By the 1960 GOP convention, Barry Goldwater had become the political leader of the transformed New Right. By 1960, too, the embarrassing extremists like the John Birch Society had been purged from the ranks, and the modern conservative movement was in place. It combined a traditionalist and theocratic approach to "moral values," occasional lip service to free-market economics, and an imperialist and global interventionist foreign policy dedicated to the glorification of the American state and the extirpation of world Communism. Classical liberalism remained only as rhetoric, useful in attracting business support, and most of all as a fig leaf for the grotesque realities of the New Right... In a few brief years the character of the right wing had been totally transformed: Once basically classical liberal, it had become a global theocratic crusade. Such is the lack of acumen and memory among the right-wing masses that few even noted that any shift had occurred.
The Old Right by Murray N. Rothbard
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