Not now, of course. Sixty-two years ago.

Now that the country has soundly thrashed the MAGA movement, Donald Trump and his Republican enablers, flipping both the U.S. House and Senate from Red to Blue, some conservative outlets and pundits are urging the new Democratic majorities to work with Republicans and the lame duck president. This, of course, is an attempt to shift the narrative from the losers to the winners, who we are told must be moderate.

In November 1964, that did not happen, when the conservative wing of the Grand Old Party was soundly defeated in both the presidential and congressional elections.

That fall, Lyndon Johnson won an overwhelming majority in the electoral college, carried 44 states and racked up a 61.1 percent landslide popular vote over conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. The election also resulted in a veto-proof Democratic majority on Capitol Hill—the 89th Congress that would go on to enact LBJ’s Great Society programs, like Medicare and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The Republican Party had been badly split between the moderate Eastern Establishment, embodied by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and the insurgent conservative wing led by Goldwater. His book “The Conscience of a Conservative” had launched a movement that led to his nomination at a highly contentious party convention in San Francisco.

Johnson’s campaign successfully portrayed Goldwater’s views as too extreme, to which the Republican standard bearer replied, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

1964 v. 2026

It’s interesting to contrast the Republican reactions in 1964 to this month’s rout, with the president blaming everyone but himself and his sycophants scrambling to shift responsibility from themselves to, well, anyone else. In 1964, I was able to cast my first presidential vote, when the minimum age to do so was 21, and, as the Washington Bureau librarian for the New York Herald Tribune, I amassed a lot of files. These included a statement from the chairman of the New York Republican Committee:

“The road back for the Republican Party in the state and nation lies obviously in only one direction — the broad course of responsible moderation. The most noteworthy Republican victories on Tuesday were scored by soundly progressive Republican who survived the deadly political backwash from the disastrous, alternative course charted for our party since the San Francisco convention.

“The Republican Party has paid a shattering price for that erratic deviation from our soundly moderate 20th century course. that ill-advised, badly-led swing to the extreme right has been decisively veoted by the American voters, hundreds of thousands of Republicans among them.

“Fortunately, we still hold some significant political bases for progressive Republicanism from which to mount an effective fight to re-establish the Republican party as a positive political force responsive to the aspirations and needs of the people This has ben our direction in New York for more than 20 years,. We must rededicate ourselves to that course with regenerated unity and momentum.”

Four years later, in 1968, U.S. Senator High Scott, a Pennsylvania Republican and former national party chairman, published his own cri de coeur, a book called “Come to the Party.”

“CAN THE GOP RETURN TO A POLICY OF MODRATE SANITY? asks Senator High Scott,” in the inside flap of the dustjacket. “How did the radical fringe manage to dominate the 1964 convention in San Francisco? Most important, what will it take for the RepubIicans to convince Americans that they should COME TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?” Of course, 1968, saw the country divided once again, this time over the war on Vietnam. The Democratic Party convention in Chicago was a bloodbath and paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon over LBJ’s feckless vice president Hubert H. Humphrey, once lauded as “the happy warrior.”

Nixon’s second term unraveled over the Watergate scandal, leading to his resignation, the Gerald Ford accidental interregnum and the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose 1964 speech in San Francisco had thrilled the convention and set the stage for his own assumption of power after moderate Republicans failed to steer their party back to “the broad course of responsible moderation.”