Just to underscore Jonah’s point: The conventional Goldwater narrative is that he helped found a movement that careened in a (socially conservative) direction that betrayed his legacy. That story is basically false, and it is not made true by his late-in-life public conversion on social issues. It was the Goldwater of (roughly) 1955-1970 who inspired the conservative movement, not the Goldwater of the late 1980s. By then, partly as a result of his own previous efforts, he was just another conservative senator with his own quirks.