Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Old Barry Goldwater and the young me

What do we want? Freedom! When we do want it? Soon!

Ah, youth. The newness of life, the excitement of fresh ideas, the certainty. I was strolling recently amoung my book collection and came across an old friend and influence sitting there ignominiously nestled between Marx and Engels on one side and Trotsky on the other, Senator Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater was the Senator from Arizona and the Republican nominee for the US presidency in 1964. He was a true, state's rights, limited government conservative. He wrote a book in 1960 in the last days of Dwight Eisenhower's tenure in the White House called Conscience of a Conservative. This book, a manifesto of conservatism, introduced me to the ideas of the honest right; it explained a creed of freedom against an oppressive government, the principled position taken by the writers of the American constitution, and an individual's and state's rights vs. federal rights. Its language was clear, simple, direct. I read it at 15 and still remembered phrases as I reread them 30 years later.

"Conservatism...puts material things in their proper place - that has a structured view of the human being and human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role" he writes in his introduction. Socialism, he says, subordinates all other considerations to man's material well-being. People are social, creative and spiritual. Conservatism, he believes, understand this; socialism does not.

In those youthful days I read Ayn Rand, Barbera Amiel. I read Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy and John Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason. The ideas were fresh and influential the first time I came across them and they stayed with me for years.

When Gov. Ronald Reagan entered the White House, he came to power speaking the words that Senator Barry Goldwater had written and campaigned on 16 years earlier (Reagan gave the keynote at the RNC 1964). I was 17 years old and steeped in the conservative philosophy.

Seeing Reagan in action for the next eight years, then four years of Bush, plus our own unctuous Prime Minister, Brian "Pay-Me-Cash" Mulroney, the AIDS crisis, and neo-conservatism disabused me of the certainty a better world would be made from the efforts of the honest right.

I began to see a 'marketplace' that, left to its own forces, brought infected milk to market, poisoned watersheds, gave thalidomide to pregnant mothers. The marketplace ignored (and lied about) smoking and cancer, about the contraindications of SSRIs. People would be forced to work at the lowest wage in the worst conditions possible using the strange Orwellian argument that it necessary to 'create wealth'. Moneymen lied about the true nature of the financial instruments they created and we're seeing the economic fallout of that. Poverty increased. The governments grew its military and had no hestitation of using it against its own citizens. I saw the war-on-drugs as an excuse to militarize the urban centres.

In short, the problem of keeping the individual, or classes of individuals, from cheating, lying and stealing became apparent. How do people exercise protection, keep themselves from being enslaved, abused or marginalized except through the powers of the state.

I came to realize that Barry Goldwater's politics let me down in every aspect. There isn't a page in Conscience of a Conservative with which I can now completely agree. Ayn Rand turned out to be a political philospher divorced from reality. Gary Allen and John Stormer were...well, they're fucking Birchers, man.

I have to say that, as I wistfully read Barry Goldwater again, the idea of a political philosophy in which the people, equal before the law, with clean hearts and honest minds come together to help each other as needed, who resist coercing or being coerced, still appealed to me. But the fact is the strong will kill and eat the weak because strength and decency are not always coincident in the same person, because we've created a society of 'getting our own' instead of helping each other. We don't think of the human wants and hurts of others when we make our choices. We're more Amway than St. Matthew.

Goldwater's political philosophy, despite his denial, is all about money in the end. His arguments for personal freedom never carried with it an equally forceful argument for responsibility. By removing responsibility from the equation he paved the way for deregulation, inaction, injustice and the 'redistribution of wealth' into the hands of the few instead of the many.

When one doesn't contribute to help the poor, to help the halt, to build community, or defend justice one can't enjoy freedom. We're all in this together. We live or die based on the decisions, great and small, we make towards each other.

Still, being young was fun, even if I was an idiotic, mouthy right-wing punk. And I loved Barry Goldwater so much I stole his glasses.

Peace.

MVL