◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

In Your Heart, You Know He's Wrong I lost forty-four states in 1964. Lyndon Johnson buried me. The Democrats ran an ad with a little girl counting petals and then a nuclear explosion. They painted me as a dangerous extremist. From wherever senators go when the Senate is done with them, I have been thinking about that. They weren't entirely wrong about the danger. Not about me. About what I started. I believed in liberty. Not as a slogan. As the only thing worth organizing a government around. The irreducible individual whose life and choices belong to himself — not to the state, not to the church, not to the mob. Get the government out of the boardroom. Get the government out of the bedroom. I supported gay rights when that was not popular for an Arizona Republican. I said a woman's body belongs to the woman. I said the religious right was the greatest threat to the Republican Party and to American freedom in my lifetime. Because liberty is not a selective virtue. The moment you believe in it for yourself but not for the person next to you, you no longer believe in freedom. You believe in privilege. What I also have to own — is that I handed certain people certain tools and did not think carefully enough about what they would build with them. I voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I gave constitutional reasons. I had supported every civil rights bill before that vote and every one after — but the Southerners who had blocked civil rights for a century walked out of the Democratic Party and into mine. They brought the country with them. I did not intend that bargain. I lived to see what was built on top of it. I ran against the New Deal, the regulatory state, concentrated federal power. I meant all of it. But the people who built the movement that elected Reagan and kept going used my language for purposes I did not intend. I said get the government off our backs. They heard: the government is the enemy. I said protect individual liberty. They heard: the strong man should face no constraints. I said limit federal power. They heard: dismantle every institution that stands between wealth and the ability to do whatever it wants. And the line that ruined me at the convention in 1964 — extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. I meant: the irreducible individual against the encroaching state. They have used it to mean: any tactic is justified if it serves my side. The words were mine. The conclusions were not. And now there is this man. He is not a conservative. He does not believe in limited government — he believes in government that serves him personally. He does not believe in individual liberty — he believes in his own liberty while curtailing everyone else's. He does not believe in the Constitution — he believes in it when it protects him and disregards it when it constrains him. He is the demagogue I spent my career warning about, who uses the language of freedom to accumulate personal power. My party. I do not recognize it. I have watched men I once respected say things they know are not true because the cost of telling the truth is higher than the cost of the lie. That calculation is the end of a party. The end of a man. I made unpopular arguments my entire career. I lost elections over them. The truth mattered more than the approval. That is not heroism. That is the minimum. The conservative who stays quiet while this man dismantles the courts, the press, the separation of powers, the rule of law — is not a conservative. He is a coward with a convenient philosophy. In your heart you know he's right. That was my slogan in 1964. They answered: in your guts you know he's nuts. I am asking you now to use your heart, your guts, whatever organ of recognition you still have working — and look at what is in front of you. Not through the lens of party. Not through what you have already said and are now committed to defending. Just look. Is this freedom? Is this limited government? Is this the Constitution as the founders understood it? Or is this one man using the machinery of the republic to make himself permanently unaccountable? In your heart. You know the answer. You have always known the answer. The question is whether you are willing to say it out loud — regardless of what it costs. That was the only conservatism worth the name. That is still the only conservatism worth the name.