The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America [Hardcover]

Godfrey Hodgson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 1996

In 1981, as Ronald Reagan swept into the White House and his men prepared to take over the government they had for years viewed with the greatest suspicion, the citizens of the United States woke up to discover that conservatism, once held in contempt, had become the nation's ruling ideology. The World Turned Right Side Up is a brilliant chronicle of the ideas and events that led to this astounding turnabout in American politics and public life. Godfrey Hodgson, a veteran journalist and historian, traces the patriotic, religious, social, and economic strands of conservatism from the dog days of the New Deal through the triumphs of the past fifteen years. He paints vivid portraits of key conservative figures, including Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand, George Wallace, Pat Robertson, and William F. Buckley, Jr., and addresses a number of critical questions: Was there really a Reagan Revolution? Has American politics become"Europeanized," "southernized," both, or neither?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Under its magisterial title, the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson's study asks a simple question: how did so many conflicting ideologies unite under the banner of conservatism to completely alter the face of American politics? The conservative nostalgia for bygone morals and stricter social controls, Hodgson points out, is an uneasy bedfellow with the imperatives of free-market capitalism. While that conflict was muted or inaudible in the high-riding Reagan era, in the 1990s it has come to the fore, to the consternation of Newt Gingrich and his congressional allies. The conservative revolution has been derailed, at least temporarily, and this thorough and provocative book shows why.

From Publishers Weekly

How conservatism, an impotent and unfashionable political philosophy at the end of WWII, gained a broad following, shifted the centerline of American politics to the right and captured seats of power is the theme of this penetrating inquiry. British journalist and historian Hodgson (America in Our Time) calls himself an ex-conservative turned "Whig," which may help to explain his empathic yet critical view of American conservatism. He tracks the movement from Ayn Rand's novels and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953) through Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, William Buckley's National Review, the harnessing of evangelical Christianity to conservative politics, Milton Friedman's monetarist economics and the defection of liberal intellectuals such as Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol and others to neoconservatism. In Hodgson's view, the so-called Reagan revolution yielded mixed results, bringing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War but also fueling a rapid growth in financial inequality among the electorate. Today's conservative movement, he asserts, is deeply divided between authoritarians and libertarians, and between neoconservatives and "paleoconservatives" whose creed is rooted in religious belief and tradition.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 365 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (October 29, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395822947
• ISBN-13: 978-0395822944
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #788,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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