It’s a mark of how ugly American conservatism has become that people with a sense of history are nostalgic for Barry Goldwater. I’ve been thinking about Goldwater lately since even before Republicans elevated a right-wing Christian nationalist named Mike Johnson to the role of Speaker of the House.
A bit of history for young listeners: Barry Goldwater was such a hard-right extremist for his time that he led the Republican party to an historic loss as its 1964 presidential nominee. His memorable quote was this: ““Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Americans rejected that, bigtime.
Yet in losing, Barry Goldwater planted a virus that all but killed the moderate wing of the Republican party – and right now, it holds Congress in a fever’s grip. Goldwater introduced Ronald Reagan to the national political audience, which yielded the so-called Reagan Revolution – locking in the broad and bitter anti-government sensibility that is the defining issue of today’s Republican party.
And look at what this anti-government extremism has brought us now: a paralyzed Congress, and a nation disgusted with its government. It’s a situation that has left the viability of American democracy itself in question, and put at risk the economic stability of the world and the survival of Ukraine as an independent nation. And it clarifies that Barry Goldwater was wrong: Extremism, whatever its ostensible aim, is unjustifiable in a pluralistic society.
Aristotle put forward the notion that virtue is found at the mean point between excess and deficiency — that is, neither too much nor too little of anything. Democracy, based on the virtuous principle that people ought to be able to decide for themselves what their government should do, tends to be moderate. We elect people to lead us with the assumption that they’ll find a rough midpoint that’s as close as we can come at any moment to satisfying most of us, and caring as best we can for all of us.
Extremists, though, don’t buy that idea. They can’t find it in themselves to tolerate goals other than their own, which suggests that extremism is something of a personality disorder. The great Irish writer William Butler Yeats — who knew politics well, and was a senator of the Irish Free State in the 1920s — asserted this: “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”
Empty souls, indeed. It is extremism that pulls books from classroom library shelves, that forbids mentioning homosexuality in schools that educate kids with gay parents, and kids that are themselves gay. It is extremism that hold back the truthful telling of American history, since that might create uncomfortable political realities today. Extremists believe any action to limit access to firearms is a threat to our constitutional freedom. Extremists would shut down government rather than accept deviation from their own point of view in the government’s actions — no matter the will of the majority.
And, in light of the elevation of Louisiana’s Mike Johnson to the role of Speaker of the House, it is extremism that asserts that God has elevated one person, of one religion, to a position of civil authority. Christian nationalism in America is extremism, no less than is Muslim extremism in the Mideast.
That underscores the danger of political extremism. It’s not just in its capacity to hobble government, but more in what it might provoke outside official channels — namely, violence. The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and the violent 2017 march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., are tragically memorable, but they’re not isolated examples. In 2020, the Center for Strategic and International Studies looked into almost 900 politically motivated attacks in the U.S. during the prior quarter century. It found that far-left attacks had led to one fatality, compared to 329 deaths arising from attacks by the far right.
It wasn’t liberals who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, of course, and it isn’t the left that is promoting even still the anti-democratic lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. On the campaign stump this year, Trump is asserting that Democrats “are going to be trying” to steal the election — so that if he is the Republican nominee and loses, he will likely again encourage his supporters to again disbelieve the facts, with potentially catastrophic results.
This is why we might we pine for a Barry Goldwater today. Extreme as he was for his time, Goldwater believed in democracy, and kept working at it for three more Senate terms after his landslide loss. He wasn’t afraid to cross typical partisan divides: Goldwater supported abortion rights; he was a lifetime member of the NAACP, and was blunt about his contempt for the right-wing push to ban gays from military service. He said: “You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”
A few years before his death in 1998, Goldwater told the Republican leadership that he no longer wanted his name associated with what they were doing. He said, “You are extremists, and you’ve hurt the Republican party much more than the Democrats have.”
Sadly, the wrong lessons of Barry Goldwater are those that survived him. The vice of today’s conservatives is extremism, and in that, there is no virtue.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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