-Arizona) vehemently warned against more than 40 years ago.

Robertson founded CBN in 1961, launching his program "The 700 Club" several years later. But it wasn't until the early 1980s that he became so influential in the Republican Party. Along with the late Moral Majority founder the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. and Pentecostal evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, Robertson was a major supporter of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign and helped the Religious Right gain considerable influence in the Republican Party.'' >It wasn't influence that Goldwater welcomed. The Arizona senator was part of Reagan's right-wing coalition, but he viewed the Religious Right as dangerous and saw far-right evangelicals like Robertson, Falwell and Swaggart as&n...President Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign painted Goldwater as a war-mongering extremist in the 1964 presidential election; during the 1980s, Goldwater's vehement opposition to the Religious Right made him an unlikely ally of liberals and progressives and a favorite among right-wing libertarians.

READ MORE: 'Flag-waving' liberal Norman Lear, now 100, warns against the 'threat of authoritarianism' America faces

Goldwater warned, "Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the (Republican) Party — and they're sure trying to do so — it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."

Goldwater's warning was downright prophetic. From the early 1980s on, the Religious Right has maintained a stranglehold on the GOP. Conservative Republicans who openly oppose the Religious Right the way that Goldwater did will not get very far in a Republican presidential primary.

Robertson himself ran for president in 1988, ultimately losing the GOP nomination to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. As Robertson's supporters saw it, Bush 41 wasn't far enough to the right. Regardless, Bush enjoyed a decisive victory over the Democratic nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis, in the general election.

Goldwater had nothing against Christianity per se, either Protestant or Catholic. But he believed that Robertson and Falwell embodied a very dangerous, fanatical and intolerant strain of religious fundamentalism. And many years after Goldwater's death, Donald Trump was more than happy to encourage that fanaticism during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Trump sees far-right white evangelicals as crucial to his success in the 2024 election.

READ MORE: 'A very frightening period': MAGA Republicans threaten librarians with prison time

In an op-ed published by CNN's website on June 9, historian Nicole Hemmer emphasizes that Robertson helped pave the way for the MAGA movement.

"One of Robertson's most lasting legacies was in the world of politics," Hemmer explains. "Running in the Republican presidential primary in 1988, Robertson pioneered a new style of candidacy that would open the door to presidential hopefuls like Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump. Long before Trump leapt from reality television to the Oval Office, Robertson showed how a celebrity with no political experience could launch a national political campaign."

Hemmer notes that Robertson's Christian Coalition "became a powerful political force after absorbing the leftover funds of the Robertson campaign — and the millions of names and addresses Robertson had collected while he ran for president."

"Robertson also became a vector for vivid conspiracy theories on the right," Hemmer observes. "His bestselling book 'The New World Order,' published in 1991, played off Bush's use of the phrase in a speech a year earlier. But rather than simply bash Bush, the book covered every internationalist conspiracy imaginable. Apocalyptic, paranoid and popular, Robertson's conspiracy tract tapped a rich vein of right-wing religion and politics — one that continues to feed the party today…. No assessment of the (Republican) Party's march away from democracy and into demagoguery can be understood without understanding Robertson's role."

After Robertson's death, liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent discussed his influence with historian Rick Perlstein, author of the 2020 book, "Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980."

Perlstein told Sargent, "Robertson's vision buttresses the entire edifice of right-wing evangelical America, in particular his institution-building work creating alternatives to supposedly demonic secular liberal America…. When you think about a right-winger living within the bubble of Fox News, that was pioneered by the Christian Broadcasting Network. The force behind this was 100-percent Pat Robertson. The role of these kinds of institutions in birthing the modern right was that it became a self-supporting world of its own — an entire parallel reality."

READ MORE: How Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, Sr. helped pave the way for Trumpism and the white nationalist horrors of the Trump era

Read Nicole Hemmer's CNN op-ed at this link and find Greg Sargent's Washington Post column here (subscription required).

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https://www.alternet.org/economy/wealthy-people/

why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider?

An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy across the United States.

In an article co-published with The Guardian, they noted:

:{“The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.”

Their efforts have had substantial success, as you can read in Documented’s article.

This effort, of course, is not unique to the one think tank they called out. From Donald Trump all the way down to the lowest Republican county official, efforts to make it harder for what John Adams called “the rabble” to vote and otherwise participate in democracy are in full swing across America.

But why? Why are some wealthy people so opposed to expanding democracy in America?

Most Americans — and lots of editorial writers — are convinced it’s simply because rich folks want to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep their regulations and taxes down. I proposed a motive like that in yesterday’s Daily Take.

And surely, for some, that’s the largest part of it. But that’s not the entire story.

I can’t claim (nor would I) to know the exact motives driving the various wealthy individuals funding efforts to reduce the Black, Hispanic, senior, and youth vote. But history does suggest that many are trying to “stabilize” America rather than just pillage her.

They are worried that America is suffering from too much democracy.

The modern-day backstory to this starts in the early 1950s when conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a startling hypothesis that would fundamentally change our nation and the world.

The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, both in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating.

The middle-class was growing in wealth and income back then, in fact, fasterthan were the top 1%.

Kirk and colleagues like William F. Buckley postulated that if the middle-class and minorities became too wealthy, they’d feel the safety and freedom to throw themselves actively into our political processes, as rich people had historically done.

That expansion of democracy, they believed, would produce an absolute collapse of our nation’s social order — producing chaos, riots, and possibly even the end of the republic.

