Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (90 page)
Read Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond Online
Authors: E. J. Dionne Jr.
Several general histories cover overlapping parts of the story told here. A thoughtful and provocative history of the United States from 1945 to the George W. Bush years that I draw on at key points is Joshua B. Freeman,
American Empire
(Penguin 2012). A valuable political history that points to links between Roosevelt and Reagan is Michael Barone’s
Our Country
(Free Press, 1990). Everyone who cares about our nation’s story should read Godfrey Hodgson’s
America in Our Time
(Doubleday, 1976), which covers the period from the end of World War II to Nixon’s presidency. Heather Cox Richardson’s
To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party
(Basic Books, 2014) is an interesting revisionist view that stresses the role of “Lincoln Republicans” such as Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower and how their efforts to use government to promote economic opportunity were regularly foiled by the party’s conservative wing.
Two valuable looks at the Great Society are G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot,
The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s
(Penguin, 2008), and Julian E. Zelizer,
The Fierce Urgency of Now
(Penguin, 2015). On the New Left, Todd Gitlin’s
The Sixties
(Bantam, 1987) is masterly and essential; also important is Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin,
The Civil War of the 1960s
(Oxford, 2011). A critical view of the 1960s that greatly influenced George W. Bush is Myron Magnet’s
The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass
(Encounter Books, 2000). Jefferson Cowie offers a rich account of cultural and economic change in the 1970s in
Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
(New Press, 2012). Daniel T. Rodgers’s
Age of Fracture
(Belknap, 2011) is an unparalleled intellectual history of our time.
Memoirs from politicians and their top aides are underrated as sources of historical knowledge. Yes, memoirs reflect the view of those who write them and are typically selective in the slices of history they report. But they can still be richly informative. For this book, I found the following memoirs especially helpful: Richard Nixon’s
RN
(Simon & Schuster, 1978); Bill Clinton’s
My Life
(Knopf, 2004); Michael Waldman’s
POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words That Defined the Clinton Presidency
(Simon & Schuster, 2000); Robert Novak,
The Prince of Darkness
(Three Rivers Press, 2007); Michael Gerson’s
Heroic Conservatism;
George W. Bush’s
Decision Points
(Broadway Paperbacks, 2010); Karl Rove’s
Courage and Consequence
(Threshold Editions, 2010); and David Axelrod’s
Believer
(Penguin Press, 2015). David Frum’s many analytical writings as well as his reflections on his White House experience were also very instructive. His
Dead Right
(Basic Books, 1994) was an early warning to conservatives about the problems they faced.
Memoirs of conservative activists take us inside the mind of the movement and how it strategized its victories (and defeats). William A. Rusher’s
The Rise of the Right
(William Morrow, 1984), which doubles as a history and a personal reminiscence, is a celebratory but candid account that helped guide me here. Two important contemporary memoirs of Goldwater’s defeat from the inside are Stephen Shadegg’s
What Happened to Goldwater?
(Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965) and F. Clifton White (with William J. Gill),
Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement
(Arlington House, 1967).
Scholarly views of conservatism in the 1950s and early 1960s often focused on the rise of the far right, and an important group of academics, notably Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset developed theories around the “status anxiety” experienced by supporters of right-wing movements. This view, carried too far, could be simply dismissive and may have contributed to the academy’s difficulties in hearing what conservatives were saying and seeing why conservatism was on the rise. Christopher Lasch, one of Hofstadter’s greatest students, said that “instead of arguing with opponents,” advocates of this view “simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds.” Nonetheless, these scholars also provided important insights into extremism—their work received wide new attention after the rise of the Tea Party—and their insistence that the radical right represented “pseudo-conservatism” still has relevance for today. The definitive collection of their essays is Daniel Bell, ed.,
The Radical Right
(Anchor Books, 1964). Also important are Richard Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
(first published as an essay in 1964, reissued by Vintage, 2008); and Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab,
The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977
(originally published by Harper & Row in 1970; updated edition, Chicago, 1978).
The rise of Reagan let loose a new wave of historical scholarship on conservatism that tended to take the movement on its own terms, even when the works were critical or partly so. One of the best collections of the work of these new historians is Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds.,
Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s
(Harvard, 2008). See also Mary C. Brennan,
Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP
(University of North Carolina, 1995); Lisa McGirr’s
Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
(Princeton, 2001), a careful examination of the rise of the right from the bottom up in California’s Orange County; Dan T. Carter,
The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics
(Simon & Schuster, 1995); Jonathan Reider,
Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism
(Harvard, 1985); David T. Crichlow,
The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made History
(Harvard, 2007); and Steven M. Teles,
The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement
(Princeton, 2008). This list only scratches the surface, and those interested in a much fuller accounting of the new scholarship exploring the American right should consult Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” in the
Journal of American History
(December, 2011).
