Someone once pointed out that Goldwater stood at the head of both "branches" of modern conservative, the social conservatives (Christian conservatives, Moral Majority, also Christian Identity and similar ethnic-identity and/or racist fringe groups like VDARE, Covenanters, etc.) and the libertarian conservatives (Paulbots, marketarian or economic conservatives [19th-century liberals and ordoliberals], and land-use and tax-resistance groups).
All these groups can point back to Senator Goldwater and hils conservative movement, who were the Main Street Republicans who'd fought with the Gilded Age plutocracy (the "Stalwarts") since the 1880's -- and been derided for their troubles as "Mugwumps" and "Bull Moosers" for generations before they rallied around Bob Taft and then Barry Goldwater against the "Me-Too'ers" and "good government Republicans". The latter were Bush-era "moderates"/"economic conservatives" who were at pains to distinguish themselves from the "socons" whom the Bush family have always derided and despised as barely-disguised KKK kleagles, n/w/s that they had before their disbelieving eyes two of the biggest, both Democrats, sitting on the Supreme Court and in the Senate Majority Leader's office back in the 1970's.
But Manor Bush is part of the old "Stalwarts" who started and won the Civil War to protect Yankee political power for a time and to aggrandize the newly risen manufacturing and financial moguls and their managerial-class hangers-on (like the infamous Henry Clay Frick, who liked to break strikes by breaking faces and shooting people, and his successor in infamy, "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the modern "turnaround specialist").
Therefore the "economic conservatives" are not and have never been "conservative" in the sense of "classical liberals", but rather the access-capitalist class against whom classical liberalism was a reaction: against permanent class advantage, structural advantage, privilege, classism, statism, fascism, and all that went with them.
Example of the latter: A magazine article I read once described the early days of Zapata Corp., a firm founded by George H.W. Bush and colleague Hugh Liedtke in the 1950's, old classmates from Yale who'd come west to help colonize Texas for the Ivy League. (Another day, I'd sat in an airliner and listened to a fellow passenger explain how his west Texas congressman had been pitched by a Yale faculty member before the congressman left Yale to move out West to, as it was phrased by my interlocutor, improve the quality of congressional representation by running for Congress as soon as he felt able to do so. Funny thing about that .... that congressman, Bush 41, and (my former) Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee all attended Yale .... then came to Texas to run for public office, among other things. I might have to check on the total number of Texas congressmen who've been "processed" and indoctrinated by Ivy League privilege academies.
In any case, while Bush 41 was still at Zapata Corp., he and Liedtke happened to attend a cocktail party of very wealthy people ..... and there they were offered a drilling deal. I don't remember where the deal was, I would assume it was somewhere in Texas, and it was a 50-well proposition. Which for me was a showstopper. A 50-well deal?! I'm used to thinking of "deals" as being a one- or two-well deal, followon wells being contingent on technical success and a lot of other things. But 50 wells? That was exorbitant, absolutely a huge deal, with entailed investment in the $20-50 million range depending on where the wells were to be located (lower costs in some parts of onshore Texas, much higher costs in South Texas, higher still offshore in Texas state waters, and still higher again if they were to be in the deeper parts of the Fort Worth or Midland Basins). And this deal was being passed around at a Texas cocktail party for Ivy League ring-knockers as if it were a canape platter. That begins to characterize both the deal and the gathering. This was serious favor-currying and enrichment for the junior members of the Permanent Ruling Class. (Bush 41 was Sen. Prescott Bush's son, remember; "Pressy" was still sitting in Congress as 41 clinked glasses and graduation rings and exchanged the secret Bonesman handshake at a party in neocolonial Texas.)
I seized on that episode as an example of how the PRC gets along and goes along and enjoys entree to wealth-building opportunities unavailable, and even inconceivable, to non-members. It is quite precisely what is meant by "crony capitalism".
I’ve always been under the impression that, during the 1964 campaign, Goldwater did not run on what we now consider the issues of social conservatism. His calling card was plain libertarianism: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
As a Senator, Goldwater took positions explicitly opposed to social conservatism; as I recall, he was pro-choice, for medical marijuana, for gay rights, etc. I don’t know which of these positions extended back to 1964 and which he might have adopted later. But his libertarian core was constant throughout his political life.