We Should Have Seen It Coming: From Reagan to Trump--A Front-Row Seat to a Political Revolution

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 country's dominant political motif, creating such popular programs as Social Security and Medicare, but it had become creaky in the face of soaring inflation, high unemployment, and a growing sense that the United States was no longer the dominant force on the world stage. 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, veteran journalist Gerald F. Seib shows how this movement was fueled by the rise of a conservative infrastructure, from the creation of the Federalist Society to promote conservative legal principles, to the National Rifle Association'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, which in 1994 secured the Republicans both chambers of Congress for the first time in forty years; the rising power of evangelicals in the wake 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 brings new insight to the most important political story of our time.