That Burkeans vs. dynamite-throwers opposition is overdone. You really don't find pure types like that in politics very often.
What I'd say is, there's Goldwaterism, which appeals to about a third of the electorate, and then there's a conservatism that can win elections, that involves more correcting liberal mistakes than wholesale ideological transformation of the country.
And the two elements, purists and pragmatists, alternate over time. It would be silly to characterize one side as mellow Burkean traditionalist wets and the other as destructive dries dismantling the compromises of the last century. Such portraits take the rhetoric more seriously than it deserves, rather it's a conflict between an idealist rhetoric and what real world politics demand.
Things got muddied up in the Bush years. Foreign policy, military, and security issues came to outweigh the Goldwater agenda, and what you had to do and say to be thought conservative changed.
Conservatism isn't dead. It's just waiting for people to get so sick of Obama liberalism that they turn to a conservative alternative. It might do to remember that when voters do make the shift they won't be turning to minimal government Goldwaterism. They'll just be asking for less government, less taxes, less interference than the Democrats offer.
After seeing what conservatism became in the last few years -- with Republicans controlling Congress and the Presidency and driving up deficits -- it would be foolish to think that when voters turn to Republicans or conservatives it will be for some whole-hog Goldwater conservatism, rather than for more modest corrections and adjustments.
Every new generation with young skulls full of mush, thinks that liberalism can work, it takes a Carter or Obama administration to make them realize that it won’t work.