The Conscience of a Conservative

By Barry M. Goldwater, Sean Wilentz, George F. Will and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

In 1960, Barry Goldwater set forth his brief manifesto in The Conscience of a Conservative. Written at the height of the Cold War and in the wake of America's greatest experiment with big government, the New Deal, Goldwater's message was not only remarkable, but radical. He argued for the value and importance of conservative principles--freedom, foremost among them--in contemporary political life. Using the principles he espoused in this concise but powerful book, Goldwater fundamentally altered the political landscape of his day--and ours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400827626

Book preview

The Conscience of a Conservative

THE JAMES MADISON LIBRARY IN AMERICAN POLITICS

Sean Wilentz, General Editor

The James Madison Library in American Politics of the Princeton University Press is devoted to reviving important American political writings of the recent and distant past. American politics has produced an abundance of important works—proclaiming ideas, describing candidates, explaining the inner workings of government, and analyzing political campaigns. This literature includes partisan and philosophical manifestos, pamphlets of practical political theory, muckraking exposés, autobiographies, on-the-scene reportage, and more. The James Madison Library issues fresh editions of both classic and now-neglected titles that helped shape the American political landscape. Up-to-date commentaries in each volume by leading scholars, journalists, and political figures make the books accessible to modern readers.

The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry M. Goldwater

The New Industrial State by John Kenneth Galbraith

The Conscience

of a Conservative

Barry M. Goldwater

Edited by CC Goldwater

With a new foreword by George F. Will

and a new afterword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 1960 by Victor Publishing Company, Inc.

General Editor’s Introduction Copyright © 2007 by Sean Wilentz

Foreword Copyright © 2007 by George F. Will

Afterword Copyright © 2007 by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work

should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

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All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldwater, Barry M. (Barry Morris), 1909–1998.

The conscience of a conservative / Barry M. Goldwater ; edited by

CC Goldwater ; with a new foreword by George F. Will and a new

afterword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

p. cm. — (The James Madison Library in American politics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13117-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-691-13117-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 978-1-40082-762-6 (ebook)

1. United States—Politics and government—20th century.

2. Conservatism—United States. I. Goldwater, CC. II. Title.

JK271 .G668 2007

320.520973—dc22 2006052047

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

press.princeton.edu

R0

Contents

General Editor’s Introduction  vii

Foreword by George F. Will  ix

Preface  xxi

1. The Conscience of a Conservative  1

2. The Perils of Power  7

3. States’ Rights  17

4. And Civil Rights  25

5. Freedom for the Farmer  33

6. Freedom for Labor  39

7. Taxes and Spending  53

8. The Welfare State  63

9. Some Notes on Education  71

10. The Soviet Menace  81

Afterword by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  121

Index  139

General Editor’s Introduction

The Conscience of a Conservative is one of the most consequential political writings in American history. When the book appeared in 1960, the conservative movement had reached ebb-tide. The disgrace of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the rise of so-called Modern Republicanism, which accepted the basic terms of the New Deal, seemed to have rendered conservatism politically irrelevant. But Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona would not be cowed, and with the editorial help of conservative writer L. Brent Bozell, he issued this uncompromising call to arms. Four years later, Goldwater won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination; and sixteen years after that, the election to the White House of Goldwater’s admirer, Ronald Reagan, ushered in a new era of conservative government. The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater’s cry in the wilderness, had apparently triumphed over Great Society–style liberalism in the battle of American political ideas.

The James Madison Library reissue of the book, edited by Goldwater’s granddaughter, CC Goldwater, offers the opportunity for fresh reflection and assessment. The book presents the essence of a revitalized American conservatism as it emerged in the 1960s. Here, with sometimes startling directness, are Goldwater’s views on everything from labor unions and civil rights to agricultural policy and education. Here, too, is a conservative anti-communism that demanded nothing less than all-out victory for the West in the Cold War—a call that, at the time, made Goldwater sound to many like a dangerous extremist, but that appears in a different light following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

What are we to make of Goldwater’s achievements and legacy? In his new foreword, George Will makes the case that The Conscience of a Conservative helped set the terms for a conservative 1960s usually ignored by (mostly liberal) historians fascinated by the liberal and left-wing movements of the era. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s afterword argues that Goldwater’s politics have been hijacked by right-wing radicals whose vision of America is very different from the one presented in this book. Nearly half a century after it first appeared, The Conscience of a Conservative can still stir controversy—one mark of a classic piece of political writing.

