It’s 2016 and we’re in the midst of a very chippy presidential campaign season, especially on the Republican side. Much has been written in other places about the unsavory cast of characters we have in this race — and I may one day have more to say on both the Democrats and the Republicans — so I won’t rehash much of that here. Suffice it to say that we’ve seen demogoguery at its most intense in recent memory, and we’ve seen an uprising against party establishment on both sides.
Things have been progressively getting worse in our political discourse for many years, of course. A lot has been spurred on and accelerated by a visceral reaction to the election of Barack Obama in 2008, with the Republicans in Congress vowing to not give an inch at all — on anything. With our societal habit of forgetting our past and this modern laser focus on whatever’s happened most recently, it’s easy to think that things have always been this way. However, 60 years ago, things were very different in our political parties. Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, takes a look at what happened in the Republican Party to get us to this point.
See, back in the day, the two major parties both had a diversity ideologies. There was none of this “Democrat == Liberal, Republican == Conservative” stuff like we have these days; each party had a “conservative” wing (defined in many different ways, depending on who you were talking about), a “liberal” or “progressive” wing (ditto on who you were referring to) and, of course, a middle ground, or “moderate” wing. There could be overlap between the wings — social conservatives are different from economic conservatives, for example — and there were times when compromise between these groups was common. Then things started moving in both parties, spurred on by anti-Communists on one hand and the Civil Rights movement on the other, which ended up getting us to our current polarized state. Kabaservice lays this out very well in his book, which lays out in great detail the motive forces behind the current ideological divide.
The book starts out by going briskly through the Eisenhower presidency, mainly to point out how postwar peace and an overwhelmingly popular president allowed for much collaboration among the parties on domestic issues, such as the interstate highway boom and the suburban shift (more on that in an upcoming book review 😉 ), and somewhat on foreign policy, at least in the beginning — wrapping up the Korean conflict and fighting the spread of Communism. Then Senator Joseph McCarthy comes along and stirs up some pretty strident anti-Communist feelings, which resonate with conservative activists to such a degree that anti-Communist organizations start popping up (e.g. the John Birch Society) that will have a later influence on the conservative movement. Combine this with the push for civil rights for black folk, which causes massive consternation in the South (especially among conservative Democrats) and yet has much support from the progressive wing of the Republican Party, and you have the ingredients for a party revolution in a few years.
Kabaservice then takes a closer look at things on a year-by-year basis as things start happening — Nixon is nominated in 1960 to succeed Ike, but he loses to Kennedy in the general election (and later loses in the ’62 governor’s race in California). It is then that the conservatives — who learned new tricks from the McCarthy followers — who see a path to taking over the Republican Party by 1964. We get to see grassroots organizing in action as we look at all the events that lead up to Barry Goldwater’s eventual nomination in 1964 — and the mighty fall he takes against Lyndon Johnson that year. The record shows that the conservative takeover is slowed but not stopped, as party officials begin to countenance the abandonment of the “Party of Lincoln” ethos that remains in the progressive and moderate wings of the party in order to chase votes among Southern racists. Later we see how this results in Nixon, who starts out as a moderate favorite but is ever the political chameleon, winning in ’68 and ’72 and the lessons learned along the way. The cyclical nature of the “right-wing revolt” within the Republican party — from McCarthy to Goldwater to the Religious Right to Reagan to the Tea Party — is highlighted to great effect in this narrative.
This can be dry material if you’re not really into politics and if this story were told by a writer with lesser talents, but Kabaservice manages to make this 500-page book read like a novel in parts. Overall, this was an effortless book to read considering its length, though I’m admittedly in the target audience here as far as interests go. I found myself reading 100-page chunks in a single sitting before I had to force myself to do other things (like sleep, or get some other work done).
There are a couple areas that I thought could have been handled differently. For example, I feel that the influence of cultural conservatives in the ’70s was given pretty short shrift in this book; Weyrich and Falwell were mentioned, but the rise of the Religious Right isn’t the star of the mid-’70s portions of the book that I would have thought it would be considering popular thought on the matter. By contrast, the John Birch Society and other right-wing activist groups are shown to have a large effect (sometimes indirectly) on proceedings throughout. In addition, the last 30 years are lumped together much like the Eisenhower portion of the book, but due to the longer time period, I don’t think it works quite as well as it does for the Ike section. Of course, there is a valid assumption that the author seems to make with this book — that much of that large chunk of time is within the target reader’s lifetime and remembrance, and by that time, anyway, the die had been cast. However, as one who’s grown up in this period, I find the story’s a little rushed through these events.
There’s a lot of history here worth reading about. If you’re curious at all about how we got here, give this book a read.