Barry Goldwater

Recently, both Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait have argued that ideological conservatism isn’t (and never has been) the major reason for Republican electoral success, and that those who consistently vote GOP because they believe in small government and low taxes are greatly outnumbered by those who do so because they’re racists.

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump has remodeled or vandalized the Republican party. In any event, left-wing pundits spent the week gaping at, and writing about, what they viewed as the grotesque spectacle of the RNC. For example, Daily Kos’s Hunter opined that the convention was "was barely one step up from an internet-peddled snuff film,” and Salon’s Heather Digby Parton declared…

In a Sunday post, The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker urged Bern-feelers to follow the example of conservatives who “rebounded from Barry Goldwater’s spectacular [1964] loss [and became] a dominant force. By forming influential think tanks and media outlets, pressuring the mainstream press to focus on issues right-wingers considered important, and voting consistently in even the most ‘minor’ of…

MSNBC political analyst and former Democratic Vermont Governor Howard Dean attempted on two occasions during Wednesday’s Hardball to further the extremely flawed and borderline irresponsible claim that Donald Trump’s candidacy is similar to that of 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. 

Barry Goldwater was a conservative hero and pioneer.  But his presidential run was an historic flop. So when Joe Scarborough described Ted Cruz on today's Morning Joe as "Barry Goldwater's ugly stepson," it was a scalding simile. Scarborough in turn scolded the Republican establishment for backing Cruz over John Kasich as the alternative to Donald Trump. Scarborough's argument focused on …

CNN host and liberal columnist Fareed Zakaria opened his eponymous Sunday talk show by rekindling the extremely flawed comparison made by the liberal media that 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is similar to the conservative Barry Goldwater’s campaign against then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Veteran Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein on Thursday rejected the comparison of “authoritarian” Donald Trump to a principled man like Barry Goldwater. Bernstein appeared on CNN Tonight to discuss a 1964 commercial in which a man rejects the presidential candidacy of Goldwater because he’s “scary” and “weird" people support him.

Michael Lind thinks that movement conservatives are becoming a minor force in American politics, supplanted less by liberal Democrats than by what might be called Trump Republicans. In a Wednesday article for Politico, Lind contended that growing “populist discontent” is bringing about “the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national…

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…

Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw made his latest appearance on the newscast he helmed for decades to act as though he had the best interests of the Republican Party at heart and warned opponents of Donald Trump that any successful attempt to stop him from gaining the nomination could “be an attack on the basic principles of why we have elections.”

Disgraced ex-CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather appeared on Wednesday’s Rachel Maddow Show to attack Donald Trump. In the process, the journalist smeared conservative icon Barry Goldwater. Asked about Trump’s policy of banning all Muslims from America, Rather excoriated, “[Trump’s] related to the candidacy of the late George Wallace. Barry Goldwater, if you will. Huey Long. He’s in that line.”

NPR got in the spirit of anniversaries on Thursday night’s All Things Considered by recalling the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco. For analysis, they turned to.....New York Times Magazine contributor Sam Tanenhaus, whose lack of political insight was proven by his 2009 book The Death of Conservatism (broadened from a 2009 New Republic essay titled "Conservatism Is Dead.")  Oopsy…

The other Sunday, Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS journalist and anchor of the network’s Sunday morning show Face the Nation, had Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on his show. Mysteriously, a seriously hard fact of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign -- a fact about the role of CBS News itself  -- disappeared from Mr. Schieffer’s recounting of that “historic landslide”  to…

As MSNBC's Al Sharpton hosted a panel on Wednesday's PoliticsNation to discuss Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann's retirement, MSNBC analyst Karen Finney claimed that Bachmann never had an idea "that wasn't about hate or wasn't about being against something," while MSNBC analyst and former Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Ed Rendell similarly charged that historians will put her "in a…