Josh did us all yet another service by linking to Gabler's LAT piece since this revisionist Goldwater to Reagan to Bush II story of modern conservatism is just so much bunk.  In the million and half books and essays about the New Deal, the modern reader can read about a political campaign against Franklin Roosevelt that closely resembles the modern Republican Party which sort of reads all this rugged libertarianism out the window.
The us against them, Americans versus these other people, with its happily added racism (so Reagan could begin his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi) started so long ago, but was smashed by FDR until, long after his death, a country that had forgotten how it was had, fell for their tricks yet again.

Just read the contemporaneous accounts of the world before FDR and you will see what I mean.

Try this one, for instance, from Arthur Krock in the NYT, Sunday, September 18, 1932, and ask yourself how familiar this territory is to anyone who went throught he Swiftboating of Sen Kerry or the "he's a Muslim" against the President-elect: 

Whispering has won more Presidential campaigns than oratory ever has, and the Republicans are eerily skilled in it.  No official sanction is given to whispering, of course, but there is a benign attitude at [party headquarters] which "the boys" understand. In 1928 the whisper ran through the South that the Democrats ought to be defeated for nominating a Catholic [in New York Gov. Al Smith].  In 1932, the soft breezes carry a suggestion to New England, New York and Illinois that the Democrats ought to lose because they refused to nominate a Catholic [the same, but now former Gov. Smith].  Industrial workers somehow hear that times may be worse if the Democrats and "radicals" are allowed to check the sure return of recovery, led by the President [Hoover, running for re-election].  Even a Republican Senator did not hesitate to make the sly suggestion that a candidate who had been afflicted with polio...would naturally debate in terms of "Alice in Wonderland."