There's this narrative out there that goes something like this: Barry Goldwater runs and loses, but in losing the battle he wins the war. The conservative coalition he mobilized takes over the Republican Party in the late 1970s, the presidency in the 1980s, the congress in the 1990s, and then dominates the whole country in the 2000s. This either proves that "conservatives are awesome!" in the rightwing formulation, or that "liberals need a Goldwater moment" in the leftwing formulation. If there were one thing I could accomplish in the realm of changing people's ideas about politics, it would be undermining this narrative somewhat. Brad Delong does some of the work:
Goldwaterism had other consequences: the damage it did to Republican congressional power were the only things that made the Great Society possible: the Johnson-era expansions of the social insurance state and the Nixon and post-Nixon-era expansions of the regulatory state were possible only on congressional foundations that had been created by Goldwater's Samson act directed against the Republican establishment.
To make possible the Great Society--and then to cheer when Ronald Reagan rolls back 10% of it--Goldwaterism was the greatest own-goal and act of political delusion by conservatives in the twentieth century.
Quite so. Meanwhile, George W. Bush, while on the one hand starving the government of revenue has, on the other hand, pretty much gutted small government ideology as both a policy project and even a rhetorical trope.
I don't doubt that they are heartfelt, but your comment is disappointing nonetheless. Winning matters, friend. Winning matters in the most profound way in our winner-takes-all system. Clinton was a classic pol-on-the-make, largely out to enhance his own glory. But by winning, he gave the rest of us a chance. A chance to work to actually see some small measure of our ideals embraced and enacted. I, like you, lament the decline of the Democratic Party from its former greatness. But I lament the decline, under Bush and the GOP, of the dream of America even more. I'm not prepared to wait for this nation to convert wholesale to progressivism before I (we) have, in some indirect way, my hands on the levers of power in the country. There's just too much at stake.
