Corbynism Will Outlast Jeremy Corbyn
Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination as the Republican presidential candidate was a defining moment in American politics, but not for the reasons that anyone thought at the time. Goldwater was crushed by Lyndon B. Johnson in the general election, a result, everyone agreed, that proved the type of radical conservatism Goldwater represented was dead. Everyone was wrong. Four years later, Richard Nixon was elected president, beginning a prolonged period of Republican political dominance that would culminate in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory. “Here is one time, at least,” the historian Rick Perlstein wrote, “in which history was written by the losers.”
The Goldwater experience—that electoral defeat does not mark the end of a movement—has implications today, and not only for the conservative right.
Even before the coronavirus outbreak, many on the “populist,” or “radical,” left insisted that globalization, climate change, automation, and inequality were” in his demand for higher state spending, even though he badly lost an election just a few months ago after campaigning on that pledge. Is history repeating itself, accelerated by the severity of the social and economic crisis ripping through Western societies as a result of the pandemic?
