Goldwater (O-CA) vs. Laki (I-BE)

[OSR stands with Israel]

Goldwater and it’s not even remotely close

[OSR stands with Israel]

Easily Goldwater.

It's actually interesting that over the last few years we agreed on a decent number of things here, given our usernames.

I guess the real Barry Goldwater would be appalled by today's GOP and the Trump cult. He'd be discredited as a RINO by the right in our day and age.

He would have opposed Trump but how moderate he is to the current GOP is completely overblown. Goldwater's 1964 campaign is still the most right wing policy platform the GOP has run on since the 1920s. I mean Goldwater openly supported privatizing social security, opposed Medicare and Medicaid, opposed the civil rights act of 1964, abstained on voting rights bills that even former Dixiecrat Senators supported.  While Barry Goldwater opposed the religious right he also was an ardent supporter of states rights so its very likely he would have opposed Obergefell and supported Dobbs as well so policy wise he was 100% to the right of pretty much every Republican nominee since then.

Today Goldwater basically would have been a Ted Cruz who never sold out his beliefs for Trump and stuck with opposing him. So it would have ended up with him getting primaried in 2018 by a Trumpist candidate funded by the Mercer family(which if you don't know the story, the Mercer Family threatened to revoke all support of Cruz in the future if he didnt support Trump).

[OSR stands with Israel]

Today Goldwater basically would have been a Ted Cruz who never sold out his beliefs for Trump and stuck with opposing him. So it would have ended up with him getting primaried in 2018 by a Trumpist candidate funded by the Mercer family(which if you don't know the story, the Mercer Family threatened to revoke all support of Cruz in the future if he didnt support Trump).

Goldwater would have been more of a John Kasich Republican, actually. (Today, that is, if he were alive)

Goldwater’s 1964 platform was much to the right of Kasich’s 2016 one so this isn’t really true at all . People very much overrate how moderate Goldwater was these days just cause of his comments about the religious right and leave out the other stuff where we was much to the right of the current GOP on. Goldwater would definitely oppose Obergefell and support Dobbs as while he would have been pro gay marriage and pro choice , he also 100% would believe those decisions should be left to the states which would in practice put him to the right of Trump on social issues .


A more principled Cruz isn’t who Ted Cruz was because Ted Cruz at the end of the day is a slimy politician but Cruz’s 2016 platform was the most similar to a modern version of Goldwater’s 1964 one out of all the candidates running that year .

[OSR stands with Israel]

Goldwater wouldn't have agreed with Kasich on everything, but I doubt he would have backed Cruz for President over someone like Kasich. It's more than just policy positions. Cruz is extremely unprincipled, like you said, and possibly a bit too unprincipled for Barry to support him, even in a general election.

Plus it's not like Goldwater would have been that much closer to Cruz than Kasich on policy. The 1964 GOP platform was a long time ago, and Goldwater did shift a little later in life. Cruz is very much religious right. Not to mention Kasich isn't exactly a foreign policy dove or Russia-appeaser. He's a conservative Republican and not someone I would actually vote for, even if Kasich is perceived as a RINO because he's not mean enough.

Kasich ran as an economic moderate by the time he ran for president though. People have completely rewritten history and act like Trump was the only Republican who ran as an economic moderate that year which isn’t true . Kasich in 2015-16 supported the Medicaid Expansion, had a pretty moderate proposal on social security, and was pretty moderate on welfare issues as well . One of Kasich’s lines on the campaign trail was “Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” Kasich said. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’”

https://slate.com/business/2015/08/republican-presidential-debate-john-kasich-gives-an-incredibly-stirring-defense-of-medicaid.html

So I don’t think Goldwater would really support him and I think a Goldwater in his prime would have run for President and have effectively been the conservative star during Obama’s 2nd term and unlike Cruz may have won the nomination as he’d have a much better relationship with the other candidates so they would be willing to coalesce the field around him .