What Does the Word ‘Conservative’ Really Mean?

It was sixty years ago, in 1964, when Barry Goldwater injected the word ‘conservative’ into the Presidential campaign as a way to distinguish himself from the liberals who were in charge of the Democrat(ic) Party and were going to push the country further to the Left than at any time since the New Deal.

Goldwater promoted himself as a champion of ‘states rights,’ which meant that laws regulating how the country operated should only be passed and enforced at the state level, the idea being that the ‘people’ and not the ‘government’ should decide how we live.

The biggest threat to local control, according to Goldwater, was the looming Federal involvement in civil rights which meant the abolition of Jim Crow in the South. And let’s not forget that Goldwater started his 1964 Presidential campaign less than five months after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., got up in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech, which scared the shit out of Southern politicians like Strom Thurmond, James Eastland, Richard Russell, and the rest of that racist bunch.

The Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision which declared ‘separate but equal’ to be an unconstitutional dictum for how the white and black races would interact, had been on the books for eleven years. But the decision was one thing, enforcing it was another.

When Goldwater got up at a campaign rally taking place in a Southern state and said that the Federal Government…