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The 1964 Goldwater campaign helped usher in the modern conservative movement in the United States.  The political careers of both [[Phyllis Schlafly]] and [[Ronald Reagan]] got a big boost during the campaign.  Schlafly wrote a book, ''[[A Choice, Not An Echo]]'' during the campaign which was widely distributed and launched her career as a conservative political activist.  ''A Choice, Not An Echo'' detailed the machinations of the [[moderate]] to [[liberal]] East Coast wing of the Republican Party to hand-pick Presidential candidates (Nixon, [[Wendell Willkie]], [[Dwight Eisenhower]], etc.) and called for conservatives in the party to organize to counter this wing of the party and their "kingmaker" approach to nominating candidates.  The book was a rallying call for conservatives in the party and helped Goldwater win the nomination.  Reagan gave a speech as part of a "TV for Goldwater-Miller" television ad campaign which made him an up and coming star among conservatives, eventually leading to his own series of Presidential campaigns in 1968, 1976. and 1980, the last of which successfully landed him in the [[White House]].  The 1964 Goldwater campaign was also followed by the rise of a growing conservative campus movement during the 1960s led by [[Young Americans for Freedom]], the rise of a small [[libertarian]] movement which also supported Goldwater but would later split with conservatism over the [[draft]] and [[drug]] policy, and modern conservative movement approaches such as [[direct mail]] organizing.

The 1964 Goldwater campaign helped usher in the modern conservative movement in the United States.  The political careers of both [[Phyllis Schlafly]] and [[Ronald Reagan]] got a big boost during the campaign.  Schlafly wrote a book, ''[[A Choice, Not An Echo]]'' during the campaign which was widely distributed and launched her career as a conservative political activist.  ''A Choice, Not An Echo'' detailed the machinations of the [[moderate]] to [[liberal]] East Coast wing of the Republican Party to hand-pick Presidential candidates (Nixon, [[Wendell Willkie]], [[Dwight Eisenhower]], etc.) and called for conservatives in the party to organize to counter this wing of the party and their "kingmaker" approach to nominating candidates.  The book was a rallying call for conservatives in the party and helped Goldwater win the nomination.  Reagan gave a speech as part of a "TV for Goldwater-Miller" television ad campaign which made him an up and coming star among conservatives, eventually leading to his own series of Presidential campaigns in 1968, 1976. and 1980, the last of which successfully landed him in the [[White House]].  The 1964 Goldwater campaign was also followed by the rise of a growing conservative campus movement during the 1960s led by [[Young Americans for Freedom]], the rise of a small [[libertarian]] movement which also supported Goldwater but would later split with conservatism over the [[draft]] and [[drug]] policy, and modern conservative movement approaches such as [[direct mail]] organizing.

The 1964 Goldwater campaign also marked the first time since before the [[Civil War]] that the states of the Deep South, angered by the liberal Johnson's support for civil rights, broke from the [[Democratic Party]] and gave their electoral votes to the Republican nominee. Goldwater broke with most GOP senators when he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.<ref>Taylor Branch, ''Pillar of Fire'' 356-357 </ref> In the Senate, he strongly supported both the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts.<ref>Barry Goldwater, Where I Stand (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)</ref>. He also helped desegregate the Arizona National Guard and was a member of Arizona's NAACP. Although he eventually regretted his vote, his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was based strictly on political ideological grounds. As a strong ''conservative'', he believed that two of its sections, Title II and Title VII, unlawfully overextended the role of the federal government.

The 1964 Goldwater campaign also marked the first time since before the [[Civil War]] that the states of the Deep South, angered by the liberal Johnson's support for civil rights, broke from the [[Democratic Party]] and gave their electoral votes to the Republican nominee. Goldwater broke with some GOP senators when he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.<ref>Taylor Branch, ''Pillar of Fire'' 356-357 </ref> In the Senate, he strongly supported both the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts.<ref>Barry Goldwater, Where I Stand (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)</ref>. Nonetheless, Barry Goldwater accomplished a task that, until then, had been seen as physically impossible — he won five states in the Deep South for the Republican Party, which had been seen for the past hundred years as the party of Abraham Lincoln and the "War of Northern Aggression." Even more incredibly, those five states were, apart from Goldwater's home state of Arizona, the only states that he won in what was otherwise a Democratic landslide, turning established political battle lines on their heads. He was able to do this solely because of his voting record against anti-racism legislation versus the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who was in favor of civil rights.

 

The South had, until that point, been a solidly Democratic voting bloc, often called the "Solid South." Nixon, taking note of this, campaigned on subtle states' rights themes in 1968 and 1972 in an attempt to keep the Deep South in the Republican column. That Southerners could be persuaded to vote Republican in presidential races by the 1960s is attributable to the greater power of race than class by that time. For the first half of the 20th century, white Protestant voters in the South tended to be quite populist on economic issues, forming an important part of the New Deal Coalition and supporting government infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. However, they were rabidly reactionary on race and other social issues, often preventing Franklin D. Roosevelt and the northern liberal wing of the Democratic Party from taking action against lynching and segregation.

 

As the South grew in affluence after World War II, class tension began to fade. At the same time, the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s and gained momentum in the '60s put race into sharper perspective, while other cultural changes in the '60s (the sexual revolution, the counterculture, the New Left) also drove white religious conservatives in both the North and the South away from the Democrats. The latter in particular placed another once-solidly Democratic voting bloc, the working-class Catholic voters of the northern industrial cities, into play, something that Nixon and future Republicans would also take notice of.

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