Fifty Years Later, Whose Country Is It?
Did Goldwater really win? Did Reagan?
The attention paid to Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the third volume in his magnum opus on the triumph of the right in modern American politics, was enough to get me to finally dive into his first volume, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. It’s a serious and thought-provoking series of books, with an implicit premise: that the loser in 1964 was ultimately the winner — that, as so many have said so often in the decades since Ronald Reagan came to and then left the presidency, we’re a center-right country.
As I said, it’s a thought-provoking body of work, and the thought that it has provoked in me is that that premise is simply wrong.
What’s striking, when you read again about Barry Goldwater in 1964, is how little of what he sought has come to pass. But rather than start an endless and boundless argument about this, I figured it could be fun to conduct a sort of close reading experiment. If we’re really that center-right country, and if Goldwater really won in the long run, his 1964 Republican platform should read today as pretty prescient.
And then, like any good experiment, I thought we should have something of a “control” as well. Maybe it would add to the fun if we contrasted the fate of Goldwater’s platform with that of George McGovern and the 1972 Democrats. Why McGovern? Because he and Goldwater are twins of a sort: Running just eight years apart, as the standard bearers of opposite parties, they each lost a presidential election by roughly a 60–40 landslide, which ties them, more or less, with history’s worst losers in modern two-party races. (The other members of this sorry club are Walter Mondale to Reagan in 1984, Alf Landon to Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, and James Cox to Warren Harding in 1920; it turns out that 60 percent seems to be the rough upper limit on the proportion of votes a presidential candidate can attract in our modern system.)
So I looked at the Goldwater platform and the McGovern platform. If we’re living in Barry Goldwater’s America, there must be lots there that eventually came to pass. And, of course, conversely, if America has drifted to the right in the last 42 years, you’d expect to find almost nothing of the McGovern wish list that became reality. (If you remember the attacks on McGovern as the candidate of “acid [legalized drugs], amnesty [for Vietnam draft evaders] and abortion” you may already see where this is going — marijuana, admittedly a very far cry from LSD, is rapidly being legalized; amnesty was announced in 1977; and abortion has now been a constitutional right for 41 years.)
Anyway, back to our experiment. I went and looked carefully at the 1964 Republican platform.
Other than an early cry for welfare reform of the sort that Newt Gingrich ultimately proposed and Bill Clinton signed, there is almost nothing that is both significant and was controversial that the 1964 GOP could look around today and smile about.
On the other hand, here is a list, in the order they appear in the platform, of controversial and important policies on which the Goldwaterites lost — lost not only in 1964 but permanently:
- Opposition to the enactment of what we now know as Medicare;
- A constitutional amendment permitting public prayer in schools and elsewhere;
- Reduced federal spending, a balanced budget (other than a brief period under Clinton), and repayment of the federal debt;
- Opposition to what we would now call affirmative action;
- A constitutional amendment overturning the “one person, one vote” rulings of the Supreme Court with respect to one house of each state’s legislature;
- Opposition to the recognition of “Red China” and its admission to the United Nations;
- The reorganization of the UN so that General Assembly members would have votes in proportion to their population;
- The formal recognition of a Cuban government in exile.
That’s a lot of defeats for folks who supposedly ultimately “won.” How about the flip side of our test, the McGovern ledger? The picture is admittedly more mixed. There are many things we’d still consider pretty radical, relating especially to income distribution and union rights, on which the McGovernites didn’t prevail. But here is a list of some things these supposed historical “losers” advocated that have happened, again in the order they appear in the platform:
- Annual cost of living adjustments to what we’d now call “entitlement” programs;
- Federal income assistance, especially to working mothers — what came to be the Earned Income Tax Credit;
- Statutory maternity and family leave benefits for working women;
- Official policies to encourage workplace racial diversity;
- National health insurance;
- Federal funding for special education;
- Ending de jure discrimination based on gender;
- Placing women on the Supreme Court;
- Legal rights for the disabled — what came to be the Americans with Disabilities Act;
- Coverage of prescription drugs under Medicare;
- Mandating of more extensive food and drug labeling;
- Availability of federally funded family planning services;
- Federal student loans for higher education;
- The end of the seniority rule for congressional committee chairs;
- Statutory ceilings on the amount of political contributions.
Again, that’s pretty substantial change for a bunch of “losers.”
The fact, of course, is that the drift of American politics since the rise of urbanization, the turn of the twentieth century, and the accession to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt has been to the left.
It has not always been a steady drift, it has not been without moments where the “arc of history” seemed to bend back the other way (1921, 1947, 1981, and 1995 come to mind), but those have been, in retrospect, moments.
Yes, the country has been closely divided in recent elections. And yes, Ronald Reagan was an historic figure — indeed, almost certainly, along with Lyndon Johnson, one of the two most important presidents since FDR. But his greatest success was in confronting the Soviets, and his principal domestic achievement — beyond the not-inconsiderable matter of restoring the nation’s faith in itself — was to slow the pace at which the great movements unleashed by the New Deal and the Great Society advanced. He did not reverse those movements.
Reagan was a key Goldwater supporter in 1964. (Here’s his speech of October 27, 1964, “A Time for Choosing.”)
Reagan regarded McGovern’s politics as anathema. And yet, here we are, 25 years after Reagan’s two terms (and effectively the third, to which George Bush “41” was elected). And the scorecard is clear. Or should be.
Anyone who doubts that this drift continues today need only look at where we are clearly headed on the legalization of marijuana, on gay rights of all sorts, on (eventually) immigration reform, on the GOP’s slow but increasingly evident surrender on the Affordable Care Act. Or they can recall that in the so-called Age of Reagan, we have enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act, Medicare Part D, and Obamacare, while federal spending and debt have grown nearly every year.
Admittedly, there are twin mysteries to why this argument will strike so many close observers of American politics as counter-intuitive.
Why is it that the right in this country is satisfied — as they so often are — to declare that they are winning the nation’s political war when they are losing it?
The Wall Street Journal editorial page and Karl Rove, for instance, never tire of asserting that America is a center-right nation. But saying it does not make it so. And by the same token, why is the left (of which Perlstein is a proudly card-carrying member) so satisfied with a narrative in which they are losing a battle they seem actually, almost inexorably, to be winning?
Tofel is the author of Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address and Eight Weeks in Washington, 1861: Abraham Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition.
