Five years to the day before men left the Earth to walk on the moon, something else was launched: modern conservatism.

On July 16, 1964, Barry Goldwater accepted the Republican presidential nomination and included a stern reply to those who suggested his wish to restrain the growth of government was “extreme”:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” he told the audience, “and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Those charges of extremism came not just from Democrats and other liberals, but from Republican moderates in that very hall.

Goldwater knew that he had no chance of toppling a president installed just eight months earlier by an assassin’s bullet and that his bold challenge to the expansionism of Lyndon Johnson’s already simmering Great Society could earn him a lopsided defeat.

But it earned Goldwater something else: the honor of firing the first shot at a movement that conservatives have fought since – the 50-year push toward a government so large that its power crushes our liberties and its cost suffocates our future.

Ronald Reagan delivered a speech at that same 1964 convention that launched him toward the Governor’s Mansion in California two years later, something many said he could not win with his promises to freeze government hiring, crack down on war protesters and “send the welfare bums back to work.”

Goldwater gave voice to the birth of modern conservatism. Reagan brought it to the White House in 1980.

Since Reagan, we have had more years of Republicans in the White House than Democrats. But under Congresses led by both parties, the size, scope and arrogance of government has brought us to today’s obvious breaking point.

Evidence stretches from ocean to ocean, and its name is the tea party.

Not everyone repelled by government overreach is a self-identified tea party member. Many are independents who realize how ill-advised their 2008 Obama votes were. Others are longtime Democrats realizing their party’s current tone of radicalism bears no resemblance to its once more-tempered voice.

The tea party movement again thrusts conservatism into a spotlight demanding attention. Reagan was not just the first president to bring consistently strong modern conservatism into the White House; he also was the last.

That is no slight to either President Bush, who deserve conservatives’ affection for the occasions they fought for such ideals. But the tea party movement is nothing less than an attempt to stop a snowball that has been rolling downhill for half a century toward an abyss of debt.

Decades of lectures from right-wing leaders and pundits could not do what one month of Obama’s actual presidency pulled off. Less than a month in, CNBC’s Rick Santelli mused about a possible public outcry against just one of this administration’s myriad schemes to explode the size of government. Within weeks, every major American city sprouted a crowd of voters suddenly energized about not just slowing but reversing the insanity.

Talk of a few Republican pickups in the House has swelled to speculation of 50 or more, all but assuring a GOP majority. Several Senate Democrats will be shown the door back to private life as well.

But tea party passions are not aimed solely at beating Democrats. Also on the endangered list are Republicans failing to live up to what a party should be when it purports to be the voice of conservatism.

Chastened Republicans are not taking it well. In Florida, the petulant Charlie Crist left the party to avoid a Senate primary loss to Marco Rubio and ran as an independent, an idea disintegrating in the polls.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, similarly unable to cope with rejection, channeled her narcissism into a doomed write-in campaign to thwart the tea party-style Republican who beat her, Joe Miller.

And in suddenly famous Delaware, defeated moderate Mike Castle showed that his lack of conservative spine is matched by a lack of class as he refused to endorse Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell.

Again the voices saying enough is enough are labeled “extreme.” I suppose everything is relative. Running the country into the ground financially and trampling the Constitution are mainstream; trying to stop those efforts is extreme. Right.

I have another adjective for those efforts: overdue.

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