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Jewish World Review / June 2,1998 / 8 Sivan, 5758
Cal Thomas
ON HEARING REPORTS that former Arizona Republican Sen.
Barry Goldwater had died, I reached for my original copy of
The Conscience of a Conservative published in 1960, and
re-read it.
This 127-page book was the American equivalent of the
Communist Manifesto and trumped every other political
document in the world. It remains remarkably fresh and
reminds us of how "Mr. Conservative" was the ideological
godfather to Ronald Reagan and the entire modern
conservative movement.
Goldwater began his book with a lament, still heard today,
that not everyone who accepts the label "conservative" is
one. He then defined the term and stated what a true
conservative is supposed to believe.
On the difference between conservatives and liberals:
"Conservatives take account of the whole man,
while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of
man's nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part,
an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a
On limited government: "(The Framers of the Constitution)
knew from vivid, personal experience that freedom depends
on effective restraints against the accumulation of power in a
single authority." Goldwater opposed laws and programs that
could not be justified by the Constitution.
On taxes: "Government does not have an
unlimited claim on the earnings of individuals. One of the
foremost precepts of the natural law is man's right to the
possession and the use of his property. And a man's earnings
are his property as much as his land and the house in which
he lives."
On spending: "Neither of our political parties has seriously
faced up to the problem of government spending .... The root
evil is that government is engaged in activities in which it has
no legitimate business. As long as the federal government
acknowledges responsibility in a given social or economic
field, its spending in that field cannot be substantially
reduced."
It was about how to fight communism, however, that
Goldwater was his most prophetic and profound. He outlined
a nine-point program and concluded with a paragraph that
accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years
later: "The future, as I see it, will unfold along one of two
paths. Either the Communists will retain the offensive; will lay
down one challenge after another; will invite us in local crisis
after local crisis to choose between all-out war and limited
retreat; and will force us, ultimately, to surrender or accept
war under the most disadvantageous circumstances. Or
we will summon the will and the means for taking the
initiative, and wage a war of attrition against them --- and
hope, thereby, to bring about the internal disintegration of
the Communist empire."
Which is precisely what happened in 1990 when the Berlin
Wall and Soviet communism collapsed, just as Goldwater
predicted, because Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and
Pope John Paul II embraced much of Goldwater's thinking
and acted on it.
Barry Goldwater was smeared as a nuclear madman in the
1964 presidential campaign. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, whose
legacy was a lost war in Vietnam and failed Great Society
programs, Goldwater's legacy is the entire modern
conservative movement which is bringing change not only to
America but also around the world as millions are taking their
first breath of freedom.
In our hearts, we really did know he was
Barry Goldwater: in our hearts 
While Goldwater offended social conservatives with his
libertarian views on abortion and "gay rights," he felt he was
being true to his convictions that limited government ought to
be, well, limited.
spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires.
What is more, these needs and desires reflect the
superior side of man's nature, and thus take
precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore
looks upon the enhancement of man's spiritual nature as the
primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other
hand -- in the name of concern for ‘human beings' --- regard
the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of
society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their
characteristic approach is to harness the society's political and
economic forces into a collective effort to compel
‘progress' In this approach, I believe they fight against
Nature'' (italics his).
