This is an important addition to what is literally a library of books about the Republican Party and conservative ideas of the last 30 years. Mark A. Smith's contribution is to show that economic policy forms the basis of Republican power and that the party's candidates have won elections by focusing on pocketbook, not cultural, issues. By doing so, Smith rejects the argument popularized by Thomas Frank (2005) in What's the Matter with Kansas? that Republican gains should be attributed to the party's duplicitous tactics and the naïveté of the lower and middle classes. Instead, he argues that Republicans effectively tapped into a real feeling of economic insecurity that has pervaded the country since the early 1970s. The party reframed its economic arguments astutely in a rhetoric that resonated with the nation. As a direct consequence, it benefited at the ballot box. Smith calculates that the Republicans' enhanced reputation on economic policy increased their presidential candidates' popular vote totals by about three percentage points more than would otherwise have been expected. The Democrats, by contrast, repositioned themselves on economic policy and, by becoming the party of balanced budgets, abandoned the New Deal and Great Society and unwittingly assisted in the rightward movement of policy.

Smith's thesis is presented within an encyclopedic overview of late-twentieth-century American political and economic history. It is an impressive accomplishment, but in covering such ground, this relatively slim volume occasionally overreaches. The author exaggerates Republican “ascendancy” or “dominance” of the last 30 years. There have been 12 years of Democratic administrations, and the Democrats have controlled the House for over half the period. Republican success at the state level has been patchy. Smith also overstates the importance of 1973 in delineating years of prosperity from a recent time of economic decline. It is presented as a pivotal year when, in truth, Americans' views of their personal and their country's economic health have fluctuated greatly across and within both periods. His argument that our economic fears have become both intensified and constant since 1973 is not helped by the presentation of much of his data. On several occasions—notably in his reporting of productivity (p. 54) and media coverage of the economy (pp. 63–64 and 108–10)—he merely averages pre- and post-1973 observations. By doing so, the reader cannot help but feel that Smith is pushing his point too hard.

More critically, I worry about two central parts of the argument. First, Smith maintains that rhetoric—which he uses in its classical sense, as “verbal and nonverbal means of persuasion” (p. 24)—helps mold public opinion. He is sensitive to the role of elite preferences, however induced, in policymaking, but argues that rhetoric is critical for the construction of the kinds of large and publicly supported coalitions necessary to move policy. This is essentially a “top-down” model of the political process. It is also a plausible one, but to be compelling, it needs to reveal how rhetoric drives policy change rather than merely reflects it. Smith never really addresses the considerable evidence that rightward movement in economic policy was facilitated greatly by a similar shift in public opinion, a basic overhaul in the way the American economy works, and demographic change. That is, he gives short shrift to a possible “bottom-up” version of events. He describes rising economic insecurity in great detail, but he does not spend much time explaining technological innovation, the demise of manufacturing, and other developments that can be used to explain the increased persuasiveness of Republican arguments. More problematic is the fact that nowhere does he show directly that any individual, whether a policymaker or member of the public, was prevailed upon to support Republican economic positions because of the party's rhetoric.

Second, it is difficult to share Smith's assertion that the Republican Party radically “repositioned” itself after 1973. Because they consist of a diverse array of different and often conflicting interests and ideas, it is always dangerous to say, as the author does, that a major American party has a singular position on a particular issue. But if the post-1973 Republicans became a low-tax and to-heck-with-the-consequences party, then this was something new. As Smith notes, it is that true there were economists advocating aggressive across-the-board tax slashing before Art Laffer, Robert Mundell, and Jude Wanniski. Theirs were lonely voices, however. The embrace of “supply-side economics” by Republicans in the late 1970s was much more profound than the repackaging of an old idea. It was the choice of party elites—including influential elected officials like Jack Kemp and Bill Roth—to move the party palpably away from its traditional fiscal conservatism and pragmatic support for the least onerous parts of the New Deal. The decision made across-the-board tax cuts a central part of Republican philosophy. This had never been the case before.

These criticisms weaken the thesis, but are far from fatal. The Right Talk is an important, interesting, and bold explanation of the rise of the Republican Party and conservative ideas in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Moreover, the chapters on conservative thought (Chapter 5) and what Smith calls conservatives' “intellectual capacity” (Chapter 4) are especially important in their own right. He describes how conservative thinkers emphasized liberty in their economic writings prior to the 1970s and worried largely about the economic consequences of government action after that time. He also presents an interesting analysis of historical changes in the content of the National Review (Chapter 5). His assessment of governors' “state-of-the-state” speeches is novel and the comparison of Goldwater and Reagan illuminating (both are in Chapter 6). These laudatory adjectives could also be applied to Smith's contribution to the theory of political rhetoric (Chapter 2), which shows it to have a complex relationship with policy preferences.