This comprehensive study of conservative politics from the post-WWI era to the present is replete with clear analysis and good nuggets of information. Lichtman (The Keys of the White House
) profiles the behind-the-scenes operators who have crafted the marching orders for right-wing Americans in the last half-century—financiers like J. Howard Pew, Frank Gannett and the Du Ponts, direct-mail kingpin Richard Viguerie and drawing-room conservatives like William F. Buckley and Bill Kristol. Lichtman observes how a clique of probusiness, mainly Protestant, Americans chaffed at the birth of the welfare state under Democratic administrations and built a network of organizations to resist social engineering and encroaching federal power. The book argues that in postwar America, rising fears over immigration, desegregation and sexual egalitarianism gave bloom to an ethic of Anglo-Saxon supremacy—but Lichtman ignores the deep roots such ideas have in American culture. Lichtman also neglects the transformation in the post–civil rights era, when the conservative movement tried to shed its extreme racial and cultural doctrines and began attracting minority voters and politicos. As a structural blueprint of conservative political power, however, this book is without peer, giving readers a wonderful historical survey of the last 80 years of conservative politics. (June)
