Mythmaker

America needs a good history of the Republican party; unfortunately, this isn’t it.

A good history would, for example, look to explain the amazing reemergence of the GOP from World War II and the New Deal years, when it seemed reduced to permanent minority status. It would trace how it was reborn as the political party that was strong on defense and national security under Dwight Eisenhower, and how, first under Nixon and then under Reagan, it capitalized on the social and cultural shambles left by the Great Society and the Sixties to dominate national politics.