On 11/16/2010 8:36 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> to argue that Goldwater was nominated as a result of grassroots
> organizing would seem to have to be predicated on an argument that what the
> National Review did during the 50s and 60s was grassrootsy... to conflate a
> top-down patrician conservatism with a bottom-up populist conservatism.
It wasn't about the National Review. Goldwater's campaign was a movement by thousands of local conservative activists to take over their GOP precinct committees, then their county committees, then their state committees. It was an activist campaign against the GOP party regulars. It grew out of the 50's conservative youth movement and especially local John Birch Society chapters. There was nothing patrician about it.
> That latter melding lies in Nixon's Southern Strategy after the racist,
> militarist, and sexist populist revolt against civil rights legislation,
> Black Power/urban "unrest", draft card and bra burning, and sex and drugs
> and rock and roll.
All that stuff happened, and it was important. But you seem to think that "populist" conservatism can only be about racial and cultural issues. I think this is where a lot of the disagreement about the Tea Party comes from. In reality, the most enduring element of populist conservatism is its opposition to "government" and its emphasis on "personal responsibility." The history of race and immigration had something (not everything) to do with why things turned out that way. But those attitudes don't depend on race to perpetuate themselves.
SA