What’s Going On: Notes on the Right Turn

The story that I want to tell about the new American right begins with the takeover of the Republican party by Barry Goldwater and his friends in 1964. Think of that as a dress rehearsal—though we thought it real enough at the time—for disciplined, ideological, right-wing politics. It wasn’t a campaign, many of us said, but a movement. Richard Hofstadter offered this analysis in the British journal Encounter:

“The Goldwater movement is a revolt against the whol...