Before the Storm
Mattson, Kevin & Perlstein, Rick
WHAT HATH BARRY WROUGHT? Before the Storm Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus Rick Perlstein Hill and Wang.. $.30, 671 fy. Kevin Hattson__________ The mystic chords of...
...Kant's ethics, for example, cannot be understood apart from his system...
...I remember an incident from the history of the early church, when Leo I, who had just faced down Attila the Hun, marched out with his whole retinue to meet the invading Vandal armies...
...My strong suspicion is that Marino, as a teacher of philosophy, agrees on both these counts, and that what really irks him about ethics experts and the applied ethics industry is that they can sometimes if not often be all too unreflective (while putatively excusing or even disempowering us laypeople from thinking for ourselves...
...My favorite is when, on national television, Goldwater was asked about countries falling to communism...
...Goldwater labeled them the "Republican establishment...
...however, my concerns about the ethics industry do not stem from my qualms about the smorgasbord approach to ethics education he aptly describes...
...Kevin Hattson__________ The mystic chords of memory operate in odd ways...
...He became famous for bellowing: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty—is—no—vice...
...Having earned his penmanship in journalism rather than academia, he harkens back to old-style "narrative" history—telling a story and telling it well...
...Behind Goldwater was the owner of Knott's Berry Farm pumping in the money, and there was Ronald Reagan who, acting or not, could put a smiling face on Goldwater's otherwise steely message...
...Yet its leaders seem forever tempted to go overboard...
...Telling the Goldwater story, Perlstein has illuminated a great deal about politics past, present, and future...
...It might be proper to ask what would have been a worst-case scenario if he had taken a more courageous action...
...And responsible for each loss was a movement of dedicated conservative activists...
...he does not mean by "autonomy" doing whatever one likes, but abiding by the dictates of reason—as elucidated in his several critiques...
...Interestingly, he watched Goldwater's rise with doubt...
...GORDON MARINO Pius, again The controversy in the April 6 Correspondence pages over the actions of Commonweal 37 May 4,2001 Pius XII during World War II revealed one item agreed on by both sides—that Pius preferred a diplomatic approach to Nazi crimes...
...But the distance between 1964 and 1980, let alone 1994, still seems great to me...
...Perlstein was born in 1969...
...I was left wanting to see Perlstein establish some better connections, rather than the compacted story told here...
...It could have been that Saint Peter's and the Vatican were bombed to rubble and the pope dead or held captive...
...Certainly, the Right possesses a set of libertarian ideals many Americans embrace...
...My question to Marino is how he thinks we should discuss ethics...
...on the other hand, he questions whether a Ph.D...
...Strangelove—portraying maniacal military leaders bent on world destruction—helped put the kibosh on Goldwater...
...Certainly Goldwater was a symptom of a coming sea change in American politics, a backlash that lasted...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) Expert disagreement Gordon Marino's critique of ethics experts and of the applied ethics industry seems to me to diverge into two possibly inconsistent lines of argumentation ["Avoiding Moral Choices," March 23...
...Though Goldwater stood at the helm of this rebellion, Perlstein makes clear just how much stood behind him...
...BERNARD G. PRUSAK Boston, Mass...
...Reading his gaffes again is still enjoyable...
...Yes, Christ himself could probably have avoided the Crucifixion if he had toned down his rhetoric, confined himself to a personal morality, and stopped speaking truth to power...
...He grew enamored with portable nuclear devices that American officers could carry around and set off against the Soviets...
...hugh rumball-petre Simi Valley, Calif...
...This story has been told before, but in the context of the Goldwater campaign, its significance heightens...
...Then there were the intellectuals...
...Down they went, each one of them...
...It is useful to be reminded that Goldwater kept refusing to run, no matter how many people tried to persuade him...
...The author replies: I am grateful to Bernard Prusak for opening up the questions that he does...
...At stake is the definition of the Republican Party— most dearly symbolized in Nelson Rockefeller's attempt to drive Goldwater barbarians out of the sacred party of Lincoln...
...Some even blamed him for John F. Kennedy's assassination...
...An alternative diagnosis to what is wrong with ethics today is that it has become too theoretical, or, from another perspective, not theoretical enough...
...More precisely, if the applied ethics industry is here to stay, and if there is even a role for ethics experts in our hospitals and laboratories and boardrooms (as he grudgingly acknowledges), what should an ethics curriculum look like...
...Founding National Review in the mid-1950s, Buckley made conservatism intellectually respectable...
...Rockefeller reeked of elitism and slackish values...
...The ghost of Barry Goldwater lives in the guise of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and Steve Forbes...
...I doubt the Right would have gotten where it is now armed only with another Goldwater and not the history we've lived through since 1964...
...As Marino knows, introductory ethics courses often present students with one theory after another: first a little Aristotle, then perhaps some Hume, next to Kant, and finally John Stuart Mill, or even Kierkegaard or Nietzsche...
...In answering why Goldwater failed, Perlstein provides little that is new...
...In the most general terms, I am, as I tried to express in my essay, skeptical about the claims to authority made by ethicists and by the growing tendency to think of ethical questions as though they were best left to the experts...
