Why the Right Went Wrong

Conservatism--From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond

E.J. Dionne

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781476763804
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476763811
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

From the author of Why Americans Hate Politics, the New York Times bestselling and “notably fair-minded” (The New York Times Book Review), story of the GOP’s fracturing—from the 1964 Goldwater takeover to the Trump spectacle.

Why the Right Went Wrong offers an “up to the moment” (The Christian Science Monitor) historical view of the right since the 1960s. Its core contention is that American conservatism and the Republican Party took a wrong turn when they adopted Barry Goldwater’s worldview during and after the 1964 campaign. The radicalism of today’s conservatism is not the product of the Tea Party, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne writes. The Tea Partiers are the true heirs to Goldwater ideology. The purity movement did more than drive moderates out of the Republican Party—it beat back alternative definitions of conservatism.

Since 1968, no conservative administration—not Nixon not Reagan not two Bushes—could live up to the rhetoric rooted in the Goldwater movement that began to reshape American politics fifty years ago. The collapse of the Nixon presidency led to the rise of Ronald Reagan, the defeat of George H.W. Bush, to Newt Gingrich’s revolution. Bush initially undertook a partial modernization, preaching “compassionate conservatism” and a “Fourth Way” to Clinton’s “Third Way.” Conservatives quickly defined him as an advocate of “big government” and not conservative enough on spending, immigration, education, and Medicare. A return to the true faith was the only prescription on order. The result was the Tea Party, which Dionne says, was as much a reaction to Bush as to Obama.

The state of the Republican party, controlled by the strictest base, is diminished, Dionne writes. It has become white and older in a country that is no longer that. It needs to come back to life for its own health and that of the country’s, and in Why the Right Went Wrong, Dionne “expertly delineates where we are and how we got there” (Chicago Tribune)—and how to return.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: What Happened to Conservatism?
• 1. The Ambiguous Hero
• 2. In the Shadow of Goldwater
• 3. From Radicalism to Governing
• 4. The End of the Reagan Majority
• 5. The Gingrich Revolution and Conservatism’s Second Chance
• 6. Put on a Compassionate Face
• 7. Double-Edged “Strategery”
• 8. “I Can Hear You”
• 9. The New, New, Old Right
• 10. Dreams of Celestial Choirs
• 11. The Logic of Obstruction
• 12. The Tea Party Overreaches and Republicans Wage Class War
• 13. Saying Yes and no to Obama
• 14. The Fever That Wouldn’t Break
• 15. Reforming Conservatism or Trumping It
• 16. Up From Goldwaterism
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• A Brief Bibliographic Essay
• Index
• Copyright