C/D: Rick Perlstein

would like to get around to reading his goldwater bio, someday

Before the Storm was interesting--less a bio of Goldwater than a view of the emerging Conservative movement, for which Barry was a kind of spokesdummy.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/rickperlstein/

The Reader article.

Nixonland is one of the best political histories I've ever read. Currently halfway through Before the Storm, which is a great insight into the genesis of batshit conservatism - rare to find a leftwing writer so engaged with finding out what makes the right tick. He's such a stylish, confident narrator too.

would like to get around to reading his goldwater bio, someday

finally read Before The Storm last year and it is indeed excellent both as history of wingnutt conservatism and character study of ol' Barry, what a complicated & conflicted guy.

Loved Before The Storm when I read it last January; it and Nixonland are really a two-part novel.

I just started Nixonland, and enjoyed the story of Dick and Murray Chotiner breaking into Elmer Bobst's pool house, but Perlstein has a real dumb brushoff of the original Planet of the Apes (it's about the Fall of Whitey).

It's been two years since I read Nixonland, but I remember it more as him throwing out what seemed like an obvious subtext to the movie: that it was an expression of white fear over all the post-Watts rioting that was going on. I don't remember him dismissing the film--maybe I'm wrong.

I was surprised to learn Sinatra supported HHH in '68; thought he'd already switched country clubs by then.

Love that Hubert quote after the convention: "let's stop pretending Mayor Daley did anything wrong." (Not sure if that includes yelling 'fuck you, Jew bastard' at Abe Ribicoff on nat'l TV)

http://oi58.tinypic.com/71h6r6.jpg

finally finished nixonland. i liked it overall but it's kind of an exhausting read, perlstein's prose pretty much never cools down and it's a little hard to take for more than 800 pages. the stand-alone chapters are great (especially the one on kent state).

there are also way too many paragraphs where perlstein seems to be just ticking off one day's events after another with no analysis, as if he thinks his descriptive writing is awesome enough to give you the gist of what happened without any need to elaborate on it.

there are also way too many paragraphs where perlstein seems to be just ticking off one day's events after another with no analysis, as if he thinks his descriptive writing is awesome enough to give you the gist of what happened without any need to elaborate on it

This problem gets much more irksome in the sequel, The Invisible Bridge, which however is still worth reading

I just finished Perlstein's Before the Storm (which I would HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend to anyone trying to wrap their heads around current events), and one of my takeaways was 'wrong time, wrong place'. Goldwater was a proto-Trump at a time when the makeup of society was such that a Trumpian figure could only go so far. The gist being that it isn't the power-hungry imbecile that's the problem but rather the extent to which society will permit a power-hungry imbecile to take the reins. We're carved up into extremist tribes with frighteningly little middle ground (another takeaway from the book was surprise at the amount of vocal Republican opposition after Goldwater secured the nomination, although granted this was the modern iteration of the GOP just taking its baby steps), so the time was ripe.

― Break the meat into the pineapples and pat them (Old Lunch), Wednesday, April 12, 2017 11:57 PM

He just wrote a piece for the NYT Mag dealing with historians' (incl his) myopia about Trumpism as a successor to a long vein of righty extremism in the American 'mainstream' -- the Second KKK, the backlash to the '60s counterculture and civil rights, etc.

The Bund took a mortal hit (in 1939) — its leader was caught embezzling — but the Christian Front soldiered on. In 1940, a New York chapter was raided by the F.B.I. for plotting to overthrow the government. The organization survived, and throughout World War II carried out what the New York Yiddish paper The Day called “small pogroms” in Boston and New York that left Jews in “mortal fear” of “almost daily” beatings. Victims who complained to authorities, according to news reports, were “insulted and beaten again.” Young Irish-Catholic men inspired by the Christian Front desecrated nearly every synagogue in Washington Heights. The New York Catholic hierarchy, the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts largely looked the other way....

