After Lyndon Johnson (click here) routed Barry Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964, pundits predicted that the right wing of the Republican Party had been discredited for good. We now know, of course, that they were mistaken.
In “Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond” (Simon & Schuster, $30), E.J. Dionne Jr., a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, syndicated columnist, commentator on NPR and the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” provides a sweeping, sophisticated and shrewd analysis of the radicalization of the Republican Party from the defeat of Goldwater to the rise of the Tea Party and the bizarre twists and turns of the GOP’s presidential contest in the fall of 2015....
