Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Betrayed the Conservative Movement

From the days of Barry Goldwater through his work for presidential candidate Steve Forbes, Philip Gold was an active and influential conservative. The Great Society of the ‘60s seemed like a scam to this poor Jewish kid from Pittsburgh, so off he went to Yale and thus began a thirty-year crusade for the Right as an Ivy League marine, a cog in the think-tank world, participant in political campaigns, and a Beltway defense intellectual in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But growing disillusionment with the creed and its people provoked his clean break from the Right in 2002. Lithely written yet earnest, peppered with humor and insight, Take Back the Right is an anecdotal tale of a Republican policymaker's breakup with the conservative movement. While regaling readers with personal and political tales, Gold explores the forces that prompted his opposition to the war in Iraq, his first published critiques of Bush and the neo-conservatives around him, and his dismay at the cultural conservatives who have alienated the party from its roots. Gold predicts that our country is facing its greatest crises since the 1850s as his book prepares readers for what lies ahead and how we can avert disaster.