Trump’s connection to this alternate right-wing genealogy is not just rhetorical. In 1927, 1,000 hooded Klansmen fought police in Queens in what The Times reported as a “free for all.” One of those arrested at the scene was the president’s father, Fred Trump. (Trump’s role in the melee is unclear; the charge — “refusing to disperse” — was later dropped.) In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie, at the time a resident of the Beach Haven housing complex the elder Trump built near Coney Island, wrote a song about “Old Man Trump” and the “Racial hate/He stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line” in one of his housing developments. In 1973, when Donald Trump was working at Fred’s side, both father and son were named in a federal housing-discrimination suit. The family settled with the Justice Department in the face of evidence that black applicants were told units were not available even as whites were welcomed with open arms.

The 1960s and ’70s New York in which Donald Trump came of age, as much as Klan-ridden Indiana in the 1920s or Barry Goldwater’s Arizona in the 1950s, was at conservatism’s cutting edge, setting the emotional tone for a politics of rage. In 1966, when Trump was 20, Mayor John Lindsay placed civilians on a board to more effectively monitor police abuse. The president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association — responding, “I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups and their gripes and their shouting” — led a referendum effort to dissolve the board that won 63 percent of the vote. Two years later, fights between supporters and protesters of George Wallace at a Madison Square Garden rally grew so violent that, The New Republic observed, “never again will you read about Berlin in the ’30s without remembering this wild confrontation here of two irrational forces.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/magazine/i-thought-i-understood-the-american-right-trump-proved-me-wrong.html?_r=0

good article

I'm in the middle of The Invisible Bridge now, after finishing Nixonloand, and I agree with the comments upthread about how overwhelming Perlstein's endless concatenation of fragments can be; the arguments he's trying to support tend to be either obvious and repetitive or buried in the profusion of detail; but his method evokes the mood of those times in a powerful way. I'm not sure if it's more consoling or depressing to realize that the 1970s were at least as fucked up as the present day.

That NYT piece provides some good context for his books by acknowledging blind spots and drawing explicitly on the work of other historians to help define and fill in the gaps.

i thought it'd have been interesting if he'd gone into the Carter administration a little bit, although for the story he was trying to tell the narrative climax was the 76 GOP primaries/convention. makes me wonder why he bothered to go into detail about Carter and the Democratic primaries though, then

because he's foreshadowing his Reagan book?

Carter's presidency still hasn't gotten the histories it deserves. The best is still Walter Karp's Liberty Under Siege, which argues that an untalented politician whose campaign seized a historical moment was unprepared for the waves of reaction emanating from establishment Washington, particularyl a House with daunting Democratic post-Watergate majorities.

the cultural-panorama sections in bridge are the weakest he's ever been -- endless "turn to page five, and a woman had hacked her kids to death -- it must have seemed the culture was spinning out of control" stuff. jefferson cowie's stayin alive gives better focus on the same period imo -- has a better analysis of jaws too. but i love the reagan-bio sections of bridge and its telling of watergate is a strong contender in a choked field.

his baffler piece from a few years ago about richard viguerie (sp?) and right-wing advertising culture was extremely good, as acknowledged by pareene the other day. suspect it will get cited in the future like it was in a journal.

i find it very strange that the dude who wrote 3 fat tomes about American conservativism, including one about Goldwater, who constantly got compared to Trump during the campaign, and who many people have said "you've GOT to read Perlstein if you want to understand our present moment", would choose this time to issue a mea culpa saying he doesn't understand Trump and you won't find the answer in my books. like, dude. sell your shit!

"i spent two decades researching and writing almost three thousand pages about contemporary conservatism. But reading them won't help you understand this Trump fellow one lick, he really came out of left field." how do you not kill yourself after writing that?

Our old friend miccio, who hasn't read any of Perlstein's books, got into a FB discussion w/me a couple weeks ago based on that very point, i.e. "if this guy is so smart, how can he not have predicted this?"

