Conservative - Reagan Revolution - Conservative America
The Conservative Revolution : The Movement That Remade America by Lee Edwards (Hardcover - April 1999) - The Conservative Revolution describes how a modern intellectual movement muscled its way into American politics by examining the lives of four major right-wing figures: Ohio senator Robert Taft, who might have become president if Dwight Eisenhower had chosen not to run in 1952; Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 campaign energized young conservatives even as LBJ trounced him; Ronald Reagan, the man conservatives think belongs on Mount Rushmore; and Newt Gingrich, who put the GOP in charge of Congress for the first time since the 1950s and then stumbled at the hard task of running a majority party. Edwards himself is a conservative partisan, and admits that "those seeking absolute objectivity will not find it here."
The Great Betrayal : How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy by Patrick J. Buchanan (Hardcover - April 1998) - Political pundit and two-time Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is best known for his sharp-edged cultural conservatism. The Great Betrayal, however, is an economic manifesto that promotes what Buchanan calls "economic nationalism." Buchanan believes that free trade serves the interests of Wall Street, not Main Street. Transnational corporations rake in huge profits, but ordinary Americans see few benefits. Instead, they suffer from free trade's bad consequences: flat wages for workers, increased drug trafficking, and environmental deterioration. Markets should serve people, says Buchanan, not the other way around. "The economy is not the country; the country comes first," he writes. Buchanan offers a protectionist political agenda--one that many modern conservatives may not like, but one that Buchanan says puts him in the fine tradition of Washington, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. A forceful polemic challenging elite economic opinion.
Let Us Talk of Many Things : The Collected Speeches with New Commentary by the Author by William F. Buckley Jr. (Hardcover ) - It's impossible to think of the modern conservative movement without the deep influence of William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review and host of the television series Firing Line. Yet Buckley's evangelizing didn't just occur on the printed page or go out on the airwaves; he gave countless numbers of speeches during the second half of the 20th century. Several dozen of the most significant are collected in Let Us Talk of Many Things, from a 1950 address at Yale University hinting at themes that would be developed fully in God and Man at Yale to a 1999 talk to the Heritage Foundation (on the meaning of heritage, appropriately enough). In between, there are comments on Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the failure of the drug war
My Love Affair With America : The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative by Norman Podhoretz (Hardcover - July 2000) - Norman Podhoretz has written several books that draw from his life story and recount his neoconservative migration from the political Left to the political Right (Breaking Ranks, Ex-Friends). What's striking about My Love Affair with America is how he describes both places as "uncomfortably similar": "It was because I could not stomach the terrible and untrue things [my left-wing friends in 1960s] were saying about this country that I wound up breaking with them.... But then, in the mid-1990s, there unexpectedly came an outburst of anti-Americanism even among some of the very conservatives" whom he had least expected to demonstrate it. (He has in mind, among other incidents, the semi-famous "First Things" debate collected in The End of Democracy?). Yet this book is not a dissection of political viewpoints: "Beyond being defended by a counterattack against its assailants and an exposure of their misrepresentations and slanders, America deserved to be glorified with a full throat and a whole heart." In a world that rewards intellectual cynicism and regards patriotism--such a basic human sentiment--as "the last refuge of scoundrels," this is a refreshing approach. Podhoretz loves America perhaps only the way members of immigrant families can: they, better than anybody else, understand what the alternatives are to life in the United States.
How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy : (And Found Inner Peace) by Harry Stein (Hardcover ) - Conservatives aren't born--they evolve. And for Wall Street Journal ethics columnist Harry Stein, that evolution began with the birth of his daughter. But Stein's memoir on transforming from bleeding-heart liberal to someone who gets junk mail from Patrick Buchanan isn't a sappy tale of fatherhood; it's a witty, intelligent account of how one man began to think for himself. "I remember when I was called a fascist for the first time," Stein writes about a dinner conversation in which he sided with Dan Quayle over the Murphy Brown/single-motherhood controversy. While alienating his left-leaning friends, Stein takes to task The New York Times, AIDS hysteria, men-hating feminists, and Bill Clinton, just to mention a few bastions of liberalism that contributed to his social makeover. As if to prove he didn't start out this way, Stein spends a great deal of time trying to convince the reader of his liberal roots. His wife, a former story editor for a major motion picture company, once belonged to a group called Women Against Right-Wing Scum. His sexual escapades as a single man (including a trip to a New York "swap" club) make up a whole chapter. He also writes of his admiration for Tennessee Williams (whom he once interviewed) as if to say, "See, I am not a homophobe."
