Fifty-eight years ago, young conservatives flocked into a San Francisco ballroom, eager to nominate their hero for president: Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who had urged the Cold War right to embrace "extremism in the defense of liberty." But just a few months later the energy of the Republican National Convention of 1964 — later dubbed the Woodstock of the right and the birthplace of modern conservatism — seemed to hit a wall, as Goldwater lost the 1964 election by a humiliating 16 million votes, one of the biggest landslides of modern political history.
In the aftermath, the defeated Goldwaterites famously set about building a new conservative machine that could eventually help them win. Realizing that part of what they had lacked in 1964 was the left's support among the young, building a right-wing youth movement became something of a mission. Over the following decades, that choice paid off in spades, as generations of Republican leaders, grassroots activists and right-wing intellectuals found a level of conservative institutional support and opportunities that young lefties could only dream of.
