A Slim Paperback From 1960 Gave Conservatives a Platform to Stand On

Forty-four states. That is how many Barry Goldwater lost in November 1964. By any ordinary measure the man was routed. The conventional wisdom, repeated for years, was that his brand of conservatism was finished, buried under the biggest landslide in modern history.

And yet within sixteen years the people who had worked for that lost campaign were running the Republican Party, and one of the speakers who gave them their best moment would one day become President. How does a movement lose forty-four states and win the future? The answer starts with a small book, written to be read in an afternoon, that cost a few dollars and changed what a generation of Republicans believed.

I will tell the story in order, as history. First the book. Then the fight at the convention. Then the landslide. Then the part that matters most, what the losers did next.

The book

The Conscience of a Conservative appeared in 1960 under the name of Barry Goldwater, then a Republican Senator from Arizona who had first been elected in 1952. It was short, a few chapters, and the publisher was a small press in Kentucky. The writing, as Goldwater later acknowledged, owed a great deal to L. Brent Bozell Jr., a writer and a brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr., who drafted much of the text from Goldwater's speeches and conversations. Ghostwriting is an old tradition in politics, and nobody on the right pretended otherwise. The voice and the convictions were Goldwater's.

The book's thesis was simple, and its first pages state it with force. Goldwater argued that the purpose of politics is the preservation of individual freedom, and that the great danger of modern government is its drift toward ever greater power in Washington. He wrote that his interest was not in making government more efficient but in making it smaller, and that his aim was not to pass laws but to repeal them. That line was memorable because no mainstream politician of either party was saying it.

Here are the main arguments, in the order he made them.

1. Freedom is the point. The individual, not the state, is the unit of a free society, and government's job is to protect the conditions in which a person can develop his own abilities.
2. The Constitution limits the federal government. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states and the people the powers not granted to Washington. Goldwater treated that as a living rule, not a footnote. Programs for agriculture, education and welfare, he said, belonged largely to the states or to private action, and the federal government had exceeded its authority in taking them over.
3. Taxes and spending belong under restraint. He argued against the graduated income tax in the form it had taken and against the habit of federal spending that never seemed to shrink.
4. The danger abroad is real. On the Soviet Union, the book took a hard line, arguing that the goal of American policy should be victory over communism and not merely coexistence.

The last of these gave the book a second audience. Free-market readers and anti-communist readers, the two groups that Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible explains, found their arguments in the same slim volume. The book sold in very large numbers, in the millions over the next few years according to the usual accounts, which was extraordinary for a political tract. It circulated through the conservative network, passed from hand to hand, and became the closest thing the movement had to a platform.

Why a short book mattered

Think about the media world of 1960. There were three television networks, a handful of national newspapers, and a publishing industry centred in New York, none of which was eager to carry the case for limited government. A conservative who wanted to reach a large audience had few doors to knock on. A cheap, short paperback with a plain cover was one of them. It could be mailed, handed over at a church supper, left on a neighbour's porch, and read in an evening by someone who had never opened a political book.

That is a lesson in method that outlasts the book. A movement does not need to win the big institutions to be heard. It needs a clear text, a low price, and people who will pass it along. The same logic runs through From a Small Magazine in 1955 to a Movement Press That Reshaped the Debate, which traces the conservative press from the little magazines forward. Ideas travel when someone puts them in a form an ordinary person can carry.

There is a second lesson, about what the book did for the people who read it. It gave them words. Picture a farmer in Kansas, a hypothetical, who felt uneasy about the growth of the federal government: now he had a paragraph he could quote at the county meeting. Picture a young lawyer in Phoenix: now she had a framework. Politics runs on confidence, and confidence comes from knowing what you think and being able to say it. The book supplied that, to a generation that had mostly felt alone.

The chapter that cost him

I have to be straight about one thing in the book, because it is part of the record. In the chapter on civil rights, Goldwater wrote that he supported desegregation as a matter of personal conviction but doubted that the federal government could constitutionally force the states to integrate their schools, and he said he was unwilling to impose his judgment on states such as Mississippi and South Carolina. He was making a federalism argument, which was consistent with the rest of the book. His critics heard something else, that a man who would not use federal power against segregation was giving cover to it.

This matters later. In 1957 and 1960 Goldwater had voted for civil rights legislation, but in June 1964 he voted against the Civil Rights Act on the grounds that two of its titles, one on public accommodations and one on employment, went beyond the federal government's constitutional authority. He did so over the objections of many in his own party. The final Senate vote was 73 to 27, and the Republicans who helped break the filibuster are the subject of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Republican Votes That Broke the Filibuster. His vote gave his opponents their best argument, and it carried real weight in the Deep South and in the rest of the country. A reader who admires the book should know this. A fair verdict is that the federalism argument was sincere and the cost of it was grave.

The convention

By 1964 the conservative organizers had a candidate. A group led by F. Clifton White and others had spent two years building a draft-Goldwater network, county by county and precinct by precinct. The movement's strategists understood something the party establishment had underestimated: nominations are decided by delegates, and delegates are chosen by people who show up.

The establishment's candidate was Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York, and later in the spring a field of others tried to stop Goldwater, including William Scranton of Pennsylvania. The contest came down to California. Goldwater won the primary in June by a narrow margin, and that gave him the delegates.

