According to the consensus school, the dissimilarities between American and European politics -- ravaged in the 20th century by wars and totalitarian movements -- suggested an essential consensus predating the creation of the nation rooted in the thought of John Locke. "The American community is a liberal community," wrote the historian Louis Hartz in his highly influential The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955. That same year, William F. Buckley, Jr., launching the modern conservative movement in the first issue of National Review, wrote that conservatism "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." By 2004, after Bush's victory, conservatives were triumphalist. "The 2004 election was about as clear a vindication as we could have hoped for," wrote Micklethwait and Wooldridge. And "that conservatism is the dominant force in American politics and that conservatism explains why America is different." Turning the old consensus thesis on its head, they argued that the American community is a conservative community.
For long periods of time political alignments shift incrementally and slowly. But our politics also has a volatile history, not always placid, erupting suddenly and sharply through cataclysms, and often as a result of violence. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War and the civil rights revolution were earthquakes that abruptly overturned long settled arrangements. When Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928, his landslide victory was universally seen as the peak of Republican Party consolidation, the culmination of the party's progress since the Civil War. Similarly, when Lyndon Johnson was elected in 1964, his landslide was interpreted as the apotheosis of the New Deal. For two generations the Republicans have been running on the themes and infrastructure developed since the Democratic collapse in 1968.
The scale of the Bush disaster is larger than any cataclysm since then. Whether or not there is a powerful geopolitical analogy between Iraq and Vietnam wars, as Bush first insistently denied, then vehemently argued, there is a pertinent domestic political analogy. Vietnam ended a Democratic era as definitively as Iraq is closing a Republican one.
Republicanism at its pinnacle -- during the Reagan years -- had been an easy identity for adherents to wear. With the recession of 1982 a memory, tax rates especially for the wealthy drastically lowered, and the country at peace amid the Cold War, President Reagan demanded no sacrifice or pain. His carefree attitude disdained the Protestant ethic, with banker's hours that conveyed there was no relationship between hard work and reward. His sunny disposition had removed the scowl of Richard Nixon and the stain of Watergate from the party. Yet Reagan's landslide of 49 states in 1984 echoed Nixon's landslide of 49 states in 1972. One famous victory was built on the other, one Californian paving the way for another. Nixon's work of realignment as well as his self-destruction made possible the rise of Reagan, who had been his rival for the Republican nomination in 1968.
Conservatives prefer to date the origins of the Republican ascent to the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. But it was his defeat followed by the shattering of the Johnson presidency over Vietnam that cleared the path for the resurrection of Richard Nixon, who was the main progenitor of the Republican rise. Only on the ruins of the Goldwater debacle was Nixon able to capture the Republican nomination in 1968. He was the author of the project for an imperial presidency. Watergate, a concatenation of plots, was an emanation of that grand design, both to create an unaccountable executive and harness the federal government into a political machine for what Nixon first called a "New Majority." The 1974 Final Report of the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities documented the Senate Watergate Committee's investigation into Nixon's effort to use "the powers of incumbency" through programs such as "the Responsiveness Program," created to "redirect Federal moneys to specific administration supporters and to target groups and geographic areas to benefit" his campaign.
If Nixon had succeeded in his plan, the U.S. government and politics would have taken very different forms. But his resignation shattered the center in the Republican Party, and Nixon made possible not only Jimmy Carter but also Ronald Reagan. The traditional Republican center attempted to hold under Gerald Ford, but it could not cohere, even within Ford's own White House where it was undermined by the team of his successive chiefs of staff, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
The Republican fall parallels the previous decline of the Democrats. From 1968 through 1988, the story of the Democratic Party had been its internal disintegration and reduction to its base.
The Republican Party dominance was not illusory, mere smoke and mirrors, though it did have superior image-making too. After the enfranchisement of black voters in the South in the mid-1960s, whites deserted the Democratic Party and flocked to the Republican Party, eventually creating a GOP Solid South, as Lyndon Johnson had feared when he told his youthful press secretary Bill Moyers upon signing civil rights legislation, "We have lost the South for a generation." The Republicans turned many urban and suburban ethnic Catholics, who had been at the core of the New Deal, into Republicans, by exploiting strategies of racial fear around issues of crime, education, taxation, and housing and by appealing to cultural traditionalism on issues such as abortion and women's rights generally.
The Republicans also won over formerly progressive Western states, through an anti-government states rights Sagebrush rebellion on behalf of local extractive industries. Running for governor in 1966, Reagan tipped California, which had been balanced for decades between liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans, toward the conservative wing of his party. The movement of California into the Republican column signaled the shift of geopolitical equilibrium to the Sun Belt, a new alliance of West and South, and consolidated the Republican Party coalition.