Conservatives Without Conscience

40.

Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, KY: Victor Publishing, 1960), 13.

41.

Notes, telephone conversation with Senator Barry M. Goldwater, March 1995.

42.

Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 14.

43.

Philip Gold, Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Betrayed the Conservative Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), 65.

44.

William Safire, “Inside a Republican Brain,” New York Times (July 21, 2004), A-19.

45.

They included the original “triad of Human Events for the activists, Modern Age for the academics and National Review for everybody,” plus “the American Spectator, Policy Review, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Public Interest, First Things and Chronicles. They also cite religiously oriented journals, Crisis, a Catholic monthly, and World, an evangelical weekly.” David Wagner, “Who’s Who in America’s Conservative Revolution?” Insight (December 23, 1996), 18.

46.

Ibid.

47.

For example, here is a list of the most commonly recurring labels conservatives used to describe themselves (or each other) that I have noted in my research: “traditional conservatives,” “paleoconservatives,” “old right,” “classic liberal conservatives,” “social conservatives,” “cultural conservatives,” “traditional conservatives,” “Christian conservatives,” “fiscal conservatives,” “economic conservatives,” “compassionate conservatives,” “neoconservatives,” and “libertarians.”

48.

Poll numbers were not easy to come by, but after posting an inquiry on Josh Marshall’s TPM Cafe, thanks to a blog reader identified only as “uc,” I located what appears to be the most recently published breakdown in, of all places, the Mortgage News (February, 17, 2005). See http://www.tpmcafe.com/author/J%20Dean.

49.

William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, “The Politics of Polarization,” The Third Way Middle Class Project (October 2005), Table 15, “Ideological self-identification of the U.S. electorate, 1976–2004,” 42. Political scientist Kenneth Janda, who examined the left-right placement responses to the 2004 National Election Survey—widely considered by academics as being among the most reliable numbers gathered— provided me with a general overview of the nation’s political leanings after the 2004 election. Here I have focused only on the postelection numbers (which are very similar to the preelection responses) of the 1,006 (randomly selected) people who responded to the following question: “We hear a lot of talk these days about liberals and conservatives. Here is a seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Where would you place YOURSELF on this scale, or haven’t you thought much about this?” The responses were:

Extremely liberal	20 people	3 percent
Liberal	103 people	10 percent
Slightly liberal	125 people	10 percent
Total on the left	248 people	23 percent
Moderate or middle-of-the-road	279 people	26 percent
Total on the middle	279 people	26 percent
Slightly conservative	143 people	13 percent
Conservative	166 people	16 percent
Extremely conservative	31 people	3 percent
Total on the right	340 people	32 percent
Had not thought about	187 people
or did not know, or	10 people
refused to answer	2 people

50.

Brian Mitchell, “Bush Spending Yet to Alienate the Hard Core,” Mortgage News (February 17, 2004) at http://www.home-equity-loans-center.com/Mortgage2_14__04/News6.htm.

51.

This conclusion is justified by extrapolation from other polling data, and none of these conservative subgroups appear to exceed 10 percent. For example, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has polled different types of political attitudes, and has divided Republicans into three groups: “Enterprisers,” who are extremely partisan and deep believers in the free-enterprise system, whose social values reflect a conservative agenda (presumably businesspeople or those closely associated with them); they constitute 9 percent of the adult population of the United States; “Social Conservatives,” who are conservative on issues ranging from abortion to gay marriage and express some “skepticism” about the world of business; they constitute 11 percent of the adult population; and “Pro-Government Conservatives,” who by definition support the government and stand out for their strong religious faith and conservative views on moral issues; they make up 9 percent of the population. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “The 2005 Political Typology” (May 10, 2005), 53–55.

52.