by Bill Moyers
He went into public relations and to soldier on in other Republican campaigns, including working with Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, in 1970, when Agnew went after journalists. He called us “nattering nabobs of negativism. ” Along the way, Vic became a confidant of the first George Bush, helping on his campaigns and in the writing of the soon-to-be president’s autobiography, Looking Forward. He also wrote a political satire with his old friend Lynne Cheney, the former vice president’s wife, called The Body Politic.
In 2007, this longtime Republican insider wrote a book with a title that almost all of us who started in politics, no matter our affiliation, wish we had claimed first. Because sooner or later—and this is what Vic Gold and I have in common today—most of us think the party of our youth has fallen into the wrong hands—his, into the hands of ideologues; mine, into the hands of its bankrollers. The title is Invasion of the Party Snatchers, but in Vic’s case, the subtitle says it all: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP.
Believe it or not, after all these years, when Vic Gold came to the studio, we were meeting for the first time.
—Bill Moyers
Do you remember what the great liberal journalist Pete Hamill said about Barry Goldwater?
This is the first time I’ve said this publicly, but Pete Hamill inspired my book.
Well, here’s exactly what you quote Pete Hamill: “No democracy can survive if it is wormy with lies and evasions. That is why we must cherish those people who have the guts to speak the truth: mavericks, whistle-blowers, disturbers of the public peace. And it’s why, in spite of my own continuing (though chastened) liberal faith, I miss Barry Goldwater.”
I have never met Pete Hamill. But when I read in the L.A. Times that Pete Hamill had said that he wished we had a Barry Goldwater around now, I said to myself, “He’s right.” And I worked for Goldwater! So I’m going to write something about why we have abandoned the principles he represented.
I never met Barry Goldwater. Back in 1964 he was the guy on the other side to beat. He did shoot from the hip, and was mobilizing the fringe, including the old Confederacy, on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. But in later years I came to admire his candor. Who’s speaking like Barry Goldwater today?
I don’t know if a Barry Goldwater could exist in today’s political world because of the sound bite mentality, the appealing to the base, which you find in both parties. If you look at the candidates today—what I call the Stepford candidates on both sides in these debates—the only two who are speaking clearly are the ones people think of as the kooks. On the Democratic side they ask Mike Gravel, “Do you think English should be the official language?” He says, “Yes.” The others say, “No, not the official language, the national language.” And I say: “What the devil is the national language? Why don’t they just say no?” And on the Republican side you have Ron Paul, who was the only candidate who is antiwar and pro–civil liberties, and he really opposes what the Bush administration is doing to civil liberties—and they call him a kook. If Senator Goldwater were around, he’d probably throw up his hands at the whole process and not run.
Why do you think candidates can’t speak their mind today?
It’s the system. Look, if you have to win Iowa, you have to come out for ethanol. And if you don’t, that finishes you. You’re compromised right there. Then you’ve got to go over to New Hampshire and you’ve got to sign a pledge: no taxes. If you don’t say “no taxes,” you’re going to lose New Hampshire. You get killed there. And then you will not make the cover of Time and Newsweek, and that’ll be your ruin. So that’s what does it.
You said you wrote this book because you were angry. Why were you angry?
Goldwater did seem to be a clarion voice, a clear voice. What did Goldwater and the conservative movement at that time stand for? They stood for limited government. Now, when I say “limited government,” I mean limited power of government. What Arthur Schlesinger ultimately described as the imperial presidency under Nixon. Of course, Nixon picked up where John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson left off, and he expanded the imperial powers of the presidency and the imperialization of the country, and now you’ve got the neocons and the religious right claiming we should be policemen for the world.
Do you feel threatened by the holy rollers—as you call them—and the neocons?
I am a nonconformist. I have always been a nonconformist. When I was with Goldwater, I was a nonconformist. We thought the conformists were on the other side. The fact is that what the religious right demands is conformity. Purely and simply, they would like to establish a theocracy. And the paradox is that the neocons are not religious. But they have a mission. They think we have a moral mission in the world. The United States is the leading nation in the world, it’s the superpower in the world, our mission is to democratize the world. Benevolent hegemony is what they want. Some of them are theocons, by the way.
Well, the neocons and the religious right have used each other.
They’ve used each other, but they take the same position, benevolent hegemony: “We’re going to teach people all over the world the way it should be.”
Barry Goldwater wrote back in 1994: “The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else in the process.” And he went on to declare that “the radical right has nearly ruined our party.” What’s your take on that?
The interesting thing is if you go back to the Goldwater campaign and read his speeches, the word spiritual—the spiritual side of mankind—is very much in every speech. He accused President Johnson and the Johnson administration of being materialistic. Goldwater spoke of the whole man, so he used the word spiritual and he used the word God.
