PRINCETON, N.J. — Forty years ago this November, Lyndon B. Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in the Arizona senator's bid for the presidency. But far from conceding defeat, Goldwater's supporters saw the election as a mandate to build a reinvigorated national conservative movement aimed at changing America's course.
How well that mission succeeded is a matter of considerable debate within the conservative political community today.
There is no question that the machinery put in place during Goldwater's campaign endured, and that over time conservatives began to win elections. Ronald Reagan, who rose to national political prominence promoting Goldwater on network television, was helped into office by a later generation of that machine, and his presidency kicked off a quarter-century in which Republicans won four of six presidential elections.
Even after Democrat Bill Clinton's election in 1992, conservatives continued to gain ground. Republicans -- conservatives, for the most part -- took control of both houses of Congress, and most states elected Republican governors. And the conservatives' power extended beyond the boundary of the GOP. The word "liberal" became "the L-word," a descriptor that candidates of both parties wished to avoid. Clinton moved aggressively rightward, proclaiming "an end to welfare as we know it," bombing Iraq and frustrating Republicans by borrowing many of their ideas.
On the electoral level, there is no doubt that Goldwater's defeat has been avenged. Conservatives have come out on top and liberals are on the run. But to what end?
Clearly there are many ways in which today's elected conservatives differ markedly from their liberal colleagues. They are more inclined to spend on national defense and less inclined to spend on domestic social programs. They support a more aggressive defense policy and back President Bush's concept of preventive military operations in some cases. On issues such as these, it is clear that the election of conservatives has made a significant difference on many national policy decisions.
But on other matters, there are disturbing signs that conservatism has lost its way in the years since Goldwater argued that the most important question to ask of any public policy proposal was whether it maximized freedom.
Many of the Goldwater supporters who built the movement could best be described not as conservatives but as constitutionalists. Because of their focus on individual liberty, they could have been called liberals if the term had not already been captured by the political left.
That emphasis on individual rights no longer seems to be the principal focus of conservatives. When voters in Oregon, for example, opted to permit physicians to help terminally ill patients speed their own deaths, conservatives in Congress rushed to pass a federal law that would supersede the state decision -- a shocking embrace of increased federal power -- and thus to insist, by federal order, that dying citizens must simply endure the agony of their final days. This was, indeed, a different sense of what American conservatism was all about.
A number of the political battles of the fledgling days of the conservative movement revolved around decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. The "enemy" in those battles was "judicial activism," judges who viewed the Constitution merely as a set of guidelines, the spirit of which was to be applied to contemporary situations.
On the other side -- the conservative side -- were the so-called strict constructionists, whose position was that the Constitution was made up not of guidelines but of rules, and that those rules established the acceptable limits of federal authority. It is perhaps an exaggeration, but not much of one, to assert that conservatives held the Founding Fathers (always capitalized) in an esteem that approached reverence. It was not the "spirit" of the Constitution, which was subject to considerable interpretation, but the actual wording of the Constitution that conservatives saw as controlling.
It is important to note that there has never been an occasion on which conservatives proposed to reconsider that perspective, or a time when that perspective was rejected. If one were to teach modern conservative political theory, as I have been doing for some years, one would have no cause to revise the course reading list to include either significant literature or public pronouncements in which conservatives embraced the left's propensity for treating the Constitution as a set of flexible guideposts.
And yet, with little public debate about the fundamental question -- what is the role to be assigned to the Constitution in considering issues of public policy? -- modern conservatives have come increasingly to treat the Constitution as something far less than America's founders intended.
