Understanding the Republican Party’s rightward march

WHEN Gerald Ford accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for president at the convention in 1976, he stood, literally, between the party’s past and future. He shook hands with the future, standing on his right: Ronald Reagan, the challenger he narrowly defeated. To his left, the past—Nelson Rockefeller, the vice-president whom Ford dropped from the ticket—dutifully cheered. Ford would go on to lose to Jimmy Carter that autumn; four years later, Reagan would win the nomination and the first of his two landslide general-election victories. Rockefeller, meanwhile, would leave public life and die in 1979.