Important New Book: Before The Storm by Rick Perlstein

I'll definitely have to buy this one...--Dictynna

FDL Book Salon: Before the Storm, Pt. 1

By Digby

(Today we’ll be discussing Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein. We’ll be reading Part 2 for the following week when Rick himself will be joining us — JH)

I grew up in a very rightwing household. My father was born in 1922 and has never voted for a Democrat, including Roosevelt in 1944 at the height of WWII. I recently came across a letter from my mother to her parents in 1960 in which she lamented about "that Mr Kennedy" stealing the election. Although we lived in many places, they were California Republicans — the home of both Nixon and Reagan. (Both of those presidents used the Southern Strategy to get elected, but they weren’t of the southern hierarchy that makes up the GOP today.) This was arch-conservatism of the old school.

Of all the politicians my Dad admired over the years (and there were actually precious few — he’s got a good radar for phonies) there was only one he truly respected: Barry Goldwater. This was his kind of guy — a straight talker, completely open about his beliefs, unsanctimonious, a man’s man without unnecessary polish or attitude. And he was as conservative as they came, just like my dad — an anti-communist to the core, a strong believer in the use of military power and a fundamental belief in self-reliance (even if he, like my father, fudged the details.) These were people who never signed on to the New Deal and at the time Goldwater ran for president, there were very few liberal establishment types who believed such people even existed.

FDL Book Salon — Before the Storm, Pt. 2

By Henry Farrell

(Today’s guest poster is Henry Farrell from Crooked Timber. Rick Perlstein will also be joining us in the comments. You can read last week’s Pt. 1 of the discussion here.)

"Before the Storm” is an important work of American history. It captures what it was like to be an angry right-winger in the 1960s, and has been praised by rightwingers like William Kristol and William F. Buckley for telling it as it was. But if it was just a piece of political history, it wouldn’t have been as influential as it’s been. It’s also an argument about politics, and a gameplan for pissed-off Democrats who feel (as Goldwater’s conservatives felt) that they’re badly served by a complaisant party hierarchy. In Kos’s words:

The parallels to today are startling, a sort of Dean bizarro world stuck on opposite day — a Republican Party that was trying to be "Democrat-lite" and an establishment hostile to "outsider" forces. With Goldwater railing against his party’s establishment and the special interests that controlled it. Throw in innovative use of tactics and technology (Goldwater pioneered the use of direct mail) and a crushing defeat, and you’ve got the Dean phenomenon.

This is right, but it’s only part of Perlstein’s story. Before the Storm does have a lot to say about movement politics. It’s not Goldwater who’s the main protagonist in Perlstein’s account; it’s the conservative activists who used his candidacy to rebuild American politics from the grassroots. But Perlstein also is interested in ideas – as the subtitle says, the book is about the “Unmaking of the American Consensus.” Perlstein wants to know how the smug liberal consensus underlying the Affluent Society of 1960s America was shattered, and replaced by a new, conservative-friendly, set of received wisdoms. “Before the Storm” only begins to describe how this happened, but suggests that it surely had its origins with Goldwater’s supporters. In short, Perlstein tells us that you have to understand both movement politics and ideas if you want to understand why the conservatives won.