He lost by a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson, of course, whose share of the vote remains the largest ever. At the time one takeaway was that right-wing economic ideas were a total political nonstarter, anachronisms that would remain so. But in fact the Goldwater campaign was just the first rollout of a new American political template, an unsuccessful beta test. It tried to exploit popular unease with the culturally new as a way to get a green light for the rollback that Goldwater and the serious right really cared about—a restoration of old-style economic and tax and regulatory policies
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