What would be a fitting memorial for the founding father of the modern conservative movement? A statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall? An airport? A gigantic federal building a block and a half from the National Mall? What’s that you say? Ronald Reagan already has those memorials, plus another 90 roads, bridges, schools and other facilities?
But you see I am not talking about our rightly revered fortieth president but about Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who carried the water and planted the seed for conservatives throughout the 1950s and 1960s, defending conservatism against all comers and deservedly earning the sobriquet, “Mr. Conservative.”
It was Barry Goldwater who in 1960 published “The Conscience of a Conservative,” an eloquent political manifesto that proposed such fundamental reforms as a flat tax, an end to federal farm subsidies, a private sector alternative to Social Security, and victory over communism. It sold 3.5 million copies and became the 125-page bible of thousands of young conservatives.
>>> Barry M. Goldwater: The Most Consequential Loser in American Politics
It was Barry Goldwater who in 1964 ran for president, knowing his chances of winning were nil but committed to offering the American people a conservative choice not a liberal echo. He only won six states but five of them were in the Deep South. He broke the Democratic strangle-hold on the South , preparing the way for a Republican invasion below the Mason-Dixon Line that transformed the GOP into a national political party.
It was Barry Goldwater who afforded Ronald Reagan the opportunity to make his historic TV address, “A Time for Choosing,” without which, prominent California Republicans have emphasized, they would not have approached Reagan to run for governor. In other words, if there had been no presidential candidate Goldwater in 1964, there would have been no President-elect Reagan in 1980.
And so what has Congress proposed for the man who sparked a conservative revolution? To name in his honor a U.S. Postal Service complex in Prescott, Ariz., far from Phoenix where Goldwater was born. It is beyond irony that the political leader who throughout his career called for the rolling back of government and championed private enterprise should be memorialized with, of all things, a post office. On the other hand, I can hear him saying: “Okay, name it after me—and then sell it.”
The Congress, the conservative movement, the nation, can do better, far better, to honor Barry Goldwater, a presidential “loser” who changed the course of American politics. We could begin with a Congressional resolution proclaiming July 16, the day on which he accepted the presidential nomination, as Barry Goldwater Day. The resolution could begin with the words Goldwater first uttered more than 50 years ago and that resonate today more than ever: “Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.”
