by 1964, the new conservatives would dominate barry goldwater. drive the eastern establishment.packing or so it seemed at the time, and effectively seized control of one of the nation's major political parties. following the goldwater defeat, a defeat which buckley both predicted and told young conservatives in a private meeting before the election, told them that it would be a good thing for a couple of reasons most importantly the reason being that he said if goldwater were to have won, who would run the government? because there were not conservatives at that time who had moved beyond theoretical thinking to actually little applying their philosophy to real world problems. i still remember the first book published in those days that took conservative philosophy and tried to address a concrete problem. it had begun as a p.h.d. thesis