Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

The Manionites’ conservatism was a conservatism of fear. They harped endlessly on the “communistic income tax,” how the economy would be decimated by inflation every time workers got a raise. (Taft Republicans, joked The Nation, feared “only God and inflation.”) Their scapegoats were unnamed subversives who were invisibly destroying the system from within: “I am at a loss to understand the current public attitude deflating the inflation psychology,” Fred Koch wrote in a self-published pamphlet. “perhaps it is propaganda, of which we have been fed much of late—pink propaganda, in as much as, in my opinion, Russia’s first objective is to destroy our economy through inflation.” Politically the philosophy lost when it won: if you removed the fear of subversion by catching subversives, you ended the fear that brought you to power in the first place—although, of course, you could never catch all the subversives, for the conspiracy was a bottomless murk, a hall of mirrors, a menace that grew greater the more it was flushed out.