Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

From a bestselling historian and journalist, a whirlwind account of how Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential belly flop shaped the political world we know now.

“Rick Perlstein is the greatest living chronicler of the American right.” —John Ganz, New York Times bestselling author of When the Clock Broke

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History

As the 1950s drew to a close, Americans were confident that impassioned political conflict was a thing of the past. Then, conservatives launched an uprising to eviscerate the centrist consensus. They were determined to see Barry Goldwater—a rich, handsome Arizona Republican who scorned the federal bureaucracy, reviled negotiations with the Communist enemy, and despised liberals on sight—elected president in 1964. Lyndon Johnson trounced him. Within two years, the notion of America as a “consensus” society was in tatters. Two decades later, Ronald Reagan was president. By the next decade, Goldwater's ideas had been adopted by Republicans and Democrats alike.

In this engrossing narrative, Rick Perlstein argues that the 1964 election marked a key shift in US politics, the aftershocks of which we’re still feeling today.