Dionne brings some notable qualities to telling this story: E.?J. the Brookings scholar knows the academic literature inside out while E.?J. the journalist is on first-name terms with many leading conservatives. Dionne is notably fair-minded. Though he makes no bones about his own liberal sympathies, he tries hard to understand the frustrations of white working-class voters who have seen their living standards stagnate and their cultural values ridiculed. Unfortunately, the one quality that he does not bring is discipline; his book is much too long and frequently disorganized.
Dionne is right that America needs an intelligent conservative party, and the insights of this decent man who, as an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post, has unique access to politicians make wonderful reading. But his attempt to find common ground with establishment Republican leaders means he overlooks the elephant in the room: that it was the Republicans’ own narrative that created today’s crisis.
Dionne's expertise is evident in this finely crafted and convincing work. He appears to have read nearly everything about the subject, including a bounty of conservative writers such as Ramesh Ponnuru and David Frum, and interviewed Republican insiders in preparing what amounts to a lamentation of the GOP's trajectory over the past half-century.
...as the book inches closer to the present and the 2016 election (allusions to which abound in the text, seemingly tossed in at the very last minute before publication), Dionne incrementally segues from historian to journalist and becomes somewhat less effective. The reader gets lost in thickets of legislative and political detail that might profitably have been pruned.
Joe Scarborough claims that the Republicans have continually oscillated between moderates and extremists. But he could find only two stellar moderates in the last half-century, Eisenhower and Reagan. Some oscillation! Dionne comes closer to the facts with his tale of a ground bass of growls against moderation, swelling at times or diminishing, but continuously present and becoming more embittered.
Granted, this is unlikely to make any difference to Republicans who may read Dionne’s book, but it is interesting to hear him profess 'a respect for conservative tradition.' Or, to add, as he describes his concerns about what he believes is a Republican party far too rigid in its ethos, 'I continue to believe that a healthy democratic order needs conservatism’s skepticism about the grand plans we progressives sometimes offer.'
...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.
Ultimately Dionne is optimistic that logic will prevail within the Republican Party. With rapid changes to the ethnic makeup of the country and the social liberalism of the younger generation, he argues, time is against the hard right. The party is likely to become more reasonable in the future, he believes, simply because it has little choice if it wants to remain politically viable.
