Fred and Loathing on The Internet

In Your Heart You Know He's Right from 1964 translate in 2025 to: Trust Me Bro'

2025-Feb-13

Topical humor among television comedies set in the late twentieth century has been a subtext weaved behind several of my blog posts. Quite a few of the blog posts centered on television series have mentioned my childhood interest in discovering the meaning to adult jokes that escaped my grasp. Names of current-ish politicians that did not reach the mass fame of say JFK, LBJ, or FDR were ones that often just missed my reach. Sometimes Woodrow Wilson or Chester A. Arthur would seep into my intellect in my elementary school days. (Although I learned of those presidents and their chronological position because of The Simpsons and Die Hard With a Vengeance, respectively.)

Names that utterly baffled me- until I put an earnest effort on reading up on US politics- were famous presidential race losers. Famous losers were the butt of topical sitcom jokes that did not land on children watching a TV show produced before their time. Names like Walter Mondale, Adelai Stevenson, Thomas Dewey, or Hubert Humphrey. Those names were sure to draw a laugh when they were summoned for a punchline. Usually in reference to a feature they had that made them so unelectable. (I knew Dukakis was a wimp before I knew he was the Democratic candidate that lost to Bush Sr in 1988; a famous wimp!) I would say the names of the losers of any presidential race have about five to ten years of cache before topical jokes no longer become topical. They become the jokes for people into politics or history. Most losers just don’t stay in the public’s mind long enough for humor to be drawn about their foibles; let alone their strengths.

Barry Goldwater was a spectacular presidential loser name that could come up all the way into the 1990s. The spectre of a name that was at first famous to me as the candidate that might ‘push the button’. The name that taught me just what ‘the button’ was, or what would happen when it was ‘pressed’. The presidential candidate in the thick of the Cold War that scared the USA into thinking he might just escalate the conflict with the USSR into the nuclear scale. This nuclear warhawk image gave his contender for the US presidency an easy electoral victory. That very commercial and the imagery of a little girl picking flowers followed by a mushroom cloud might have been in one of the US history textbooks I was given in high school or college.

What I knew about American conservatism and the Grand Old Party- AKA the Republicans - prior to my forthright pursuit of bookreadin’ knowledge about politics- was summarized rather well by the banner The Simpsons had for their rendition of a Republican rally:

“We want what’s worst for everybody. We’re just plain evil.”

That quote in isolation is unfair since the Republican have only existed in counterpart to the Democratic party. The Simpsons used this banner for them in the same episode:

“We hate life and ourselves. We can’t govern.”

As you can see, The Simpsons painted them both with a mean brush. Through the mean words, deep in your gut you know which one you are for and which one you are against. With not too much consideration.

At least that is how I have seen both parties (especially at this point) ever since I could piece together just what each of their ethos contains. Something I had only come to learn recently by all the careful book reading -that I’m always going on about- is that the two party separation has not been such an august difference in ethos as it is now. I grew up watching the news-TV broadcast, periodicals, long form interviews- starting with some level of sophistication in the late 90s. At that time The Simpsons had released that episode I had quoted. At this point in history, the two US parties had cemented into the national organizations they are today, almost thirty years later. Differing in degree, yet the same pushed in their own idea of progress.

Although you can see the dawning of a new realignment. The end of history has its first bump in the US story!

I had read Nixonland, the book Rick Perstein wrote after Before The Storm, several years ago. That was a cornerstone book that showed me how the regional factions of the Republican platform united into a national platform, ushered in by Nixon’s foray into the ‘hard-working’ working class as a voting bloc. I had read books like Nixonland to try and solve the mystery of how the super racist Democrats in the south after the Civil War belonged to the same party of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Just how could the same party put up the same presidential candidate that could please those two constituencies? What I knew of the Republican was just as much a riddle. They freed the slaves, but then they go on to become the party that thwarts any legislative correction of slavery’s repercussions? My book reading was too superficial before books like Nixonland to find purchase into the big picture of what the parties were and what they were becoming.

The answer to both parties' marked differences between their respective origins and current agenda is the same. It does not have any one ‘event’ that marks the shift. Each party definitely now became the party of the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ for the entire nation, when prior to the late twentieth century each region or state’s party operation could have quite a different agenda from the others; let alone their being a national party consensus. The GOP as late as the 1970s could be wide enough to hold the liberal Republicans who wanted to respect the idea that government could solve the public’s problems, but also that it could be done with a more trimmed budget than what the Democrats wanted. As the years moved on from then, those ideas could not be tolerated by the GOP. Goldwater could not and his ideas would pervade most of the official rhetoric of the party after his run for president.

