A great strength of the two-party system is that basically we have been in general agreement on
    many things and neither party has been the party of extremes or radicals, but temporarily some
    extreme elements have come into one of the parties and have driven out or locked out or booed out
    or heckled out the moderates.
        -Lyndon Baines Johnson, October 24, 1964

    I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right.  There is only an up or down: Up
    to man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order; or down
    to the ant heap of totalitarianism.
        -Ronald Wilson Reagan, October 27, 1964, A Time for Choosing

This is a terrific, nearly novelistic, account of the movement, mostly subterranean at the time, by American conservatives to take back the Republican Party from the Eastern Establishment, after several decades in the wilderness, and run one of their own, Senator Barry Goldwater, for president in 1964.  Author Rick Perlstein--though a self described "European-style Social Democrat" (if I recall correctly from his appearance on Booknotes)--is clearly fascinated by the colorful characters, Byzantine machinations, and heartfelt ideals that went into this epic struggle and he's managed to turn a topic that might have been dry and scholarly into an exciting story about the triumph of ideas.  In many ways the book owes less to Teddy White, the erstwhile chronicler of Presidential campaigns, than to Fletcher Knebel, the great thriller writer of the 60s, whose bestsellers tended to rely on the existence of Vast Right Wing Conspiracies long before it was cool to see them lurking behind every subpoena.  Perlstein actually gets to write about a real conspiracy here, the plan by a reasonably small band of political activists to force their party to return to its conservative principles, and it makes for lively political history.  Perhaps the best facet of the book is that he is always fair, and often sympathetic, to a Right Wing which has all too often been the subject of shallow and brutally unfavorable caricature in the journalism and academic writing about American politics.

As compelling as Perlstein's authoritatively detailed narrative is though, one wishes that he'd provided an equally thorough  political and historical analysis of these events.  In the introduction to the book he states that the conservative movement must be seen as part and parcel of the broader social upheaval of the 60s, and cites Murray Kempton to the effect that it may have been more significant than the more well known activism of the Left.  I think this thesis is somewhat dubious, but it hardly matters because he doesn't really bother trying to prove it ("We must assume that the conservative revival is the youth movement of the '60s").  I can't emphasize enough how open minded and generous Perlstein is in examining the ideas and motivations of those on the Right (whose politics were after all antithetical to his own), but at the same time it seems as if he may have simply expected readers to share his assumption that prior to the Goldwater candidacy there existed what he calls in the books subtitle an "American Consensus" and that the breaking of that consensus was necessarily revolutionary.  On the contrary, as the story he tells here amply demonstrates, what appeared to be a consensus was a flukish and necessarily temporary construct, a function mostly of the bizarre politics, and unfortunate American history, of Race.

The two great American political parties can be roughly defined as standing for freedom from government (Republicans) and reliance on government (Democrats).  It is for this basic reason that the Republican Party is said to be a party of ideas, while the Democrats are a party of groups.  Typically this dichotomy has meant that the two parties have been fairly evenly matched, as the number of folks demanding government largesse has seldom been sufficient to tilt the balance entirely in the Democrats favor.  And speaking in the most general terms, it has generally tended to be the case that the Republicans were the party of the haves, Democrats of the have nots.  But in the years after the Civil War there was a very odd exception to this rule : blacks, even poor blacks, who would normally be expected to adhere to the party of big government, were instead loyal to the Republican Party which had freed the slaves.  On the other hand, White Southerners, though culturally conservative, devoutly religious, stubbornly independent, and relatively economically advantaged, at least in comparison to their black neighbors, remained loyal to the Democrats, who, even under FDR, reciprocated by defending their right to maintain Jim Crow segregation.  The result of all this was that the Republicans remained mostly a party of the North, despite immigration and industrialization which should have benefited Democrats.  Meanwhile, the Democrats completely dominated the South, even though their natural constituency in the black population voted, when allowed, against them.  But this was a situation that was inherently unstable.

Then, in the wake of the Great Depression, the delicately balanced numbers did shift and tilted in favor of the Democrats.  Although obviously simplistic and ultimately mistaken, it is easy to see why people blamed capitalism for the collapse of America's economy in the late 20s and early 30s and the Republican Party, the party of the unfettered Free Market, was understandably made to pay the price for the calamity .  Given this context it is also easy to see why many in the Republican Party became little better than me-too New Dealers, accepting without question the mammoth expansion of the role of government in the economy.  But as recovery came, with the rebirth of industry to supply armaments to first the Allies and then our own Armed Forces, and as the GOP shifted Left, the balance did not return.  Blacks had at last followed their perceived economic self-interest and transferred their allegiance to the Democratic Party.  However the corresponding shift of Southern whites to the GOP failed to occur right away because the rather patrician Republican Party was, somewhat to its credit, resistant to playing the race card in the same way that the Democrats had for so long in the South.  Because of this strange convergence of unusual political forces, the Democratic Party was the majority party in American politics, at least at the legislative level, for sixty years (until the 1994 Republican landslide).