Sean Wilentz

Foreword

George F. Will

When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, he was Arizona’s junior senator. But, then, measured by length of Senate service, ninety-eight other senators also were junior to Arizona’s senior senator, Carl Hayden, who was a former sheriff in Arizona territory. Hayden had entered the House of Representatives at age thirty-five, when Arizona acquired statehood in 1912, and entered the Senate at age forty-nine, where he served until 1969. The Western frontier, so vivid in the national imagination and so associated with American libertarianism, lived in Goldwater’s Senate colleague.

When I visited Goldwater at his home in Phoenix a few years before his death in 1998, he said he had built his house on a bluff to which, when he was young, he would ride his horse and sleep under the stars.When he was a boy, about 100,000 people lived in the Valley of the Sun.When Gold water died, the population of a suburb of Phoenix—Mesa—was larger than St. Louis, and the population of the Phoenix metropolitan area, the nation’s fourteenth largest, was approaching three million.

You must remember this: Goldwater was a conservative from, and formed by, a place with precious little past to conserve. Westerners have no inclination to go through life with cricks in their necks from looking backward. When Goldwater became the embodiment of American conservatism—partly by his own efforts, and partly because he was conscripted by others for the role—that guaranteed that the mainstream of American conservatism would be utterly American. The growing conservative intelligentsia would savor many flavors of conservatism, from Edmund Burke’s to T. S. Eliot’s, conservatisms grounded on religious reverence, nostalgia, and resistance to the permanent revolution of conditions in a capitalist, market society. Such conservatisms would have been unintelligible, even repellant, to Goldwater, if he had taken time to notice them.

In the beginning, which is to say in the early 1950s, America’s modern conservative movement was remarkably bookish. It began to find its voice with Whittaker Chambers’s memoir Witness (1952), Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953), and the twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale (1951). The books most congruent with what came to be Goldwaterism included one published in London in 1944 by an Austrian and future Nobel laureate in economics—Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Another book by another winner of the Nobel prize for economics was Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Like Hayek and Friedman, Goldwater was mainly preoccupied with freedom, and the natural tendency of freedom’s sphere to contract as government’s sphere expands.

Goldwater was a man of many parts—politician and jet pilot, ham radio operator and accomplished photographer—but no one ever called him bookish. And if anyone ever had, Goldwater, a man of action and of the West, might have said—echoing the protagonist of the novel that invented the Western,Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902)—"When you call me that, smile!"

Then Goldwater would have smiled, because although he could be gruff, he could not stay out of sorts. He was, as journalist Richard Rovere said, the cheerful malcontent. In that role, he also was an early symptom—a leading indicator—of the 1960s ferment.

The 1960s are rightly remembered as years of cultural dissent and political upheaval, but they are wrongly remembered as years stirred only from the left. Actually, they were not even stirred first, or primarily, or most consequentially from the left. By the time the decade ended, with Richard Nixon in the White House, conservatism was in the saddle, embarked on winning seven of the ten presidential elections from 1968 through 2004.

But because of the political complexion of the journalists who wrote the first rough draft of history, and because of the similar complexion of the academic historians who have written subsequent drafts, and because much of the decade’s most lurid political turbulence, such as the turmoil on campuses and at the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, were episodes of dissent by the Left—because of all this, the decade is remembered as one dominated by dissent from the left. Nevertheless, it can reasonably be said that dissent in the 1960s began on the right, and it is certain that the most nation-shaping dissent was from the right.

Some say we should think of the sixties as beginning on November 22, 1963, and ending in October 1973—that is, as beginning with a presidential assassination that supposedly shattered the nation’s sunny postwar disposition, and ending with the Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo that produced a sense of scarcity and national vulnerability. Arguably. But although it may seem eccentric—or banal—to say so, the sixties, understood as a decade of intellectual dissent and political insurgency, began in 1960.

On July 27, to be precise, when an Arizona senator strode to the podium of the Republican Convention in Chicago and barked: Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take the party back—and I think we can—let’s get to work.

Back from whom? In two words, moderate Republicans. In one word, Northeasterners. What that word denoted, to those who used it as an epithet, was the old Republican establishment that had nominated Wendell Willkie (the simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer was from Indiana, but not really), New York’s Governor Tom Dewey twice, and Dwight Eisenhower twice. (Eisenhower was from Texas and Kansas, long ago, but had sojourned in Paris and in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights—as Supreme Allied Commander and president of Columbia University—before winning the 1952 Republican nomination by defeating Mr. Republican and the conservatives’ favorite, Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio.)

The Republican establishment, speaking through the New York Herald-Tribune, represented what Goldwater and kindred spirits considered