From a reader:
Jonah
Your argument seems to be that people cannot change their minds. Goldwater became much more libertarian in his later years. Essentially, he repudiated many of his earlier socially conservative positions. I remember, with some surprise, Goldwater stating that “abortion is not a conservative issue.” Your argument does nothing to protect the neoconservative movement from charges that it is essentially Marxist, since a number of neoconservatives had left wing backgrounds. Consequently, your argument allows one to state that regardless of what evolution toward conservativism their thoughts may have taken in recent decades, they are at heart Marxists and the neoconservative movement is a Marxist movement. You should be careful to whom you give ammunition.
Me: I don’t mean to be excessively harsh, merely necessarily harsh. But this strikes as absurd. My argument has very little to do with changing minds. People like John Dean argue they are in the true Goldwater tradition. They take Goldwater’s statements at the end of his career and try to rewrite history by saying that’s what Goldwater was always about. And that’s dishonest and ignorant nonsense. That was the point of my column, which I think a fair reading would reveal.
As for this neocon thing. Sigh. First of all, which neocons are we talking about? Because very few alleged neocons actually out and about today making news were ever Marxists — or Trotskyists — and not that many of them were even ever Democrats. But even if that were the case, the analogy stinks because “Goldwaterism” was never defined by what Goldwater said in the 1990s. Similarly neoconservatism was never defined by Marxism, but by, uh, neoconservatism. When (some of) the neocons were Marxists, they weren’t preaching neoconservatism, they were preaching Marxism. When Goldwater was Goldwater, he wasn’t preaching gooey libertine-libertarianism he was preaching National Review conservatism.