LGM Film Club, Part 100: Goldwater’s Acceptance Speech
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Imagine a different world. It’s one where Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. He gets crushed by Lyndon Johnson. And…..the Republican Party learns that promoting crypto-fascist white nationalists is a terrible idea and electorally disastrous. Ronald Reagan is remembered as an actor with less skills than the chimps in his movies. Dick Cheney is an outlier backbencher in Congress. George W. Bush does a line of coke every time someone homers off the Rangers. And Donald Trump is nothing but a reality TV star. Instead, Republicans embraced a Rockefeller-style conservatism that seeks to only minimize the welfare state instead of destroy it and has some respect for the values that has made America work as a nation, at least to the extent it has worked (it’s not as if the Rockefeller Drug Laws weren’t as draconian and racist as anything Donald Trump has ever done but bear with me here).
But instead, that didn’t happen.
Anyway, here’s Barry Goldwater’s 1964 RNC acceptance speech if you want to depress yourself tonight.