Arizona conservatives

The maxim holds that people move right as they grow older. I moved left. In each case, I was in the minority. Only one other child wore Goldwater buttons in 1964 at Kenilworth School, Barry's alma mater; LBJ buttons were in profusion. Later I handed out leaflets for state Rep. Betty Adams Rockwell. In high school, I manned the phones for Jack Williams and Richard Nixon. Even on a shallow, but oh-so-important level for a high-school boy (oh, I've grown up, honest…), being a Teen Age Republican was a lonely avocation. Back then, all the pretty girls, much less the pretty and smart girls, were Democrats. There were certainly no blond goddesses such as Monica Goodling, who led the hiring thought police at the Bush Justice Department. 

As a young columnist, I staked out what at the time was the Dead Career Zone in newspapers, as a supporter of free markets, free trade and limited government. Now I feel the need to put all of those goals in quotation marks. For I did move left, knowing, as Whittaker Chambers said in a different context, "that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side."

I must say a few things in my defense besides "young" and "stupid." I was raised in a staunchly Republican family, where my grandmother never voted for a Democrat again because of the way Woodrow Wilson treated Theodore Roosevelt. My mother was involved in Arizona GOP politics. It was an intensely political household, with dinner-table conversations over public policy. My mother's rule was that one could take any position, as long as he could defend it with learning and logic. Barry Goldwater was an icon and seemed to embody the best of Arizona and the West, as did leaders such as Paul Fannin and John J. Rhodes. In a house of books, I gravitated to the ones that tended to support my positions — a fatal intellectual flaw, of course. Buckley and Goldwater conservatism encouraged independent thinking, as opposed to the rigid ideologies of the left, or so it seemed. Growing up in old Arizona, I was in a sparsely populated place where abstractions seemed borne out by everything around us. And the existential struggle of the Cold War towered above all else; here the Republicans seemed stronger, no small thing.