Donald Clarke: Republican free-for-all is the converse of 1970’s situation

Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan was among the most gripping books published last year. Anybody old enough to remember Nixon's weighty jowls sagging towards delayed resignation will savour Perlstein's detailed analysis of Watergate and its aftermath.

The book reminds us that – though positively merry in comparison to the UK and Ireland – the United States passed through seven layers of dementia during the 1970s. Patty Hearst was kidnapped. New York City went bust. Helicopters lifted the last remaining Americans from an occupied Saigon.

Perlstein hangs his anecdotes around the unlikely tale of Ronald Reagan’s lengthy assault on the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. Until close to the last minute, nobody took the former governor of California seriously. He was too extreme. We was too old. He was too cheesy. Yet Reagan came dangerously close to unseating President Ford.

Following the tense showdown, the New Yorker declared that, though his concession speech may have sparkled, the former actor was almost certainly finished in politics. Not quite.

In the wake of President Nixon's resignation, the Republican Party knew that it was facing likely defeat. The strange, uncharacteristic rebellion that juiced up the bicentennial year did not, thus, matter all that much.

The current mad free-for-all on the American right is more baffling. The US has its troubles, but we are not looking at the apocalyptic chaos that characterised the 1970s. The presumed candidate for the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, though a formidable politician, is certainly beatable. There are as many rayon-trousered evangelists who think Hillary a communist, as there are Brooklyn cheese-vendors who think her a saviour. Familiarity has bred a certain amount of contempt.

Yet the candidates receiving the most attention arrived on the Mayflower with Clinton. The news that Mitt Romney, a politician played by his own waxwork dummy, was entering the 2016 fray triggered hysterical levels of activity among satirists. All the jokes from 2012 were dusted off and primed for redeployment. At least one left-leaning publication reprinted the famous conversation that found Mitt admitting in blase fashion that "47 per cent" of the public would never vote for his party.

To make matters stranger, Romney has emerged not as an alternative to younger thrusting tyros, but to a man of his own generation with similar centre-right views (by US standards). It seems a stretch to call any privileged scion of a political dynasty “unlucky”, but, if Jeb Bush’s surname were Bourne, Burns or Bailey, he would surely have already contested for the presidency.

Presidential legacy

It’s not just that handlers are wary of his elder brother’s presidential legacy. The notion of three Messrs Bush occupying the highest office in the space of 30 years could undermine the US’s claims to be a republic. Heck, the United Kingdom has had only one Windsor since 1953. Were

Jeb Bush

, former governor of Florida, to find himself running against the wife of a former president, the dynastic comparisons would be still harder to ignore.

Nonetheless, Jeb appears to have placed himself at the starting gate. Last month, he announced he would be putting together an “exploratory committee” to assess his chances. “I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for president of the United States,” Bush wrote.

Why have these creaky establishment figures emerged from the panelled rooms to resume their stalking? We may find some answers in comments made by Joe Trippi, veteran Democratic campaigner, to the New Yorker a few weeks before Jeb donned his metaphorical pith helmet and set to exploring. "I think the chances are 50:50 the Republicans are going to nominate a nutcase," Joe said.

The two most likely "nutcases" (Joe's words, not mine) are Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. In the interests of fairness, we should clarify that, though carnivorous in outlook, both men have interesting and original back-stories. Son of the considerably more eccentric Ron Paul, Rand shared dad's Libertarian (note the big "L") views for many years and, in comparison to foreign-affairs bruisers such as John McCain, still speaks like an isolationist.

Cruz, best known as chief ringleader in the US government shutdown of 2013, is the son of a Cuban immigrant who fought for Castro and, after swinging rightwards, worked his way through the University of Texas by washing dishes.

Romney and Bush have emerged to save the Republican Party from its own increasingly immoderate urges. The position is, in short, the converse of what it was in the 1970s. The unpredictable right-wing insurgents now control the party’s momentum. The ageing men in grey suits – like Reagan, former governors – seek to represent what passes for centrism in this world. The world’s gone topsy turvy, ma.