Posted on 05/15/2020 5:39:09 AM PDT by cotton1706
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution ... or have failed their purpose ... or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests,' I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
-Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, 1964
wow... i am a goldwater republican. who knew.
Every once in a while I like to be reminded of Goldwater. Maybe like is not the best word because I end up getting pissed off. Goldwater reminds of my desire for smaller government. It has never happen. Government grows each year and our freedoms diminish each year. I was only a babe in 1964, but I remember experiencing greater freedom and liberty in my life and a lot less government. Those days seem long gone and I have been beaten down so much I have no hope of those days returning. Imagine returning to a government the size that it was in the Carter Administration. I thought that was incredibly large at the time. It’s only a pipe dream today.
Full court press this November with Trump in the lead. What would it get us?
Thanks for posting that, I’ve often wondered what our country would look like today if he had won
More government, but not as much government if a Rat were president.
We really missed an opportunity there.
More specifically, you are an AuH2OGOP v.1964. The end of model v.1987 and later was decidedly different.
We had a chance then to turn it around. Blew it.
We never had a chance. The groundwork for big government was placed in the 1910's, long before anyone living now had a chance to affect it.
At best, Goldwater would have been more or less like Reagan and Trump: stem the tide for a while.
My $0.02. YMMV.
The usual suspects were up to their usual tricks. I remember a magazine cover, probably from Life, trying to boost Scranton's chances.
The National Review had a joke:
"What do you think of Scranton?"
"I don't know, I've never been there."
Fast forward to 2020 and the Biden campaign has an ad that's mostly black and white photos of Scranton, PA, Biden's birthplace. We are supposed to get warm and fuzzy feelings about small town America and its virtues and transfer that affection to Biden.
Recall also a governor named Romney who wouldn’t support the Republican nominee...but would have had it been Rockefeller.
Some friends of my parents went to San Francisco at the time of the convention. The Scranton people had printed a bunch of phony admission tickets and they got a couple. The group got in and my parents' friends split away from the Scranton supporters (who were soon detected and made to leave) and managed to stay for that day's proceedings...my parents' friends were Goldwater supporters.
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