No patent medicine has been sold more frequently or ardently since the mid-1960s than racial prejudice. As the chasm between fantasy and reality opens too wide to be bridged by the artful devices of Madison Avenue, the real losers are neither Democrats nor Republicans, but an increasingly cynical and confused electorate primed to switch wildly from one political patent-medicine salesman to another, reaching deeper into passivity with each election, and accepting the notion that this nation is ungovernable.' It is a way of life.' The ingredients that make good campaigns increasingly make poor governance. Politics, argued the Roman moralist and biographer Plutarch, is not like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached.

But Stevenson was correct in insisting that there was a connection between means and ends, a link between campaigning and governing. He quotes with approval Adlai Stevenson's observation that if the 'only way I can get elected is by pandering to people's fears and hatreds, I want no part of it,' and adds: 'By the 1990s, Stevenson's earnest disquisition seemed as out of date as bathtub gin and hula hoops. To this subject he brings not merely the scholar's emphasis on research and interpretation, but the moralist's conviction that exploiting race for political ends is plainly and simply wrong. A professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, he has concentrated on racial issues throughout his career. On the question of race and politics in America, Carter may now be the leading authority. Carter was working on his fine book 'The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics.' The fourth, about the Republican Party from 1988 to 1994, was added as an afterthought, and mostly reads like one. The first three - dealing with George Wallace, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan - were originally presented as lectures at Louisiana State University in the spring of 1991, while Dan T. This discussion of the role that direct and indirect appeals to racial prejudice have played in the conservative revival consists of four essays. Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994

The Politics of Rage by Dan T. Carter