I learned somewhat of the Democrat’s party alignment put forth in the 60s from the very first hardcore political book I read. Back in my high school days. Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail ‘72 by the late great Hunter S. Thompson. From that book I learned that the established Democrats were made up of good ol’ boys pushing forth ‘good government’. These often racist forebears of the Democratic party were getting taken over by the New Left. The Democratic party should be put aside for another blog post. (This one already is pushing the content limit.)

So after some book reading about who the GOP and Barry Goldwater was prior to finally sinking my teeth into the big heavy Before The Storm by Rick Perlstein, I’ll tell you my impression of Barry Goldwater gathered from fables, sitcom jokes, and context clues from US history: he is the American leader every Republican dreams about. And I mean the real Americans. Not the RINOs! Not those sherry swilling country club member Republicans! Barry Goldwater is a cowboy. He is the president for cowboys!

A Dirty Harry. A loose cannon law enforcer that plays by nobody’s rules except his own. And he’s here to be the marshall in the corrupt town of Washington D.C. All you have to do is vote him in, and all the other stuff that comes along with him being a tough-talking hombre who will brutalize the people you don’t like will happen. All the other stuff though… Besides the brutalizing of the people you don't like. (Which is consistently popular among Americans.)

The other stuff Goldwater goes on about cutting the government. That just happens to be very unpopular with most voters. Unless you frame it just right. Especially if you let them know the right people will get the subsidies and the people you don’t like won’t.

Well, I am getting too carried away into the progress of conservatism coursing through the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. Barry Goldwater is the start of that new direction for the party, but he himself would abhor the idea of any government assistance, let alone one that has a targeted rather than equal outcome that would become the populism playbook of the modern Republican party. Barry wants white and black off the government dole.

He may himself have been a pure libertarian demagogue that saw past race or any petty prejudice, that cared only about the strict federal enforcement of only the freedoms explicitly detailed in The Constitution. He was however the first to get the ball rolling for letting a loose federal government be the reason the GOP could pander to the prejudices of the body politic of the USA. Which I guess keeps proving it to be prejudice to not-white people.

I try not to dig myself too deep of a review in these blog posts unless the material itself is short, like a few episodes of a TV show, a movie, or a slim novel. Before The Storm, or any of the Rick Perlstein volumes about the American conservative movement are far from slim. They are heavy collections of so many operators, operations, organizations, with a touch of oddball humor between the stack and stacks of detailed political maneuvering.

What this book had rekindled, what Nixonland had not done, was remind me why I leaned toward the ‘We’re just plain evil.’ banner in The Simpsons the first time I saw it. When I was a kid I bought in hard to the idea of a tough-talking, hard-walking cowboy that an adult man and his political leaders need to be. In order to face the even tougher-talking, hard-walking world outside the US borders. As a kid, the cowboy was way cooler than the technocrat. It was obvious now and it is obvious now.

That is somewhat surprising to the kid version of me. Did the adults also want to be the cowboy even though deep down in their guy they know the technocrat is right? The cowboy way feels wrong but we know we want the cowboy way anyway. This could just be locker room talk. Men’s locker room talk. This superficial synopsis of Godlwater style conservatism as ‘the cowboy way’ being not only accurate, but perversely appealing, is quite uncommon among women. Especially the more educated they get.

Even at this point, now a politically savvy middle aged adult, I can understand Barry Goldwater’s ‘lawfully stupid’ adherence to his small government ideals that allow a racism he finds ignominious to seep into the institutions he wants to defend. His gut tells him that’s what he has to do. He’s a cowboy. That’s all he knows. It is a stirring sensation. Poisonous once it got put into the late twentieth century lurch of the Republican party, leaving now in the hands of one Donald J. Trump.

That big city fat cat somehow knows how to play a cowboy to early 21st century Americans. He can talk the talk and he never has to walk the walk. Every cowboy at home can pretend they’re one too by giving their democratic power to the big sheriff who will shoot the bad guys and forget all the boring technocratic horseshit. Goldwater stood on principle, paving a runway for people who do not give a fuck about the small government ideals Goldwater cherished.