[Olog-hai]

Vast majority of Republicans think exactly like Democrats. That was the case when The Conscience of a Conservative was published in 1960.

The New Deal, Dean Acheson wrote approvingly in a book called A Democrat Looks At His Party, “conceived of the federal government as the whole people organized to do what had to be done.” A year later, Mr. (Arthur) Larson wrote A Republican Looks At His Party, and made much the same claim in his book for modern Republicans. The “underlying philosophy” of the New Republicanism, said Mr. Larson, is that “if a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is the proper function of the federal government.”

Here we have, by prominent spokesmen of both political parties, an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government. There is no reference by either of them to the Constitution, or any attempt to define the legitimate functions of government. The government can do whatever needs to be done; note, too, the implicit but necessary assumption that it is the government itself that determines what needs to be done. We must not, I think, underrate the importance of these statements. They reflect the view of a majority of the leaders of one of our parties, and of a strong minority among the leaders of the other, and they propound the first principle of totalitarianism: that the State is competent to do all things and is limited in what it actually does only by the will of those who control the State. …

— TCOAC, Chapter 2, page 15

So if Republicans in the Eisenhower administration were thinking exactly like communistic FDR Democrats (Acheson was investigated for his ties to the USSR), how much more so today?

[x]

Most Americans didn't and don't agree with Goldwater.

That's a major reason why he lost, and since then people haven't come around to thinking as he did.

That doesn't mean government should be unlimited.

But it does mean that people didn't think government was to be as limited as severely Goldwater assumed it should be.

It would have been a cheap shot if Goldwater accused his fellow Republicans (and by implication the public who voted for them) of having a totalitarian philosophy and it's a cheap shot to do so now.

But Goldwater himself didn't necessarily agree with what was written in his book, and given his later record he might not agree with your interpretation of what he wrote.

And while everybody in the State Department was suspect after the Hiss case, there were no serious charges of Soviet ties against Acheson.