The first chapter of Kirk’s 1951 book, The Conservative Mind, is devoted to Edmund Burke, the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in 1793 on his way to get arrested in the French revolution. Paine was so outraged by Burke’s arguments that he wrote an entire book rebutting them titled The Rights of Man. It’s still in print (as is Burke).

Burke was defending, among other things, Britain’s restrictions on democracy, including limits on who could vote or run for office, and the British maximum wage.

That’s right,maximumwage.

Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if working-class people made too much money, they’d have enough spare time to use democratic processes to challenge the social order and collapse the British kingdom.

Too much democracy, Burke believed, was a dangerous thing: deadly to nations and a violation of evolution and nature itself.

Summarizing his debate with Paine about the French Revolution, Burke wrote:

“The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler [candle maker], cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively are permitted to rule [by voting]. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”

That was why Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay peopleover a certain amount, so as to keep wage-earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives.

It was explicitly to avoid too much democracy and preserve the stability of the kingdom. (For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any Dickens novel.)

Picking up on this, Kirk’s followers argued that if the American middle-class became wealthy enough to have time for political activism, there would be similarly dire consequences.

Young people would cease to respect their elders, they warned. Women would stop respecting (and depending on) their husbands. Minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire.

When Kirk laid this out in 1951, only a few conservative intellectuals took him seriously.

Skeptics of multiracial egalitarian democracy like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater were electrified by his writings and line of thinking, but Republicans like then-President Dwight Eisenhower said of people like Kirk and his wealthy supporters:

“Their numbers are negligible and they are stupid.“

And then came the 1960s.

— In 1961, the birth control pill was legalized and by 1964 was in widespread use; this helped kick off the Women’s Liberation Movement, as women, now in control of their reproductive capacity, demanded equality in the workplace. Bra burning became a thing, at least in pop culture lore.

— By 1967, young people on college campuses were also in revolt; the object of their anger was an illegal war in Vietnam. Along with national protest, draft card burning was also a thing.

— The labor movement was feeling it’s oats: strikes spread across America throughout the 1960s from farm workers in California to steel workers in Pennsylvania. In the one year of 1970 alone, over 3 million workers walked out in 5,716 strikes.

— And throughout that decade African Americans were demanding an end to police violence and an expansion of Civil and Voting Rights. In response to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against Black people in the late 1960s, riots broke out and several of our cities were on fire.

These four movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk’s 1950s warnings about the dangers of the middle class and minorities embracing democracy.

Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet. And the GOP turned on a dime.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “national crisis” these movements represented was put into place with the election of 1980: the project of the Reagan Revolution was to dial back democracy while taking the middle class down a peg, and thus end the protests and social instability.

Their goal was, at its core, to save America from itself.

The plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide down or at least remain frozen for a few decades; end free college across the nation so students would study in fear rather than be willing to protest; and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding participation in democracy.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?

:{“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”}:

While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and more powerful (and that’s certainly been the effect), the ideologues driving the movement also thought they were restoring stability to the United States, both socially, economically, and — most important — politically.

The middle class was out of control by the late 1960s, they believed, and something had to be done. There was too much democracy, and it was tearing America apart.

Looking back at the “solutions” England used around the time of the American Revolution (and for 1000 years before) and advocated by Edmund Burke and other conservative thinkers throughout history, Republicans saw a remedy to the crisis.As a bonus, it had the side effect of helping their biggest donors and thus boosting their political war-chests.

If working people, women, minorities, and students were a bit more desperate about their economic situations, these conservative thinkers asserted, then they’d be less likely to organize, protest, strike, or even vote. The unevenness, the instability, the turbulence of democracy in the 1960s would be calmed.

— To accomplish this, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times.

— He put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment benefits and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by working-class people.

— He ended the deductibilityof credit-card, car-loan and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and multimillionaires from 74% to 27%. (There were no billionaires in America then, in large part because of FDR’s previous tax policies; the modern explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s massive tax cuts for the rich.)

— He declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American non-government workforce when he came into office to around 10% today.

— He brought a young lawyer named John Roberts into the White House to work out ways to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision. His VP brought in his son, George W., to build bridges between the GOP and the most fanatical branches of evangelical Christianity, who opposed both women’s rights and the Civil Rights movement.

— He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and NAFTA, which opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while cutting corporate donor’s labor costs and union membership.

And, sure enough, it worked.

— Reagan’s doubling-down on the War on Drugs shattered Black communities and our prison population became the largest in the world, both as a percentage of our population and in absolute numbers.

— His War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and median wages by more over a couple of decades than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.

— And his War on Students jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today so saddled with more than $1.7 trillion in student debt that many aren’t willing to jeopardize their future by “acting up” on campuses.

The key to selling all this to the American people was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, Republicans said, government itself is a remote, dangerous and incompetent power that can legally use guns to enforce its will.

As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, democracy was not the solution to our problems, but democracy — government — instead was the problem itself.

He ridiculed the once-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.

He told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were:

“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, wealthy people associated with Kirk’s and Reagan’s Republicans built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify this message about the dangers of too much democracy.

As the reporting from documented.net indicates, they’re working at it with as much enthusiasm today as ever.

It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was repeating things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from groups like the Heritage Foundation, the group documented.net wrote about yesterday.

Fox News today carries on the tradition, warning almost daily about the danger of “people in the streets” or political movements like anti-fascism and BLM.

