I think Matt Yglesias offers a pretty useful corrective here on the subject of liberals’ overestimation of the Goldwater movement’s success. Obviously, I don’t share much of the anti-conservative bias Yglesias brings to the subject, but I think his point is basically right. However, I think he gets the history a little bit muddled, if not necessarily wrong. He writes:

For one thing, it’s really not the case that the Goldwater Republicans “didn’t try to become Democrats” after losing in 1964. Goldwater ran on a platform of eliminating Social Security, opposing the Civil Rights Act, opposing the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and opposing a federal role in education finance. By the time Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to power in 1981 he had abandoned all of those planks and also had to accept the existence of the EPA and various other innovations of the 1970s. What he did once in power was basically scale back to some extent programs that didn’t even exist when Goldwater ran.

Me: What’s left out of this timeline is Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party. The GOP did in fact become like Democrats. This happened when Eisenhower affirmed the bipartisan nature of the New Deal. In 1960, Goldwater rallied conservatives against Ike’s “dime store New Deal” and Nixon’s disastrous “Pact of Fifth Avenue” with Nelson Rockefeller which made Nixon promise to put all sorts of liberal planks in the platform (Nixon was triangulating in the big leagues when Clinton was triangulating in his crib). There was all sorts of great invective against the pact. Lots of conservatives called it “Munich on the Hudson” and Goldwater called it “The Betrayal in Babylon.”

Despite a strong draft Goldwater movement, Goldwater bit the bullet and promised to be a loyal Republican. He delivered his “let’s grow up Conservatives!” speech and implored the the insurgent Right to stay in their historic home and support the nominee (which, was a bit of a stretch since the Republican Party wasn’t in fact always known as the indisputably more conservative of the two parties). The conservatives supported Nixon and when Goldwater got his turn in 1964, the ungrateful, petulent liberal Republicans refused to help (remind you of anybody Sens Chafee, Specter & Jeffords?). Goldwater lost in a landslide. And, somewhat contrary to Yglesias’ (and Bill Bradley’s) history, Nixon and the GOP did in fact become like the Democrats. Nixon of course was a spectacularly liberal and statist president. He also won elections handily.

In some respects I think the comparisons between Nixon and Clinton are revealing. Both men won the presidency by trimming the differences between their party and the other party. Both presidencies left their respective parties weaker and more shorn of principles. The good news for the GOP was that conservatives had stuck around to take up the fight and eventually — via Reagan — win back the Oval Office and Congress. Yglesias is right that the Reaganized conservative movement wasn’t as purely libertarian as the earlier Goldwater movement. But then again, the Goldwater movement lost the White House in a landslide. The Reagan movement was more fusionist in that it had a much broader coalition — Southerners, evangelicals, anti-Communist “neocons,” Reagan Democrats, free markerters etc.

The problem for the Democrats is that their corresponding Reagan movement seems a less likely candidate for similar successes. First, who is their Reagan? Second what do they believe? Third, What movement? Surely the MoveOn crowd isn’t remotely up to snuff. People forget that Goldwater-Reagan movement spent decades working on ideas, magazines, think tanks etc. Listen to liberals today and you get the impression that that sort of internal debate and ferment can happen over night. It can’t. The Goldwater analogy falls apart, on this point alone. If liberals really want to follow in Goldwater’s footsteps they’ll either have to embrace a serious left ideology the American people won’t accept or they’ll have to go back to square one.