Ron Paul needs to heed the lessons of Goldwater

On April 8, 1957, Barry Goldwater took the Senate floor and tore into President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Eisenhower had just submitted a record $71.8 billion budget and the senator from Arizona was apoplectic. Rather than return the country to economic health through low taxes, limited spending and balanced budgets, Eisenhower, according to Goldwater, had fallen for the “siren song of socialism.”

It was Goldwater’s first major break with Republican Party orthodoxy, but it would not be his last. The words of Old Right standard-bearer Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio must have been ringing in his ears: “If you permit appeals to unity to bring an end to criticism, we endanger not only the constitutional liberties of our country, but even its future existence.”

Over the next seven years, Goldwater would rally Americans who believed in the founding fathers’ attempt to restrain the power of government. He rejected Eisenhower’s brand of big-government modern Republicanism. In his book, “The Conservative Revolution,” author Lee Edwards writes:

“Goldwater and other traditional Republicans from the Midwest and the West were determined to resist the policies of the modern ‘Me-Too’ Republicans: those who trailed in the wake of Democrats as they promised more and fatter giveaways, yelling at the top of their lungs, ‘Me too, me too!’”

The culmination of this rally was Goldwater accepting the Republican nomination for president at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964 and telling his audience: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

Since that time, big government has ruled the day. For the past 43 years, Republicrats have spent hundreds of billions of dollars expanding the reach of the federal government into every crevice of a citizen’s economic, personal and cultural life. Some conservatives like to point to Ronald Reagan as the embodiment of a principled conservative, but that is only because they ignore Reagan’s actual record while in office — national debt ballooned, spending skyrocketed and taxes actually increased (of course, Reagan was smart enough not to call them taxes, but “revenue generating measures”).

All the while, Americans waited for someone to talk the talk and walk the walk of Jefferson, Washington and Adams. The waiting is over. Texas Rep. Ron Paul is running for president.

Despite the mainstream media totally ignoring his campaign (and neo-conservatives and glibertarians actively disparaging it), Paul managed to do something last week that no other Republican has ever done: he raised almost $4 million over the Internet in one day. As the National Review put it: “This sort of thing just isn’t done … We can’t

know for sure until the quarter’s end, but Paul is probably leading Rudy Giuliani and perhaps even Mitt Romney in cash on hand at this moment.”

Close to 40,000 people gave an average of $98 to Paul’s campaign. The pundits are at a loss to explain what is happening, but it really doesn’t seem that complicated. Ron Paul, like Goldwater, is advocating liberty in all its forms. And — surprise! — Americans like liberty. They like being free to do as they like, think what they like, and believe what they like without government interference.

But now, if history is any lesson, Ron Paul needs to be careful. For much of the run-up to the 1964 election, Goldwater was overlooked. Most people assumed he didn’t have a chance. But as his campaign picked up steam, the modern Republicans and the liberal-leaning media got scared. They started to attack him in whatever way they could — comparing him to Hitler, lying about supposed ties to extreme right groups in Germany, implying he would start a nuclear conflagration. They did anything and everything to keep him out of the White House.

The same hysteria is set to launch itself against Ron Paul. Why? In part, because a truly limited government, a truly free American society threatens the power and prestige bureaucrats and journalists have built up over the past four decades.

For example, it is often said few in Switzerland know who their foreign minister is because the post has so little power as to be inconsequential. No one in Washington wants to be inconsequential.

The Old Right libertarian message is making a comeback. Let’s hope it has more success than in 1964.

Noah Clarke is an economist and freelance writer

living in New Hampshire.