Conservatives opposed to racial discrimination, however, had few obvious ways to act on that belief without abandoning their long, twilight struggle to re-confine the federal government within its historically defined riverbanks after the New Deal had demolished all the levees. Perlstein portrays Goldwater, a member of the NAACP who had fought against segregation in the Phoenix public schools while on the city council, as anguished by the choice between a moral and a constitutional imperative confronting him in the vote on the civil rights bill.
[...]
Thus, liberals dismiss "states' rights" as nothing more than a code word for racism. There is no point in conservatives even asking what the code word for states' rights is, because liberals cannot imagine anyone believes this to be a legitimate political concern.
From this viewpoint, conservatism's "reasons" for opposing civil rights were, in fact and from the beginning, excuses for oppressing blacks. Buckley's least judicious writings make it difficult to wave away that allegation. These are moments in conservatism's history where it was, in Goldberg's sense, worse than merely missing in action in the battle for racial equity.
[...]
Harsh as it is, this liberal accusation misses an important point: the hardest question the triumph of the civil rights movement raises about conservatism is not whether its stated purpose of restoring the founders' republic was a ruse designed to perpetuate racial inequality. Rather, it is to what extent that sincerely held belief was ever feasible and coherent. The troubling incongruity is not conservatives' initial tolerance of segregation for the sake of limited government, but the later, tacit admission that America did well to expand the purview of the federal government in order to end Jim Crow.
I'd think conservative, but that doesn't necessarily say much about today's conservatives in itself.