The Republican National Convention met at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in July 1964. The fight there was bitter. When Rockefeller rose to speak and criticised what he called extremist elements in the party, he was heckled loudly by delegates. Goldwater won the nomination on the first ballot. In his acceptance speech he said that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. The line thrilled his supporters and handed his opponents a slogan. The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future covers the campaign in more detail.

Notice what this fight was about. It was a contest between the Rockefeller wing, the Eastern establishment of the party, and the new conservative movement that came up from the grassroots. It is the opening round of a conflict that has recurred in every generation, which Seventy Years of GOP Insurgents Versus the Establishment, in Order puts in order.

The landslide

On November 3, 1964, Lyndon Johnson defeated Goldwater in one of the largest landslides in American history. Johnson won 486 electoral votes to Goldwater's 52. Goldwater carried his home state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. That is six states out of fifty, which is where "forty-four" comes from. Johnson took about 61 percent of the popular vote.

The check on the arithmetic: 486 plus 52 is 538, the full electoral vote; and 50 states minus 6 is 44, the number Goldwater lost. Johnson's 486 includes the 3 electoral votes of the District of Columbia, which voted in a presidential election for the first time in 1964.

Republicans lost seats in Congress, and the talk in the press was that the party had committed suicide. I do not want to make the defeat sound like anything but a defeat. A party should not celebrate a loss like that. But the conventional reading missed what was happening underneath.

What the losers built

Here is the argument that gives this post its title. The 1964 campaign lost the election and built the machinery that won later ones.

1. A national network of volunteers and precinct workers. The people who had gathered delegates and knocked on doors for Goldwater did not go home. Many of them, including organizers from Young Americans for Freedom, the group launched in 1960 that William F. Buckley Stood Athwart History and Then Built a Movement describes, became the core of the party's activists.
2. A donor base outside the establishment. The Goldwater campaign raised money from large numbers of small donors, by mail. The direct-mail fundraiser Richard Viguerie built his business on lists of Goldwater donors, which gave the movement a financial independence it had never had.
3. A spokesman. On October 27, 1964, in a televised address for the campaign, a former actor named Ronald Reagan gave a speech that came to be known as "A Time for Choosing." It brought him to the notice of California donors, who encouraged him to run for governor in 1966. You can read about it in The 1964 television speech that turned Ronald Reagan into a conservative leader.
4. A written case. The book, with its arguments for limits on federal power, remained in circulation. It gave new activists an agenda to point to when they wrote platforms and recruited candidates.
5. A lesson about organization. The insurgents had learned that they could take over a nomination without the establishment's approval. That lesson did not need Goldwater to win. It needed only that someone remember it.

Sixteen years later, in 1980, Reagan won the White House with a coalition of the very people who had been Goldwater's foot soldiers. Anyone looking for a single reason that the right came to dominate the party for a generation can start with the fact that its organizers lost in 1964, learned from it, and kept working.

The objection, and the answer

The strongest objection to the story is this:

"You are telling a victory story about a defeat. Goldwater's loss gave Johnson a huge majority and made possible a wave of legislation that conservatives opposed. The Republican Party lost seats and a decade of influence. And the Goldwater coalition's pairing of states' rights with an appeal to white Southern voters carried a price that the party paid for decades. The right way to read 1964 is as a cautionary tale about nominating a candidate who cannot win."

I think the objection is right on the first part and incomplete on the rest.

• It is true that the loss was costly. The party lost seats in Congress that year, and the Great Society legislation of 1965 passed in part because of the size of Johnson's majorities.
• It is true that the Southern strategy question is a serious one. Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act and his strength in the Deep South are facts, and any honest history includes them. Readers who want the longer version can start with The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows.
• It is incomplete because it ignores the long game. A movement that builds a donor base, a volunteer corps and a spokesman in defeat will be stronger in four years than one that wins by accident and builds nothing.
• It is also a reminder of the price of the wrong candidate. Goldwater's own words, including the extremism line, gave his opponents ammunition, and a conservative movement that wants to persuade should choose its words as carefully as its principles.

I would summarise it this way: the book was right to argue that the federal government had outgrown its constitutional limits, the campaign was wrong to underestimate how its opposition to the Civil Rights Act would be heard, and the organizers were right to keep working.

The verdict

A slim paperback, a lost campaign and a long game: it is not a tidy story, and I do not think it should be told as one. The lesson I would take is both a hope and a warning. The hope is that ideas, patiently organized, outlast the election in which they are defeated. The warning is that a movement has to persuade the voters in front of it, in language they can hear, or it will spend a generation recovering.

The bottom line

• Read the book. The Conscience of a Conservative is short, and it explains the argument for limited federal power better than most of what came after it.
• Lose well. A defeat that leaves behind volunteers, donors and a trained leadership is not wasted. Ask what your county party would have left if it lost next year.
• Respect the cost of a bad vote. Goldwater's stand on the Civil Rights Act was a sincere federalism argument, and it cost him and his party dearly. Argue principle with care for how it will be heard.
• Keep the organization alive between elections. The 1980 victory was prepared in 1964 and the years that followed, one precinct at a time.
• Know both sides of the story. If you can tell the Goldwater story fairly, to a skeptic, you can tell any story fairly.