Let's hear it for the Goldwater Democrats!

[eallen]

Andrew Sullivan explains:

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/10/goldwater_democ.html

:bounce:

[ClassWarrior]

1. Hey, witness John Dean's new book...

..."Conservatives Without Conscience," a project he began with the late Sen. Goldwater. A powerful book. Read it if you get a chance.

NGU.

[Tansy_Gold]

2. Much as I dislike Sullivan, he's probably correct on this

And I speak as one who was raised a Republican (with a capital-R) and who still has a 1964 campaign button "If I were 21, I'd vote for Goldwater."

Lyndon Johnson was correct when he told Bill Moyers that the federal civil rights legislation that Johnson championed would turn the hard-core Southern (i.e. unreconstructed Confederate) voters away from the Democratic party. But what subsequent Democratic strategists have failed over the past 40+ years to do, IMHO, is campaign on the issues that really affect those disaffected dixie-crats.

Goldwater, from what I know of him, was fundamentally a libertarian (lower-case) who preferred not to have Government interfere any more than absolutely necessary into the lives of individual citizens. His stance against civil rights legislation (which allowed him to carry the southern states in 1964) was not predicated on racism so much as on a libertarian, (principled) states' rights platform.

And in an era when socioeconomic stratification was declining, thanks to a booming economy and the enactment of laws that diminished overt discrimination, the idea of lower taxes had some universal appeal.

Today, however, with the erosion of ALL civil rights and the INCREASED socio-economic stratification (exacerbated by the not-free global market economy), even Goldwater's rather benign fiscal libertarianism easily morphs into feudalism, as tax cuts concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands and government spending cuts deprive more and more of subsistence/assistance.

The Dems failure/refusal to hammer home these points to an electorate increasingly voting against its own best interest has allowed a bunch of neo-con con-artists to sucker a vulnerable populace -- and make even the un-suckerable (us!) suffer for it.

Discounting Jimmy Carter, who rode in on the heels of Watergate and the disgust over Ford's pardoning of Nixon, the Dems have been unable to win nationally except with Clinton, a man who had the ability (and the southern connections) to appeal to the working classes on a personal, rather than ideological, level. And heaven knows that's exactly what the neo-cons did when they put up mental midget booooosh against Gore. They did EXACTLY what the GOP did in '52 when they put the likeable, grandfatherly Eisenhower (who had no strong party affiliation prior to then) against the egghead Stevenson.

Sometimes I think the Dems don't bother to read the zeitgeist very well. Sadly, I think there are repukes who are reading it better, even as it turns against them.

Tansy Gold, rambling today