Goldwater even in his later years still seems like an ideal candidate for current realities. A hawkish libertarian isn’t a bad thing. That at least is my understanding of what you would be talking about. I was the ripe old age of 3 when he left office.
Well, that'd be better than what we have now, but all the same, a guy who leaned as far left on social issues as Goldwater did later in life would be absolute electoral poison for the GOP. He'd lose his entire base, and go down in flames as badly as he did in 1964.