Goldwater, Trump & The Slow Death of Meaning

The second Trump impeachment showed that rediscovering principles is the only route to salvation for a bankrupt political class.

While I watched the January ’21 impeachment requal (Impeachment: End Game), a thought struck me: Barry Goldwater was in favour of abortion. It was the kind of thought that barges it’s way in and starts trashing the place while you shout futile threats, but sometimes there’s sensible meaning to be found in the chaos of the mind. Barry Goldwater, icon of the modern libertarian right, conservative paragon, the villainous progenitor of Ronald Regan and Milton Friedman’s bastard age, of which I abhor almost everything, was pro-choice, a position pretty much unthinkable within the contemporary Republican Party.

I had tuned in to the impeachment hearings wanting to see some contrition from the Republicans. I wanted to see a pall of shame hanging over their benches, I wanted to see each of them forced to rise uncomfortably in turn and admit, finally, that the delirium overtaking American life is their harvest. After twenty minutes or so I switched off in disgust. It was a shameless spectacle of self-justification, dissembling and whataboutery — arguments about procedure, about the “need for healing”, about outrages supposedly attributable to Black Lives Matter and “antifa”, as if all of this should somehow excuse the President of The United States from leading a violent attack on the United States government, and the Republican Party from having enabled him. Everywhere Republican representatives intoned about high-principle while transparently demonstrating low-principle — the idea, for example, that some bureaucratic procedural concern is of greater urgency than insurrection on the part of the President is just obviously dishonest. There was no shame on display, and no principles either.

There was also the routine tossing around of the word “political” as an accusation. The White House started sprinting ahead of the gun here, wailing about “politically motivated impeachment” some days in advance of the hearings. It’s a weird, tautological concept, this notion that politics is political, and depressing that the word has become a pejorative. To me, politics has always been, conceptually, the practical expression of ethics. Establishing ethical principles should be the genesis of political action, which then becomes the means by which to articulate and apply those principles in a material sense, whether that’s through seeking to alleviate poverty, widen access to education or indeed lower the tax burden and defend the right to own guns.

Politics should not be Instagram for charlatans, in which grifters like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley brand-build their way to the top spot, trampling any inconvenient principle that might ask a question or two along the way. It should not be used as a priority pass to a corporate directorship or as an easy fraternity for those who want a reasonable pay-check and elevated social status. What it should be is the realm of Barry Goldwater, whose politics I vehemently disagree with, but who consistently chose principle over the immediate tactical interests of his party or the demands of its leadership. The last time that the dread of impeachment visited a Republican President, it was in the shape of Goldwater, who sat opposite Richard Nixon in the Oval office and told him that the game was up.

Here in the UK, political corruption had once become so endemic, trust in politics so ravaged, that when Tony Blair assumed office as Prime Minister he proclaimed that his government would have to be “whiter than white”. Although the Iraq war would eventually shred his own reputation, Blair fired or demanded the resignation of every minister accused of even a minor transgression, irrespective of personal loyalty or political expediency. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s closest political ally, twice found himself on the wrong end of a firing. He later observed: “it was not just the reality of a conflict of interest, it was the perception of a conflict”.

This is the ultimate test of political integrity, whether you elevate principle to a higher level of concern than party loyalty or personal interest — on the 13th of January 10 Republicans passed that test, 197 failed it, and over the past four years there have been many more failures besides.

Mandelson’s rubric re-appears in modern politics as an impossibly high-standard, a utopian joke. Even its premise has been negated — “reality” and “perception” are horribly outdated concepts, long-since supplanted by spectacle. The House Representatives spooling on about “a time for healing” don’t believe these platitudes, nor do they believe that the public believes them; it’s all just demonstrative, aimed at pandering to the demands of their tribe. The absurd Marjorie Taylor Greene even addressed the microphone while wearing a mask that bore the word “censored”, as her speech was broadcast live across the international news media.

We are in an era in which political principle has been substituted for political conformity. In part this has come from the 90s doctrines of media training, message discipline, policy polling and political communications; in that context, it is perhaps natural that performers eventually replaced politicians wholesale (rather than just at the ultimate leader level, where a performer has always been required). The duties of the modern politician are unswerving fealty to the short-term tactical calculations of their party leadership, remorseless, unprincipled attacks on political opponents and strict adherence to grass-roots dogma e.g. on gun rights, abortion, environmentalism and healthcare, even where these are patently deranged — climate change denialism, for example. For careerist politicians, these duties are mandatory, there are no other choices.

And so the House impeachment hearings of 2021 swiftly, predictably devolved into a principles-free, partisan slanging match. These are politics where respect is impossible, a parliament of bad faith in which all participants conform to the low standards of party dogma and act under orders. It’s a problem that predates Trump, whose ascent would have been impossible without it and who has tested democratic politics to breaking point.

There comes a time when you need to decide. For a libertarian like Goldwater, liberty extended to a woman’s right to exercise sovereignty over her own body, irrespective of what his party rank-and-file or evangelical donors might have thought about it. Goldwater was pro-choice in more than just a reproductive healthcare sense, he chose principle over careerism and consistency over expediency.

For politics to be renovated and democracy buttressed in the post-Trump era, politicians will need to do what all but ten Republicans failed to do in the impeachment hearings, and start taking some responsibility. The impending exit of Mitch McConnell presents an opportunity to move beyond his cynical games of obstruction and gerrymandering. Insisting on the lie that Trump won an election that he lost in a landslide is the inevitable endpoint of McConnell’s leadership, in which truth and principles are subordinate to the short-term project of trying to extract maximum political advantage from every situation, no matter the long-term cost to democracy.

Those politicians who want to see an alternative future need to decide what it is that they believe in. They need to stop genuflecting before their party leadership and pandering to the reactionary prejudices of their grass-roots activists. They need to abandon the age of spectacle and stake out their own ethical ground, they need to stop taking orders so readily, particularly from corrupt, racist autocrats like Donald Trump and realise that there are alternatives. They need to become pro-choice.