My only response, a feeble one, is that the NYT magazine is not The New Republic or The Nation -- he has to write these rehashes and mea culpas.

yeah i didn't get that piece. if there's one major takeaway from his whole series so far it's that the liberal_commentariat keeps saying this stuff is done forever right before it comes back to crush them. he doesn't mention that at all now which i guess is very gracious.

funny that the piece was online the same week as pareene's "confused about trump? read this four-year-old rick perlstein article"

Why are historians supposed to be great prognosticators? I would never assume that. Peoples is not meteorology

Anyway absent few thousand votes and the flukiness of the electoral college, Trump isn't Perlstein's to have to explain, is he?

Agreed, but historians don't have to and shouldn't have to write these mea culpas, but I get that the NYT Magazine probably pays quite well.

Thanks for the heads up on that article, Morbs. I'd just about tossed last weekend's paper.

I wouldn't say I'd have expected Perlstein to predict the Trump phenomenon specifically, but he ended Before the Storm on such a pointed note of anti-Goldwater peeps thanking their lucky stars that right-wing extremism died alongside Barry's candidacy that I would have at least expected him to see the signs of liberal hubris that wenteth before our fall.

Or what dlh just said, basically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kx-ke9RKww

Perlstein was actually more prescient than many, at least once the Trump train got rolling. From September 2015:

Reagan, and now Trump, reveal our own tendency to repress our fear of demagogues by dismissing them. And ultimately, it's all about us. Follow the bouncing beach ball. Take demagogues seriously. Voters love them. And they're only a joke until they win.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/what-ronald-reagan-teaches-us-about-donald-trump-925

reagan and nixon both have a lot more to do w trump than goldwater does, even tho the goldwater campaign was where a lot of now-apotheosized technique was born. this--

Goldwater, who constantly got compared to Trump during the campaign

--is true but there was a lotta wishful thinking in it.

("technique" admittedly covering a lot there including the beginnings of the southern realignment -- but goldwater himself wasn't a ball of insecurity and rage nor a weird half-there monarchical cypher, whereas trump is both and also an idiot)

(and a winner)

I rewatched Game Change the other night. I know that's got nothing to do with Perlstein, but it's relevant to what you're talking about. This one exchange, between Palin and Steve Schmidt, was (apocryphal or not) made to order.

Schmidt: “You can't say you were cleared of all wrongdoing.”
Palin: “Why not?”
Schmidt: “Because you weren't. The report stated that you abused your power. That is the opposite of being cleared of all wrongdoing.”
Palin: “Then why was I told otherwise?”
Schmidt: “You weren't told otherwise.”
Palin: “And why haven't you released a statement saying that Todd was never a member of the Alaska independence party?”
Schmidt: “Because that would be untrue. He was a member.”
Palin: “He checked the wrong box. He registered by accident, and rectified the error immediately.”
Schmidt: “He was a member for seven years!”

palin def a prophet of rage and aesthetic liar in the way trump, reagan, nixon all in their own ways were and goldwater didn't rly know how to be -- she now seems happy as just a plain grifter tho. trump prob would have been too.

Agreed, but historians don't have to and shouldn't have to write these mea culpas, but I get that the NYT Magazine probably pays quite well.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, April 19, 2017 10:11 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think every media outlet in the world was trying to get him to opine during and after the election and he didn't seem super comfortable about it in the handful of articles he wrote in a response.. Was probably trying to wrap his head around it all.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/rick-perlstein-donald-trump-economy-right-republicans-goldwater-nixon-reagan/

one of the worst things ever written

This framing fits with Perlstein’s model of political change as the cultural-cum-psychohistory of how the mental idiosyncrasies of particular leaders interact with the public’s irrationality and innate conservatism.

this seems like a 180 degrees misread. (although i have only read the Goldwater book). the Perlstein thesis is that it's all about the sociopolitical forces and the guys doing the backroom deals and organizing and NOT about the leaders!

no article titled "Trump's Predictable Rise" should be getting submitted from anywhere but the private island you purchased after betting on his victory.

if the nyt essay were the only thing i'd read by perlstein i'd agree w that piece. it didn't make any sense.