When you look at the long arc of post-Agricultural Revolution human history you discover that Burke was right when he claimed that oligarchy — rule by the rich — has been the norm, not the exception.

And it’s generally provided at least a modicum of stability: feudal Europe changed so little for over a thousand years that we simply refer to that era as the Dark Ages followed by the Middle Ages without detail. It’s all kind of black-and-white fuzzy in our mind’s eye.

Popes, kings, queens, pharaohs, emperors: none allowed democracy because all knew it was both a threat to their wealth and power but also because, they asserted, it would render their nations unstable.

These historic leaders — and their modern day “strongman” versions emerging in former democracies like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, The Philippines, and Russia — are the model for many of today’s conservatives. And not just because they were rich.

Understanding this history gives us clues to how we can revive democracy in America. Step one is to help people realize that instability, like labor pains before birth, is not a bad thing for a democracy but most frequently is a sign of emerging and positive political and social advances.

Hopefully one day soon our vision of an all-inclusive democracy — the original promise of America, to quote historian Harvey Kaye — will be realized. But first we’re going to have to get past the millions of dollars mobilized by democracy’s skeptics.

I believe it’s possible. But it’s going to take all of us getting involved to make it happen. As both Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama were fond of saying: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”

Tag, we’re it.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-evangelicals-2649541067/

alexh

Christian Right is in mourning over President Donald Trump being voted out of office. Pat Robertson, the far-right evangelical who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, has declared that the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20, 2021 must be prevented, saying, "We will not give up this great country. And Satan, you cannot have it." But the irony is that the incoming president is much more religious than Trump, who has demonstrated how little he knows about Christianity and the Bible.

Although Trump was raised Presbyterian, religion was never a high priority in his life. But when he ran for president in 2016, Trump realized that the Christian Right was a prominent voting bloc in the GOP and went out of his way to pander to the far-right White evangelicals he had no connection to in the past. The Trump of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s was more of a Blue Dog Democrat than a GOP culture warrior, and he spent a lot more time in casinos than in churches.

Journalist Ed Kilgore, in an article published by New York Magazine on December 17, notes Trump's history of butchering Biblical references during his speeches.

Kilgore explains, "Before Donald Trump became the very favorite politician of White conservative evangelicals, he was regularly a figure of sport for displaying exceptional ignorance in all matters religious. A particularly rich example of his clumsiness occurred when he was campaigning at evangelical stronghold Liberty University early in 2016 and tried to quote a Bible verse that was very familiar to the audience, since it's etched on several buildings there."

Kilgore adds that there were many other "religious gaffes Trump committed while stumping for votes" in 2016.

"On another occasion along the campaign trail," Kilgore recalls, "Trump was asked about his favorite line of scripture. He delivered a word salad for a while and finally tried to recall 'an eye for an eye,' not the sort of thing Christians of any variety consider normative for the faith of the Prince of Peace…... Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, Trump was in a Council Bluffs church when a plate came down the pews with communion bread on it. The billionaire misidentified it as a collection plate and put a couple of bills on it."

Kilgore also notes that in 2017, Trump met with two Presbyterian minsters and was surprised to learn that they didn't consider themselves evangelicals but rather, described themselves as "Mainline Protestants."

Of course, anyone with even a basic knowledge of Christianity realizes that Presbyterians aren't evangelicals any more than Episcopalians or Lutherans — two other examples of Mainline Protestants — are evangelicals. And there's no way that either Biden, a devout Catholic, or former President Barack Obama, a Mainline Protestant, would have made that mistake or confused a communion plate with a collection plate. Unlike Trump, Biden and Obama both have a long history of being churchgoing Christians and obviously have an extensive knowledge of the Bible.

[twt]

if Pat Robertson were to sit down with Biden or Obama, they could have an in-depth conversation about scripture. Yet Robertson, like much of the Christian Right, adores Trump while hating Biden and Obama — which underscores the deeply tribalist nature of the Christian Right.

The Christian Right has long been a hate movement, and it is as much about White nationalism and far-right identity politics as it is about Protestant fundamentalism. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of Liberty University and co-founder of the Moral Majority, was a notorious segregationist during the 1950s and 1960s, when he vigorously defended Jim Crow laws in the pulpit and argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a not a true Christian because of his anti-segregation views. During the 1980s, Falwell defended the racist apartheid regime in South African and encouraged Christians to buy krugerrands to support it.

The late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, known for being an arch-conservative in his day, was vehemently critical of Falwell and the Christian Right during the 1980s — describing them as dangerous fanatics and warning that the GOP was making a huge mistake by allying itself with that movement. But many Republicans ignored Goldwater, much to the GOP's detriment.

To the Christian Right and far-right White evangelicals, the fact that Biden and Obama are more religious than Trump is irrelevant. Robertson, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and other evangelical Trump supporters are extreme tribalists, and they view Trump as part of their tribe — which is why Trump got a pass when, according to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, he had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet.

Trump repeatedly attacked Biden as anti-Christian during his 2020 presidential campaign. But in 2017, Trump didn't even know the difference between Presbyterians and evangelicals.

The Christian Right will miss Trump dearly when he leaves off on January 20, 2021. And no matter how much Biden goes to church or accurately quotes the Bible, it won't matter to the far-right evangelical extremists who value White identity politics above all else.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Here comes the son: Barry Goldwater Jr. fights for solar power in Arizona

By Kate Sheppard

The name Barry Goldwater is practically synonymous with conservatism in America. That’s even more true in the late politician’s home state of Arizona, which he represented for five terms in the U.S. Senate. Now his son, Barry Goldwater Jr., is putting the family name behind an effort to protect solar energy’s growing share of the electricity market — a struggle that has pitted him against entrenched utility interests and a right-wing dark-money group.

