A Big Con Manifesto

An argument has broken out in the comments for my Independence Day post [1]. Folks are beating up on me for beating up on poor Barry Goldwater--when the problem is clearly George Bush.

Allow me to respond.

The watchword of The Big Con is that conservatism is the problem, not Bush, and that it is not the perversion of conservatism that is at issue but its original conception. Goldwater, in his famous acceptance speech, and Reagan, in his 1981 inauguration speech, spoke for that original conception. It is, as Reagan pronounced it: "government isn't the solution to our problems, government is the problem."

That means: tax cuts and dismantling and attempted dismantling of the structures of shared sacrifice that make America great, and keep America free. (Key example: affordable college education.)

You can't say that's not "Goldwaterism." They're doing exactly what Goldwater dreamed of. Goldwater may or may not have approved of the criminal and semi-criminal acts of the Bush administration--and the Reagan administrations. But he would have adored their tax cuts, and adored, to use my example above, their dismantling of cheap public college education. Reagan said America "shouldn't subsidize intellectual curiosity." Goldwater was against ALL federal funding to help educational institutions--it was a huge part of Conscience of a Conservative.

For years, people have been trying to acquit Goldwater and Reagan at the bar of history by arguing they would never have approved of Bush, that Goldwater was an honest guy, and that Reagan was a genial guy. But on the most important issue--fundamental public philosophy--it's case closed, and the verdict is:

Goldwaterism isn't the solution to our problems. Goldwaterism is the problem.

If, by some miracle, George W. Bush suddenly came to Jesus and repented of his spying on American citizens, his monstrous military expansionism, his cronyism, his vacation from civil liberties, and all the rest, he'd still be devoted to dismantling the structures of shared sacrifice bequeathed to us by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He would still be a disaster.