Jackson Free Press

Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon about the father of modern-day conservative, and why he turned on the right of today: "It was Goldwater, the genuine article, who established the image of conservative as Western hero. His persona was indistinguishable from his ideology. He was the imperial individual, the free spirit embodying the free market. He seemed a natural force in Arizona, a state on the economic frontier. With less than a million inhabitants before World War II, it exploded afterward. In his time, Goldwater appeared as new and startling as the booming suburbs in the desert."

"Yet in his older years the founding father of conservatism gazed out upon his works and recoiled. It was not, after all, what he had had in mind. In his plainspoken manner, indifferent to what anyone else thought, he railed against the right's intolerance, sanctimony and bullying. Mr. Conservative, author of its early seminal manifesto, 'The Conscience of a Conservative,' took to calling himself in public a 'liberal.' He spared no words in denouncing the right as the enemy of liberty."

"'Barry was always a social liberal,' Susan Goldwater Levine, his widow, keeper of the flame, told me at her home, high in the hills above Phoenix, watching a pastel sunset, in 70 degree winter weather. 'Barry believed that people should be allowed to do whatever they wanted in their own homes.' When Goldwater observed the right trying to use government to enforce private morality, he spoke up for women's right to abortion and for gay rights. His wife insisted that his convictions had remained unaltered, but that the movement for which he was the avatar had become warped. 'He hated it that the right-wing zealots took over the party,' she said. 'Barry hated the right wing.'"