As it happens, I recently read [Craig] Shirley's January 2005 book, Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All. In fact, the next issue of Blueprint magazine will include a review I wrote of that book and the much-better-known Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein's study of the Goldwater campaign.

Which is of some interest to me, since I'm in the middle of reading (haphazardly, while I try to drum up paying work) Perlstein's book myself. Paperwight notices what he calls a "humdinger" in Kilgore's teaser for the forthcoming review, and what I think of more as the usual story of old dogs and new tricks:

My Perlstein-Shirley review will focus on the dangerous belief of some Democrats that we should emulate the 1964 and 1976 conservative "noble defeats," and one of my arguments is that Reagan's survival in 1976 and his apotheosis in 1980 were far more fortuitous than anyone, including Shirley, seems to be willing to admit.

This isn't a surprise, is it? The Kilgores of the Democratic world get paid to bash, after all, and they don't get paid to bash toward their right. Besides, the sermon on the evils of ideological enthusiasm must be so well honed by now that Ed can recite it in his sleep.

Still, you have to give the man some credit for stones, since he's going to be arguing in the teeth of an account (Perlstein's, I mean) which on any honest, untendentious reading makes an all but unanswerable case against the DLC tendency: namely, that the Goldwater Takeover—coming after years in which the Republican party had been hollowed out, structurally and ideologically, by "me-too" efforts to calibrate its appeal within the (apparently invincible) ascendancy of liberalism—was the necessary precondition for the eventual electoral success of the modern conservative movement. The parallels to our current moment are so apt as to be eerie. Not two years after the retirement of a centrist, two-term Republican president, and the impossibly narrow defeat of his vice-presidential successor, the party according to Perlstein was practically an empty shell, out of money and out of ideas:

The Republican Party was going broke. The debt from the Nixon campaign approached a million dollars, which in itself was no great problem; the parties always borrowed in presidential election season and paid off the deficit in between. This time, though, money wasn't coming in. Every Friday night the Republicans' creaky old Senate and House leaders Everett Dirksen and Charlie Halleck went on TV to retail the tired argument that too much spending promised recession just around the corner; ... with economists predicting 10 percent economic growth in 1962 against 3.2 percent yearly during Eisenhower's terms, the counsel of doom just wouldn't take. The "Ev and Charlie Show" played so poorly against John F. Kennedy's sparkling weekly press conferences that in a poll of thirty GOP congressmen, only two admitted liking it: Ev and Charlie. A prgram to sell "sustaining memberships" in the Republican Party for $10 showed promise. If only the leadership could agree on what they were selling.

I'm sure Ed will be happy to tell us why all the obvious parallels in fact mean the opposite of what they seem, but for the life of me I can't tell you how he's going to do it: it's not a task I'd want to take on.

'Cause the thing is, Ed, it seems to me that we've already tried it your way: we've given in to the reflex that prefers the ignoble pursuit of victory to "noble defeat," and what do we have to show for it? Or were those last two Democratic presidential campaigns not the cautious, calibrated, "me-too"-ist failures of imagination and confidence we (along with a considerable majority of our fellow citizens) all thought they were? Perhaps you can enlighten us misguided leftists about that, too.

Past which, I seem to have missed the memo in which Comrade Dean instructed all of us about the nobility of losing, and commanded his minions to fan out across the country in '06 and '08 and send Democrats down in beautiful, defeatist flames. Naive, non-Beltway sort that I am, it's my impression that people generally involve themselves in politics—major-party politics, certainly—in order to win. I've noticed plenty of disagreement about ways to win, but if there's a debate currently raging in Democratic circles between proponents of winning on one side, and losing on the other, I confess it's passed me right by. Nor were the conservatives of '64 or '76 trying to bring their parties down around them. On the contrary, they held a reasonable belief—which at this point appears to have the vindication of history on its side—that a party without ideological direction, without passion or vision, had no hope of success unless its could harness the energy of its most committed cadres.

And the vacuum of ideology and passion in the Republican establishment, post-Eisenhower, made it ripe for those cadres to move in and take over. (Win the party apparatus first; electoral success will follow.) No doubt an intensely uncomfortable historical parallel for Ed Kilgore to contemplate, who seems to believe in his core that "ideology" and "passion" are political dirty words. And I sympathize with your discomfort, Ed, and that of your DLC bretheren, I really do. As I know from too recent experience myself, unemployment's a bitch.

posted by michael  5:39:49 PM  
tell me about it []