Although Goldwater was a westerner through and through, it was the delegation from South Carolina that put him over the top to win the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. This was no accident. Movement Conservatives embraced the same ideas that, a century before, had led South Carolina slave owners to attack the United States government. Like elite slaveholders before the Civil War, they believed in a world defined by hierarchies, where most people—dull, uneducated, black, female, weak, or poor—needed the guidance of their betters.
