A good recap by Ed Kilgore of the half-century Goldwater-Tea Party continuum--pace the conventional ignorance of Politico's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen--which warrants, however, two clarifications.
One, it's true that Goldwater "frequently attacked LBJ for waging a 'no-win war' in southeast Asia." But these attacks scarcely preshadowed what Kilgore calls the "Randpaulism" of "the pre-Cold War conservative commitment to truculent unilateralism" (isolationism?), because it's also true that Goldwater suggested the unthinkable use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam--which was profoundly antithetical to conservatism's pre-Cold War ideology, hence Paul's isolationism.
Two, it should always be emphasized that Goldwater's social conservatism of 1964 was, for him, a deeply distasteful political expedience. As an Old West libertarian he never believed religion and politics should mix; yet, his reluctance notwithstanding, he accepted advisers' exhortations to assault LBJ on the 1960s' cultural upheavals from an offensive position of "social morality." And Goldwater regretted the hell out of it: "Perhaps I'm one of the reasons this place [Washington, D.C.] is so redneck," he confessed years later.
Ideologically, though, his mid-1960s social conservatism was an absolute sham--which seems transcendently fitting to always note.
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