This central fact was obscured to some extent by the victories of Eisenhower in 1952 and of Nixon in 1968.  They gave the illusion that the GOP was competitive at the national level.  But if you dig just a tiny bit deeper you find that both were elected only when Democrats had gotten the country mired in intractable foreign wars; one was a war hero, the other his Vice President; both agreed to leave the Welfare State largely intact or even to expand it; both agreed to leave the Soviet Union intact; and both were, largely thanks to these moderate/liberal positions, anointed by the Eastern Establishment of the Party.  Lost in all this was the genuine voice of the Party, the Robert Taft style conservatism which distrusted powerful domestic government and foreign entanglements.

It was the great insight of those who organized the conservative revival and the Goldwater candidacy that you could win the Republican nomination by giving vent to that true voice.  Perlstein has a great section featuring Clarence Manion, one of the may unknown heroes of the movement who are here given their due.  Manion's plan for 1960 was :

    ...to build movements behind both a Republican and a Southern Democrat running on conservative
    platforms, watch as both were turned back at their respective party conventions, then merge the two
    organizations to form a new party to back one of the candidates, who, combining the votes of
    Dixiecrats and Taft Republicans, could finally block the major-party candidates from their
    electoral college majority.

This did not, of course, happen in 1960, but with the increasing racial divisiveness of the Civil Rights struggle, folks in the movement soon realized that they did not even need the third party, that they could use the same strategy to remake the Republican Party into a conservative party, and make the Party competitive in the South.

In Goldwater they found a vehicle to test their theory, but the candidate's shortcomings--such as temper, bluntness, woeful communication skills, lack of decisiveness and organization, etc.---which Perlstein does a good job of demonstrating, and the "tragic" circumstances of the Kennedy assassination (which as Perlstein notes was cynically exploited by the Press and Democrats to discredit "Right Wing Extremism", much as the Oklahoma City bombing would be brilliantly manipulated thirty years later by Bill Clinton and the Press to bring Newt Gingrich to heel) ) created a climate in which their great experiment would fail miserably.  But at the end of the 1964 campaign there emerged the nearly perfect candidate, a figure who would achieve the conservative apotheosis : Ronald Reagan.   In due time, and admittedly taking advantage of another disastrous Democratic presidency, Reagan would restore conservative Republicanism to its natural place in the public debate, in rough balance with the liberal Democrats.  Then in 1994, the generation of Republican leaders who had imbibed these lessons would finally restore the balance in Congress, largely on the strength of a resurgence of the Party in the South.

We are left today with the two parties occupying a position of near equilibrium.  Looking back from this point, it should be clear that the "American Consensus" was always a fiction, that it was a product not of broad political agreement, but of a series of historical/political aberrations.  It is perhaps helpful to view the campaign of Barry Goldwater as extending from the publication of The Conscience of a Conservative (read Orrin's review)--which was written for him by Brent Bozell, brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr.--to the Time for Choosing speech--delivered on his behalf by Ronald Reagan.  Without seeking to diminish the man in any way, one might say, not that had Goldwater not existed, the Right would have had to invent him, but instead, as Perlstein shows, that they did indeed invent him, or at least tried to.  It also seems fair to say that the events of the book represent a revolution only in the sense that they brought politics full circle, back to the traditional divide between liberty and security, back to the confrontation between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.

None of the foregoing should be taken in any way to suggest that the book is not eminently worth reading.  It is in fact one of the better political histories you'll ever read and I absolutely agree with him about the importance of Goldwater and the conservative movement in general.  Considering the amount of research that went into it and that the book already extends to 600 plus pages (with footnotes), it is certainly understandable that these sorts of contextual issues are not really taken up in the text of the book.  And I'm sure that, having finished what is already a splendid volume, Rick Perlstein wanted nothing more than to get on with the rest of his life.  But it would have been great to have an afterword or something where he drew some personal conclusions about what it all means.  Actually, there's probably a shorter book to be made out of this kind od discussion, one in which he could bring his own liberal leanings into play and present his arguments that there was, and presumably should have been, an American Consensus and that the conservative movement destroyed it.  He's a young man (one of the Voice Literary Supplement's Writers on the Verge) and I for one look forward to his future books, regardless of whether he addresses these questions or moves on to entirely new subjects.

(Reviewed:12-Jun-01)

Grade: (A) Orrin C. Judd

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