The Right Moment
by Matthew Dallek
Free Press

According to a conspiracy theory currently making the rounds on the Internet, Ronald Reagan died earlier this year.

The Republicans, of course, know this already. And somehow they're not going to let it get out until late October. Then, in the ensuing bout of lachrymose GOP nostalgia, the voters will win a final one for the Gipper and elect Bush.

So why is this theory interesting? After all, no one's suggesting that Ford really died after his stroke at the convention. Why not? Well, he's not Reagan. The Republican primary contenders this year didn't style themselves as "Ford Republicans." Reagan's influence on contemporary conservatism is such that a period of (uncritical) national reflection on his legacy really could shift the results of an election.

Matthew Dallek proposes a much stronger formulation of the conventional wisdom on Reagan's influence in "The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics." Reagan, Dallek argues, pretty much singlehandedly shook 1960s liberalism out of its smug complacency when he defeated Pat Brown in the 1966 California gubernatorial race. And since then, he writes in the final sentence of the book, a sentence that's its own paragraph, "It [liberalism] has never really recovered."

But putting a sentence on a line by itself doesn't make it true.

And in fact, Dallek utterly fails to prove that Reagan's first victory was the devastating blow to liberalism he claims it was. By taking the reader no further than November 8, 1966, he doesn't even try to make much of a historical case for his claim. He shows quite convincingly that Pat Brown and his supporters, in the iconic governor's campaign for a third term, greatly underestimated the appeal of Reagan's conservatism and displayed an inflated confidence in the universality of their beliefs that Reagan shattered. What he argues but can't establish is that Reagan's victory represented some kind of national conservative turning point. And that's too bad, because Dallek's book is an instructive, engaging study of a time in American politics that doesn't need a grand unified theory to make it relevant today.

It's not Reagan's and Brown's ideas that are most relevant; it's their strategies. When you consider Bush's ill-fated visit to Bob Jones University and McCain's disastrous attack on conservative Christian groups, Reagan's approach to extremist right-wing groups seems even more brilliant. Dallek portrays Reagan as an expert triangulator, able to distance himself from John Birch Society's leader Robert Welch's more outlandish theories about water fluoridation and Eisenhower's supposed Communist sympathies, without alienating the group's rank and file. Reagan issued a statement exhorting Birchers to denounce some of Welch's ideas, but not Welch himself — this way, Dallek points out, he would be less likely to encounter future questions on the matter when Welch failed to step down. Reagan also called Birch Society members "fine upstanding citizens" and retained the support of most of them.

Compare to Pat Brown's reaction to extremists on the left. When the Filthy Speech Movement, a fringe offshoot of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, took to the campus chanting "F-U-C-K", it created a lasting impression that would come back to haunt Brown. Brown had made several speeches promoting student activism before the protests at Berkeley, protests involving a student takeover of Sproul Hall. These speeches, along with his later meetings with student groups, created the impression of a governor too sympathetic to student radicals to enforce order, and Reagan used the issue to the best possible advantage.

Extremism on both sides of the political spectrum was what defined the 1966 California governor's race. And by highlighting extremism, Dallek is able to prove his other main thesis — that the "Reagan revolution" was fueled as much by social conservatism as by trade policies and economic libertarianism — more convincingly than he proves the premise of his title. Reagan appealed to an electorate who saw order collapsing after the Watts riots and the Berkeley uprisings, both of which Pat Brown in their view had handled badly. But Dallek still fails to explain why the political climate of 1980 would be equally conducive to Reagan's promise of law and order.

What Dallek has given us is a well-documented political history of a place and time, 1960s California — a history that's self-evidently relevant today. But by putting forth two weakly established theses, he makes us wonder just how lasting Reagan's legacy really is. Note to conspiracy theorists: you can keep playing Dick Cheney's convention speech backwards.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)