Fein rightly notes that over the past two decades, the study of conservatism “has been one of the most dynamic subfields in American history.”
It may be a harbinger of a new period of conservative self-scrutiny that another revival of interest in the thought of Edmund Burke is under way. My views on Burke were especially influenced by a recent book from a Conservative member of the British Parliament, Jesse Norman,
Edmund Burke: The First Conservative
(Basic Books, 2013). Yuval Levin offered
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
(Basic Books, 2014). Levin is the informal leader of the Reform Conservative movement and his book offers insight into the background assumptions of the new disposition. David Bromwich’s
The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke
(Harvard, 2014) is a major new scholarly work on the complexity of Burke’s thinking.
Joe Scarborough’s
The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics—and Can Again
(Random House, 2013) is a lively look at the GOP and especially important for being the rare book by a conservative that reads Eisenhower back into the history of conservatism. My friend John Kenneth White recently published
What Happened to the Republican Party? And What It Means for American Presidential Politics
(Routledge, 2016). The perspective he offers in his fine extended essay is quite compatible with my own.
Several recent works on American politics influenced my overall view, as is clear from my text. Thomas E. Mann and Norman Orenstein’s
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks
(Basic, 2012) is one of our era’s most important books on politics and opened many eyes to the asymmetric nature of polarization. Both are dear and generous friends who have shared their insights over many years. Two books by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson,
Off Center
(Yale, 2006) and
Winner-Take-All Politics
(Simon & Schuster, 2010), are essential to understanding the radicalization of the right. Two eloquent polemics reflect the frustrations this radicalization has called forth from thinkers who hold broadly moderate views: Sam Tanenhaus’s
The Death of Conservatism
(Random House, 2009) and Alan Wolfe’s
Return to Greatness
(Princeton, 2005).
And despite my skepticism about developments on the right over the last fifty years, I turn regularly to two books that remind me of my underlying respect for conservative thought: Robert A. Nisbet’s
Tradition and Revolt
(Vintage, 1970) and William F. Buckley Jr.’s
Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe Our Country
(Random House, 1990).
I got a copy of Phyllis Schlafly’s
A Choice Not an Echo
(Pere Marquette Press, 1964) when I was a preteen fascinated by politics. It has been sitting on my bookshelves for more than fifty years. Few brief, highly polemical tracts have done more to change the trajectory of American politics and American history. To say I disagree with Schlafly is an understatement. But I’m glad I kept the book.
A note about the index:
The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
abortion,
19
–20,
37
,
50
,
69
,
79
–80,
91
,
105
,
106
,
161
,
196
,
230
,
254
,
255
,
257
,
259
,
273
,
282
,
283
,
292
,
354
,
359
,
360
,
361
,
362
,
363
,
369
,
410
–11,
441
Abraham Lincoln,
USS,
211
Abramowitz, Michael,
490
n
Acheson, Dean,
462
Act of Congress
(Kaiser),
316
Adams, John,
388
Adelson, Sheldon,
356
Adenauer, Konrad,
463
Ad Week,
241
affirmative action,
136
Affordable Care Act (ACA) (2010),
6
,
11
,
12
,
17
,
24
,
53
,
82
,
113
–14,
192
–95,
228
,
237
,
239
,
252
,
259
,
265
,
267
,
272
,
284
–85,
303
–18,
325
,
327
,
334
–35,
339
,
352
,
377
,
393
–98,
403
,
409
–13,
419
–21,
426
,
432
–35,
440
–41,
453
–54,
458
Afghanistan,
35
,
82
,
200
–201,
205
,
222
,
227
,
238
,
353
,
447
African-Americans,
7
–8,
10
,
14
–18,
28
,
29
–30,
39
,
41
–49,
57
–63,
68
,
70
,
74
,
81
,
97
–98,
116
,
117
,
135
–36,
158
,
164
–65,
184
–85,
236
–40,
256
–68,
284
–85,
287
,
292
,
319
,
326
,
365
,
379
,
383
,
407
–8,
437
–38,
454
–58,
465
,
466
Age of Fracture
(Rodgers),
337
Age of Reagan, The
(Wilentz),
105
Agriculture Department, U.S.,
32
Ailes, Roger,
148
,
241
–42,
245
–46
air traffic controllers strike (1981),
32
Alexander, Lamar,
133
–34,
391
,
401
Alito, Samuel,
221
Al-jon,
348
Allbaugh, Joe,
390
Allen, Dennis,
352
Allen, Mike,
483
n
Allitt, Patrick,
477
n
al-Qaeda,
200