The Politics of Bad Faith : The Radical Assault on America's Future by David Horowitz (Paperback - March 2000) - The author of Radical Son returns with a vigorous polemic against the American Left. Showing that liberals and conservatives have sharply contrasting views on the ideas of freedom and equality--and defining these differences in forceful prose--Horowitz goes on to blame the Left for many of what he believes to be America's ills, including multiculturalism, feminism, and economic socialism. "We speak reflexively of leftists as 'progressives,' even though their doctrines are rooted in nineteenth-century prejudice and have been refuted by a historical record of unprecedented bloodshed and oppression," writes Horowitz, an ex-Marxist who is now a staunch right-winger. In an especially controversial chapter, he charges gay-rights activists with creating a political environment that made it almost impossible for the public health community to react effectively to the AIDS crisis. Like the man himself, this book will attract lovers and loathers, depending on their political creed. For conservative readers, he performs the helpful task of clarifying their own convictions; for left-of-center ones, he provides a penetrating glimpse into the conservative mindset.
The Death of Outrage : Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals by William J. Bennett (Paperback - October 1999) - Don't look for President Clinton's picture in The Book of Virtues; bestselling author and former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett considers Bill Clinton uniquely unvirtuous. In the wake of the White House intern sex scandal, Bennett accuses Clinton of crimes at least as serious as those committed by Richard Nixon during the Watergate imbroglio. Rising above anti-Clinton polemics, The Death of Outrage urges the American public--which initially displayed not much more than a collective shrug--to take issue with the president's private and public conduct. Clinton should be judged by more than the state of the economy, implores Bennett. The commander in chief sets the moral tone of the nation; a reckless personal life and repeated lying from the bully pulpit call for a heavy sanction. The American people should demand nothing less, says the onetime federal drug czar. In each chapter, Bennett lays out the rhetorical defenses made on Clinton's behalf (the case against him is "only about sex," harsh judgmentalism has no place in modern society, independent counsel Kenneth Starr is a partisan prosecutor, etc.) and picks them apart. He may not convince everybody, but this is an effective conservative brief against Bill Clinton.
Goldwater : The Man Who Made a Revolution by Lee Edwards (Paperback - May 1997) - Conservatives in the United States frequently celebrate the Reagan revolution in the 1980s. Yet, as Lee Edwards shows in this definitive biography, Reagan might never have made it to the White House if Barry Goldwater had not won the Republican nomination for president in 1964. Goldwater lost to President Johnson by a wide margin that year, but he fundamentally reshaped the GOP in the process.
The scrappy Arizona senator is best known for his raw, Western-style conservatism that featured strong libertarian leanings and a devil-may-care wit. When he retired after serving six terms, Washington, D.C., suddenly became a less interesting place. Edwards writes as a sympathizer, but also offers a nuanced understanding of the man who famously declared, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.... Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" Edwards renders the most penetrating account to date of the icon who put the conservative movement on to the national stage.
President Reagan : The Role of a Lifetime by Lou Cannon (Paperback ) - This is possibly the single best book available on the Reagan presidency. Lou Cannon began reporting on Ronald Reagan as a journalist when Reagan first ran for governor of California in 1966, and then covered him again in Washington after his 1980 presidential election. In short, there is probably no man or woman who has spent more years writing about the Gipper than Cannon. The result is a magisterial account of Reagan's two terms in the White House. Cannon is broadly sympathetic to his subject, but also coolly detached. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime pulled off the remarkable feat of winning praise from both Reagan's admirers and detractors when it was first published in 1991. This reissued edition, which includes a new preface describing Reagan's postpresidential descent into the abyss of Alzheimer's disease, must now be considered the standard text on the subject
Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade by Nina Easton (Hardcover - August 2000) - "There is a hidden history in American politics, the other side of the baby-boom generation: political rebels of the Right who emerged on campus in the 1970s and went to overturn the established liberal order," writes Nina J. Easton in Gang of Five. "To understand them is to understand what politics has become and what it will be." Her book is probably best described as a quintuple biography of five movement conservatives in the midst of their political careers: Clint Bolick, a civil rights lawyer; William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard magazine; David McIntosh, a GOP congressman running for governor of Indiana in the fall of 2000; Grover Norquist, an antitax activist and one of Washington, D.C.'s most prominent right-wingers; and Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition maestro. "To understand these five men is to understand the real conservative movement," writes Easton.
The Right Moment : Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics by Matthew Dallek (Hardcover - September 2000) - When Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination for governor of California in 1966, The New York Times called the GOP's decision "against all counsels of common sense and political prudence." That comment probably deserves to go down in history as one of the most spectacularly wrong political assessments ever to appear in a newspaper. As historian Matthew Dallek writes in The Right Moment, his account of Reagan's campaign against Democratic governor Pat Brown, "Ronald Reagan redefined politics like no one since Franklin Roosevelt." The future president's "stunning, out-of-nowhere victory," in which he beat Brown by nearly a million votes, altered the course of American politics for at least a generation: it signaled liberalism's descent into the fatal politics of 1970s McGovernism, announced the rebirth of the conservative movement out of the ashes of Barry Goldwater's crushing defeat two years earlier, and foreshadowed Reagan's greater accomplishments on the national stage.