We Should Have Seen It Coming

The executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal chronicles the astonishing rise, climax, and decline of one of the great political movements in American history--the forty-year reign of the conservative movement, from the election of Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party's capitulation to Donald Trump.

In 1980, President-elect Ronald Reagan ushered in conservatism as a political force in America. For four decades, New Deal liberalism had been the dominant political motif in America, creating such popular programs as Society Security and Medicare, but it had become creaky. Reagan's efforts to reshape the government with tax cuts, deregulation, increased military spending, and a more conservative social policy faltered at first. But the economy roared back, and the Reagan revolution was on.

In We Should Have Seen It Coming, Gerald F. Seib shows how this movement was aided by the rise of a conservative infrastructure, from the creation of the Federalist Society to promote conservative legal principles, to the NRA's push into politics, to the founding of the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Tax Reform. Seib tells the story of how conservatism came to dominate national politics in Washington and in the media over the succeeding decades, thanks to Rush Limbaugh and the rise of Fox News. We follow Newt Gingrich's Contract with America that secured the Republicans both chambers of Congress for the first time in forty years, the rising power of evangelicals in the face of Roe v Wade, and George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism. But we also see multiple warning signs, many overlooked or misread at the time, that a populist revolution was brewing. Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party--all were precursors of the Trump takeover.

In a scintillating work of journalism, Seib makes sense of the American political scene in a way no one has before.