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In the 1964 presidential election, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater, the dream candidate of his party's conservative wing, had offered a "choice not an echo" in his campaign and the American people seemed to have little doubt about their choice. Goldwater carried only his home state of Arizona and five Deep South states where opposition to the Civil Rights movement was at high tide. Johnson took the rest with sixty-one percent of the popular vote and his coattails increased the Democratic majority by thirty-eight House members and two new senators. By all the traditional measurements of American politics, the election of 1964 was a disaster for American conservatism. Not only was their choice decisively rebuffed by the voters, but the overwhelming Democratic victory gave Johnson the opportunity to enact his "Great Society" programs, collectively the most far-reaching liberal legislation since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
If 1964 was a decisive political defeat for Barry Goldwater, it was only a temporary setback in the steady growth of a conservative movement which would reach new heights in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the creation of a Republican majority in both houses of Congress in 1994. The complex story of that conservative resurgence-centered politically in the Republican Party but extending throughout American society-is one of the most critical developments in the last half of the twentieth century.
The rise of this conservative movement had its roots in the three decades before the Goldwater campaign, drawing upon two powerful and interrelated impulses. The first was an unambiguous defense of laissezfaire capitalism. Such conservative ideas ran deep in American history, but they had been badly discredited during the 1930s by the fact that most Americans attributed the Depression to the excesses of the capitalist system in general and the rapacious greed of corporate and business interests specifically. During the 1930s, most Americans seemed to accept the argument that the federal government had an obligation to protect the American people against those whom Franklin Roosevelt described as "malefactors of great wealth" by regulating and controlling these financial interests. At the same time, the establishment of a limited national welfare system-symbolized most concretely by the Social Security Act of...