In the first of a series of books on modern conservatism, Rick Perlstein explores the origins of the movement in the 1950s and its throughline to today's Republican Party. According to Perlstein, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations created a consensus around governing with New Deal style programs. This consensus was strong enough that it was unaffected by the election of Republican President Eisenhower. But during Ike's presidency conservatives who did not agree with the consensus grew vocal and organized.

Perlstein finds the core of this movement in the types of families that own a manufacturing business that employs everyone in a town that feel that increased taxes, regulations, and labor representation don't benefit them at all. They rail against the liberals who have sold out the country to "socialism" while also opposing the big city corporate types who control the Republican party and chose Eisenhower over their favored candidate Robert Taft in the first place (ironically, the movement they create would allow big conglomerates to gobble up family-owned businesses in future decades). There's also a youth movement in the 1960s, but not the counterculture, which creates the Young Americans for Freedom organization who also push for conservative values. Considering how many significant right-wing leaders of the past 60 years were born in the late 30s/early 40s, this cohort had great staying power.

This movement coalesces behind department store owner Barry Goldwater who single-handedly flipped Arizona from Democrat to Republican when elected to the Senate in 1952. Goldwater's organizing skills and confrontational speech style helped him gain support throughout the country. This included the South where white voters had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War but now saw the national Democratic Party taking stronger Civil Rights stances. Goldwater's insistence that Civil Rights legislation and New Deal programs were a threat to freedom, that Soviet-influenced communism was creeping in everywhere, and that the U.S. needed to be more aggressive militarily including using nuclear weapons won him followers while also terrifying a greater number of people.

The second half of the book focuses on Goldwater's 1964 campaign for President. It is sprawling in detail and challenging to keep track of all the figures involved in the Republican primary campaign as well as Lyndon Johnson's administration. It's refreshing that Democrats in 1964 had no compunction about calling out Goldwater's extremism and danger, instead of calls for bipartisanship and a "strong Republican Party" that we hear today. The news media was similarly unequivocal about the danger of Goldwater instead of playing "both sides" debates. That dangerous and insurrectionist right wing ideologues have essentially been normalized today is part of Goldwater's legacy.

Goldwater lost the 1964 election in a landslide with Johnson still holding the record for percentage of popular votes received. But Perlstein notes that in many ways Goldwater won by losing. A speech late in in the campaign by a Goldwater surrogate electrified the conservative movement. The man who gave that speech, Ronald Reagan, will be a key figure of the rest of Perlstein's series of books. ( )

Perlstein obviously can’t have intended this trilogy to be an explainer for Trump—but damn if it doesn’t work like one. ( )

It is, unfortunately, a good time to read about the origins of the southern strategy, conservative backlash to the new deal, white backlash to civil rights, and the resulting political realignment. I knew about this stuff, vaguely, but reading about Barry Goldwater and his movement in context really crystalized how consequential it all was. From the end of Reconstruction through the 1950s, the two political parties had considerable ideological overlap. This is no longer the case, and Barry and his friends deserve a lot of the credit. With missionary fervor and military discipline, conservatives executed a hostile takeover of national Republican party machinery, wresting it away from liberal softies like Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. Though they lost the '64 election spectacularly due to awful campaigning, cold war fears (the Daisy ad goes so hard), Kennedy nostalgia, and LBJ's political genius, history would reward the conservatives and their frothing-at-the-mouth, racist, paranoiac anti-communist supporters immediately and decisively. But I didn't have to tell you that.

I'm too lazy to write all that much more so I'm going to move to bullet points:

What I liked most:

Perlstein demonstrates that the conservative movement was a 60s movement through and through just like civil rights and free speech. It was cool, filled with young people, and scared political insiders. The likes of SDS and CORE had their equals in YAF, the National Review (lol), and Goldwater organizations.

The media got everything wrong. Reading their constant predictions of Goldwater's demise and the fatal damage his loss would inflict on the Republican party is a great reminder that pundits are always full of shit, and love nothing more than rubber-stamping powerful interests while being incorrect all of the time. It's even funnier now because as reporters at prestigious legacy outlets have less power to shape narratives, their pomposity increases.

It's tempting to draw parallels between the conservative takeover of the GOP and Bernie's outsider shot at the Democratic nom in 2016 and 2020. There are enough similarities to make the comparison worthwhile: ideologically committed and disciplined outsiders representing people who feel shunned by both parties coalescing around the presidential campaign of a Senator far afield of the political mainstream. These were movement candidates, powered in unprecedented fashion by small donors, animated by righteous anger at the system and targeted at political parties seen as sluggish and out of touch. It's interesting too that both Sanders and Goldwater were reluctant candidates, because of the perceived impossibility of their goal and its likelihood to ruin their comfortable Senate careers. There are two things, in my view, that ultimately made Goldwater successful and Sanders fall short. First, '64 was one of the last of the "smoke-filled room" primaries. Far fewer delegates were bound to reflect a popular vote than nowadays. The conservative political takeover of the GOP happened procedurally, through a thorough knowledge and steady application of party rules at county, state, and eventually national conventions. Sure, Goldwater encountered the same structural barrier that Sanders did: complete opposition from mainstream media in coordination with powerful capitalists and party donors. But he was able to take over the party machinery *before* popular sentiment was in his corner in a way that Bernie, or any other left challenger to the Democrats, could never do.

The second factor in Goldwater's success and Bernie's failure is that conservatism had backers among the capitalist class, whereas even mild social democracy faces unified opposition from wealth. Some capitalists may have held old-school views about civic virtue among businessmen, and others may have sneezed at such rabid racism and bellicosity, but Goldwater had enough buy-in among the wealthy to significantly bolster his movement. To be super reductive: this is also why Trump's outsider candidacy succeeded and Bernie's didn't.

What I liked least about this book:

I learned that Barry Goldwater is Jewish, a fact that fills me with unutterable shame.

Before the Storm describes the beginnings of the modern Republican/Democratic split. For example in 1960, Vermont went Republican which seems laughably impossible these days. In 1964 it went Democrat for the first time and has not looked back since. Other states similarly lined up to how we recognize them today. What happened? Barry Goldwater, an ultra-conservative, re-arranged politics along the southern strategy which was primarily concerned with civil rights and the ideology of communism versus capitalism ("freedom"). At the same time, as blue collar jobs were replaced with white collar and increased prosperity, politics shifted from what can be done to make life better, to fear of things getting worse, keeping what you have. Thus civil rights and communism were the perfect bogymen to strike fear in the hearts of voters to create a new political force to challenge the existing order. It would take 20 years, and four books by Perlstein to describe the ultimate triumph of Regan and the insanity we have lived with since, culminating most recently with the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. So long as people buy into the fantasies of self-sufficiency and fear mongering, there will be a misinformed, paranoid and angry base of Americans to contend with. ( )

One of the best histories of the American conservative movement. Perlstein does an excellent job of describing the twists and turns that led the Republican party to embrace Goldwater. In his narrative we catch glimpses of individuals who will, down the road, play a major role in the shaping of the GOP. The cold war and the civil rights movement play a major role in the shaping of the neo-cons to come. After two hundred years, Thomas Jefferson's "Fire Bell in the night" is still ringing. Pointing to a issue that will not go away. If you want to understand where we stand as a country, read this book and proceed on to"Nixonland" and "The Invisible Bridge". It will be time well spent. ( )