Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater, many liberals have assumed — or naively hoped — that each national defeat would teach Republicans that they had overreached, and pull them back from the extremes. Instead, the opposite has happened: The lesson of every loss, even the routs, has been “we were not conservative enough.”
The Goldwater smackdown in 1964 really did lay the groundwork for the Reagan revolution and the ensuing conservative era.