Goldwater, 74, is the chair of Tell Utilities Solar Won’t Be Killed (or TUSK, for short), a group launched in March to fight the state’s largest electric utility, Arizona Public Service, on solar power. APS has been campaigning to get the state utility commission to change regulations dealing with net metering, a policy that allows homes and businesses with their own solar power systems to send excess energy they generate back to the grid and make money off of it. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia have a net-metering policy in place.

Arizona has had net metering since 2009, which has helped make it the second-ranked state in the country in installed solar capacity. But APS has called for an overhaul of the state’s net-metering policy and plans to unveil its proposal to the regulators on the Arizona Corporation Commission this Friday.

APS argues that under the current arrangement, the 18,000 Arizonans with rooftop solar aren’t paying enough to cover the cost of maintaining the grid. Even if a house has a solar system, it still uses the utility’s infrastructure. It pulls energy from the grid when the sun is not shining and feeds energy back into the grid when the solar unit is generating more power than the house needs. The utility wants to lower the rate that it pays for solar power produced by these rooftop solar generators, or otherwise recoup the costs. “Our only point is that anybody who uses the grid should pay their fair share of the grid,” said APS spokesperson Jim McDonald.

Opponents, however, say reducing the incentives for rooftop solar will make it a less appealing investment. They argue that APS is going after net metering because it is worried that solar might start to cut into its profit margins, as fewer homeowners are buying from the grid and more are selling to it. McDonald said net metering has “zero impact” on the utility’s profit margins right now — but it could down the line. “Eventually would it become a business issue? It probably would,” he said.

Enter Goldwater. TUSK’s sole concern is protecting net metering, and it has brought together solar industry and other business groups to push back against APS. If APS is successful, said Goldwater, “they may very well kill rooftop solar in Arizona, and that would be a tragedy.”

A politician in his own right, Goldwater represented California in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1969 to 1983. (He still lives in California, though he is active in Arizona-based conservative organizations like the Goldwater Institute, named after his father.) His support for solar, he said, comes from conservative, free-market principles rooted in “creating choices for the American consumer.”

“Choice means competition. Competition drives prices down and the quality up,” Goldwater told Mother Jones. “The utilities are monopolies. They’re not used to competition. That’s what rooftop solar represents to them.”

TUSK’s campaign to date has been creative, to say the least. It includes a of a large gorilla beating up a smaller one as a booming voice condemns the utility monopoly for “trying to kill the independent solar industry in Arizona,” before Goldwater comes on screen to say that it’s “not the American way, it’s not the conservative way.” Another ad about APS sung to the tune of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” (Chorus: “They don’t think consumers are that smart.”) The group has also been running ads on the Drudge Report and conservative radio in the state.

The public relations company behind the campaign is Phoenix-based Rose + Moser + Allyn, led by Jason Rose, a well-connected member of the state’s Republican establishment. Rose’s wife, Jordan, is the founder of Rose Law Group, which represents California-based SolarCity, the county’s largest installer of rooftop solar. One environmentalist in the state described Rose, 42, to me as “a hip, young, ultra-right-wing PR guy.”

I asked Rose whether he thought the description fit. “I will gladly accept that moniker,” he replied. The group hired a Republican polling firm in March to survey likely voters on solar and found that 88 percent of all voters in the state — and 76 percent of Republicans — supported net metering.

“I think solar has just relied on the left for so long, and it hasn’t made a strong intellectual effort to the right. And it should,” Rose said. “Because it’s entirely consistent with that more libertarian, free-market strand of the Republican Party.”

Rose thinks that Arizona is the leading edge of a solar renaissance among conservatives. “Arizona might be the key focus group on this, and might be a leading indicator of a future shift in Republican attitudes not just in Arizona, but across the country,” he argued.

But his group is getting push-back from APS and its allies — most of which are also conservative. The utility is a major donor to Republican causes in the state, giving $25,000 to the Republican Victory Fund in the 2012 election, according to the Arizona Department of State records. Republicans have long held the majority in the state legislature. The two renewable-friendly Democrats on the Corporation Commission, which will ultimately decide whether or not to approve APS’s net-metering plan, lost reelection bids last fall, leaving an entirely Republican commission. APS has pretty entrenched supporters in the state.

“APS wields a lot of power,” said Tom Mackin, president of the Arizona Wildlife Federation, which isn’t involved in the net-metering fight but has worked on renewable energy issues in the state. “They pretty much get what they want.”

Last week, the national conservative group 60 Plus Association entered the Arizona fight as well, with a website and web ads decrying “corporate welfare” for solar energy and raising the specter of Solyndra, the solar panel company that went bankrupt in 2011. 60 Plus bills itself as the conservative group representing senior citizens (the anti-AARP, if you will). As a 501(c)(4), the group does not have to disclose its donors. It made big outside expenditures on Republicans in 2012. While 60 Plus has weighed in on a federal renewable energy standard in the past, claiming it would be bad for senior citizens, this appears to be the first state issue the group has taken on.

Renewable advocates have accused APS of funding the 60 Plus campaign, a charge that APS flatly denied in an interview with Mother Jones. But the group’s involvement is perhaps a sign of just how much attention is being paid to the net-metering fight in Arizona. Bryan Miller, president of the advocacy group Alliance for Solar Choice, recently deemed it “the most significant fight for solar in the country.”

