The chaotic events leading up to Mitt Romney\'s defeat in the 2012 election indicated how far the Republican Party had rocketed rightward away from the center of public opinion.
He lives outside Washington, DC..
He has written for numerous national publications and has been an assistant professor of history at Yale University.
About the Author: Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of the National Book Award-nominated The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment .
He has added a new afterword that considers the fallout from the 2012 elections.
In this insightful and elegantly argued book, Kabaservice contends that their decline has left Republicans less capable of governing responsibly, with dire consequences for all Americans.
Today, following the Republicans\' loss of the popular vote in five of the last six presidential contests, moderates remain marginalized in the GOP and progressives are all but nonexistent.
In hindsight, it is today\'s conservatives who are "Republicans in Name Only." Writing with passionate sympathy for a bygone tradition of moderation, Kabaservice recaptures a time when fiscal restraint was matched with social engagement; when a cohort of leading Republicans opposed the Vietnam war; when George Romney--father of Mitt Romney--conducted a nationwide tour of American poverty, from Appalachia to Watts, calling on society to "listen to the voices from the ghetto." Rule and Ruin is an epic, deeply researched history that reorients our understanding of our political past and present.
But the Republican civil war ended with the overthrow of the moderate ideas, heroes, and causes that had comprised the core of the GOP since its formation.
Even in the 1960s, when left-wing radicalism and right-wing backlash commanded headlines, Republican moderates and progressives formed a powerful movement, supporting pro-civil rights politicians like Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton, battling big-government liberals and conservative extremists alike.
In Rule and Ruin , Geoffrey Kabaservice reveals that the moderate Republicans\' Downfall began not with the rise of the Tea Party but about the time of President Dwight Eisenhower\'s farewell address.
Except this development is not new at all.
The GOP, it seemed, had suddenly become a Party of ideological purity.
Moderation and compromise were dirty words in the Republican presidential debates.
Tea Party activists mounted primary challenges against Republican officeholders who appeared to exhibit too much pragmatism or independence. debt default.
Republicans in Congress threatened to shut down the government and force a U.
S.
The chaotic events leading up to Mitt Romney\'s defeat in the 2012 election indicated how far the Republican Party had rocketed rightward away from the center of public opinion
