The campaign also coincided with the high point of the journal's literary circle: in 1964, the journal's contributors included Didion modernist critic Hugh Kenner fiction writer, poet, translator, and artist Guy Davenport literary scholar and cultural critic Jeffrey Hart and classicist, historian, and journalist Garry Wills. Brent Bozell, Jr., ghostwrote Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), the book that transformed him into a national figure and helped define his presidential campaign. National Review played a prominent role in this victory William F. For the first time, the movement pushed through one of its own presidential candidates, edging out more moderate and electable figures such as Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, and Richard Nixon. The 1964 election was a defining moment for the conservative movement, promoted and defined by National Review, a magazine for which Didion was a frequent contributor between 19. Even Goldwater will betray this alignment he will never be the same man who ran for president in 1964. The 1964 federal election is the singular moment when these two temporalities coincide, when Didion's beliefs align with those of a presidential candidate. First, why does she trace the fall of the conservative movement to the rise of Ronald Reagan, a figure whose style and policies were very similar to those of Goldwater, and who rose to political prominence through a televised speech to support Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign? Second, what does Didion mean when she says that she would have voted for Goldwater in subsequent elections had he "remained the same age and continued running"? There are two temporalities at work in this passage: Didion's conservatism is static, while that of the conservative movement changes with time. 1ĭidion's explanation raises at least two questions. Instead, shocked and to a curious extent personally offended by the enthusiasm with which California Republicans who had jettisoned an authentic conservative (Goldwater) were rushing to embrace Ronald Reagan, I registered as a Democrat. Had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election thereafter. In 1964, in accord with these interests and beliefs, I voted, ardently, for Barry Goldwater. They believed above all that a limited government had no business tinkering with the private or cultural life of its citizens. The people with whom I grew up were interested in low taxes, a balanced budget, and a limited government.
They are the logical product of a childhood largely spent among conservative California Republicans (this was before the meaning of "conservative" changed) in a post-war boom economy. In Political Fictions (2001), Joan Didion insists that her politics are not "eccentric, opaque, somehow unreadable." She writes:
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