It’s important to note that we don’t have to become like them to beat them. We DO have to scare them by admitting that – if pushed, we’d go farther than they could ever go, and farther than they can even begin to imagine in their worst nightmares. What makes us progressive (and think that’s a fine word – makes sense too), is that we CHOOSE to NOT move forward with their kind of tactics. However, it’s important that the reich-tys know: we CAN be bigger, badder, meaner, more vicious, and more unforgiving than you can – so watch yourselves, little nutjobs, or we’ll make the wrath of God look like little Miss Mary Sunshine when and if we have to come down on your ass.

There are some ways we can begin to step up our efforts, and step out. The suggestion to point out that organizations like the NRA are being watched just as much as “those damn libruls” is a good start. But it’s also good to give a daily reminder to the reich-tys that we on the left are, in general ALL of these things: A) We’re smarter. As they always tell us, we hold all the college campuses. So let them know they’re right – we are smarter. B)As such, we don’t necessarily NEED guns to kill them. We can do it with almost anything they have in their house or office – and because we’re smarter, as they said, we’ll get away with it. C) Prove it to them. Using LEGAL data mining procedures (sometimes as simple as keeping one’s eyes and ears open), tell them shit about themselves they don’t think anyone else knows. Then remind them, “There are a million ways to die. Physical is just one of them, and one I really don’t want to do to you, because then I’d go to prison. But that says nothing about all the other ways…” D) When the reich-tys finally get up the courage (or arrogance) to ask you if you’re crazy… give ‘em a shit-eating grin and make’ em wonder.

As I often say to the nutjobs I run onto, after I go through these steps, “As your ‘boy’ said, ‘Bring It On.’”

For some reason after this, they usually begin to crawl back under the rocks from whence they came, and rarely confront me about their asinine political views again. Hmmmmm… might be something to the way I do that…

One thing I think is valid about this book – the title. It implies there was a storm, and before it, the conservatives were ignored, almost into non-existance. I’d say the the storm’s done. Time to put things back where they were “Before The Storm.”

http://www.prospect.org/print/…..itt-m.html
My review echoes some of the comments here, especially the last, and links Goldwater as much to McCain as to Bush.

One thing that always surprises me about the reaction to Before the Storm is how much people attribute something to it that’s not there in the book at all. The history ends on election night, 1964. It is not a story about how the right rebuilt after 1964, it’s a story about 1964. However, knowing where the right is today, we read it in a wholly different light, knowing that the seeds of the conservative revival are obviously in there somewhere. To me it’s not so much a didactic book as a wonderful story, which really is a tribute to Perlstein as a writer, because the protagonist, Goldwater, isn’t automatically fascinating, in the way that both LBJ and Nixon are.

The Perlstein book is a brilliant piece of writing, evocative, evenhanded, and educational with being didactic. But many leftish commentators seem to have missed one of the major points of the book, which is this: the Goldwaterites were, by Perlstein’s own admission, actually kind of admirable (certainly not wholly or even mostly so), not only in their conviction and communitarian spirit but in their more than usually principled small-government conservatism, which seemed to stem from something other than the resentment and support for inherited power by proxy that characterize its popular manifestations today. It’s reasonable to think they were wrong about the nature and ideal role of government – and yes, there’s always incoherence in such a view, the threat of the slippery slope – but Goldwater himself comes across as, to a greater or lesser degree, legitimately admirable in Perlstein’s book. He seems only secondarily a politician, which is something that can be said of very, very few characters in the story (quite the opposite of Reagan, as characterized in those haunting scenes late in the book).

From Digby’s #30-something comment up above:

McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was. “Senator Goldwater doesn’t strain at all,†she marvelled. “He is entirely himself.â€

My, oh My, the comfortable man vs the stiff. Where have we heard that before?

The importance of this ‘comfortable man’ myth is certainly consistent, and off-putting. But let’s not make the easy mistake of saying Goldwater was Bush’s direct precursor in every way. Perlstein implies similarities in his book, but the differences are even clearer. Those who look to history solely for ratification of their dislike will find exactly what they’re looking for, and nothing more – which redounds to their discredit.

If people are getting out of Perlstein’s work that the connection between Goldwater and his movement was simple and direct, I believe they’re missing one of Perlstein’s most interesting points. Goldwater – as I interpreted Perlstein’s portrayal of the man – would never have been a Goldwaterite. That to me was one of the most hopeful things about the book, and an arrow in the direction of genuine populism, not Bush’s ludicrous simulacrum of it.

The Crooked Timber post raises some interesting issues as well, and is worth reading; the ideological coherence of the leftward ‘netroots’ stems to such a degree from its status as triply oppositional – incensed about Bush, incensed also about the gross politics-as-usual of centrist Democrats, and defiantly carrying the torch for a particular kind of dispersed digital affinity group, which is to say, a generational concern – that the need for positive declarations of principles seems to continue to go, to a degree, unaddressed. I haven’t read Kos’s book; I’ll get around to it soon, with any luck, but Kos’s website is interesting to me only as a news aggregator, and I worry that the book will be as pro forma as much of the commentary at DKos. Still, perhaps some of what I want is in there…

In any case, Perlstein’s book is a great choice, and I look forward to reading (and actually taking part in!) more discussion.

There is a potential danger in how people read the book. It’s worth nothing that the GOP didn’t take over until they moderated many of Goldwater’s positions; I don’t think it proves that strategic compromise is never necessary. But the Democrats are so far to the other end that it’s a less prominent worry. We need to solve the Tim Roemer problem (i.e. people who think that voting for Bush’s fiscal plans, against Clinton’s, and opposing Roe–in other words, being bad politically and on the merits–makes you the right person to head the DNC) first.

‘ I don’t like Communists,’ Kerry said. ‘ In fact, I hate them.’

What a damn shame that man ain’t presidentin us today.

=====

From an Amazon review:

Before the Storm is a book that both conservatives and liberals can and should enjoy. Anyone seeking to understand why politics and society are what they are today should start here.

While the Goldwater Campaign is the starting point of the modern Conservative Movement, you have to go back to the New Deal Era, the first Progressive Movement, and even the Gilded Age, to understand the forces that have shaped the modern political landscape.

People like to say that we are an evenly divided country right now — truth be told, we’ve been evenly divided for more than a hundred years. FDR’s victory was dependent on the Solid South — and holding the South meant going slow (or doing nothing) on Civil Rights.

The Dixiecrat exodus to the GOP was an inevitable cultural and political realignment, not some plot hatched in the Nixon White House.

In the Spring of 1945, LIFE Magazine ran an editorial that began I’m a Liberal too, but . . . — the point being, conservative had become such a dirty word, that even conservatives were calling themselves liberals. Likewise, FDR called himself a Liberal because the word progressive had been disgraced by Wilson’s betrayals.

The Gilded Age is the closest thing to a parallel for today’s situation — McKinley and his guru Mark Hanna manipulated corporate cash to divide and defeat the progressives and populists. Mark Hanna is Karl Rove’s hero — but Hanna had a preznit with a brain.

One last thought — long before Goldwater, the Claire Boothe Luce and Henry Luce Foundations were laying the ground work for what would become the modern Conservative Movement.