Conservatives Without Conscience

At the height of Watergate, conservative historian Daniel J. Boorstin gave an extended interview to Congressional Quarterly in which he noted that radio and television enabled countless Americans to follow the proceedings. “We used to think of the conscience as being a private, intimate, still, small voice within,” he said. “Now the conscience of democracy becomes the whole community sitting in their living room watching what has been done.” The conscience of a democracy, Boorstin said, was “what could be called the conscience of the marketplace—the people’s feeling of outrage at the violations of common decency, of legal and constitutional rules.” This, warned Boorstin, should be distinguished from “what might be called the judgment of the marketplace. The judgment of the marketplace is lynch law, and that is something we must beware of.”[8] If Boorstin’s analysis was applied to Clinton’s impeachment, the House of Representatives would be seen as having rejected the “conscience of the marketplace,” and having imposed the judgment of a lynch mob.

Conservatives attracted to conspicuously false history, as occurred with Silent Coup, and conservatives with the mentality of a lynch mob, were foreign to me, but they certainly got my attention. In now writing about them, by myself, I am not proceeding as this project was initially conceived. It started as a joint undertaking with the late U.S. senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, whom I had the good fortune of knowing almost his entire political career. His oldest son, Barry, Jr., has been my close friend since the early 1950s, when we were roommates at Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, which was also the senator’s high school alma mater. Senator Goldwater was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952, resigned in 1964 to pursue an unsuccessful bid for the presidency as the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, and was reelected to the Senate in 1968, where he served until his retirement in 1985. After leaving the Senate he remained active and interested in Republican politics until his death in 1998.

I discovered Senator Goldwater’s political thinking during my college years, when, like countless other college students of the early 1960s I read his book The Conscience of a Conservative and experienced a political awakening. The senator made conservatism respectable, unlike the witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy and the screwball absurdities of the John Birch Society. Senator Goldwater’s conservatism was sensible and straightforward, and therefore appealing. Given the influence he had on my thinking, as well as my admiration for him, it is not surprising that I still consider myself to be a “Goldwater conservative” on many issues. Be that as it may, while my core beliefs have not changed significantly in the past forty years, the Grand Old Party to which I once belonged has moved so far to the right, that on the contemporary political spectrum I now often fall to the left of the Republican center. Like many Republicans uncomfortable with the right-wing extremists who control the party, I reregistered as an Independent.

It was not Senator Goldwater’s politics, however, that prompted me to call him after the 1994 midterm elections, when the Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in forty years. I called to solicit his thoughts about the Silent Coup lawsuit, and to talk to him about the conservatives who were so aggressively promoting, and buying into, this false history. Following the senator’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1964 he had filed a defamation lawsuit against the publisher of FACT magazine, Ralph Ginsberg, who had claimed during the 1964 presidential campaign that the senator was crazy, a judgment he based on a ludicrous and highly partisan poll of psychiatrists. Although it took years, Senator Goldwater eventually won. His case made new law, which I told him would help my wife and me, as public figures, prevail in our suit.[9] He was aware of the attacks on Mo, and he immediately put our situation into a larger context, while counseling that we vigorously pursue the litigation.

“I heard that jackass Liddy on one of the talk-radio shows,” the senator told me. “I don’t think anyone believes him, John. He’s a fool.” “Frankly, I find it offensive that he calls himself a conservative,” the senator added.

“Why’s that?” I asked.