The GOP's reality-based community: the fall of moderate Republicans wasn't inevitable. But their resurrection is hard to imagine.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party - Book review

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

by Geoffrey Kabaservice Oxford University Press, 504 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Yale historian Geoffrey Kabaservice first attracted critical attention with his biography of former Yale University president Kingman Brewster, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment. The book was not only a chronicle of the life and times of Brewster and his circle of hugely influential friends, it was also a history of the world of public servants, both Democrat and Republican--from 3FK's national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, to John Lindsay, Republican mayor from New York; from Episcopal bishop Paul Moore to Jimmy Carter's secretary of state, Cyrus Vance. These were all men born to great wealth and privilege, and they were all fierce believers in the notion that they had an obligation to be of service to their country.

Kabaservice's new book, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, reads like an elegy to that bygone era--to the once-proud Republican moderate political establishment that was defined by men such as Lindsay and Moore. Kabaservice surveys the rise and fall of the patrician class that once dominated the GOP but has been all but banished from the Republican Party hierarchy by the movement conservatives who are now in charge.

The conservative revolution that overtook the old moderate establishment is by now a familiar story, but has been mostly written (as most history is) about the victors. Rule and Ruin is the same story, but told mostly about the losers. Kabaservice has combed the archives and conducted hundreds of interviews with politicians and activists, unearthing a wealth of information about postwar moderates--men like George Romney, Elliot Richardson, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Charles Percy, Edward Brooke, John Chafee, and Nelson Rockefeller--and reminding us that these men were both numerous and influential.

The GOP, as Kabaservice notes, has not always been a bastion of reflexive hostility to elites or to government. Quite the contrary. It was none other than George Romney--governor of Michigan, father of Mitt--who in 1968 campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination by embarking on a 10,000-mile tour of poverty across America, insisting that it was essential to "listen to the voices from the ghetto." Can anyone imagine his son, who insists that "corporations are people," uttering a remotely similar statement?

The pedigree of moderate conservatism goes back to the Mugwumps, the anticorruption Republican East Coast gentry who, during the 1884 presidential election, fled the Republican Party en masse, throwing their support to Democrat Grover Cleveland rather than support a Republican nominee with suspect financial connections. Kabaservice begins his story...