Now, Republican conservatives understand what it means to keep government out of the boardroom, but what they don’t seem to understand is keeping government out of the bedroom, out of our private lives. Goldwater understood that. If you had told me and if you had told Barry Goldwater that we would one day have an office in the White House called the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives—what kind of Orwellian language is that? Faith-based initiatives? That’s the Office of Religion. The Office of Religious Outreach. How do you put that in the White House?
The Terri Schiavo case seems to have been a turning point in all of this. The moment people like you really began to be aroused was when the religious right took that case to the White House.
Well, think of what it was aside from the emotional side. Think of what it meant constitutionally and in terms of conservative principles. The hypocrisy of the Tom DeLays and people like him who had always been against activist judges. “We don’t want these activist judges interfering”—right? Here, state courts had decided this thing. And Republicans in Congress pass a law which takes it out of state jurisdiction and turns it over to the federal court. And President Bush—who waited four days before he visited New Orleans after Katrina—interrupts his vacation in Crawford, Texas, to immediately fly back to sign this bill. A bill that takes the case out of state hands and puts it in federal hands. The pitiful thing was they take this personal family tragedy and elevate it to a national case.
Goldwater over the years openly supported the rights of gay men and women. He voted consistently to protect a woman’s choice concerning abortion. He championed the separation of church and state, and he was as concerned about the religious right as liberals. I began to ask, “Who’s the conservative here and who’s the liberal?” Did the Goldwater Republicans then desert him? Did they leave him? Is that what happened?
No, they didn’t leave him. They now feel we can’t win an election unless we have the theoconservatives, the religious right, with us. These are our ground troops. These are our storm—but when you take them in, it changes the character of the party. You win, but do you win on the principles that you once stood for?
Well, they won twice, 2000 and 2004.
&nbs
p; They won. You said, “They won.” That’s what I think a lot of conservatives like me have discovered. I voted for George Bush in the year 2000, but there were a lot of defections in 2006. There were a lot of conservative Republicans like me who wanted to lose in 2006 and then come back to the kind of reform we believe in.
Back in 2001, you wrote the profile of the new vice president, Dick Cheney, for the official inauguration program. You called him “a man of gravitas with a quick and easy wit; a conservative who will see a road less traveled; a political realist who sees his country and the world around him not in terms of leaden problems but golden opportunities.”
That’s the person I knew. I mean, I wasn’t writing bull.
So what happened to him?
That is one of the great mysteries. I quote Madame de Staël: “Men do not change, they unmask themselves.” As you know, power can change people. When I was in the army I remember that when I got my sergeant stripes they told me, “Now we’re going to find out what kind of person you are.” So Cheney becomes vice president of the United States. Maybe all this has been a very good masquerade he’s been putting on, because this is not the Dick Cheney any of us knew. If you recall, when George W. Bush was elected, everybody said, “Well, George may be inexperienced, but we have a good stable person in Dick Cheney.” And now—he’s bombs away. Intransigent on everything.
You’re very angry in the book about the war.
Yes.
Why?
Because I feel for those kids—and they are kids—over there. They are getting killed every day, and their lives are being wasted. Politicians say, “Oh, no, they’re heroes.” But their lives are being wasted. And while they’re getting killed, we have white-tie dinners at the White House. The president says this is total war. Where is the sacrifice? I know what a total war is like. You know what a total war is like. I feel for the families of the kids who are over there and the people who are getting killed in a war. Every day that passes, every day that passes there are more of them going to be killed to no end.
Well, back in the Johnson years, the war in Vietnam, especially 1965 when we escalated the war so dramatically, there were white-tie dinners, dances at the Smithsonian. There was a disconnect then. You wrote a piece once about how presidents get isolated. You said they have to burst the bubble of celebrity and sycophancy.
Oh, yes.
George W. Bush has disappeared into the presidency, hasn’t he?
He’s acting a role. But, you know, have their feet touched the ground? This is the thing that I wonder—is this a real-life thing to them? This happened to Clinton. It becomes a celebrity thing to them. And they get carried away by it.
You’re also angry in the book about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Justice Department.
I think it’s a corrupted Justice Department. When I say “corrupted,” I don’t mean dollars and cents. I mean corrupted in terms of our constitutional values. You’ve heard some of the prosecuting attorneys who were fired now speaking out about exactly what’s going on up there. When you corrupt the justice system—the Justice Department is the most important department of government in terms of protecting our constitutional values—well, there need to be investigations. And I knew there wouldn’t be with the Republicans controlling Congress. I say let these investigations happen.
Did I just hear you say you want the Democrats to win in November 2008?
