Before the Storm Read Free

sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate—how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering. How to feel bigger than yourself. It was something beyond the week, the year, the campaign, even the decade; it was a cause. You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle, suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more. Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? —that was how William F. Buckley entitled an anthology of conservative writings in 1970. Later that year, his brother won a Senate seat from New York with the backing of the state’s Conservative Party. The dream was walking. Maybe it wasn’t even just an army. Maybe it was a moral majority.
    America would remember the sixties as a decade of the left. It must be remembered instead as a decade when the polarization began. “We must assume that the conservative revival is the youth movement of the ’60s,” Murray Kempton wrote in 1961, in words that would sound laughable five years later. Forty years later, these are words that are, at the very least, arguable.
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    A new academic discipline formed in the early sixties that perfectly captured the liberal establishment’s mood: “futurism.” In the presidential year of 1964, the movement even spun off a parlor game, as the sociologist Daniel Bell lamented: “The year 2000 has all the ingredients for becoming, if it has not already become, a hoola-hoop craze.” Lyndon Johnson was a prime offender. “Think of how wonderful the year 2000 will be,” he would gush on the campaign trail. “I am just hoping that my heart and stroke and cancer committee can come up with some good results that will insure that all of us can live beyond a hundred so we can participate in that glorious day when all the fruits of our labors and our imaginations today are a reality! ... I just hope the doctors hurry up and get busy and let me live that long.”
    Perhaps it is a blessing that he didn’t live that long. History humiliated Lyndon Johnson. It was as a young boy, he told a crowd on the steps of the
Texas State Capitol in Austin in the closing days of the 1964 campaign, that “I first learned that the government is not an enemy of the people. It is the people.” Three decades later, half of all Americans would be telling pollsters that “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses a threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 1964 those who rejected the dominant vision of liberalism were classed as vestiges, soon to be overwhelmed by the inexorable spread of things as they are. In the year 2000, political pros would dismiss those who held on to that same creed as “paleoliberals.” Which, along with its antonym, “neoconservative,” would once have sounded as oxymoronic as “zebra elephant.”
    So it is appropriate that this story should begin with a little circle of political diehards whose every move was out of step with the times, who lived in a mental and social world presumed to have been in its death throes ever since Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt had driven a stake through its heart in 1922, but who managed to set the spark that lit the fire that consumed an entire ideological universe, and made the opening years of the twenty-first century as surely a conservative epoch as the era between the New Deal and the Great Society was a liberal one.

PART ONE

1
    THE MANIONITES
    I magine you live in a town of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred thousand souls—in Indiana, perhaps, or Illinois, or Missouri, or Tennessee—with a colonnaded red-brick city hall at its center, a Main Street running its