In Your Guts, You Know He's Nuts

"Someone who truly believes, as Goldwater writes, that 'individual liberty depends on decentralized government,' might nevertheless subordinate his principles in time of war. But once you declare war on an idea, you've declared endless war: Once you've committed yourself to maintain a permanent war footing and a first-strike capacity anywhere at will, you've no kind of libertarian principles at all. Goldwater fantasized that the federal state ballooned in power because the Democratic Party "was captured by the Socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement." But it was the secretive, unaccountable, and ever-growing defense establishment that made decision-making less democratic and government more expensive."

In The New Repubic, Eric Rauchway wonders why today's liberals look back fondly on Barry Goldwater.