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

by Rick Perlstein

The best measure of a politician’s electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people’s desires, but how well he could tap their fears.

America would remember the sixties as a decade of the left. It must be remembered instead as a decade when the polarization began.

The right achieved a major victory when the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 gave states license to pass their own right-to-work laws.

Until about 1958, Republicans were more liberal on race than the Democrats were (although it wasn’t hard to take a liberal stand on race so long as it was seen as a Southern problem, and the Republicans didn’t have any white Southerners to placate).

“Its success,” agreed Barron’s, “springs in part from the author’s ability to give humanitarian reasons for following policies which usually have been associated with a lust for gain.”

OnConscience of a Conservative

Fidel Castro, a former student at a Jesuit high school, noted that moralistic young Catholics made the best revolutionaries. Goldwater would soon discover the same thing.