> Goldwater was the first major presenting symptom
Can you please elaborate? I'm briefly aware on who Goldwater was and his influence on Reagan's election, but this phrase puzzles me. (I'm not from the US, maybe I lack some context)
Can you please elaborate? I'm briefly aware on who Goldwater was and his influence on Reagan's election, but this phrase puzzles me. (I'm not from the US, maybe I lack some context)
A lot of libertarianism was invented in the late 40s as a response to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. "How do we avoid totalitarian states" - their answer was to simply remove the power of government to regulate/oppress/etc. It is important, IMO, to recognize the root problem that Libertarianism was aiming at solving and not laugh it out of the room.
Anyway, this dovetailed into the prior opposition to FDR's New Deal, and misc refugees from the USSR such as Ayn Rand. Remember, this was during the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism. The Conservative wing of both parties choked on the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements. Goldwater happened to agree and win the 1964 nomination of the Republican Party. He was roundly defeated, in part because Americans broadly disagreed with him. A lot of his campaign alumni and supporters went on to be influential in the 70s and beyond. A lot of today's old partisan hands in the GOP trace were either in that campaign or mentored by people from it. Much of the GOP history since Goldwater has been how the "Rockefeller Republicans" were turned out by the Tea Party or its ideological forebears.
Note that all of this essentially wound up reorienting the Republican, Democrat, and regional politics in the US to the configuration you see today. For sourcing - Kevin Kruse is a historian at Princeton - he's tracked this reconfiguration and has the documentation of how this played out. I'd start with his documentation if you want to dig into it.
Republicans have leaned on this talking point hard ever since then, in part to justify tax cuts for their donor class (but not spending cuts, ironically). They also use it to justify inaction, because if the government takes action, then that's the government "doing something", which is bad, get it? This is a much easier argument for them to make than actually coming up with alternate solutions to things. It's nihilism disguised as trying to save people money, but the reality of the last 56 years has been lower taxes for their donor class coupled with vastly increased government spending, which is the opposite of anything resembling fiscal conservatism.