Goldwater and his backers were Cold Warriors through and through – supporters of NATO and other anti-Communist alliances, determined not to let any more states fall to Communist aggression even if that meant war, and advocating all means of confrontation and rollback short of war in the understanding that the Soviets intended a slow-motion world conquest and that peaceful co-existence was impossible.

To call Goldwater’s nomination a resurgence of embittered non-interventionists is flat-out wrong.

The Dems used to be even worse in this regard. They united blacks and Catholics in the North, with segregationists like George Wallace and Lester Maddox in the South. (That changed after 1966, when the segregationists left the Dem Party.)

Why would ANY blacks, anywhere in the nation, want to be in the same party with white segregationists?

Because liberal Dems provided Northern blacks with jobs, and brought them into the American mainstream.

The Dems realized that a rising tide is inherently inclusive: Keep the economy growing, and everybody wants to get on board.

The expansionist Reagan years did the same thing for conservatives.

A party’s coalition starts to fracture when a stagnant economy makes life into a zero-sum game: One faction can only get more at the expense of another.

That happened to the Jimmy Carter administration, and the Dems were destroyed.

Now it happened to the Bush administration, and the GOP was similarly destroyed.

Not an example we want to follow.