The right’s horrifying edge: History shows surprising pattern about its demise

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http://www.salon.com/2014/08/05/rick_perlstein_presents_ronald_reagan_exorcist/



Rick Perlstein’s three-part history of modern American politics has been one long cautionary tale about liberals writing off the right. “Before the Storm,” his extraordinary account of the rise of Barry Goldwater, opened with New York Times columnist James Reston writing Goldwater’s political obituary, after the GOP’s 1964 humiliation by Lyndon Johnson. “He has wrecked his party for a long time to come and is not even likely to control the wreckage.” Four years later, of course, Republicans took back the White House, and thanks to the fire on the right Goldwater ignited, they held it for 20 of the next 24 years.

“The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan” ends much the way “Before the Storm” began: with the Times writing the last chapter of Ronald Reagan’s career – in 1976, after he lost the GOP nomination to Gerald Ford. “At sixty-five years of age,” Reagan was “too old to consider seriously another run at the Presidency,” the paper editorialized. We know how that story really ended.

I always think of Perlstein when I’m tempted to predict the coming end of the GOP, when I’m sure demography will doom it, or when I believe its Tea Party fringe has done something so awful and destructive that this time, the American people will finally rise up, and send the haters and the know-nothings and the fear-mongers packing. Like, let’s say, Sen. Ted Cruz cynically blowing up the possibility of a House GOP border-crisis bill. That’s gotta wake people up, right?

But liberals like me have waited for that great rising up day many times in history, and just as it seems ready to arrive, the right rises up again, instead. People like me thought Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were too extreme and divisive to lead their parties, let alone the nation, and Perlstein lives to show us in cringe-making detail how wrong we were. Read “The Invisible Bridge,” and you won’t be able to write off the idea of President Ted Cruz entirely. (I do nonetheless, but not blithely.)