When the first Republican President in twenty years was elected, liberals feared Dwight D. When commentators want to remark on today’s sweeping embrace of market thinking, the retreat of the regulatory state, and America’s military role as the “indispensable nation,” a shorthand rolls off their tongue: “There Is No Alternative”-TINA. The analogy wouldn’t be exaggerating what has happened since 1964 too much.

And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of these positions just to get taken seriously for their party’s nomination. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, reregulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations-and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. It is hard, now, to grasp just how profoundly the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted between 1964 and today.

Before the storm rick perlstein