Commentators of all political stripes who tell you how times have changed in the last 30 years ignore the startling similarities. “By 1980 many Republicans in Washington could be considered victims of the political equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages come to sympathize with their captors,” Steven F. Hayward writes in The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989. “Having been in the minority for so long, many Washington Republicans had come to absorb the premises of establishment liberalism, preferring to offer a low-budget version of the Democratic platform.”
Hayward, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, will be the featured speaker at Accuracy in Academia’s next author’s night on November 5, 2009 @ Armand’s on Capitol Hill from 6-8 PM.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
