Conscience of a Conservative (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
Read more from Barry M. Goldwater
Conscience of a Conservative Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Conscience of a Conservative Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Conscience of a Conservative (Rediscovered Books)
Related ebooks
Summary of David Livingstone Smith's On Inhumanity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity, 1860–1920 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSurvival and Conscience: From the Shadows of Nazi Germany to the Jewish Boat to Gaza Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJames J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJane Means Appleton Pierce: U.S. First Lady (1853-1857): Her Family, Life and Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Negro in the South: His Economic Progress in Relation to his Moral and Religious Development Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGetting to God: Preaching Good News in a Troubled World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDaniel Sickles: A Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReligious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vietnam, Ptsd, and Therapy: Survived All That! Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe're Better Than This: My Fight for the Future of Our Democracy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women's Antebellum Antislavery Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThis War Ain't Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Black Man's President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Presidency: Facing Constitutional Crossroads Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbortion Care as Moral Work: Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPreserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSacred to the Memory of the Blairs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe South in Modern America: A Region at Odds Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe War on Football: Saving America's Game Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeaders of the Lost Cause Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Public Policy For You
The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chasing the Scream: The Inspiration for the Feature Film "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works--and How It Fails Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Affluent Society Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Social Security 101: From Medicare to Spousal Benefits, an Essential Primer on Government Retirement Aid Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Capital in the Twenty-First Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing The Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nolo's Guide to Social Security Disability: Getting & Keeping Your Benefits Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5America: The Farewell Tour Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (2022) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Conscience of a Conservative (Rediscovered Books)
4 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An important little book. The cold warmonger pages (last section only) are outdated, but the rest of the book is a refreshing discourse, whether you agree or not is hardly the question. You just don't hear politicians speak like that anymore - and you won't be able to listen to them in the same way anymore either...
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fantastic book. I have been looking for a book to summarize why Conservatism is the method for prosperity. Goldwater does a brilliant job of highlighting and explaining the key areas of conflict between Republicans and Democrats (and between current Republicans and conservative Republicans.)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Another great installment in the series about Jacky Faber, ship's boy, fine lady, privateer, and possible slave? This completely unbelievable adventure (really, how much trouble can one girl get into?) is highly entertaining. L. A. Meyer has no trouble keeping up the status quo with Jacky's misadventures and does not disappoint in the fourth book of the series.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Of these five tales, four of them are bone-chillingly good. My favorite is "Witches Hallow," and then the title piece. The only reason the book didn't earn the full five stars was that weak last story.
Book preview
Conscience of a Conservative (Rediscovered Books) - Barry M. Goldwater
Conscience of a Conservative
©2014 Wilder Publications
Cover image © Can Stock Photo Inc. / patrimonio
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.
ISBN: 978-1-63384-636-4
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Conscience of a Conservative
Chapter 2: The Perils of Power
Chapter 3: States' Rights
Chapter 4: And Civil Rights
Chapter 5: Freedom for the Farmer
Chapter 6: Freedom for Labor
Chapter 7: Taxes and Spending
Chapter 8: The Welfare State
Chapter 9: Some Notes on Education
Chapter 10: The Soviet Menace
CHAPTER ONE
The Conscience of a Conservative
I have been much concerned that so many people today with Conservative instincts feel compelled to apologize for them. Or if not to apologize directly, to qualify their commitment in a way that amounts to breast-beating. Republican candidates,
Vice President Nixon has said, should be economic conservatives, but conservatives with a heart.
President Eisenhower announced during his first term, I am conservative when it comes to economic problems but liberal when it comes to human problems.
Still other Republican leaders have insisted on calling themselves progressive
Conservatives.* These formulations are tantamount to an admission that Conservatism is a narrow, mechanistic economic theory that may work very well as a bookkeeper’s guide, but cannot be relied upon as a comprehensive political philosophy.
[*This is a strange label indeed: It implies that ordinary
Conservatism is opposed to progress. Have we forgotten that America made its greatest progress when Conservative principles were honored and preserved.]
The same judgment, though in the form of an attack rather than an admission, is advanced by the radical camp. We liberals,
they say, are interested in people. Our concern is with human beings, while you Conservatives are preoccupied with the preservation of economic privilege and status.
Take them a step further, and the Liberals will turn the accusations into a class argument: it is the little people that concern us, not the malefactors of great wealth.
Such statements, from friend and foe alike, do great injustice to the Conservative point of view. Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place—that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.
The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature. The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand,—in the name of a concern for human beings
—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society. They are, moreover, in a hurry. So that their characteristic approach is to harness the society’s political and economic forces into a collective effort to compel progress.
In this approach, I believe they fight against Nature.
Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.
The first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul—which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord withNature. We have heard much in our time about the common man.
It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.
Secondly, the Conservative has learned that the economic and spiritual aspects of man’s nature are inextricably intertwined. He cannot be economically free, or even economically efficient, if he is enslaved politically; conversely, man’s political freedom is illusory if he is dependent for his economic needs on the State.
The Conservative realizes, thirdly, that man’s development, in both its spiritual and material aspects, is not something that can be directed by outside forces. Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his owndevelopment. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings. If the Conservative is less anxious than his Liberal brethren to increase Social Security benefits,
it is because he is more anxious than his Liberal brethren that people be free throughout their lives to spend their earnings when and as they see fit.
So it is that Conservatism, throughout history, has regarded man neither as a potential pawn of other men, nor as a part of a general collectivity in which the sacredness and the separate identity of individual human beings are ignored. Throughout history, true Conservatism has been at war equally with autocrats and with democratic
Jacobins. The true Conservative was sympathetic with the plight of the hapless peasant under the tyranny of the French monarchy. And he was equally revolted at the attempt to solve that problem by a mob tyranny that paraded under the banner of egalitarianism. The conscience of the Conservative is pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being. Today, therefore, he is at odds with dictators who rule by terror, and equally with those gentler collectivists who ask our permission to play God with the human race.
With this view of the nature of man, it is understandable that the Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order. The Conservative is the first to understand that the practice of freedom requires the establishment of order: it is impossible for one man to be free if another is able to deny him the exercise of his freedom. But the Conservative also recognizes that the political power on which order is based is a self-aggrandizing force; that its appetite grows with eating. He knows that the utmost vigilance and care are required to keep political power within its proper bounds.
In our day, order is pretty well taken care of. The delicate balance that ideally exists between freedom and order has long since tipped against freedom practically everywhere on earth. In some countries, freedom is altogether down and order holds absolute sway. In our country the trend is less far advanced, but it is well along and gathering momentum every day. Thus, for the American Conservative, there is no difficulty in identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom. As he