...in ethics qualifies a person as an expert...
...True Christianity is a risky business...
...After all, as the historian Alan Brinkley once pointed out, those who cut their teeth in the 1960s New Left lambasted cold-war and "corporate" liberals more than the Right...
...Another, even earlier tale, probably apocryphal, tells of a Peter who lost his nerve and was fleeing the Roman persecution when he met Christ on the road walking in the opposite direction...
...A historian, he is author of Creating a Democratic Public (2998) and a forthcoming book on intellectuals and the New Left...
...Compare Thomas Shannon's "The Human Genome," March 23...
...was answered, "To Rome to be crucified a second time...
...Why liberalism, not conservatism...
...But there are moments when I wondered just how much of conservatism's future can be squeezed out of a story about Goldwater...
...During the campaign, Goldwater looked increasingly foolish...
...It is no surprise that it took a member of Generation X to do this...
...While I am clear about what I take to be the temptations of professional ethics, I need to give more thought to the question, "What might be a positive way of relating oneself to ethicists...
...Think 1960s, and you probably think of hippies, riots, student revolutionaries, the Great Society, and liberalism triumphant...
...On the one hand, he questions the very idea of expertise in ethics...
...Perhaps it's because academic historians are just a bunch of "tenured radicals" who hate the victories of the Right...
...Prusak is right to suggest that the ethicists have found a niche and are here to stay...
...In his warning of impending loss, Buckley made clear that the eventual outcome of Perlstein's story—LBJ's electoral landslide over Goldwater— mattered less than long-term changes in ideas...
...yet he believed in ethical excellence and thought it worthwhile for mature persons to reflect upon basic questions of how to live...
...After all, didn't the successors of Goldwater really need conflicts over the heightened escalation in Vietnam, the New Left fissures of the late 1960s, continued racial conflict, and the "culture wars" more familiar to the 1980s...
...Everyone knows Goldwater suffered from a case of loose lips...
...Kevin Mattson is associate director of the Walt Whitman Center (Rutgers University...
...His famous question, "Quo vadis, Domine...
...But could we not answer the second question negatively and the first positively...
...But all Christians have to realize that we are not above our master...
...Besides, any upright historian must find it difficult to enter a world populated by fundamentalists and the John Birch Society...
...Commonweal 36 May 4,2001 Aristotle, as Marino remarks, had no truck with the sophists of his day and age...
...He explained that they were Commonweal 35 May 4,2001 "going to go through the same period of growth that the United States did, when we spent 110 or 112 years experimenting with socialism and communism and egalitarianism and monarchy and everything else, arriving at our constitutional republic...
...What such survey courses rarely communicate is the genesis of the theory in question: in other words, how it belongs to a more general understanding of the cosmos and our place in it, the fundamental questions to which the practice of philosophy is dedicated...
...Perlstein ends his story with Ronald Reagan poised in the mid-1960s for greater things to come...
...Now many New Left historians write our histories...
...Now, if it turned out that professional ethicists were essentially poseurs, this would be a difficult homework assignment...
...On the other hand, Perlstein sheds light on the central plight of the Right— a plight as important today as it was in Goldwater's time...
...But why shouldn't Barry Goldwater's rise to the head of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan's resounding defeat of Pat Brown for the governorship of California, and Richard Nixon's appeal to the "silent majority" in his presidential victory in the-crash-and-burn year of 1968 epitomize the decade...
...Indeed, Goldwater famously suggested that the government "sell the T.V.A.," one of the central linchpins of the New Deal, a system that Eisenhower had already made peace with...
...When Rockefeller divorced his wife and took another, cultural conservatives as well as libertarians started to embrace Goldwater...
...I presume his earliest political memories (like my own) were mostly about Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton (the latter, though a Democrat, seemed more like a Republican at times...
...Prime here was William F. Buckley Jr., the famous Catholic intellectual who had already excoriated his alma mater, Yale, for secularism...
...Rockefeller represented the Eastern stalwarts, those who liked their country clubs clean...
...Rick Perlstein has come to the rescue by writing an important book that explores the ascendancy of American conservatism...
...This Western senator was too libertarian for centrists like Rockefeller...
...Though a caricature, there's something to this...
...Perlstein suggests interesting intersections between politics and popular culture, how movies like Seven Days in May and Dr...
...To a roomful of campaign workers, Buckley warned: "Any election of Barry Goldwater would presuppose a sea change in American public opinion...
...The Arizona senator's strength is in part seen in the cast of characters who ran against him—Lodge, Romney, Scranton, and Rockefeller himself...
...Commonweal 38 May 4,2001...
...The story is Goldwater's rise to the presidential candidacy in 1964...
...To many people today liberalism appears in tatters, and Perlstein is ready to tell why...
...We can also imagine the effect of this on the German prelates who were telling their people to support the war, the nations debating whether to join the Allied war effort, and since the Nazis were obviously trying to keep the details of their Final Solution secret, the effect of worldwide publicity in stopping or slowing the killing...
Vol. 128 • May 2001 • No. 9
