Rick Perlstein: The GOP Throws a Tampa Tantrum

Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, is at work on a book about the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan.

Republican conventions didn’t always used to be like this. They used to be only partly like this.

For generations, GOP national meetings were sites for one of the longest-running ideological blood feuds in the nation. In 1952, the Grand Old Party’s moderate and conservative wings almost fought to a draw. The right-wing partisans of Senator Robert Taft marched into Chicago’s International Amphitheater locked arm in arm, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and left united in the dubious conviction that the convention had been “stolen” from them by the better-organized supporters of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower—just one more instance, many of them went on to insist, of what Joe McCarthy called a Communist “conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

In 1960, the battle was joined once again when Richard Nixon’s endorsement of a civil rights plank was decried by Barry Goldwater as “the Munich of the Republican Party.” Thrilled conservatives tried to draft Goldwater instead. By 1964, Goldwater’s partisans succeeded in winning the nomination, but the civil war continued unabated on the convention floor when the moderates’ innocuous plank opposing “the efforts of irresponsible individuals and extremist groups to infiltrate our party” (endorsed by a governor named George Romney, who had a then-17-year-old son named Mitt) was shouted down in a voice vote....