Goldwater was LBJ's dream opponent in the 1964 election. An unapologetic ultra-conservative, Goldwater criticized the Great Society as a tyrannical intrusion of Big Brother into the lives of freedom-loving Americans.

Goldwater's 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative laid out his own hard-liner stance on, well, just about everything. Now the Arizona senator wanted to bring his fiscally conservative, small-government, anticommunist policies to the White House. Even fellow Republicans cringed at his extreme far-right philosophy.

In his now legendary acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention, Goldwater famously said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." His acceptance speech advocated the polar opposite of LBJ's Great Society beliefs.

Goldwater laid the blame for all the problems LBJ enumerated right at the feet of big-government Democrats. Centralized government planning destroyed individual initiative and creativity rather than nurturing it. Pushing equality on everyone was a bad idea; it's nothing more than "regimented sameness." People have to be free to manage their own lives and make their own choices, not be slaves to some liberty-destroying central government. The only rights the government should be protecting are property rights.

The Goldwater campaign slogan "In Your Heart You Know He's Right" was countered by the Democrats: "In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts." (Source)

Johnson won the election by a landslide, earning the largest percentage of the popular vote of any presidential candidate since records were first kept in 1820. But Goldwater ignited a conservative revolution that laid the groundwork for a Republican party that declared war on the Great Society.