Where are you now, Mr. Goldwater, your nation turns its eyes to you…

Wouldn’t it be ironic if liberals claimed Barry Goldwater’s legacy? They may be trying.

Reflection on our past, and idols, can be constructive. Next month, September 18, HBO will air “Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater.” This reflection, however, seems to be more of a 2006 campaign argument to use the usual debates in the Republican Party among traditionalists, libertarians and newer thinkers and doers who predominate to divide and denigrate Republicans. An indicator is that Editor & Publisher highlighted the coming show.

This debate is one of the healthy reasons the Republican Party has been so successful over the past decades: it is a big tent. By comparison, the Democrat Party has been narrowing its appeal and membership. To my surprise, a local friend, quite liberal, believer in open forums, former MSM reporter, former publisher, still a widely respected columnist, just resigned along with his wife from registration as a Democrat due to his opinion that too many Democrats have become insensitive to Jewish concerns and due to the treatment of Lieberman, even though my friend has come from support to wanting a reasonable timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

Barry’s granddaughter, C.C., is the originator of the project. As she told an interviewer:

Growing up, Goldwater knew little of her grandfather's politics. She didn't know what he stood for. She didn't quite understand where people were coming from when they told her either how fantastic or what a warmonger he was.

It wasn't until she got into researching the film that she understood their reaction to a man unrestrained by spin doctors and political niceties.

He was "brutally frank."

"Right or wrong, he always said what he felt. In some situations, it was not completely right. In other situations, it was right. But it was always honest," she said.

However, a reviewer sees an agenda in the show’s thrust:

Pic reflects on a contempo religious GOP right wing that would have profoundly alienated Goldwater, who rarely brought God into his politics.

The selection of interviewees appears to reinforce this leaning:

The list of interviewees underlines it's not a big right-wing project: it includes Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Al Franken, Helen Thomas, James Carville, Bob Schieffer, Andy Rooney, Julian Bond, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, John Dean, and erstwhile Goldwater Girl Hillary Rodham Clinton. A few righties appear (Richard Viguerie, George Will) and some more centrist GOP types do, too (John Warner, Sandra Day O'Connor).

I usually don’t harken back to former posts, but this once please see this one, “Conscience of a conservative” from last September.

An excerpt:

There aren’t many of us who remember Barry Goldwater’s challenge to the excessively liberal common wisdom of the 1960’s, his conscience of a conservative trumpeting the creed that put the individual first and launched the modern conservative movement said to dominate the Republican Party, which in turn is said to dominate American politics.

But, that creed has morphed into a political machine in which the purism of Goldwater’s beliefs are peripheral to obtaining, keeping, and using power, as often for self-enrichment and glorification as any statist. There aren’t many of us who remember Barry Goldwater’s libertarian core in the 1970’s running contrary to some of the social conservatism that much of the Republican alliance rested upon. Most Republican leaders paid him as much false homage as to Lincoln, but treated him mostly like a loved but aged and quirky uncle. Today, I can’t even remember the last time I heard his name, not to mention his views, mentioned by a Republican.

There are faint echoes today of the debates over the fundamental meaning of conservatism and of liberalism that dominated discourse in the 1960’s and 1970’s. But, that’s all they are, faint echoes heard in the halls and media of power, largely treated as trivial to the business at hand. And, that’s what is at hand, the business of power, not the power of ideas, including the powerful idea of individual responsibility and morality….

Out of their loss of power, like conservatives in the 1950’s, liberals are at last realizing they need new thinking. It may be comfortable to see their state of thinking epitomized by their equivalent of conspiratorial Birchers whose insanities we highlight, but below that surface there are some saner thinkers stumbling toward a newer more attractive vision that may resonate over the coming decades. Meanwhile, the primary contrary thinking from the right is more concerned with cutting spending, but of the other guy’s programs, or the same programs but at a state instead of federal level, but not much new that recognizes the fallibility of relying on government programs to the relative exclusion of individual initiative and acceptance of the limitations of group programs.

Both liberals and conservatives have reached virtual bankruptcy of ideas. Both are rummaging around their vaults of oldie goldie slogans, and polls show most Americans except the few most partisan see through both’s emperorial clothes. Both need to really rethink their core assumptions, and take on their vested interests. If conservatives don’t get a new Barry Goldwater soon, the liberals may find theirs first.