Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona became the leader of the movement in 1960.
His book did it: The Conscience of a Conservative.
A handful of young conservative activists put together a near-prank: the Goldwater for Vice President movement. They actually persuaded organizers of the Republican National Convention to let them hold a mini-demonstration. In far away California, I donated a few dollars to the prank/movement in the spring of 1960. I received a copy of the book and a Barry Goldwater for Vice President button. (One of its organizers, David Franke, died in late 2020. I wrote an obituary here.)
In 1964, he was the Republican candidate for President. He lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. Sixteen years later, Ronald Reagan won. In between was the story of a political transformation that was not conceivable in 1960.
Edwin Feulner, co-founder of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, wrote this in the Foreword to a 2004 reprint of two chapters of The Conscience of a Conservative:
He affected American politics more than any other losing presidential candidate in the twentieth century. The political historian Theodore B. White wrote, “Again and again in American history it has happened that the losers of the presidency contributed almost as much as to the permanent tone and dialogue of politics as did the winners.” Goldwater was just such a candidate in 1964. Like a stern prophet of the Old Testament, he warned the people to repent of their spendthrift ways or reap a bitter harvest. Anti-communist to the core, he urged a strategy of victory over communism by a combination of strategic, economic, and psychological means, including military superiority over the Soviets and the cessation of U.S. aid to Communist governments that have used the money “to keep their subjects enslaved.” He talked about the partial privatization of Social Security and a flat tax. Denounced as extremist in 1964, today such proposals are deemed mainstream.Barry Goldwater laid the foundation for a political revolution that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 and the Republican capture in 1994 of the U.S. House of Representatives. In his memoirs, he insisted that he did not start a revolution, that all he did was to begin “to tap ... a deep reservoir [of conservatism] that already existed” in the American people. That is like Thomas Paine saying he did not ignite the American Revolution by writing his fiery pamphlet Common Sense.
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Reagan's speech.
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