Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

The old ways of talking about politics were falling away. In their place, both candidates would serve up rhetoric that autumn that tingled with strains of utopianism—intercut with equal and opposite strains of apocalypticism. They told stories of hope, of a society that could not but surpass any the world had ever known. They also told stories that spoke to the dark, looming fear that the world bequeathed us by science, technology, and the Pax Americana would not make us more secure but might instead unleash the devil.