Mark L. Hineline is an historian at the University of California, Riverside and San Diego campuses. He lives in Escondido, California. Over the past three decades, strident voices of social and political reaction -- voices belonging to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, and lately Ann Coulter, among others -- have captured the national agenda. In so doing, their greatest prize is the success they have enjoyed in blurring the critical distinction between conservatism and reaction. This is a distinction with a difference. And it is not only conservatives who have suffered its loss. Progressives -- who...