AuH20
05-20-2010, 12:21 AM
The potential parallels are striking.
http://reason.com/archives/2002/03/01/he-was-right/
Who does this remind you of?
Yet he connected with many Americans in a deeply personal way. Lyndon Johnson may have creamed Goldwater at the polls, but it was Goldwater who was truly a grassroots phenomenon. About 3.9 million Americans worked in his campaign, twice as many as in Johnson's. More than 1 million individual donors gave money to Goldwater, almost 20 times as many who contributed money to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon combined four years earlier. Worried LBJ operatives reported to headquarters late in the campaign that Goldwater bumper stickers outnumbered those of Johnson by a 10-to-1 margin. Clearly, Goldwater touched something in the American consciousness.
Nor was Goldwater's philosophy purely political. He stressed both personal liberty and personal responsibility, and warned against the propensity of modern liberalism to see society as a collection of groups: "The conservative knows that to regard men as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery....Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being."
Goldwater, in short, was a politician of ideas, not knee-jerk reaction or pork-barrel plenitude. His ideas appealed to a large segment of the population (Goldwater called them "the forgotten Americans") -- instinctively wary of the growing power in Washington and the elite class that wielded it -- that had long been without a political voice. Their elation at the end of their isolation showed in their wild response to Goldwater's speeches, though he was generally a humdrum speaker who only occasionally drifted up into the oratorical jetstream where Ronald Reagan would later cruise.
He appealed not only to traditional conservatives but to young Americans harboring quiet worries that their lives were being put together on a social assembly line over which they had no control. Goldwater's cry against conformity struck a chord, loudly, with them. Later, as he ran for president, the news media would delight in caricaturing Goldwater as a reactionary loon trying to rub out an entire century of American history. (Editorial cartoons frequently showed his supporters carrying signs reading "Goldwater in 1864.") But his fears about the loss of individuality to the madding crowd were on the razor edge of the social debate on America's restless college campuses, and shared much with the early manifestos of Students for a Democratic Society.
http://reason.com/archives/2002/03/01/he-was-right/
Who does this remind you of?
Yet he connected with many Americans in a deeply personal way. Lyndon Johnson may have creamed Goldwater at the polls, but it was Goldwater who was truly a grassroots phenomenon. About 3.9 million Americans worked in his campaign, twice as many as in Johnson's. More than 1 million individual donors gave money to Goldwater, almost 20 times as many who contributed money to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon combined four years earlier. Worried LBJ operatives reported to headquarters late in the campaign that Goldwater bumper stickers outnumbered those of Johnson by a 10-to-1 margin. Clearly, Goldwater touched something in the American consciousness.
Nor was Goldwater's philosophy purely political. He stressed both personal liberty and personal responsibility, and warned against the propensity of modern liberalism to see society as a collection of groups: "The conservative knows that to regard men as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery....Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being."
Goldwater, in short, was a politician of ideas, not knee-jerk reaction or pork-barrel plenitude. His ideas appealed to a large segment of the population (Goldwater called them "the forgotten Americans") -- instinctively wary of the growing power in Washington and the elite class that wielded it -- that had long been without a political voice. Their elation at the end of their isolation showed in their wild response to Goldwater's speeches, though he was generally a humdrum speaker who only occasionally drifted up into the oratorical jetstream where Ronald Reagan would later cruise.
He appealed not only to traditional conservatives but to young Americans harboring quiet worries that their lives were being put together on a social assembly line over which they had no control. Goldwater's cry against conformity struck a chord, loudly, with them. Later, as he ran for president, the news media would delight in caricaturing Goldwater as a reactionary loon trying to rub out an entire century of American history. (Editorial cartoons frequently showed his supporters carrying signs reading "Goldwater in 1864.") But his fears about the loss of individuality to the madding crowd were on the razor edge of the social debate on America's restless college campuses, and shared much with the early manifestos of Students for a Democratic Society.