By any reasonable measure, the leader of the Republican Party these days is an extremist. And it’s a sign of how much America has changed that Donald Trump seems to be about a coin-flip away from the presidency, while the guy who was until now the Republicans’ most extreme candidate lost in a landslide.
That, of course, was Barry Goldwater, who in the presidential campaign 60 years ago memorably declared, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Americans in those days felt otherwise: Goldwater led his party to an historic defeat.
Yet in losing, Barry Goldwater planted a virus that all but killed the moderate wing of the Republican party – and which now holds the party in its grip. Just to review the history: Goldwater introduced Ronald Reagan to a national political audience, and just two years later, that more genial disciple of Goldwaterism was elected governor of California – which set the stage for his eventual ascension to the presidency. The so-called Reagan Revolution, ideologically descendent from Goldwater’s platform, aimed to turn back the clock to a pre-New Deal laissez-faire government. And over the past four decades, that notion has morphed from policy into dogma, so that a broad and bitter anti-government sensibility is now the defining issue that unifies the Republican Party.
And look at what the anti-government extremism of Goldwater’s political heirs has brought us now: a paralyzed Congress, a nation disgusted with its government and a presidential candidate who vows to govern like a dictator, at least for a while. What these last six decades of political devolution have brought us makes it clear that Goldwater was wrong: Extremism, whatever its ostensible aim and whatever its defenders may claim, is unjustifiable in a pluralistic society.
Whatever they may say about government, most Americans actually want its benefits. We want national security, the protection of our health and welfare, the freedom to think and say what we wish, and the promise that we’ll all be treated equally. Most of us, I think, could be swayed by a notion that Aristotle put forward: that virtue is found at the mean point between excess and deficiency — that is, neither too much nor too little of anything. Democratic governments tend to be moderate because we won’t all agree on very much, so 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, however, 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, “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”
And, in fact, psychologists tell us that extremism is often rooted in a lack of empathy, which is a fundamental trait that humans need if they hope to share space peacefully with one another. A lack of empathy is also a characteristic of people with borderline personality disorder or narcissism, the latter being the mental illness that many experts believe Trump displays.
Over American history, there have been extremists both conservative and liberal, but these days it is on the right that extremism is surging. It is extremism that pulls books from classroom library shelves, that forbids mentioning homosexuality in schools and that targets women who want to control whether or not they will be pregnant. Extremists want to 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 attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 at the urging of the most extreme president in our history, Donald Trump.
Yet if you look back six decades to the progenitor of today’s conservative extremism, you feel a bit of nostalgia. Extreme as he was for his time, Barry Goldwater believed in democracy, and kept working at it for three more Senate terms after his landslide loss — sometimes in the minority, sometimes with Republicans leading the Senate. He was a principled conservative rather than a radical rhetorician. And he wasn’t afraid to cross typical partisan divides: Goldwater supported abortion rights; he was a lifetime member of the NAACP, and he 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, in fact, 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.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.