That’s why renewable energy advocates in the state say that having a voice like Goldwater’s involved is changing the game. “It really does make a big difference when a group like TUSK comes out and they say directly, ‘Look, the utilities are trying to kill solar,’” said Nancy LaPlaca, a Phoenix-based energy consultant.

Goldwater paints the fight to keep net metering as going to the very heart of Republican values. “Conservatives believe in individual freedom, in choice, in competition,” he said. “We believe all of those things allow people to live a better life — to be able to choose what they want to do and not have a monopoly, or in the case of government, big government, telling them how to live their life. So it’s a very natural place for a conservative to be. I think as time goes by you’ll see more and more Republicans vocalize this.”

Pacifica's Mitch Jeserich hosts “Letters & Politics 8/22/12 10 am how BG start of ending moderationeg nelson rockefeller (booed, shouted down in fact)

1964 conv sf cow palace: unthinking ladies?

Rule and Ruin Geoffrey Kabaservice http://www.amazon.com/Rule-Ruin-Moderation-Destruction-Development/dp/0199768404

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/29/rule-and-ruin-the-gop-s-secret-love-affair-with-spending.html

BG took down party and helped LBJ's agenda; now seen as rino

suggested a nuke war wd be cleansing? led to daisey commercial

NR served in fdr, truman and ike admin; divorced, remarried divorcee who let husb have kids; almost beast BG in CA primary

conservationists?

kevin philips (now recanted "emerging rep maj) john mitchell (ex-mod) so strategy (courted so segregationsits, allowed to switch to gop and keep senirity eg strom thurmond; dixiecrats temp seceded and put him up as pres cand

BG ~ evangel in 80's shift to rt

RR on taking office biggest tax hike in state hist? 11x most lib abort law

mod gop also had So strategy; support civil rights and appeal to prof'l in so))

see rwhist2

**Barry Morris Goldwater** (January 2, 1909 [1] – May 29, 1998) was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987) and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. An articulate and charismatic figure during the first half of the 1960s, he was known as "Mr. Conservative".

Goldwater is the politician most often credited for sparking the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s. He also had a substantial impact on the libertarian movement.^[2]

Goldwater rejected the legacy of the New Deal and fought through the conservative coalition to defeat the New Deal coalition. He mobilized a large conservative constituency to win the hard-fought Republican primaries. Goldwater's right-wing campaign platform ultimately failed to gain the support of the electorate^[3] and he lost the 1964 presidential election to incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson by one of the largest landslides in history, bringing down many Republican candidates as well. The Johnson campaign and other critics painted him as a reactionary, while supporters praised his crusades against the Soviet Union, labor unions, and the welfare state. His defeat allowed Johnson and the Democrats in Congress to pass the Great Society programs, but the defeat of so many older Republicans in 1964 also cleared the way for a younger generation of American conservatives to mobilize. Goldwater was much less active as a national leader of conservatives after 1964; his supporters mostly rallied behind Ronald Reagan, who became governor of California in 1967 and the 40th President of the United States in 1981.

Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1969, and specialized in defense policy, bringing to the table his experience as a senior officer in the Air Force Reserve. His greatest accomplishment was arguably the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which restructured the higher levels of the Pentagon by increasing the power of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to direct military action. In 1974, as an elder statesman of the party, Goldwater successfully urged President Richard Nixon to resign when evidence of a cover-up in the Watergate scandal became overwhelming and impeachment was imminent. By the 1980s, the increasing influence of the Christian right on the Republican Party so conflicted with Goldwater's libertarian views that he became a vocal opponent of the religious right on issues such as gay rights and the role of religion in public life.^[4]...

Political relationships

Goldwater was grief-stricken^[21] by the assassination of Kennedy and was greatly disappointed that his opponent in the race would not be JFK, but instead Kennedy's Vice President, the former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.^[22] Goldwater disliked Johnson (whom he said "used every dirty trick in the bag", and Richard M. Nixon of California, whom he later called "the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life."^[22]) Goldwater, by then again a Senator, advocated for Nixon to resign at the height of Watergate, warning that fewer than ten senators would vote against conviction after Nixon was impeached by the House of Representatives.^[23] The term "Goldwater moment" has subsequently been used to describe situations when influential members of Congress disagree so strongly with a President from their own party that they rise up and take a stand against them.

His 1984 Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act allowed local governments to require the transmission of Public, educational, and government access (PEG) channels, barred cable operators from exercising editorial control over content of programs carried on PEG channels, and absolved them from liability for their content.

[edit] U.S. presidential campaign, 1964

Republican primaries results

At the time of Goldwater's presidential candidacy, the Republican Party was split between its conservative wing (based in the West and South) and moderate/liberal wing (based in the Northeast). He alarmed even some of his fellow partisans with his brand of staunch fiscal conservatism and militant anti-communism. He was viewed by many traditional Republicans as being too far on the right wing of the political spectrum to appeal to the mainstream majority necessary to win a national election. As a result, moderate Republicans recruited a series of opponents, including New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, to challenge Goldwater. Goldwater would defeat Rockefeller in the winner-take-all California primary and secure the nomination. He also had a solid backing from Southern Republicans. A bright young Birmingham lawyer, John Grenier, secured commitments from 271 of 279 southern convention delegates to back Goldwater. Grenier went on to serve as executive director of the national GOP during the Goldwater campaign. This was the Number 2 position to party chairman Dean Burch, Goldwater's fellow Arizonan.