perlstein's historiography isn't as great-man as it could be but it's also not exactly movement history; its way of finding out what was happening in the country any given week is to read all the papers, not to interview anyone for 100 hours the way caro or branch do. nixonland in particular is v interested in how nixon's particular personality interacted w the country's particular wounds, as is perlstein's reagan work. the books really are a little topheavy and the shallowness of the headline-scanning in bridge made that one more so.

however he makes plenty clear in all three books that "intellectual conservatism" was always symbiotic with another thing and that nixon and reagan's success vs goldwater's failure had a lot to do w their relationship to that thing. like you the other day i was confused to find him claiming to have missed that and if his new position really is "trump is radically new" he is wrong.

(also agree w the jacobin piece that perlstein is not very interested in economic history and that this hampers his approach to the 70s in partic)

haven't read Nixonland but i believe that (Jefferson Cowies book had same problem) but the economics of the 70s are hard and imo left never really grappled w them (in both USA and europe)

cowie book at least was immersed in the politics of economics, changing relationships between loci of power in labor+business, changing nature of union management and union membership, etc -- doesn't give you any ideas about how to construct a revised keynesianism for the 70s, but fills in the, ah, disposition of forces around the 72 election in a way that perlstein doesn't

agree that the economic left (not unanimously -- cowie book has some painfully forward-thinking quotes in it from defeated and forgotten steelworker reps) lost the plot in the 70s, and after being backfooted by an all-out political assault from organized capital never really did go back and find it. no time like the present tho

hell I still don't get stagflation, so if Perlstein can't...

Ya right got possession on the fumble of stagflation and haven't stopped running. there was some interesting stuff in Cowie about Nixon and Carters halfhearted / ineffective attempts at economic planning necessary for their Full Employment policies, but im not sure he's the right person to tell it. I'm a big fan of Barry Eichengreen's The European Economy Since 1945 which lays bare all the pitfalls and potential of 'coordinated capitalism' but someone needs to write (1) a response from the left and (2) an equivalent book for America (BE does some comparatives but not much)

(not that Eichengreen is of the Right but i want to read someone to his left)

agree with the ppl who said that times article was bizarre. the article was just a rehash of things i first learned from his own books, with him saying that it was all new to him.

Our old friend miccio, who hasn't read any of Perlstein's books, got into a FB discussion w/me a couple weeks ago based on that very point, i.e. "if this guy is so smart, how can he not have predicted this?"

this misstates my beef with the piece quite a bit. he ends sayingFuture historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage. what i don't get is how an allegedly astute writer could put buckley, goldwater and reagan on one side and "political surrealists," "intellectual embarrassments," "con artists" and "tribunes of white rage" on the other.

i never suggested it's weird he couldn't predict president trump. all you needed to not predict that is optimism.

I reread the article on a plane last night and yeah you're right

btw my post looks more snarky than I intended

"if this guy is so smart, how can he not have predicted this?"

ask miccio how many smart people he knows. let him go on a while. then ask him how many of them can accurately predict the future.

The simple point, though, which I missed as a Perlstein partisan, is that he has spent his life writing about this shit and, while no one gets everything right, I don't expect this person to write an article explaining how Trump's lineage wasn't obvious.

Historians not understanding what seems obvious in the present is the origin story of most practicing historians.

Ref: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian

Eagleman is pretty annoying but his anecdotal insight from this piece has stuck with me because it contains a strong nugget of truth:

Although Eagleman and his students study timing in the brain, their own sense of time tends to be somewhat unreliable. Eagleman wears a Russian wristwatch to work every morning, though it’s been broken for months. “The other day, I was in the lab,” he told me, “and I said to Daisy, who sits in the corner, ‘Hey, what time is it?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. My watch is broken.’ It turns out that we’re all wearing broken watches.” Scientists are often drawn to things that bedevil them, he said. “I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they’re all overweight.”

