How did conservatism win by such a landslide in 1980 under Reagan after it took such a beating in 1964 under Goldwater?

by chai-knees

To expand on it, how did conservatism as an ideology shift electorally from a total loser to a total winner in half a generation?

Vladith

This is a really enormous and interesting question that is really difficult to answer in in just a few words. But thankfully, historians and journalists have been pondering this question since the 1980 Reagan landslide itself.

Probably most significant among these is Rick Perlstein, who has spent about 20 years charting the rise of American conservatism from the 1950s till the present. His four books "Before the Storm," "Nixonland," "The Invisible Bridge," and "Reaganland" all seek to explore this question in different ways.

There are many different reasons why the American public (and in particular northern, white, suburban) voters shifted toward the Republican Party in this era, eroding the permanent Democratic constitutional majority that had existed since the New Deal. To list a few of these in very brief detail:

  • While Civil Rights was initially popular among northern white voters, racist backlash exploded in cities like Chicago and Boston during discussions about school and neighborhood desegregation. Many Republican politicians from northern and western states deliberately fed into the racial anxieties of northern and western Democrats, as seen by Barry Goldwater's rejection of the Civil Rights Act and Nixon's fear-mongering over race riots.
  • As the 60s progressed, there was a widespread belief that the Democratic Party was endorsing radicalism. Democraric support for integration and oblique ties to the anti-war movement gave many white northern voters the impression that the Democratic Party was behind the rise of an imagined violent left-wing insurgency of African American rioters and hippie agitators. These fears, again exploited to great effect by GOP strategists, were particularly strong in lower-middle-class households and among white ethnic voters, particularly Rust Belt Catholics whose parents or grandparents emigrated from Europe.
  • In general, the postwar decades saw a trend toward atomization. At least among white people, ethnic communities began to loss their political salience. For a long time it was basically understood that all people of certain ethnic groups voted a certain way. This misperception has echoes in contemporary politics, but in the 50s and 60s the Democratic Party had a strong belief that certain ethnic communities as well as organized labor institutions would always back them, due to longstanding "machine politics" ties with various leaders. But thanks in large part to suburbanization, union membership declined and urban ethnic communities began to break up. Being Polish American in 1970 was a lot less socially important than it was in 1940, so a Polish voter became less inclined to vote for the Democrats simply because this was expected of a Polish American.
  • There was a general economic downturn from the 1960s onward. Deindustrialization and increased economic competition from abroad weakened the standing of the American working class and organized labor in particular. Union membership dropped during this era, which led to a corresponding dip in support for the pro-Union Democratic Party. Short-term crises such as the oil crisis and stagflation scare of the 1970s came at a political cost for both Republicans and Democrats, but gave particularly conservative Republicans like Ronald Reagan an opening to attack the Democrats for supposed fiscal irresponsibility and promote his own program of tax breaks paid for through massive cuts to government services.
  • Last, church attendance and self-identified religiosity increased over this period. While pop culture was becoming increasingly secular, the so-called "silent majority" or "moral majority" rejected many of the changes to racial and gender politics across this period and turned to faith. Evangelical Protestant churches became increasingly popular, and although these organizations initially supported candidates from both parties (Carter was an Evangelical) by 1980 issues like gay rights and abortion put Evangelicals and Democrars on opposite ends of the culture war.

All of these bullet points are major issues of interest for contemporary historians. I'd really encourage you to dive deep into all of these. It might be helpful to post a new question focusing on one in particular. The increase in perceived religiousness of many Americans is a particularly interesting topic that's received a lot of attention and seems to be pretty unique to the United States during this period.