Word: goldwaterism
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In his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Rick Perlstein offers an intriguing thesis: While Goldwater may have been the biggest popular-vote loser in American presidential-race history, the movement which garnered him the 1964 Republican nomination laid the groundwork for...
Perlstein is a talented political writer—one whose work has appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect, Slate and The Village Voice, among others—and his seductively colorful writing style is in full form here. The book begins with tantalizing, epic promise. From the wreckage of...
Perlstein’s greatest strength is his ability to craft a good narrative—even if, at 516 pages, Before the Storm is a whopper. In the book’s opening chapters Perlstein nicely depicts the Arizona cowboy milieu from which Goldwater emerged, even as he reinforces...
...while well-written, could have been significantly shorter and just as effective. If a politician was militant and conservative in the postwar era, the reader quickly learns, then he was automatically labeled another “Hitler.” While driving to work, Charlton Heston suddenly converts to Goldwaterism. Writes Perlstein, “Looking up at an ‘In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right’ billboard at a Sacramento intersection, road-to-Damascus-style, on the way to a movie shoot, he thought to himself...
Meantime, the Republicans do not inspire confidence that they have overcome their past tendencies toward spectacular acts of self-destruction. The party's smart money last year settled on George W. Bush precisely because he was thought immune to the party's traditional suicidal impulses, to "extremism in the defense...