Conservatives Determined to Win the White House — in 1964
Seriously. Take a look at the parallels between today and 1964.
In 1964, GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater campaigned on the Constitutional right of restaurant owners to refuse service to Nigras and other undesirables. He was also in favor of right-to-work laws and other union-busting tactics. And he thought the very concept of Medicare was just appalling, un-American. Medicare, according to Goldwater, was the equivalent of giving old people “free vacation resorts and a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink.”
Fast-forward fifty years. Rand Paul has won the CPAC/teatard straw poll for 2016 presidential candidate. And Rand Paul's views on today's issues are...[see previous paragraph]
Aside from the parallels between Rand Paul and Barry Goldwater, today's Republicans are re-fighting the same intra-party civil war that they were fighting fifty years ago. Goldwater slammed President Eisenhower over the New Deal, even though the New Deal had been established by FDR twenty years earlier. Goldwater's main theme was that Republicans should stand on their principles, stand up for what's “right” instead of compromising. (Sound familiar?)
Goldwater's most famous campaign slogan was “In your heart you know he's right,” which got parodied into “In your heart you know he's White.”
And here's another parallel between then (going back a little further) and now. In the years immediately before and after the 1930s Great Depression, the Supreme Court was a gang of corporate hacks, rubberstamping the Big Business agenda. In a series of rulings, the Supreme Court overturned laws guaranteeing a minimum wage, protecting workers' rights to organize, and laws banning child labor. Plus ca change...
Since there are so many parallels between today and 50-80 years ago, maybe the GOP presidential candidate in 2016 will go the way of their 1964 candidate.
One can hope.
Labels: Barry Goldwater, Rand Paul
posted by Tom Harper @ 4:52 PM
6 Comments:
The republicans are determined to prove history wrong. And you know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
"Morans" says it all!
It’s hard to defend Barry Goldwater, but in a way I think comparing him to Paul is like apples to oranges as it tells me how libertarianism has changed over the years. It appears to have gone so much to the right that the ideas that made it a middle ground for both liberals and conservatives have all but disappeared.
Goldwater believed in Brown in Principle but didn’t think the Federal Government should enforce it, as Governor of Arizona he desegregated the Arizona National Guard, before Truman did it nationally. As a department store owner, he was know to pay his employees better wages then his competitors yet he hated unions.
But as a true Libertarian he also extended the local control to no drug laws, moral laws (like pornography) and a eventually even Abortion as pure choice issues, things libertarians seem to avoid today (I’m told you can find those on the Ron Paul website but you’ll never get him to speak about them). Once Goldwater saw the KKK march in San Francisco during the 1964 GOP convention in support of him, then saw what Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had become, he realized they were motivated more on racism then libertarianism, he begin to backtrack.
The part about Richard Nixon praising Civil Right legislation was bullshit especially when he (and then Reagan) promised to pack a Supreme court with people who would overturn Brown. The term they used was overturn busing, but few people understood if you overturned Brown then you brought back Pleussy, when means you just legalized Jim Crow again which would also nullify most of the Civil Rights acts (which Reagan never supported BTW)
What really gets me about Paul is that he’s brought back old traditional Southern Arguments from over 60 years ago. Once on a national scale the Dixiecrats realized the Traditional, racist arguments would no longer work, they started to push a “State’s rights/Local choice” type of agenda. Even Reagan kept insisting all during his career it had nothing to do with race, put simply “property owners rights” the Southerners (and others) understood with a “wink” and then took off with it - solid words from their hero.
Erik
If you dig into what Goldwater said and stood for, by today's standards the SOB would be a liberal. That's how bad it's gotten.
Jerry: And I hope these Morans have the same outcome in 2016 that they did in 1964.
Erik: Unlike Rand Paul, Goldwater genuinely was a Libertarian. Drug laws, the entire "Christian" Right agenda -- Goldwater consistently took the side of liberty and personal choice. Ironically, Nelson Rockefeller, one of the best known moderate Republicans, passed some of the most draconian drugs laws in the country (in New York State).
Mr. C: Damn right. Today's rightwing "libertarians" only use those libertarian slogans while they're gutting regulations that protect workers' safety and the environment. When it comes to the Pentagon and the Prison Industrial Complex, they have no problem whatsoever with "big government" and "spending other people's money."
1964, you are giving them way too much credit Tom. They are trying to take us back to 1864. You know, when only the good property owning, white guy had a voice, like it should be.
Jess: You mean 1859. You know, before the War of Northern Aggression and its disastrous effect on Our Way Of Life.
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