Shaving off the Fringe

A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modem American Conservatism, by Jonathan M. Schoenwald (Oxford, 338 pp., $35)

THE great political story of our time is the collapse of American liberalism and its standard-bearer, the New Deal Democratic party. Historians and journalists have generally shied away from this story, and for good reason: It is a complex human tale of tragic, even epic proportions, and telling it requires the skill of a Shakespeare or a Melville. Furthermore, since most people who write about American history are liberals, the task would also pose an excruciating question: “How did the principles and ideals I myself uphold fail America?” Self-examination on this scale is an essentially conservative instinct; liberals, as we have learned, prefer to “move on.”