"Today, Nearly All Political Centrists Are Democrats"

"Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene.  Wary of excessive government, they were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent.  Their beau idéal was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1952 became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected president.  His principal opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, had opposed the New Deal and was a staunch isolationist who opposed supporting Britain in the first years of World War II.  Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home.  He called it 'modern Republicanism.'  With Eisenhower's landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P.
"Of course it wasn't."

In The New York Times, Timothy Noah reviews Geoffrey Kabaservice's Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party and Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

And in The New Republic, Mark Schmitt reviews Kabaservice's book.