Digby: Aggrieved Conservatives

I have hesitated to link to Rick Perlstein's Princeton speech, published here on Huffington Post, because he makes a very kind statement about me in it, and I sound like I'm tooting my own horn by posting about it. But, I decided to post about it anyway, because what he says is so important for people to understand: Republican intellectuals like to promote themselves as the party of Goldwater the principled conservative and Reagan the optimistic conservative, but they are actually the party of Richard Nixon, the aggrieved conservative. Their penchant for secrecy, their disdain for democratic processes, their lawless political tactics and their belief that might makes right are best understood by looking at them in that light.