Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,

so that you may be able to prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12 2. This is resistance and reformation on the Fight, laugh, Feast Network.

I have just re-read for the first time in years the classic 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative. I shouldn't have waited

so long. It was long overdue. The author, Barry M. Goldwater, was a five-term U.S. Senator

from Arizona and a champion of conservatism.

His manifesto-like book and the race for the presidency that the book precipitated four years later

launched a reformation of American politics that paved the way for a renaissance of conservatism.

Though he suffered a resounding defeat at the polls, his efforts helped prepare for the election

of one of his conservative disciples, Ronald Reagan, as president in 1980, and laid the philosophical groundwork for the

emergence of the modern American conservative movement. Coldwater carried only six states and

36 percent of the popular vote in 1964. After the election, most analysts and commentators

concluded that the Republican Party was hopelessly divided, and that Goldwater and his

conservative philosophy were all but politically dead. In fact, he had rested control of the GOP

from the Eastern liberal wing that had dominated it for years. By 1980, he was acknowledged as

the founder of the conservative movement that became a vital element

in mainstream Republican thinking and a major ingredient in Reagan's political ascendancy.

It was a 1964 speech delivered on behalf of Goldwater that brought Reagan to national prominence and helped

launch his political career. By that time, he had come to be regarded as the grand old man of

the Republican Party and one of the nation's most respected exponents of

conservatism, which he sometimes defined as holding on to that which was tested and true

and opposing change simply for the sake of change. His political motto, which he declared with gusto, in his 1964

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