While the term “Goldwater conservative” originally described supporters of 1964 Republican presidential candidate and states’ rights advocate Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, it has increasingly come to define one specific ideological approach to the relationship between the power of the federal government and the rights of citizens. Specifically, Goldwater conservatives believe in limited government involvement in the economy, but they also believe in limiting government involvement in the personal lives of individuals, separating the Goldwater species of conservatism from the social conservative movement that emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century, long after Goldwater’s failed 1964 campaign. In contrast to the social conservatives in the GOP, Goldwater was an early supporter of abortion rights (at the state level), and his support for abortion rights expanded over the course of his career. In the early 1990s, he also became an advocate for gay men and women, arguing that they should be able to serve openly in the military, observing, “You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.” A strong believer in the separation of church and state, Goldwater was skeptical about the influence of the religious right on the Republican Party and bluntly critical of Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the political ambitions of televangelist Pat Robertson.
Some political commentators may characterize Goldwater conservatives as libertarians; however, Goldwater himself cannot be so characterized. Unlike contemporary libertarians, who tend to espouse isolationism, Goldwater supported a strong military and an activist U.S. foreign policy as a means to thwart the spread of Soviet influence, and he was often viewed as an extremist for his willingness to use military force whenever it was expedient to do so. Moreover, during the 1980s, he began to accept a more moderate attitude toward the scope of the federal government; still, Senator Goldwater continued to identify himself with the principles of smaller, less intrusive government, and he generally supported the policies of President Ronald Reagan. Save for the Iran-Contra blunder, for the most part, Goldwater admired the Reagan presidency. That said, Sen. Goldwater found himself increasingly estranged from his party’s social conservatism and its reliance on the support of religious fundamentalism. He fervently disassociated himself from those elements within the Republican Party who presumed to be his heirs, referring to the GOP in 1989 as being led by “a bunch of kooks.” In 1996 he observed that he and Republican presidential nominee Sen. Bob Dole were, compared to contemporary GOP conservatives, the “new liberals” in the party.
In retrospect, Sen. Goldwater appears to be a different breed of cat compared to nearly every variety of conservatism in American politics today. Some might claim Kentucky senator Rand Paul as the true heir to the Goldwater legacy, and Sen. Paul does share the Goldwater faith in limited government and expansive individual freedom, but Paul’s isolationism couldn’t be farther from Goldwater’s commitment to national defense. Barry Goldwater’s impact on American politics doubtless continues to reverberate throughout the American ideological topography, and his quixotic 1964 presidential campaign remains a potent ideological touchstone, but the species “Goldwater conservative” might today be as rare as vacuum tubes.
See also Campaign of 1964; Rockefeller Republican
Buckley, William F., Jr. Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
Bush, Andrew, John W. Dean, and Barry M. Goldwater Jr. Pure Goldwater. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Goldwater, Barry M. The Conscience of a Conservative. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Second ed. New York: Nation Books, 2009.
Sherman, Elizabeth Tanner, ed. Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.