Although Goldwater was not the man to lead them into their promised land, this supports my idea that we need to account for Goldwaterism too. Now we see Buchanan can't lead some of them out into populist nationalism because he is a Catholic.
CJ http://www.alternet.org/rights/147004/how_the_gop_became_the_white_man%27s_party?page=4 Such obdurate pronouncements proved too ideological for the 1964 electorate. When a journalist asked Goldwater what it might feel like to become president one day, he had replied, "Frankly, it scares the hell out of me." Voters agreed, and he picked up just 52 of 538 electoral votes. Even as the Arizona senator fell far short in his drive for national power, however, he proved an able revolutionary within his own party. Unlike any politician since Prohibition, he made crime a galvanizing national campaign issue. By winning five ex-Confederate states plus his own, he proved that Republicans could compete in the "solid South," and he shifted the party's center of gravity to the Sunbelt. Proclaiming famously that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," he drove liberals like his primary opponent Nelson Rockefeller into Republican exile. Within a single election cycle he repositioned the Grand Old Party as the standard bearer of opposition to civil rights. Only two years earlier, poll respondents had perceived almost no difference between the two major parties when it came to race. By late 1964, however, Americans overwhelmingly identified Democrats with civil rights and Republicans with a go-slow, states' rights approach. The sea change was apparent at party gatherings, where the conservative journalist Robert Novak was dismayed to hear a new cadre of GOP activists conversing freely about "niggers" and "nigger lovers." Under Goldwater's leadership, he concluded, the Republican Party "was now a White Man's Party." _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
