Contrived Hysteria

Barry Goldwater

2,197 words

Lionel Lokos
Hysteria 1964: The Fear Campaign Against Barry Goldwater
New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1967

The 1964 election was a critical contest. That year was a transitional one between the two social revolutions of the 1960s. The first revolution, which culminated in the early 1960s, was when non-white, liberal, and Jewish activists achieved their aims of socially integrating the races and elevating sub-Saharans after decades of activism. The second revolution was a conservative white response to these changes, which advanced in fits and starts after 1964 and continues to advance in the same manner to this day.

The election pitted two former US senators against each other. The Democratic Party, which was then a mishmash of interests, including significant core support from Southern white Protestants and Irish Catholics in the North — along with Jews, white liberals, and non-whites — squared off against the Republicans, who were just beginning to pull in all American whites under their banner. The Democratic champion was incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was entirely of old-stock American ancestry, who took the White House after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The Republicans were led by Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater was partially Jewish, but mostly of old-stock American ancestry.

The election of 1964 took place at a time when the United States had experienced an enormous wave of prosperity. The Ford Mustang went into production that year, and it was situated to capture the teenage driver market. Teenagers today, if they are lucky enough to afford a car at all, usually start off with a used clunker, given that the broad wealth of the 1960s is gone. American factories were globally competitive then, and they produced well-paying jobs alongside their wares.

Underneath all the prosperity were two very unpleasant issues. The first was the Vietnam War. The United States had been increasing its involvement in that Southeast Asian land incrementally and in secret, going back to France’s attempt to retain it as part of its empire in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. In August, the United States Navy had fought a confused series of actions against North Vietnamese torpedo boats in international waters. The battles became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and President Johnson used the affair to obtain an authorization for war from Congress.

The other issue was “civil rights.” Up until 1964, the “civil rights” movement was a carefully-managed and choreographed series of disruptions that were designed to create provocations that led to a backlash from the authorities, making them look bad.

The mainstream media was wholly supportive of “civil rights,” and they carefully edited reports on “civil rights” disruptions in order to make sub-Saharans look peaceful and genuinely aggrieved. The press would usually stick around to see the police out in force with their batons, and then the Kennedy or Johnson administration would move in to protect the blacks. The press would then leave, since they were not interested in what happened next.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed on July 2. Within weeks, the “civil rights” movement ceased the pretense of being peaceful. Race riots, initiated by sub-Saharans over trivial grievances, spread across every city in the North that had suffered inflows of migrating sub-Saharans in the preceding years. The reason for the violence was that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a second, illicit constitution. Sub-Saharans were then empowered to do violence. Their riots were no different from the victorious Red Army sacking the cities of Eastern Europe in 1945.

The Act was supported through the centralizing filter of the mainstream media. In 1964 there were three major news broadcasters: CBS, NBC, and ABC. They were all headquartered in New York City, and thus were heavily influenced by Jews, so they only hired liberals. All news spreading nationally went through the filter of these three broadcasters.

President Johnson was the man who got the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed into law. Senator Goldwater had opposed it. Johnson and the Democratic Party were riding on the success of a semi-command economy that had been created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s called the New Deal. The Democrats had used it to successfully steer the United States through the Depression and the Second World War, and this system seemed to be prevailing even in the ongoing Cold War, besides some significant hiccups like the placement of genuine Communist spies in high positions and the Korean War stalemate.

The 1964 Election & LBJ’s Administration

These twin problems framed the situation going into the 1964 election. Johnson and the Democrats won the contest in a landslide. The Democrats likewise prevailed in Congress, winning 295 seats in the House and 68 seats in the Senate. Johnson stood at the apex of his long career. Goldwater and his conservative faction of the Republican Party had led the party to defeat.

Or so it seemed. When institutions appear to be at their height, the sand upon which they are built has already started to shift. The rest of Johnson’s administration was plagued by race riots, the Vietnam War became an unwinnable quagmire, and the American economy was grievously wounded by more efficient foreign industries.

Although the problem was still a cloud the size of a man’s hand, America’s support for Israel was likewise becoming an issue. After the Israelis captured parts of Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan in 1967, the oil-producing Arab nations began to question why they should pump so much oil to benefit Israel’s main supporter. America was headed for a major energy crisis.

The 1964 Hysteria

In retrospect, Barry Goldwater had no chance to win the election. His resistance to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was only appreciated in the Deep South, where the population had centuries of experience in living alongside sub-Saharans. Goldwater also had ideas which truthfully addressed the ongoing Cold War, but these were new and shocking for most of the public. Finally, it was unlikely that the American public would have wanted three different presidents in the two years since Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

Nonetheless, the entire American business, religious, and media establishments closed ranks behind Johnson against Goldwater and waged a hysterical response to his selection as the Republican candidate. Hysteria 1964 looks at the media hype and offers a response to it.

Hysteria 1964 was published in 1967, so it was published in time to influence high-information voters prior to the 1968 US Presidential Election. In 1967 things were going very badly indeed, the Vietnam War becoming increasingly unpopular, but there was a large faction of the American public that still thought the war could be won. Additionally, the “civil rights” movement was victorious but had gone off the rails in endemic rioting.

