The unfortunate truth is that many libertarians are actually leftists who own guns and don’t like taxes. They do not understand that limited government does not mean no government and they sometimes like to call themselves “Goldwater conservatives” (you will notice that the ‘Rats have enough sense not to describe themselves as McGovern or Mondale liberals) but they fail to realize that Goldwater’s conservatism was a FAILURE and that conservatism only succeeded when Ronald Reagan recognized the need for social conservatism.
Hi, wags. Long time no see.
Actually, Barry Goldwater was unified in his conservatism; both social and "economic" (libertarian) conservatives look back to his statements of principle. In particular, his campaign speech of May, 1964, in which he laid it all out, and in which both strains of conservatism can be seen unified.
He assumed that people begin with a floor of personal and public virtue -- just like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison all assumed as the necessary basis of a representative democratic republic.
Later on, I think Barry was the object of what Salafist "Gen 4 War" thinkers call an "information operation" (propaganda/psyop), when someone in his family came out to him. We recognize this now as a standard gay polemical tactic (Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, Jerry Falwell, the Cheneys all had this pulled on them -- and I suspect someone in the Bush family, too), but back then it was pioneering psywar, and the homosexual lobby reaped the rewards of getting Barry to turn and defend his kinsman against his own principles. His later defense of his relative in principled terms has been used by polemicists like the execrable Clintonista wordsmith Sid "the Squid" Blumenthal (spawner of Max B., of The Daily Beast).
But there was no division in Barry Goldwater's conservatism. The division between "social" (knuckledragging, sheet-wearing, cross-burning) conservatives and "economic" (enlightened, liberal) conservatives was created, destructively and with evil knowledge, by gay polemicists 40 and 50 years ago.