Goldwater famously declared in his bold acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." This paraphrase of Cicero was included at the suggestion of Harry V. Jaffa, though the speech was primarily written by Karl Hess. Due to President Johnson's popularity, however, Goldwater held back from attacking the president directly; he did not even mention Johnson by name in his convention speech.

Past comments came back to haunt Goldwater throughout his campaign. Once he called the Eisenhower administration "a dime-store New Deal," and the former president never fully forgave him. Eisenhower did, however, film a TV commercial with Goldwater.^[24] Eisenhower qualified his voting for Goldwater in November by remarking that he had voted not specifically for Goldwater, but for the Republican Party.^[citation ^needed] In December 1961, Goldwater told a news conference that "sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea". That comment boomeranged on him during the campaign in the form of a Johnson television commercial,^[25] as did remarks about making Social Security voluntary,^[26] and statements in Tennessee about selling the Tennessee Valley Authority, a large local New Deal employer.^[citation ^needed]

The Goldwater campaign spotlighted Ronald Reagan, who appeared in a campaign ad^[27] and gave a stirring, nationally televised speech, "A Time for Choosing", in support of Goldwater.^[28] The speech prompted Reagan to seek the California Governorship in 1966 and jump-started his political career. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, later well known for her fight against the Equal Rights Amendment, first became known for writing a pro-Goldwater book, A Choice, Not an Echo, attacking the moderate Republican establishment. Senator Prescott Bush (1895–1972), a moderate Republican from Connecticut, was a friend of Goldwater's and supported him in the general election campaign. Bush's son, George H.W. Bush (then running for the Senate from Texas against Democrat Ralph Yarborough), was also a strong Goldwater supporter in both the nomination and general election campaigns. Future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and fellow Arizonan William Rehnquist also first came to the attention of national Republicans through his work as a legal adviser to Goldwater's 1964 campaign. Goldwater was painted as a dangerous figure by the Johnson campaign, which countered Goldwater's slogan "In your heart, you know he's right" with the lines "In your guts, you know he's nuts," and "In your heart, you know he might" (that is, might actually use nuclear weapons, as opposed to merely subscribing to deterrence). Johnson himself did not mention Goldwater in his own acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Goldwater's provocative advocacy of aggressive tactics to prevent the spread of communism in Asia led to effective counterattacks from Lyndon B. Johnson and his supporters, who claimed that Goldwater's militancy would have dire consequences, possibly even nuclear war. Regarding Vietnam, Goldwater charged that Johnson's policy was devoid of "goal, course, or purpose," leaving "only sudden death in the jungles and the slow strangulation of freedom."^[29] Goldwater's own rhetoric on nuclear war was viewed by many as quite uncompromising, a view buttressed by off-hand comments such as, "Let's lob one into the men's room at the Kremlin."^[30]

Goldwater did his best to counter the Johnson attacks, criticizing the Johnson administration for its perceived ethical lapses, and stating in a commercial that "…we, as a nation, are not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and people…I say it is time to put conscience back in government. And by good example, put it back in all walks of American life." Goldwater campaign commercials included statements of support by actor Raymond Massey^[31] and moderate Republican senator Margaret Chase Smith.^[32]

Before the 1964 election, the muckraking Fact magazine, published by Ralph Ginzburg, ran a special issue entitled ‘The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.’ The two main articles contended that Goldwater was mentally unfit to be president. The magazine attempted to support this claim with the results of an unscientific poll of psychiatrists it had conducted. Fact had mailed questionnaires to 12,356 psychiatrists, and published a ‘sampling’ of the comments made by the 2,417 psychiatrists who responded, of which 1,189 said Goldwater was unfit to be president.^[33][34] After the election, Goldwater sued the publisher, the editor and the magazine for libel in Goldwater v. Ginzburg. "Although the jury awarded Goldwater only $1.00 in compensatory damages against all three defendants, it went on to [396 U.S. 1049, 1050] award him punitive damages of $25,000 against Ginzburg and $50,000 against Fact magazine, Inc."^[35] According to Warren Boroson, then-managing editor of Fact and now a financial columnist, the main biography of Goldwater in the magazine was written by David Bar-Illan, the Israeli pianist.^[36]

[edit] Daisy

A Democratic campaign advertisement known as Daisy showed a young girl counting daisy petals, from one to ten. Immediately following this scene, a voiceover counted down from ten to one. The child's face was shown as a still photograph followed by images of nuclear explosions and mushroom clouds. The campaign advertisement ended with a plea to vote for Johnson, implying that Goldwater (who was not mentioned by name) would provoke a nuclear war if elected. The advertisement, which featured only a few spoken words of narrative and relied on imagery for its emotional impact, was one of the most provocative in American political campaign history, and many analysts credit it as being the birth of the modern style of "negative political ads" on television. The ad only aired once, and was immediately pulled, but then was shown numerous times by television stations.^[37]

[edit] Results

Goldwater only won his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South, depicted in red. The Southern states, traditionally Democratic up to that time, voted Republican primarily as a statement of opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which had been passed by Johnson and the Democrats in Congress earlier that year.^[citation ^needed] Capturing 61.1% of the popular vote and 486 electors, Johnson won in a landslide.

