Note to Conservatives: Take Another Look at Goldwater

"I am concerned about clergy engaged in a heavy-handed, continuing attempt to use political means to obtain moral ends -- and vice versa. It is one of the most dangerous trends in this country. They are attempting to institutionalize politics in their churches."

These are not the words of Bill or Hillary Clinton or John Kerry. Barry Goldwater wrote them in his final book, his 1988 autobiography.

Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg, in his syndicated column last week, complained that liberal Democrats are misappropriating Goldwater for their own ends. Goldberg quoted John Dean's assertion, which is indeed laughable on its face, that Dean had considered himself to be a "Goldwater conservative" for the past 40 years.

The Democrats and the media demonized Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign as a right-wing lunatic who would start World War III. This enabled his detractors to avoid any serious engagement with the iconoclastic ideas Goldwater brought to the table about the welfare state, individual initiative or the Soviet threat.

Goldwater lived to see the conservative movement he founded and inspired move from the margins to the mainstream of American political culture. But he never rested on his laurels once conservatives obtained power. Instead, he became a thorn in the side to many conservatives, even to one of his most famous disciples, President Ronald Reagan.

And this is where Goldberg misses the point. Goldwater was never the two-dimensional cartoon cutout that his detractors on the left -- or some of his "fans" on the right -- portrayed him to be. This becomes clear as you read Goldwater's own words, something Goldberg needs to do more of.

In his seminal work, the 1960 manifesto "The Conscience of a Conservative,'' Goldwater argued that conservatives seek both to expand individual liberty and to resist the accumulation of power by those who claim to know what's best for everyone else. "The Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of the social order." The Founders, he wrote, "knew from vivid, personal experience that freedom depends on effective restraints against the accumulation of power in a single authority."

Goldwater consistently fought for these two basic principles -- maximizing individual liberty and resisting the concentration of power -- throughout his political career. His core beliefs never changed. But as conservatism became a dominant force, he proved willing to challenge his own movement when he believed it strayed from individual liberty or toward overbearing power.

This is why, I believe, Goldwater attacked head-on what he called "the religious right." He saw them as becoming too powerful, too intolerant, and too quick to take away others' liberty. And he saw them as a threat to his beloved Republican Party.

"The GOP will be weakened if it adopts the exclusionary views of the religious right," he wrote in 1988. "The more the Republicans embrace fundamentalists or some of their self-anointed leaders, the more voters will be lost to the GOP."

On the divisive question of abortion, the pro-life Goldwater was pragmatic. "There is too wide and complex a range of opinion for us to reach a national consensus on issues of morality," he wrote. "If either side insists on legislating morality in absolute terms, then the challenge to democratic society is too great."

Accepting his party's nomination at the 1964 Republican convention, Goldwater offered two of the most memorable lines in American politics. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Yet two decades later he would observe that, "For a democracy to function, there has to be give-and-take, some room for compromise." With age and wisdom, the fiery political insurgent of the early 1960s had developed a more nuanced understanding of politics.

In attacking today's liberal "revisionism" of Goldwater, Jonah Goldberg correctly notes that Goldwater stressed the role of faith and morality in his conservatism. But for Goldwater, such values were personal, and not to be imposed on others. He never believed that "government knows best" -- not even when conservatives were at the helm.

Today's conservatives should reread Barry Goldwater, in his entirety.

Correction: In the third paragraph, the author mistakenly identified Howard Dean instead of John Dean. This column reflects that change.