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Zusatztext on SOULED OUT “A deeply personal and searchingly intelligent reflection on the noble history! recent travails and likely prospects of American liberalism.” Informationen zum Autor E.J. Dionne Jr. Klappentext 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.Why the Right Went Wrong 1 THE AMBIGUOUS HERO Ronald Reagan as Conservatism’s Model and Problem “You can choose your Reagan.” “I was 13 years old. . . . There was one afternoon my father called me into the room and he said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to watch this. You’ve got to see what this man is saying.’ And there in the TV was this former actor from California. And he looks right at me. He looked right at my father. But he was really speaking to an entire nation. And he said things to us that intuitively made sense. He talked about liberty and freedom. He talked about balanced budgets. He talked about traditional values and personal responsibility. And my father looked at me and said, ‘Well, son, we must be Republicans.’ And, indeed, we were, and are. That’s the party I joined.” On a late June night in Mississippi in 2014, Chris McDaniel offered this warm invocation of the Gipper to open what most thought would be a concession speech. McDaniel had just lost a bitterly contested Republican runoff to incumbent senator Thad Cochran. The result came as a shock to McDaniel and his supporters. Just three weeks earlier, he had run first in the primary, only narrowly missing the majority he needed to avoid a second round. Incumbents forced into runoffs usually lose in Mississippi. Cochran won anyway. As it happened, it was not a concession speech at all. McDaniel pledged to fight on and contest the outcome—in Reagan’s name, of course—though his efforts ultimately failed. The decisive v...