I’d say open up the book. Open up the book. I wasn’t the only one. Listen, if these same people had won in 2006 following the 2004 mandate, with the war and everything that was going on in the Bush White House—if they win again, my God, we’ll be at war with Iran in two weeks.
But both of us agree that the parties are now captives of big wealthy interests, don’t we?
You’re talking about the people who put up the money for their campaigns? Absolutely. They’re captive because their only interest is “How do we get reelected?” And after they get reelected, well, they want to make money. You don’t make money inside Congress anymore. There’s K Street.
They become lobbyists.
For the first time in my lifetime we have an attorney general—John Ashcroft—who leaves office and establishes his own lobbying firm.
Do you sometimes feel like a dinosaur standing in a lake that’s drying up around your ankles?
Well, I’ll put it to you this way. I am reading more and more histories of the 1940s and ’50s and listening to Frank Sinatra music and Bobby Darin.
Are we winding up here at the end as old curmudgeons?
I don’t want to be an old curmudgeon. You remember the old play Waiting for Lefty? Well, I’m waiting for Righty. And for a rebirth of Goldwater. I don’t see him around.
NELL PAINTER
During a decisive period in the 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton stopped off at a chain restaurant in Ohio and posed with waitresses in a gesture of working-class solidarity. Barack Obama showed up at a titanium factory, meeting with workers in hard hats as the cameras rolled. Each knew the margin of victory could come from working people who had once been solidly Democratic but now felt abandoned by a party that has become as enthralled as Republicans with hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and corporate lobbyists.
As these photo ops played out on the evening news and across the Internet, eyes must have widened in moneyed suites where a blue-collar job is valued only if it’s being shipped overseas. Were Clinton and Obama, whose campaign coffers overflowed like Christmas stockings with Wall Street cash, turning against their benefactors? Or were they just feigning a little populism for the sake of the bleachers?
The mainstream media figured that must be it—a temporary deviation from the corporatism that Democrats practice in a Washington far removed from roadside diners and factory floors. “Before Votes, Democrats Deliver Populist Appeals,” read a headline in The New York Times, as if it were but a realistic nod to the vulgar concerns of everyday people trying to make a living. The Columbia Journalism Review politely weighed in: “Before this gets out of hand, big media needs to stop using the word ‘populist’ to describe Democrats’ economic programs and their appeals to voters. ... Reporters and headline writers don’t need to be historians-on-deadline to know that the word ‘populist’ has no widely agreed-upon definition, but plenty of negative associations.” Meanwhile, the quintessential Beltway oracle David Broder was actually praising Sarah Palin for “her pitch-perfect populism.” One could hardly fail to note a double standard at work here: populism on the right, good; populism on the left, dangerous.
So exactly what is populism, anyway? Merriam-Webster’s defines a populist as “a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people.” Defined that way, no wonder both Democrats and Republicans are eager to grab the mantle and rub a little dirt on their freshly acquired denim jeans and work shirts. But there actually was a populist political party, known as the People’s Party, in the late nineteenth century. Until it was finally squashed, these populists challenged the power of monopolistic corporations, big trusts, the railroads, and banks. Many of the party’s goals—a graduated income tax, election of senators by direct vote, civil service reform, the eight-hour workday, pensions—eventually won public approval, culminating in the Progressive era that followed in the early years of the twentieth century.
The historian Nell Irvin Painter tells this vital story in her book Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era. Until her recent retirement Painter was one of the most popular teachers at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Organization of American Historians, the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history.
—Bill Moyers
It seems that everybody’s throwing around the word populism.
And it sounds as if they’re throwing it around as a dirty word. If it is a dirty word, they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Why do
they think it’s a dirty word?
I think they think it’s a dirty word because in their understanding of it, populism pits Americans against each other, as if we would all be one happy family, hand in hand, if it weren’t for populist agitators. You know, every time politicians start talking about what’s needed for working people or, heaven forbid, poor people, and how their interests are different from people who have a lot of money, critics accuse them of “populism.” But if you go back to the late nineteenth century, when rich people decided what to do and expected workers and others to go along with it, a lot of ordinary people weren’t having it. They stood up and declared that their interests were not the same as the plutocracy—the people with all the money.
In the new edition of your book you quote the populist orator and presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan on how America can be a democracy—
Or an empire.
But not both.
Well, he was right. And we’ve become an empire. That happened in the twentieth century with one war after another. Running an empire doesn’t square with what regular people have to face every day—health care, making a living. Especially ever since the Cold War we have become what my colleague Lizabeth Cohen calls “a consumers’ republic.” The populists, on the other hand, talked about a producers’ republic. And our interest as consumers and our interest as citizens may be different. As citizens, we need to pay for bridges, roads, education, colleges. But these are not the kind of things Americans are going to buy as consumers. Yet we need them as citizens. There’s a difference.