In the end, Goldwater received 38.4% of the popular vote, and carried six states: Arizona (with only 50.45% of the popular vote) and the core states of the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, where for the last time the electorate was practically all white. In all, Johnson won an overwhelming 486 electoral votes, to Goldwater's 52. Goldwater, with his customary bluntness, remarked: "We would have lost even if Abraham Lincoln had come back and campaigned with us." He maintained later in life that he would have won the election if the country had not been in a state of extended grief (referring to the assassination of John F. Kennedy), and that it was simply not ready for a third President in just 14 months.

Goldwater's poor showing pulled down many supporters. Of the 57 Republican Congressmen who endorsed Goldwater before the convention, 20 were defeated for reelection, along with many promising young Republicans. On the other hand, the defeat of so many older politicians created openings for young conservatives to move up the ladder. While the loss of moderate Republicans was temporary—they were back by 1966—Goldwater also permanently pulled many conservative Southerners and white ethnics out of the New Deal Coalition.^[38]

"In the South, Goldwater broke through and won five states—the best showing in the region for a GOP candidate since Reconstruction. In Mississippi — where Franklin D. Roosevelt had won nearly 100 percent of the vote just 28 years earlier — Goldwater claimed a staggering 87 percent." ^[39] It has frequently been argued that Goldwater's strong performance in Southern states previously regarded as Democratic strongholds foreshadowed a larger shift in electoral trends in the coming decades that would make the south a Republican bastion (an end to the "Solid South")—first in presidential politics and eventually at the congressional and state levels, as well.^[40]

[edit] Goldwater and the revival of American conservatism

Although Goldwater was not as important in the American conservative movement as Ronald Reagan after 1965, he shaped and redefined the movement from the late 1950s to 1964. Arizona Senator John McCain summed up Goldwater's legacy thus: "He transformed the Republican Party from an Eastern elitist organization to the breeding ground for the election of Ronald Reagan."^[41] The columnist George Will remarked after the 1980 Presidential election that it took 16 years to count the votes from 1964 and Goldwater won.^[42]

The Republican Party recovered from the 1964 election debacle, picking up 47 seats in the House of Representatives in the mid-term election of 1966. Further Republican successes ensued, including Goldwater's return to the Senate in 1968. In January of that year, Goldwater wrote an article in the National Review "affirming that he [was] not against liberals, that liberals are needed as a counterweight to conservatism, and that he had in mind a fine liberal like Max Lerner."^[43]

Throughout the 1970s, as the conservative wing under Reagan gained control of the party, Goldwater concentrated on his Senate duties, especially in military affairs. He played little part in the election or administration of Richard Nixon, but he helped force Nixon's resignation in 1974.^[44] In 1976 he helped block Rockefeller's renomination as Vice President. When Reagan challenged Ford for the presidential nomination in 1976, Goldwater endorsed Ford, looking for consensus rather than conservative idealism. As one historian notes, "The Arizonan had lost much of his zest for battle."^[45]

In 1979, when President Carter normalized relations with Communist China, Goldwater and some other senators sued him in the Supreme Court, arguing that the president could not terminate the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty with Republic of China (Taiwan) without the approval of Congress. The case was known as Goldwater v. Carter, which was dismissed by the court as a political question.

[edit] Later life

By the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan as president and the growing involvement of the religious right in conservative politics, Goldwater's libertarian views on personal issues were revealed; he believed that they were an integral part of true conservatism. Goldwater viewed abortion as a matter of personal choice, not intended for government intervention.^[46]

As a passionate defender of personal liberty, he saw the religious right's views as an encroachment on personal privacy and individual liberties.^[47] In his 1980 Senate reelection campaign, Goldwater won support from religious conservatives but in his final term voted consistently to uphold legalized abortion and, in 1981, gave a speech on how he was angry about the bullying of American politicians by religious organizations, and would "fight them every step of the way".^[48] Goldwater also disagreed with the Reagan administration on certain aspects of foreign policy (for example, he opposed the decision to mine Nicaraguan harbors). Notwithstanding his prior differences with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Goldwater in a 1986 interview rated him the best of the seven Presidents with whom he had worked.

On May 12, 1986, Goldwater was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.

After his retirement in 1987, Goldwater described the Arizona Governor Evan Mecham as "hardheaded" and called on him to resign, and two years later stated that the Republican party had been taken over by a "bunch of kooks".^[49]

In a 1994 interview with the Washington Post the retired senator said,

When you say "radical right" today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.^[50]

Goldwater visited the small town of Bowen, Illinois in 1989 to see first hand where his mother was raised.

In response to Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell's opposition to the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, of which Falwell had said, "Every good Christian should be concerned", Goldwater retorted: "Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."^[51] (According to John Dean, Goldwater actually suggested that good Christians ought to kick Falwell in the "nuts", but the news media "changed the anatomical reference." ^[52]) Goldwater also had harsh words for his one-time political protege, President Reagan, particularly after the Iran-Contra Affair became public in 1986. Journalist Robert MacNeil, a friend of Goldwater's from the 1964 Presidential campaign, recalled interviewing him in his office shortly afterward. "He was sitting in his office with his hands on his cane ... and he said to me, 'Well, aren't you going to ask me about the Iran arms sales?' It had just been announced that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran. And I said, 'Well, if I asked you, what would you say?' He said, 'I'd say it's the god-damned stupidest foreign policy blunder this country's ever made!'",^[53] though aside from the Iran-Contra scandal, Goldwater thought nonetheless that Reagan was a good president.^[54] In 1988 during that year's presidential campaign, he pointedly told vice-presidential nominee Dan Quayle at a campaign event in Arizona "I want you to go back and tell George Bush to start talking about the issues."^[55]

