In fact, I was at the Lyndon Baines Johnson PERLSTEIN: Well, I-I-I-I paid supplication at the foot of hisĭriveway in-Paradise Valley in Phoenix. Opposite directions when confronted with the same set of facts. Politically incommensurate, I mean, absolutely be coming from exact Started doing, and just being astonished at how much anger there was,Īnd really kind of coming around to the idea that people can really be Mc-McVeigh did with what Newt Gingrich was up to, but I just rememberīefore that bombing listening to t-right-wing talk radio, which I Ideas, you know, no reason to-to-to-to equate what Timothy That-that people could get so passionate about these right-wing Many months later was the Oklahoma City bombing. But it still came asĪ surprise to me, and the anger and the passion. I certainly knew Republicans and conservatives. There was at ideas that I took almost for granted not for grantedīecause, you know, my family's relatively conservative, and, you know, It just startled me to realize how much grassroots anger Of the thinking was quite conventionally left-wing, at least in the I had come from a campus-based environment in which a lot Was a really important experience for me.īut that was right around the time of the 1994 mid-term congressionalĮlections.

Interest tone that deals with what happens in universities, and that It has articles about new intellectual trends, But it's-it's-it's more like a general interest magazineįor academics. It'sīeen described, a little uncharitably, as the academics' People PERLSTEIN: Linguafranca: The Review of Academic Life. politics-from concerns over threats from abroad to concerns about disorder at home from campaigns plotted in back rooms to those staged for television. Perlstein argues that the 1964 election led to a key shift in U.S. The story of the rise of conservatism during a liberal era has never been told, and Rick Perlstein's gutsy narrative history is full of portraits of figures from Nelson Rockefeller to Bill Moyers. But by the campaign's end the consensus found itself squeezed from the left and the right and two decades later, the conservatives had elected Ronald Reagan as President and Goldwater's ideas had been adopted by Republicans and Democrats alike. Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. They chose as their hero Barry Goldwatera rich, handsome Arizona Republican who scorned the federal bureaucracy, reviled detente, despised liberals on sightand grew determined to see him elected President. Buckley, Jr., John Birch Society leader Robert Welch, and thousand of studentsformed a movement to challenge the center-left consensus. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, conservativeseditor William F. Before the Storm begins in a time much like the presentthe tail end of the 1950s, with America affluent, confident, and convinced that political ideology was a thing of the past.īut when John F.

Before the storm goldwater