"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making
it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size," Barry Goldwater
explained in 1960s Conscience of a Conservative. "I do not
undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My
aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them."
The Arizona senator dreamed that such rhetoric would become a staple of stump speeches. And it has. The Conscience of a Conservative became not only a most unlikely bestselling political book -- Shepherdsville, Kentucky isn't exactly the capital of publishing -- but it transformed a party, bequeathed one of the 20th century's most consequential presidencies, and animates a political movement more than a half-century later. It's hard to imagine the Reagan presidency, the Contract with America congressional takeover, or even the Tea Party without Goldwater's slim volume.
Yet The Conscience of a Conservative failed to make the cut of the Library of Congress's "Books That Shaped America." In fact, no explicitly conservative book -- not Whittaker Chambers' Witness, Charles Murray's Losing Ground, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, or Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind -- did.
Congress may be divided between a Republican House and Democrat Senate. The Library of Congress boasts liberal uniformity.
The 88 highlighted books, exhibited at the Jefferson Building this summer, includes Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, and W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/06/a-conservative-free-zone
The Arizona senator dreamed that such rhetoric would become a staple of stump speeches. And it has. The Conscience of a Conservative became not only a most unlikely bestselling political book -- Shepherdsville, Kentucky isn't exactly the capital of publishing -- but it transformed a party, bequeathed one of the 20th century's most consequential presidencies, and animates a political movement more than a half-century later. It's hard to imagine the Reagan presidency, the Contract with America congressional takeover, or even the Tea Party without Goldwater's slim volume.
Yet The Conscience of a Conservative failed to make the cut of the Library of Congress's "Books That Shaped America." In fact, no explicitly conservative book -- not Whittaker Chambers' Witness, Charles Murray's Losing Ground, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, or Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind -- did.
Congress may be divided between a Republican House and Democrat Senate. The Library of Congress boasts liberal uniformity.
The 88 highlighted books, exhibited at the Jefferson Building this summer, includes Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, and W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/06/a-conservative-free-zone
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