The book sought to explain how Goldwater’s 1964 platform had actually been good, and points out how the Johnson campaign and establishment had been wrong. It begins with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and points out that the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had not been entirely truthful about the timing of the response to the incident — an aerial bombardment — and moreover was in completely over his head. The US had not yet known that the second “attack” by North Vietnamese torpedo boats had not in fact occurred at all. Johnson eventually knew this, but decided to escalate the war anyway.

This led to the first hysterical accusation against Goldwater. The issue was who had the authority to order the use of tactical nuclear weapons — designed to be used against conventional military forces on the battlefield rather than against strategic targets like cities or military bases — should war break out. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, the US Army was equipped with such weapons with the aim of defeating the much larger Soviet conventional forces then in Eastern Europe. One such weapon was the Davy Crockett, which was an atomic grenade fired by a recoilless rifle that was issued to infantry battalions. Then as now, only the President has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. Goldwater argued that it was unlikely that an order to use tactical weapons which came from overseas in the White House would arrive in time to be useful. The release authorization should therefore have been delegated to the NATO commander in the theater. This proposition was exploited by the Johnson administration to try to make Goldwater out to be a crazed Right-winger seeking a nuclear confrontation. This was the context in which the famous “Daisy” television advertisement was developed, which suggested that Johnson was the only choice to avoid nuclear war.

The book also addresses Goldwater’s objections to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He supported it except for titles II and VII. He claimed that these laws should “infringe upon the right of free association among citizens” (80).

Lokos goes on to criticize the Angelic African, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., by saying:

Goldwater refused to close his eyes to the deliberate and studied lawlessness now being wielded as a political bludgeon by civil rights groups. He was disturbed by the extent of their civil disobedience campaign, and the arrogant defense of law-breaking when such law-breaking suited their purpose. And there was cause to be disturbed when the Director of the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the NAACP quoted with approval Martin Luther King’s statement that two types of American laws should be disobeyed: “segregation laws” and laws that “deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest.” King called these laws “unjust.” But since there was scarcely any law that was not considered unjust by someone, he seemed to be advocating — and practicing — a kind of selective anarchy. (82)

Goldwater was considered a racist and implied to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan in political advertisements. Lokos points out that Goldwater had endorsed earlier “civil rights” legislation and was himself a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also supported local officials in determining when and how communities would be desegregated. There is, of course, a civic nationalist angle to this argument, and one can see how the conservatives of the time were digesting the “civil rights” social system into their political worldview. This book only hints that “civil rights” was rotten to the core, but doesn’t explicitly state it.

A large portion of the book describes hysterical anti-Goldwater news articles. The parallels to the anti-Trump journalism of 2016 are clear. These articles were heavy on describing Goldwater as “Right-wing” and “fringe.” There is also much about the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist organization which terrified much of the Democratic Party’s base as well as many liberal Republicans.

The parallels to today continue. Many Protestant ministers virtue-signaled against Goldwater. Lokos quotes an Episcopalian magazine, The Living Church, which wrote in an editorial:

It seems to be the latest fad among the American clergy who glory in the title of “liberal” to vie with one another in skills of the game which they used to call “character assassination” when Joe McCarthy was flourishing. We earnestly hope that this kind of liberal bigotry will not become standard fare in the pulpits of the Episcopal, or any other, church. (119)

Lokos also examines the selective anarchy around Martin Luther King, who forecast “a ‘dark night of social disruption’ in the United States if Senator Barry Goldwater is elected President” (150). Lokos goes on to add,

By now it had become a familiar ploy for Martin Luther King to predict violence if his demands were not complied with. [King] had used this tactic with almost monotonous success in the civil rights struggle; and he had this weapon primed for use in the election. One can only wonder how many votes were swayed by Dr. King’s self-serving prophecy of “violence and riots, the like of which we have never seen before,” if the country chose to defy him by electing Barry Goldwater. (151)

Hysteria 1964 shows how little American political discourse has changed since 1964. Selective anarchy — or anarcho-tyranny — continues to be practiced today, and sub-Saharans are effectively allowed to riot. In fact, these riots are deliberately encouraged by the Democratic Party and mainstream media every election year. Furthermore, the mainstream media is every bit as hysterical and partisan as it was then.

Goldwater’s vision ultimately did prevail, however. In 1980 conservative Republicans triumphed by getting Ronald Reagan elected. In 1994, they captured the House after four decades of being in the minority. For its part, the Johnson administration ended in disaster. In 1968 their convention was beset by ugly infighting among the delegates and violent riots outside the convention, and all of Johnson’s legislation ended up being problematic. Overturning these laws needs to be a focus of our activism going forward.

The central reason for the bad legislation and other disasters was that Johnson believed in “civil rights.” All people who believe in “civil rights” end up misreading data.

Barry Goldwater was not a white advocate. He never pushed for a white ethnostate, and became increasingly libertarian as his political career continued. He is important to study, however, because the Republican Party’s center continues to adhere to his vision today. It is vision that consists of civic nationalism, less government intervention in the economy, and appeals to privatize Social Security. Ideally, we should work for both parties, unequivocally supporting white interests over civic nationalism.

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