The Great Polarizer

...But little of this turmoil was reflected in the presidential campaigns...

...What is the relevance of the Goldwater surge three decades ago to the situation conservatives find themselves in now...

...I’ve often wondered whether Goldwater’s resentment at being forced to run was a factor in relegating White and the other sophisticated, mainly Eastern, conservatives who launched the Draft Goldwater committee into a peripheral role in the general-election campaign against Lyndon Johnson...

...The Eisenhower-Stevenson races of 1952 and 1956, and the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, were virtually free of memorable issues...

...This genuine uncertainty, I believe, accounts for a lot of the rancor one observes among social-conservative leaders who, on paper, disagree on very little...

...This strategic uncertainty is unlikely to be resolved in advance of future elections...

...But events in the next two years quickly made plain that politics would not revert to 1950s blandness...

...Thanks in considerable part to the rise of Goldwater, the presidential elections of 1964-84 were, on average, as polarized as those of 1952-60 had been bland...

...Like the Goldwaterites, social conservatives are the main if not the only dynamic force at the Republican/conservative grass-roots, though they are viewed with great suspicion in moneyed circles and in the GOP’s high command...

...Republicans had won their first two elections since the Depression, and they had come within a hair’s breadth of winning again with the supercautious “new Nixon...

...That these gains were intimately related to the growing vulnerability of the liberal policy mix, what with urban race riots, Great Society failures, and American frustration in Vietnam, only added to the sense of possibility for the conservative movement in 1966 and beyond...

...How many conservative leaders did Ronald Reagan convince in 1982 that Soviet communism would within a few short years find itself on the ashheap of history...

...And in 1966, the victory of Ronald Reagan in the race for California governor, along with other conservative gains, suggested even more clearly that the Goldwater phenomenon was a beginning, not an end...

...but almost nothing in American politics before or since was as polarized as the GoldwaterRockefeller battle for the Republican nomination in 1964...

...On the morning after his crushing 44-state defeat, it was not self-evident, even to many fervent Goldwaterites, that the enormous mobilization of human resources in 1964 would lead anywhere...

...In retrospect, the most remarkable thing about Goldwater was his willingness to take on the moderateto-liberal establishment, which pretty much dominated both parties, at the points of its greatest strength: its record of bringing the benefits of a then-popular welfare state to more and more people, and its ability to keep the peace at a time when most Americans were worried about nuclear war...

...In its growth and activism, the present-day phenomenon that most resembles the Goldwater wave is the social-conservative movement...

...In particular, Goldwater’s narrow triumph over Rockefeller in the winner-take-all California primary 34 years ago was as close as I’ve experienced to emotional Armageddon, even though I was going to college on the other side of the continent at the time...

...Perhaps Goldwater’s sense of his own vulnerability, due to the establishment’s strength and his own near-reckless courage, is what made him an unusually reluctant presidential candidate...

...We saw them (not altogether inaccurately) as narrowly ambitious men willing to squeeze the last drop of juice out of the Republican party, and thus out of American politics itself...

...Like Reagan, the optimists among the social conservatives will win the argument at the elite level only by going out and changing the world...

...Social-conservative leaders who are optimistic about the potential of their movement in late-1990s America should remember that they need not convince all their peers...

...Unlike his immediate predecessors (including John F. Kennedy), he tried to widen the gap, actual and perceived, between the two parties...

...The conventional wisdom among most GOP strategists was, the less said about issues, the better...

...He was the first important politician to embrace the label “conservative,” though he admitted he would have preferred to be seen as liberal in the older sense...

...Much was happening in global and even domestic politics, including a Cold War that kept threatening to get hot and the dramatic climax of the McCarthy era...

...It took Herculean efforts by F. Clifton White, National Review’s William Rusher, and other experienced strategists associated with the New York-based Draft Goldwater committee to push the senator into the race...

...For millions of social conservatives and their political leaders, the unanswered question today is the same as it was for Goldwaterites in the 1960s: Is the movement’s potential limited to pushing politics a bit to the right on two or three core issues, or is it capable of growing into a national movement that has something to offer across the range of issues, including those outside its narrow franchise...

...From my own perspective and that of many other young conservatives, William Buckley’s brilliantly eccentric campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 proved that conservative ideas could appeal to downscale, blue-collar voters in a way that the Goldwater campaign had failed to do...

...With the seemingly apolitical Eisenhower, Jeffrey Bell is president of Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon, an economic consulting firm in Arlington, Va...

...By almost any standard, Goldwater’s general-election campaign was a disappointment...

...To young conservatives like me, coming of age in the early 1960s, Goldwater was an electrifying figure, the only important politician who talked about rolling back the New Deal and winning the Cold War...

...It is difficult to exaggerate the disdain we Youth for Goldwater types had for Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, and John Lindsay...

...No one guessed what lay just ahead...

...What lay ahead was the 1960s, and Goldwater was the first true 1960s politician...

...He used words as a weapon...