Voice in the Wilderness.(Review)

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein (Hill and Wang, 671 pp., $30)

As Alan Brinkley observed in the American Historical Review in April 1994, "American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship." This should be no cause for surprise; most contemporary historians are liberals, and there was no obvious reason why they should devote themselves to the objective study of a phenomenon they found it positively painful to contemplate-especially since the tale, as it unfolded across the decades, turned out to be a success story. So the modern American conservative movement has been left, for many years, to the tender mercies of writers who had something very different from objective historical scholarship on their minds.

Sheer silence was the treatment of choice in the 1950s, though a few liberal commentators weighed in with snide observations. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose judgment in these matters is dependably poor (we shall hear from him again, later in this review), assured readers of the New York Times Magazine in mid-decade that the movement had no significance, being merely "the ethical afterglow of feudalism." John Fischer, the editor of Harper's, was kinder, writing in its March 1956 issue that National Review, the movement's leading (indeed, only) journal of opinion, might "serve a useful purpose in feeding the emotional hungers of a small congregation of the faithful, and it will have a certain interest for students of political splinter movements."

By the early 1960s, the growth of the conservative movement, and its consequent higher visibility, prompted certain other liberals to tackle the subject. Now the analysis tended to be clinical: Conservatism did not need to be understood so much as diagnosed. Richard Hofstadter, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, turned to psychology for an explanation, suggesting that a sense of "persecution" characterized conservatives.

No doubt Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 reconfirmed serious liberal historians in their belief that there was nothing here worth studying. In any case, another 16 years rolled by without any objective history worthy of the name. (An important exception, written by one of the few conservative historical scholars in the country, was George H. Nash's magisterial study, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published by Basic Books in 1976.)

But one might suppose that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ratified the ascendancy of the conservative movement in American politics, would surely inspire, at last, serious attention to the movement's history. Alas, no; another two decades passed in virtual silence, prompting Professor Brinkley's comment, quoted above.

It is only now, with the appearance of a whole new generation of political historians who were born too late to participate in the ideological wars of the 1950s and subsequent decades, that we are being vouchsafed the objective attention the conservative movement has deserved for more than forty years. And it is good news that one of the earliest of these studies, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein, is comprehensively researched, well written, and basically fair.