Thread by @LarryGlickman

I'm grateful to @ed_kilgore for his engagement with and critique of my @madebyhistory piece on the ways in which the anti-Goldwater GOPers in 1964 presaged in critical ways the "Never Trumpers." In this thread, I'd like to offer a brief response. /1

https://twitter.com/ed_kilgore/status/1159114876855308289

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory First, I'll concede that the analogy between 1964 and 2016 is imperfect and in a longer piece I would have delved into the differences. I agree also that Goldwater's candidacy was, as Ed says, DOA. /2

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory However, we should remember that the vast majority of pundits and politicians, including those that supported him, thought that Donald Trump would lose in 2016. His victory was a surprise to many people, including apparently Trump himself./3

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory Notwithstanding the important differences, there are good reasons to compare the elections. I began to think about the similarities as I researched the actions of the anti-Goldwater faction of the GOP in 1964, including Theodore H. White's The Making of the President, 1964. /4

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory One evening, I reread George Packer's profile of the moderate Republican, Ryan Costello. After describing his disgust with Trump's "atrocious" "Access Hollywood" comments, Packer notes, "In November, he cast a reluctant vote for him anyway." /5
newyorker.com/magazine/2018/…

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory I got to thinking that a "reluctant" vote counts just a much as any other kind of vote (keep in mind that PA was a swing state decided by very few votes) and it called to mind, what Evans and Novak referred to as Nelson Rockefeller's "tepid" endorsement of Goldwater in 1964. /6

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory A "reluctant" vote is still a vote and a "tepid" endorsement is still an endorsement. In our two-party system, the choice is: to vote for the candidate or not; to endorse the candidate or not. /7

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory But the broader area where I disagree with Ed is this: the fact that Goldwater was going to lose should have made it easier and more politically wise for those fighting for the soul of the GOP to denounce him. /8

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory What if Scranton, Rockefeller and Eisenhower had issued a joint statement saying that they planned to remain in the Republican Party and that they would fight for their principles within the GOP, but that they could not, in good conscience, endorse Goldwater? /9

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory Ed writes: "you can argue plausibly that moderate-Republican acceptance of Goldwater (and it was far from universal) was based on a desire to get rid of him gracefully and then reconquer the party." Let's unpack this. /10

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory First, as Roscoe Drummond observed, the GOP moderates, including Scranton, Rockefeller, and Romney, (not to mention, Ike) "closed ranks" behind Goldwater. It was, in fact, pretty universal. /11
newspapers.com/clip/34652070/

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory Second, in retrospect, we can say that if their plan was to "get rid of him gracefully and then reconquer the party," their plan did not fully succeed. /12

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory The actions of Scranton and Goldwater in particular, went well beyond "getting rid of him gracefully." Scranton strongly endorsed Goldwater and browbeat Senator Hugh Scott into endorsing BG "by name." /13

@ed_kilgore @madebyhistory Eisenhower & Nixon went along with removing a proposition from the GOP platform condemning the John Birch Society: Nixon "spoke in favor of the platform as drafted and defended the views" of BG and said he would campaign for him. /14
archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.co…

As Robert Novak wrote in “The Agony of the GOP, 1964,” the party was in serious danger of transforming into a “White Man’s Party.” /15

As @mattdelmont has shown, Jackie Robinson, for one, recognized the danger. “The danger of the Republican party being taken over by the lily-white-ist conservatives is more serious than many people realize,” he cautioned. /16
theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

@mattdelmont Nixon wasn't a Goldwaterite but he accommodated this faction in his campaigns of 1968 and 1972. Ed is right that we can too easily (and ahistorically) draw a direct line from 1964 to 1980. But the handwriting was on the wall. /17

@mattdelmont By campaigning not just reluctantly but vigorously for Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act, many of the moderate leaders of the GOP lost some ability to articulate an alternative version of moderate Republicanism. /18

@mattdelmont None of this is to deny the many solid points that Ed makes in his piece (especially the last paragraph, which is excellent). Rather, my goal was to provide some additional documentation that, I think, supports the argument I made in my @washingtonpost piece. /19