No one in American electoral politics, left right or center, was on the side of real liberation for black people.
Ronald Reagan got started in politics as a main speaker for Goldwater’s campaign, often as valued on the campaign trail as Goldwater himself. It also gave birth to two major right-wing political figures: Phyllis Schlafly got started as writer of hard-right pro-Goldwater anticommunist conspiracy books and went on to become a star of the anti-gay campaign in the US. Political realignment: the Goldwater campaign facilitated the switch of Southern racist reactionary whites from the Democrats - which they had been aligned to since the Civil War - to the Republicans, which means that it facilitated the modern separation of the two parties into “left” Democrats and right republicans. There’s also a throughline from the McCarthy movement, as the Birch Society absorbed a lot of former stalwarts of McCarthyism. Buckley (who had once been the Birch founder’s friend) & his National Review taking a “critical support” position towards Goldwaterism, then the campaign itself, then the popular hardliners in the movement like Schlafly and the half-disowned John Birch Society adherents, and finally the far right like the Ku Klux Klan, who were “underground” in the movement but clearly visible to its opponents the fascist organizer Willis Carto for example got his start in the Birch Society. Political layout of the movement: William F. This was all while the Klan was running riot in the South, the white supremacists were bombing churches, the Freedom Riders were met with mass violence, civil rights campaigners were murdered, and all of that. Goldwater claimed to oppose the Civil Rights Act only because he found it unconstitutional, and rebuffed the infamous segregationist George Wallace’s attempt to be his vice presidential running mate, while his ads showed “scary” black proletarians rioting in Harlem and his enthusiasts yelled the n word at his rallies. They couldn’t own the far right because they judged that it would put them too far outside the mainstream to win, but they couldn’t disown it because it was the far right’s sentiments - segregationism/hardline white supremacy, anti-communist conspiracy, moral froth - that fueled their fanbase and the far right’s literature that circulated from hand to hand at their rallies. Takeaways from the Goldwater campaign: the American mainstream right’s presidential effort during the height of the Civil Rights Movement era rode on a strategy of half owning, half disowning the far right, not unlike the Trump administration The initial nucleus of the campaign was pretty heavily rooted in John Birch Society adherents, but those were disowned once the campaign got off the ground.
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