Rule and Ruin The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

The 2010 elections were notable for heavy losses--not just by Democrats, but by centrist Republicans to more conservative Republicans. Mike Castle of Delaware, a popular moderate, lost a Senate primary to Christine O'Donnell. Two-term Senator Bob Bennett of Utah, generally regarded as strongly right-wing, failed to win re-nomination, thanks to Tea Party activists. The GOP, it seems, has suddenly become a party of ideological purity. Except this development is not new at all. InRule and Ruin, Geoffrey Kabaservice reveals that the downfall of the moderate Republican began not in 2009, with the rise of the Tea Party, but about the time of President Eisenhower's Farewell Address. Ever since the party's formation in the 1850s, he notes, moderate ideas, causes, and activists have comprised the core of the GOP. Even in the 1960s, when the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society and right-wing Young Americans for Freedom commanded headlines, moderate and progressive Republicans dominated the party, supporting Nelson Rockefeller and Howard Baker, coalescing in the Ripon Society and the pro-civil rights magazineAdvance. Writing with passionate sympathy for a bygone tradition of moderation, Kabaservice recaptures a time when fiscal restraint was matched with social liberality; when a cohort of leading Republicans opposed the Vietnam War; when George Romney--father of Mitt Romney--conducted a 10,000-mile coast-to-coast tour of American poverty, from Appalachia to Watts, calling on society to "listen to the voices from the ghetto." Overshadowed by the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964, the moderates quickly rebounded, only to collapse as Richard Nixon shifted the party sharply to the right. Today, moderates are marginalized in the GOP, and progressives are all but nonexistent. In this insightful and elegantly argued book, Kabaservice contends that their decline has left Republicans less capable of governing responsibly, and may well doom the party in the years ahead.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of the National Book Award-nominated The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment. He has written for numerous national publications and has been an assistant professor of history at Yale University. He lives outside Washington, DC.