Some of Goldwater's statements in the 1990s aggravated many social conservatives. He endorsed Democrat Karan English in an Arizona congressional race, urged Republicans to lay off Bill Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and criticized the military's ban on homosexuals:^[50] "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar."^[56] He also said, "You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight."^[57] A few years before his death he went so far as to address the unprincipled establishment "republicans", "Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you've hurt the Republican party much more than the Democrats have."^[58]

In 1996, he told Bob Dole, whose own presidential campaign received lukewarm support from conservative Republicans: "We're the new liberals of the Republican party. Can you imagine that?"^[59] In that same year, with Senator Dennis DeConcini, Goldwater endorsed an Arizona initiative to legalize medical marijuana against the countervailing opinion of social conservatives.^[60]

anti-union http://cambridge.academia.edu/ElizabethShermer/Papers/131273/Origins_of_the_Conservative_Ascendancy

Barry Goldwater was the Republican Party's U.S. presidential candidate in 1964.

Honorary Board, Republicans for Environmental Protection ^[1]

Resources and articles

References

↑ Honorary Board, Republicans for Environmental Protection, accessed September 14, 2010.

Before the Storm

Perlstein

after 66 election LBJ stalled by big gop gains?! 60's not just left, but polarization xv

BG dad avoid draft in czr's army, leaned haut cout in paris, stated a dept store (bg did not carry cash, just charged all to dad'd acct) mom desc of Roger Williams (TB patient)

antsy-pants fad fame

Rehnquist advised BG on how to vote on CR act (as SC clerk, he wrote memo that Plessy v Ferg 1896 sep but = )shd be upheld) 363 2nd op from bork, who said cr not question, but if anyone can assoc [or not?] for any reason (wrote 75 pp brief)

In Selma bl trying to go to movie attacked by whites, run out by lestor maddox w/ pistol --> celeb 366

john chancellor hustled out of convention signed off "somehere in custody " 382 cow palace (WPA)

===

Mentor

In April 1941, Kitchel married the former Naomi Douglas (1907-2004), an artist, a native of Santa Barbara, California, and the daughter of the mining and railroad executive Walter Douglas and his wife, the former Edith Margaret Bell. Naomi Kitchel, who attended Stanford University, was the first woman trustee of the Phoenix Art Museum, the founding chairman of Planned Parenthood in Phoenix, and a member of the National Federation of Republican Women.^[7] The couple had two sons, James Douglas Kitchel of Scottsdale and Harvey Denison Kitchel (namesake of his great-great-grandfather) of Jamul in San Diego County, California, and four grandchildren. He served for three years in England in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II and was discharged as a lieutenant colonel.^[1]

1964 campaign

The Kitchel-Goldwater friendship began in 1935, when Goldwater was a young department-store executive in Phoenix. In 1952, Kitchel managed the first of Goldwater's five successful, nonconsecutive campaigns for the United States Senate.^[8] He encouraged Goldwater's enthusiasm for the NATO and convincedthe presidential candidate to support the unanimous 1954 United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which led to the use of federal troops in 1957 in a test case to compel school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.^[1]

Kitchel's judicious manner contrasted with Goldwater's early tendency to make controversial statements, to shoot from the hip. It was often said that Kitchel was the only man who could oppose Goldwater and still survive the conformity of the candidate's inner circle.^[9] Goldwater named Kitchel as campaign manager in January 1964. In doing so, he bypassed the key figures in the Draft Goldwater Committee, Goldwater's Senate campaign manager Stephen Shadegg, F. Clifton White and William A. Rusher.^[10] From the start, party leaders pressured Goldwater to replace Kitchel with a more experienced national figure. Some Republican financial contributors wanted Leonard W. Hall of New York, the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1953 to 1957, for the top campaign position, but Goldwater stood behind is longtime friend.

Kitchel once said that he had an active distaste for campaigning, or "kissing babies," as he called such demands. However, Kitchel exerted leadership regarding issues, strategies, and drafting policy statements. Kitchel wrote Goldwater's Senate speech, which explained his then opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on constitutional and libertarian grounds. Then, Governor Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, a moderate Republican and later a Senate colleague of Goldwater, who was the keynoter of the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, introduced Kitchel at a caucus of the Oregon delegation as

a man of little background in national politics.... Just as voters this year have been confounding the pollsters, this man has confounded the professional politicians.^[1]

Kitchel and several others in the Goldwater inner circle were hesitant to allow Reagan's well-remembered half-hour televised address on Goldwater's behalf. The program, "A Time for Choosing", aired on October 27, 1964, under auspices of F. Clifton White's "Citizens for Goldwater-Miller" organization.^[10]

After Goldwater's defeat, Shadegg published What Happened to Goldwater?: The Inside Story of the 1964 Republican Campaign, which revealed that Kitchel had been an early member of the John Birch Society. The New York Times reviewer recommended the book: "students of political organization and political philosophy will find many other minor fascinations in these pages, not least of which is the author's ambivalent attitude toward his hero."^[11]

Legacy

From 1957 to 1963, Kitchel was general counsel for the Arizona Republican Party. In 1958, when Goldwater was first reelected to the Senate, Kitchel wrote the state party platform in which he defined his conservative philosophy in eight short paragraphs, one of which reads:^[6]

The preservation of freedom demands that governmental restraints be kept at a minimum and that both freedom of association and the right to work is protected.