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The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History. By Donald T. Critchlow. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 359 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02620-9.)
Donald T. Critchlow's history of the conservative ascendancy starts from the proposition that the Republican electoral victory in 2004 was "the culmination of a half-century of struggle by the Right to achieve political power in the United States" (p. 1). It ends with the (slightly different) judgment that "George W. Bush's election in 2000 marked the triumph of the conservative ascendancy" (p. 286).
Some might quibble. Some, not necessarily unblushing partisans of the Left, might argue that Bush's victory in 2000, when he did not win a majority in the popular vote and owed his success to a judgment in a Supreme Court, whose majority were Republican appointees, is hardly decisive...