Journalism is often said to be the best that can be said quickly. Writing history takes time.

For the last few weeks, Economic Principals has been dipping in and out of two books by three distinguished journalists. One book argues that the changed in the national mood traces back to 1992 the appearance on the national stage, of Newt Gingrich, a Congressional representative of Georgia. True enough, it seems to EP. The other goes a little easier on the former Speaker of the House, in order to show how many other Dixie politicians of his ilk there were.

But Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Party (Little Brown, 1996), by Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein, and Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (Times Books, 1996), by Peter Applebome, were written well before the looming Constitution crisis. Telling the latter story of how that happened requires a much longer view.

A persuasive account of how a conservative legal regime replaced a liberal one in fewer than fifty years is The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, 2008). by Steven M. Teles. The author, a strategist with the eyes of a tactician, is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University.