I am currently reading Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, and was struck by a passage in his essay, “Goldwater and Pseudo-Conservative Politics,” in which Hofstadter contrasts the sharply differing political styles of what he refers to as “Taft Republicans” (which included Eisenhower), and the new era of “pseudo-conservatives” that emerged with the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter uses that term, pseudo-conservatives, to describe what was, at the time Hofstadter’s book came out (1965), a radically different form of conservatism that rejected the traditional conservative value of “conserving” established tradition, in favor of remaking society and overthrowing settled law to reflect the pseudo-conservatives’ ideology of “economic individualism” (Hofstadter’s phrase).
The three Republican leaders he takes as examples of, respectively, the old and the new approach to Republicanism, are William Howard Taft (president from 1904 to 1908) and the two-term Pres. Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater. Here is a judiciously pruned (hopefully, so as not to run afoul of copyright law) section of text (The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, with a new foreword by Sean Wilentz, First Vintage Books Edition, June 2008, pp. 94-99):
Unquestionably Goldwater’s ideas do retain some shreds and scraps of genuine conservatism, but the main course of his career puts him closer to the right-wing ideologues who were essential to his success, who shaped his tactics, who responded to his line of argument, and whose extremism he chose to defend at the vital moment of his career. …
Goldwater’s brand of conservativism has its most recognizable American roots in those thinkers, quite numerous in this country, who imagine conservatism to be almost identical with economic individualism. … Most conservatives are mainly concerned with maintaining a tissue of institutions for whose stability and effectiveness they believe the country’s business and political elites hold responsibility. Goldwater thinks of conservatism as a system of eternal and unchanging ideas and ideals, whose claims upon us must be constantly asserted and honored in full. The difference between conservatism as a set of doctrines whose validity is to be established by polemics, and conservatism as a set of rules whose validity is to be established by their usability in government, is not a difference of nuance, but of fundamental substance.
[…]
In any case, to ultra-conservatives, … the Eisenhower administration was worse than a disappointment, it was a betrayal. It did not repeal the New Deal reforms, do away with high taxes, kill foreign aid, or balance the budget. In fact, its primary historical function seemed to be to legitimate what had been done under Roosevelt and Truman: when it left certain domestic and foreign policies intact, it made them more generally acceptable by passing them, so to speak, through the purifying fire of eights years of Republicanism and thus confirming that they represented, after all, a bipartisan consensus. …
Goldwater’s deviation from Taft Republicanism also marks him off from the established moderate conservative wing of his party. … Though he had a profound dislike of change and a passionate bias toward fiscal conservatism and decentralized administration, Taft accepted the idea that the federal government should concern itself with “seeing that every family has a minimum standard of decent shelter,” should “assist those states desiring to put a floor under essential services in relief, in medical care, in housing, and in education,” should underwrite the states in providing “a basic minimum education to every child,” sustain minimum wage laws “to give the unorganized worker some protection” comparable to that given to organized workers by the unions, persist in a steeply graduated income tax, … and through its social security program (which he held to be woefully inadequate) “assure to every citizen 65 years of age and older a living wage.”
I am not sure what is meant by that last reference to a “social security program,” since there was no such program until Franklin Delano Roosevelt created it, but maybe this was some earlier, much less effective, version that I am not aware of. In any event, Goldwater obviously opposed these types of social welfare policies, and indeed advocated getting rid of them:
Governmental activities in “relief, social security, collective bargaining, and public housing,” he thought, had caused “the weakening of the individual personality and of self-reliance. He … declared himself against “every form of federal aid to education,” denounced the graduated income tax as “confiscatory,” and asserted that the country had “no education problem which requires any form of Federal grant-in-aid programs to the states.”
I had never heard “pseudo-conservatives” used before as a specific term for conservatives like Goldwater who actually favored radical and sweeping political and social change as opposed to approaching such change in a cautious, measured, and utilitarian manner, but from the way he describes them, they sound very much like the “Tea Party” extreme far right conservatives we see all over the place today — people like Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller; Republican congressional leaders like Jim DeMint and Mitch McConnell and Darrel Issa; and Republican media pundits and bloggers like Michelle Malkin and Erick Erickson.
I mean, how’s this for ringing a bell: “My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them.” Or, “I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow.” That’s Goldwater again, and these, writes Hofstadter, “are the characteristic accents of the pseudo-conservative agitators, who are convinced that they live in a degenerate society and who see their main enemy in the power of their own government.”
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