In the fall of 1964, the Democratic Party seemed to have seized decisive control of US national politics. Returning from the terrible setback of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the previous year, former vice president and now incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson had beaten his hyperconservative Republican challenger Barry Goldwater by an almost unprecedented margin. Johnson won more states’ electoral votes and more of the popular vote, with 61 percent, than any candidate since 1820. The Democrats swept through the congressional election as well, gaining a total of thirty-six seats to secure a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives. It was the best election the Democrats had ever had in their nearly 150-year history.
Rather than laying the foundation for a Democratic-dominated national politics, however, the Johnson-Goldwater election inspired a generation of right-wing strategists and organizers. After Johnson’s victory in 1964, only one other Democrat (Jimmy Carter) managed to win the presidency until 1992, and the Republican Party — and in many ways US politics as a whole — shifted decisively rightward. This was in large part the result of successful organizing by a movement that came to be known as the New Right, organizing that looked to outside observers like embarrassing infighting inside the Republican Party between the centrist Republicans and so-called Goldwater Republicans. Rather than hurting the GOP, this right-wing civil war was the precursor to the ascendance of the Christian right that would dominate the party for the next several decades.
A similar pattern may be repeating itself in today’s Republican Party, this time not in the wake of a terrible loss but a decisive victory. Having hitched itself…
Auteur: Craig Johnson
