Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party

In this wistful study of the postwar Republican Party, historian Kabaservice (The Guardians) eulogizes the doomed struggle by moderate Republicans to prevent a conservative takeover of the GOP from the Eisenhower era through the Nixon administration. (The decades from Ronald Reagan’s inauguration to the Tea Party jihad flit by in a 25-page montage.) Kabaservice spotlights seldom remembered Republican moderates, including the intellectuals of the Ripon Society and politicians like George Romney, John Lindsay, and Ohio congressman Charles Whalen—Republicans who, he contends, reached out to minorities and youth, questioned the Vietnam War, and accepted the New Deal while trying to tame its excesses. (As he celebrates this lineage, it’s their enemies, the fire breathing Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich conservatives, who supply the narrative’s energy and élan.) This is hard-core political history, full of bitter campaigns, factional infighting, and backroom deals, and Kabaservice tells it with fluency, insight, and colorful detail. Unfortunately, his focus on clashing ideologies and temperaments slights underlying interest-group politics; he says little, for example, about Republican business constituencies that benefit from conservatives’ devotion to the needs of wealthy “job-creators.” Kabaservice’s well-told but blinkered history neglects crucial reasons for the Republican flight from the middle. (Jan.)