Published to coincide with the dawning of a primary season in which “Massachusetts Moderate” Mitt Romney would veer sharply to the right to claim the Republican presidential nomination, Geoffrey Kabaservice's Rule and Ruin has offered an insightful and compelling account of the demise of moderation within the GOP. The book focusses mostly on the 1960s and 1970s – years in which Kabaservice views the moderates as succeeding in many of their policy goals, such as civil rights advancements, yet simultaneously losing a foothold in their party. The administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the advent of the Tea Party movement serve predominantly as bookends for the author's narrative. The former is read as the epitome of the successful moderate Republican and the latter is seen as the latest in a long line of rightward thrusts from the GOP that has driven the final vestiges of moderation out of the party: “Conservative politicians and media outlets hailed the Tea Party movement as a glorious and historically unprecedented people's revolt,” Kabaservice notes. “Moderates, however, had a distinct feeling of déjà vu” (387).

Upon signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously told an adviser that the Democrats had now lost the South for a generation. According to Kabaservice, however, this was no fait accompli. Clearly sympathetic to the moderate Republicans’ cause, Kabaservice uses the civil rights developments to demonstrate the key role that moderates were able to exercise in the passage of both the 1964 Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Citing prominent crusaders on civil rights, such as Congressman William McCulloch and Governors George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller, Kabaservice bemoans the GOP's subsequent inability to wrap their party in the mantle of Abraham Lincoln. Instead, the author credits the role of Barry Goldwater's Southern Strategy in 1964, which welcomed aboard ardent segregationists including Strom Thurmond, with going some way towards ensuring that the Republican party would follow a less enlightened racial policy in the years to come. While Kabaservice is certainly correct in making this point, it would have carried more weight had he earlier avoided treating Eisenhower somewhat hagiographically, thus giving “Ike” a pass for his administration's distinctly dubious civil rights record.

As the reader moves through the chronologically arranged chapters an almost inevitable sense of doom begins to take hold regarding the fate of GOP moderates. With the rise of Sunbelt politics, and particularly as the Religious Right begins to blossom in the 1970s, it is not long before the small stream of moderate Republicans who are either shifting their previous positions to the right, crossing over to the Democrats, or even retiring from politics altogether collectively becomes a torrent. Kabaservice uses short, but effective, biographical sketches of these frustrated figures to illustrate the changes that left many Republicans feeling as though conservatives were betraying their own party's heritage of small government and fiscal prudence. This development was particularly evident in the increasing influence within the party of Jerry Falwell's “Moral Majority” (which advocated for government control of social behaviour), and in the defence spending of the Reagan administration which contributed to the transformation of the US from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor by the end of “the Gipper's” two terms. (366)

Kabaservice does not attempt to advance a small number of neat conclusions for the demise of moderates in the party. Indeed, by this reviewer's count, there are at least twenty reasons given for their passing from the scene, the majority of which Kabaservice sees as being outside their own control. Of this kind, demographic and technological changes feature prominently, which, combined with the tumultuous social and political upheavals of the 1960s, ultimately served to point the GOP in a more southern and western direction, hostile to the moderate cause. Moderates, however, do not escape without blame. Kabaservice reserves particular scorn for the liberal standard bearer, Rockefeller, whose somewhat fanciful and long-lasting presidential ambitions he sees as counterproductive to the interests of moderates. Moreover, perhaps the most interesting point that Kabaservice stresses is the inherent problem of moderation, namely that it fails to inspire the same level of passion among grassroots activists or indeed in the wealthy donors who open their chequebooks. Thus those further to the right in the GOP have been able to rely on more committed activists and cash flow over the past fifty years, especially during the all-important primary season.

Rule and Ruin is an excellently researched and eminently readable account of one of the most important developments in American politics over the last fifty years. Ultimately, as Kabaservice reveals in the final few pages, the book is a last-ditch plea for the current Republican party to rediscover the importance of moderation in politics: “A nation as large and complex as the United States … requires both the Republicans and the Democrats to be serious and responsible governing parties. If moderation remains absent from one party, let alone both, the consequences are likely to be dire” (401).