Your father founded it perhaps to start things up he cadged a loan from the father of the man you bank with now. Imagine you are the proprietor of one of these concerns. One of these factories, locals point to them with pride, because they are what make their little town prosper, and because all over the world foundries use machine parts inscribed with the town's name. Although no one who didn't have to would ever venture inside Throw up great clouds of smoke, churning out vast pools of cement, cords of lumber, spools of rolled steel, machine parts of every size and description. It is June 1959, and, three shifts a day, they With modest bungalows and named for trees and exotic heroes and local luminaries, interrupted at intervals by high-steepled churches. Imagine 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 breadth, avenues rimmed This inspired much work, including his effort to draft Barry Goldwater for president.Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus Manion, a man of the anti-Roosevelt Old Right, was displeased to see Eisenhower carrying on the New Deal rather than repudiating it. It is the people.' Goldwater championed individual rights and liberties, and called the government 'a Leviathan, a vast national authority out of touch with the people, and out of control.' LBJ won the election by a huge margin, but over the long run, according to Perlstein, Goldwater's vision has triumphed.Īmong the book's major contributions is tracing the origin of the Goldwater movement to Clarence Manion, former dean of the Notre Dame Law School. In his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Baines Johnson articulated the postwar liberal consensus: 'Government is not an enemy of the people. The polarization concerned the role of government. Really it was the 'decade when the polarization began.' 'America would remember the sixties as a decade of the Left,' writes Rick Perlstein, in his fascinating and revisionist account of how the 1964 presidential campaign marked a new course of American political life. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus By Rick Perlstein Hill and Wang, 671 pages, $30

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