Back then, both parties contained distinctly conservative and liberal wings: southern segregationists and northern liberals in the Democratic Party, for example Waspish liberals and mid-western conservatives in the Republican. Up until 1964, the party political divide in the US was not as simple as it is today. In Before the Storm, Perlstein describes what came before Nixon and Reagan. Johnson in a landslide in 1964, only to spark an ideological transformation of American politics.Īs it happens, the first in Rick Perlstein’s series of books tells this exact story. And she is not Nixon or Reagan, but Barry Goldwater, the Arizonian senator who lost to Lyndon B. Her premiership might not have survived, so the argument seems to go, but her ideas will live on. Yet now - with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph and an interview with Spectator TV yesterday - we discover she is mounting something of a comeback, or, at least, a defence of her legacy. Here, in other words, was the Truss plan.Īnd then came her time in office, all 44 days of it, which saw her grand plans swept into the dustbin of history, along, it seemed, with her reputation. For Truss, Perlstein’s books were totemic, romantic dispatches from another age when true believers transformed the world around them.

The Invisible Bridge is the third in a four-part series chronicling the great conservative revolution in the United States, which seemed to come from nothing in the Sixties to sweep away everything barely two decades later. The reading material was, I thought, very Truss. The book explores the links between the post-war administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the latter of whom is one of Truss’s great heroes. When I last interviewed Liz Truss - in early 2022, when she was just Foreign Secretary - I spotted a copy of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf.

Perlstein goldwater