Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Goldwater contrasts two conceptions of “equality.” In the first, associated with the American founding, equality means equal rights before the law and equal protection—conditions that allow individuals to pursue their own ends and to develop distinct talents. In the second, “equality” is treated as sameness of condition or outcome, which in his view pressures citizens toward uniformity (“conformity”) and invites coercive state power to enforce that uniformity (“despotism”). The line encapsulates a central theme of Goldwater-era conservatism: a defense of individual liberty and pluralism against what it saw as collectivist or bureaucratic leveling.