The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
Scared of Your Own Shadow
The NRA helped write California's gun control law in 1967. Forty-nine years later, it took them over a day to comment on a licensed gun owner's death.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
Ronald Reagan didn't invent the modern American right. He's the fulcrum it balances on, built by a thirty-year apprenticeship most retellings skip, then invoked by every wing of it since. Book One: the performer nobody was watching yet. Book Two: the public man, from the speech that announced him through the presidency people remember. Book Three: the canonization, the invocations that don't survive contact with his record, and what was really happening to him while the performance ran.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
The Campaign and the Reckoning
A Republican governor and a Democratic Assembly Speaker teamed up to raise the sales tax, the top bracket, and sin taxes all at once. Big government built this one together.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
Sacks of Mail, Rooms of Men
The mail said groundswell. The room of businessmen who'd already funded one broadcast said something more like a plan. Book One closes with Reagan's actual declaration of candidacy.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
October 27, 1964 - The Turning Point
Thirty years of radio timing, union politics, and rehearsed economics, compressed into thirty minutes. The numbers inside it don't all add up quite as cleanly.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
The Speech Before "The Speech"
Goldwater's own advisers didn't want Reagan on the air. One rich Californian wrote a personal check and put him there anyway. Episode IV
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
Selling General Electric
$125,000 a year, in 1954, to host a TV show. The agency that arranged it owed its whole television business to a waiver he signed himself.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
The Liberal Anti-Communist
Before the conservative, before the Republican, there was a man whose father got his job from Roosevelt's own patronage machine. That part never really left him.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
The Actor Who Wasn't Quite a Star
A lifeguard chair, a dead wire, a line about losing your legs that became his memoir's title. The making of Ronald Reagan starts long before anyone was watching.
The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism
New Series - Reagan as the Fulcrum
Introducing a dive into the Reagan mythos. THe good, the bad, and the downright ugly. Three acts, from his acting days, through his performance of a lifetime, to the canonization and saint hood. No shiboleths spared