Elephant walk.

Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans, by Lewis L. Gould (Random House, 597 pp., $35)

THE Republican party has been in existence for less than 150 years. In that short time, it has ended slavery, saved the Union, confronted Communism, and provided a home for those fighting against some of the bad, dangerous, or simply stupid ideas of our age: not a bad record. In this book, Lewis Gould, a professor emeritus of American history at the University of Texas, covers the party from its Lincolnian beginnings to the 2000 presidential election. Gould seems to be an old-fashioned historian, and the book is filled with detail that will endear him to political junkies. He provides analyses of changing voting patterns, the rise of the "southern strategy," and the importance of the West in the Republican electoral calculus.

This book--quite surprisingly, considering that it comes from a mainstream press and is written by an academic--says a number of nice things about the Republicans. Their emphasis on cultural issues, for example, has "often been necessary and salutary" to correct the excesses of liberalism. Gould also notes, with some astonishment, that the GOP up until 1980 had a platform plank supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and was "marginally more inclusive" than the Democrats. The party was founded on anti-slavery principles and the desire for progress toward racial equality; the Democrats, meanwhile, for many decades harbored the racialist leftovers of the Confederacy.

Nonetheless, Gould has trouble coping with the changes the GOP has undergone. He writes that what started out as a "radical, reformist political movement ... has become the conservative party of the nation.... Begun as a party of nationalism and positive government, the Republicans have evolved into the champion of states' rights and limited federal power." That Republican positions have changed over the years is not really disputable or even remarkable; a party that has contained Strom Thurmond and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller, is a big tent indeed. Unfortunately, Gould examines these policy shifts almost exclusively from the perspective of presidentialelection cycles. This proves an unstable footing for an attempt to understand a party that has based its program in large part on a commitment to reduce the power of the federal government and the Washington elites. Such an approach also buries the state-level issues that still form the bulk of any party's success. While not unaware of these other factors, Gould's narrative generally takes us from one national party convention to another.

More important, the book fails to address in a significant way the intellectual shifts that influenced the policy changes. We see this perhaps most clearly in Gould's summation of the differences between the two parties. In 2000, he writes,

   the GOP was still pro-business, but otherwise
   it had taken over key aspects of
   the Democratic creed of the Bryan era:
   states' rights, small government, free
   trade, and limits to overseas involvement.
   On race, the Republicans had not
   adopted the creed of white supremacy,
   but they did represent the view that too
   much had been done for African Americans
   and other minorities during Democratic
   administrations.

This summary is, to put it mildly, misleading. There is a world of difference between believing in states' rights because they help maintain "the creed of white supremacy," and believing that federalism is a cornerstone of American constitutional government because it preserves freedom. A serious examination of the extent to which the policy shifts in Republican platforms reflected real changes in ideas--rather than mere short-term considerations of political expediency--would have made the book much more accurate.

The omission becomes more pronounced as we near the present. Gould weirdly opines that the Reagan Revolution "proved to be mostly rhetoric." (Tell it to the Kremlin.) He does group Reagan with Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Theodore Roosevelt as one of the GOP's "transcendent figures," but Reagan still comes off in his account as something of a fraud: "When hard choices loomed, Reagan and the people around him preferred a conservatism of gestures rather than one of substance." But Gould denies us the information we need in order to assess that conclusion. He gives us almost nothing of the intellectual substance that made the Reagan Revolution possible: very little of Milton Friedman, NATIONAL REVIEW, or the conservative resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s, except for a few scant paragraphs on the neoconservatives; and no Russell Kirk at all. And so when Gould gets to the 1992 convention and the subsequent career of Patrick Buchanan, we are at a loss to understand what is really going on in the struggle for ideas within the party.

If it is true, as City Journal's Brian Anderson has recently argued, that conservatives are winning the culture wars, any ultimate victory will have a lot to do with the generation of Republicans who grew up with Reagan and who believed conservatism to be a coherent approach to modern politics and society. These millions of red-state voters who are rejecting the political party of liberalism have formed their own culture with their own institutions, one of which Gould calls the "talk-radio craze." In his preface, Gould says that he wanted to understand how the Republicans have, over the course of a century and more, met the "deeply felt needs of the American people." While Grand Old Party provides a decent introduction to the party's history and achievements, more is needed to get to the core of the Grand Old Party's enduring appeal.

Mr. Russello is a writer living in Brooklyn.