Posted by “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!”
Barry Goldwater, Acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention upon receiving its nomination for president
Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater speaks at an election rally in New York in October 1964.
This is the second of three posts that traces the history of the Republican party since Lincoln. The current post will examine the years since that startling moment in the Cow Palace to the moment of undisputed triumph –the election of Ronald Reagan. The Republicans have won the presidency ten out of eighteen elections since the end of World War II. However, that success masks the fact that the Party has been in substantial turmoil since the 1950s, with the mainstream candidates in both the presidential and congressional wings constantly in combat with various insurgencies, both from the traditional small government wing and from the conspiratorial extremist wing.
Ronald Brownstein, writing in The Atlantic, recounts a day which marked the transformation of the Republican Party from an Eastern, centrist organization, to a different, more radical party, one focused on identity. He writes, “It’s an image that still shocks in its feral intensity: On July 14, 1964, supporters of Barry Goldwater, the arch-conservative senator from Arizona whom the Republican Party was preparing to crown as its presidential nominee, unleashed a torrent of boos against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he spoke at the party’s national convention in San Francisco.”
He continues, “What’s less remembered is why Rockefeller, who had lost the nomination to Goldwater, was standing behind the lectern in the first place: to speak in support of an amendment to the party platform that would condemn political extremism. The resolution repudiated “the efforts of irresponsible extremist organizations,” including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, a rapidly growing far-right grassroots group obsessed with the alleged communist infiltration of America… The resolution failed, which testifies to the GOP’s long-standing reluctance to draw a bright line against the extremists who congregate at its fringes.”
In 1964 there were two groups in the Republican Party, an ideologically conservative wing, represented by Goldwater, and a moderate wing, represented by Rockefeller. In the post-war years, the two factions began to diverge. The moderates, like Rockefeller, Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, and Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts found the Party increasingly uncongenial as it became dominated by conservatives. At the same time, the Southern strategy promoted by Goldwater, led to the Dixiecrats eventually leaving the Democratic Party to be replaced by Republicans like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Tower of Texas.
For sixteen elections, the Republican candidate for President was a traditionalist, that is, someone who believed in a conservative political doctrine: pro-business and capitalism, smaller government, personal responsibility, and a muscular anti-Communist foreign policy. But even though the GOP governed from the center, it frequently ran on platforms that emphasized identity politics. Over the years the identity wing emphasized Communist conspiracies, the left’s attack on traditional values and the threat of increasing numbers of non-whites in America. The following chart points out the tension between the main-stream conservative candidates and the identity ideologues who pushed their campaigns to exploit grievances.
The Pre-History –John Birch Society and McCarthyism. The Republican Party was no stranger to extremist views. In the 1950s, at the height of anti-Communist fervor, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy famously conducted a Communist witch hunt from the Chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He laid waste to the State Department and Hollywood in his search for Communists and fellow travelers. He famously said to the Women’s Club of Wheeling West Virginia, “The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The phrase “I have here in my hand a list…”was particularly chilling. It is interesting to note that McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who was a favorite of Donald Trump, and that his associate counsel was the twenty-seven year old Robert Kennedy Jr. (McCarthy was held in high esteem by prominent Catholic politicians and by the American Catholic Church).
McCarthyism continued to be a prominent part of the “identity” side of the GOP until McCarthy overreached himself, attacked the US Army, and was utterly demolished on television by the Army’s legal counsel, Joseph Welch, who famously said, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher [whom McCarthy attacked as belonging to a Communist organization] is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. … Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me…Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild … Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The American public was OK with McCarthy attacking Hollywood and the State Department, but attacking the Army did not sit well with them. Then McCarthy was skewered by Joseph Welsh and he no longer commanded the fear he once did. Edward R. Murrow, a reporter and television personality whom Americans trusted more than any other, attacked McCarthy on his See it Now television show. He said, “the line between investigation and persecuting is a very fine one…We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty…We will not walk in fear one of another, and we will not let our fear dominate us. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason…We will remember that we are not descendants of fearful men.”
McCarthyism was dead before its corpse hit the floor and the Junior Senator from Wisconsin descended into irrelevance and alcoholism. The Senate censured him for conduct unbecoming, and his last years were unhappy ones. He died of hepatitis at the age of 48.
Southern Strategy. Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign was marked by an appeal to Southern voters. Goldwater himself was a strong traditional conservative who believed in limited government and a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy. He had been a member of the NAACP and a supporter of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. However, by 1963 he opposed Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act, believing it was an overreach. Much of his campaign centered on his extreme Cold War views, but his opposition to the Johnson civil rights agenda won him support in Southern states, and while he lost the 1964 election by what was until then the largest margin in history, he nevertheless won five Southern States (Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi) plus his home state of Arizona. Despite Goldwater’s failure electorally (he was famously undone by an ad showing a little girl removing the petals from a daisy as the narrator counted down; the ad ended with a nuclear explosion), the Republican Party had made a Faustian bargain with identity ideologues.
The elections of 1968, 1972 and 1976 were quiet ones for the GOP. The Vietnam War was a time of major upheaval in the Democratic Party, but the Republicans under Nixon and Ford stayed in their traditional lane. Nixon was actually a centrist, and his great foreign policy success, his opening with China, ended years of Republican ideologues chirping about how the leftists in the Democratic Party had “lost” China.
However, Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew and his speech-writer, William Safire, viciously attacked the media and gave the right a new rhetorical voice. Agnew called his enemies “nattering nabobs of negativity,” and said, “They have formed their own 4-H Club — the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’
As Will Bunch wrote in 2009:
“The words that William Safire penned and that Spiro Agnew mouthed actually had enormous impact that has lasted until this day. They helped foster among conservatives and the folks that Nixon called ‘the silent majority‘ a growing mistrust of the mainstream media, a mistrust that grew over two generations into a form of hatred…Today, the vast majority of Americans of all political stripes — conservative, liberal, centrist — don’t believe the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” a.k.a. the mainstream media, in record numbers.
But the real change in the GOP and in American politics came in 1980 with the Reagan Revolution.