It sounds like it was just a meme that cropped up. No way to know for sure who thought it up.
If “Political Cause X” is the state sanctioned murder of protesters, as Esox claims, then yes, you pretty clearly do support violence against the political opposition.
That is a giant load of bullshit.
Barry Goldwater resigned from the NAACP in 1952 so he could run to be Senator from Arizona without may right-wingers viewing him as a “nigger lover”.
Moreover, he was hardly an ally of the Civil Rights movement since he vociferously argued that school segregation was perfectly constitutional.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,870316,00.html
Now, I’ll be blunt and say that anyone who doesn’t find his statement that “Negro children… do not have the right…to attend the same schools as white children” to be “extreme” is delusional or not worth arguing with.
Nope, I talked to him one day at lunch while we were both waiting for take out ribs.
In 1964 that was a sadly commonplace belief.
Goldwater’s problem, as a politician, was that he sucked at it. Successful politicians moderate their statements in public and figure out how to offend as few people as possible. Goldwater was sort of the living embodiment of the common TV/movie/fiction fantasy of a candidate who “speaks from the heart” and is honest about his beliefs and sweeps to victory over the lying professionals. Well, he did that and got his ass handed to him.
Darn. You win. 
adaher writes:
> It sounds like it was just a meme that cropped up. No way to know for sure who
> thought it up.
This illustrates why I don’t think the idea of a meme is very useful. Yes, of course ideas in certain ways travel like changes in DNA in a species or like viruses and bacteria. Websites (with a particular video or whatever) that “go viral” become popular in certain ways DNA or viruses or bacteria. Computer malware also travels in a certain way like them. That’s true if you look at those things in a very big picture way. However, if you look at the individual ways that those things get created or travel around, the fact is that a website has to be created by a person, and it’s possible to look at why that website becomes popular and say something about why people like it. An idea has to be created by a person, and it’s possible to say something about why people like it. A piece of malware has to be created by somebody, and it’s possible to say something about why other software allows it to be passed around. Somebody originally made the crack about guts and nuts. We may never know who did it, but it was done by a person, not an impersonal force of nature.
Goldwater wanted to try and paint Johnson as an ineffective fighter of the Cold War (at times his rhetoric seems to hint Johnson was more sympathetic to the Commies) while at the same time capitalizing on the Truman/Kennedy/Johnson Administrations tendency to get involved in unpopular military contests with the Soviet Union due to containment.
Trying to argue the Dems were soft on Communism, while at the same time arguing they started too many wars to fight Communism left his foreign policy statements sounding like a confused muddle. And left him talking about stuff like nuking Vietnam, which while an insane plan, did have the virtue of both killing more Communists then Johnsons policy and not sending an army overseas.
I think that’s at least part of the reason why “he’s nuts” was an effective meme.
Johnson himself obviously didn’t come up with it, since it doesn’t contain any swear-words.
But I think the poster your responding to was just using “Johnson” to mean “the Dem Presidential campaign”, not the man himself.
FWIW: this AZ article says Bill Moyers “helped coin” the phrase, which is a little vague, but makes sense.
What’s the evidence that Bill Moyers came up with the slogan (other than that claim of Goldwater’s, assuming that it accurately quotes Goldwater)?
Claiming that saying that Johnson came up with the slogan is equivalent to saying that someone in Johnson’s campaign came up with the slogan just shows me how vague this all is. If a low-level secretary in Johnson’s campaign one day while at home came up with the slogan and told her husband who passed it on to friends, does that mean it came from Johnson’s campaign? I await some definitive evidence where the slogan came from.
It’s not a quote by Goldwater, its just an aside the paper put in the article.
That’s my point. Campaigns don’t usually attribute stuff to the person that actually writes them, so if you want to track the quote down to an individual, you’re usually screwed. The best you can say is that it came from the campaign, hence saying “Johnson” came up with it is a useful shorthand.
I don’t think you’ll get it.
Anyhoo, its a pretty good line. Up there with “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha” and “Nattering Nabobs of Negativity”.
He may not have been as public about them, but Goldwater had long been an abortion rights supporter – his first wife Peggy* was a founder of the Arizona chapter of Planned Parenthood, and in the 1950s they helped one of their daughters obtain an abortion. It’s just that a lot of people mistakenly think that his pro-choice views came later in life, with his second marriage.
I couldn’t tell you about his feelings on gay rights, however. (I do know he had a gay grandson, which may have influenced his feelings)
*I believe they even have an award named after her.
Certainly it is extreme now, but this is not 1964.
But it did happen, without a police state. The courts proved sufficient.
I read in Rick Perlsteins’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, that once an admirer presented Goldwater with a new soft drink named after him. Goldwater: “This tastes like piss! I wouldn’t drink it with gin!” A more savvy pol would have downed it with a smile.
If an individual won’t sell you his house, the court system isn’t a very efficient way to resolve that.
Congress chose not to empower the FBI to just arrest people for things like housing discrimination, but they can under the law, and there was no way for Goldwater to know at the time that they wouldn’t.
Of course it is, and the would-be purchaser can probably get a free lawyer from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But it was still wrong of him to object to people getting arrested for housing discrimination, wasn’t it? Besides, I’m not sure the CRA even defines housing discrimination as a crime. Cite?
I came in the thread tomention Perlstein’s book. The executive summary of what I took away from it is that (a) Goldwater certainly was not a moderate, and he was actually a (right-wing) libertarian rather than simply a conservative Republican; (b) Goldwater was a terrible campaigner, and a lot of his legacy now is a result of his allowing Johnson to define his public image; (c) Goldwater wasn’t as far right as, say, the John Birch Society, but had trouble differentiating himself from them, especially as his support genuinely was grassroots and not (at least for a while) actively cultivated by his campaign.
Conscience of a Conservative was largely written by Brent Bozell (father of the Brent Bozell who runs the Parents’ Television Council today).
I had trouble parsing that too, so I’ll try to restate the point. If it’s a state’s right to decide to withold civil rights and it has to use violence to do so, the violence must be justified because it upholds the state’s decision. (“Support” was too strong a word for Goldwater, I admit, although a lot of voters at the time probably didn’t think so. “Condoned” is probably more accurate even if he didn’t like the violence himself.)