Buckley and Goldwater aren't intellectual embarrassments or con artists (Buckley is a propagandist and good at making conservatives feel intelligent, but that's not quite the same thing as a con artist, andTrump a pure snakeoil salesmen--and an intellectual infant), and i'm not sure i'd call them surrealists either, Goldwater is just a boring old pilot from Arizona and Buckley a verbose middlebrow pseud. as no book jacket can go without a quote attesting to, Perlstein is perhaps unique on the left in being able to put aside ideological differences and, at least as as strategists, 'admire' the right; whereas most of us can't leave any invective un-lobbed, he can patiently catalogue them. as much as we want to tar the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan tradition of GOP with Trump and vice versa, it's obvious that Trump is a break with that tradition in a way that Cruz, Rubio, Bush or any other of the nominees wouldn't have been

it's "the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan" that strikes me as the most false to say trump has nothing to do with

but again you'd never get the impression trump has nothing to do with it from his books.

maybe he literally means only the bright-eyed optimistic parts of RR's shtick and not the snarling disciplinarian parts -- but even behind the former, masquerading as it, is the usual shit

agree that goldwater wasn't a con artist or an embarrassment. maybe a political surrealist. for buckley any and all invective will do but that's just me

trump has dead-eyed optimism

lol

the path (one path) goes nixon-reagan-trump imo -- deeper into the image, deeper into fantasy, flatter, crueler, madder. looks more like an actual ruling "dynasty" than the bushes or clintons: the paranoid emperor --> the vapid ceremonialist --> the syphilitic monster. on this continuum the difference between trump and his "serious" primary opponents (not including ben carson and probably some others i've just forgotten) is that trump takes the next step down it.

sorry, flopson, but Buckley was an embarrassment. The publicity over the purported expulsion of the Birchers obscured how white supremacist NRO was in the sixties.

And I think that's the thing it ultimately all comes down to. I feel like there's a pretty obvious connection between the historical stewards of white supremacy and Trump, whatever cosmetic differences may exist between them.

I have a hunch that Trump rather lucked into the racist constituency because so few Republicans politicians with national ambitions thought it was worth risking such open racism in 2016. They were too timid, I guess.

Well, surely the decades of taking racist positions, loudly and publicly, and being feted for it, also factors in. Plus birtherism. It's not like he suddenly decided to go out and talk about fixing up our nation's campgrounds and discovered there was an audience hungry for it, that no one had noticed before.

Perlstein's premise in the Goldwater book seemed to be that there was a wave of racist white resentment just looking for a figurehead to rally around, and that Barry could've likely won if he and his people hadn't constantly fumbled the ball. You swap out 'the Civil Rights Act' with 'eight years of Obama' as the source of the resentment and the circumstances are eerily similar. It's just that the GOP has had fifty years to tamper with various aspects of the electoral process such that last year's bumblefuck candidate was able to just squeak out a victory.

I wasn't around for Goldwater or Buckley or the rise of Reagan so I can't speak to how they were perceived at the time, but I don't think you can argue that to the mainstream, MOR, Beltway and "institutions"-fellating political class they are considered Serious Conservatives today. it's very hard to imagine Trump being held up that way 40 or 50 years from now. I mean, I guess anything's possible, though I have a hard time imagining how we even have a country left if we every reached that point.

Goldwater and Reagan were considered rubes, reactionaries, and unelectable; Goldwater's failure and Reagan's long record of boneheaded statements and his record as governor made many of the Beltway pundits dismiss his chances in 1980 (and he nearly got the nomination in '76, recall).

Just finished Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996), which is fantastic throughout.... really gets into the hows of deindustrialization, housing discrimination, etc., and tracks the "urban crisis" back to Depression-era roots and immediate post-WWII developments. Relevant to this thread, the last few chapters struck me as being of interest to Perlstein readers, as he tracks the really vicious, organized, en masse white backlash to "civil rights gone too far" (etc.) especially with regard to housing. Some of it's stuff we're all familiar with by now (red-lining, restrictive covenants, all that), but it was really clarifying to me to see how early northern politicians were capitalizing on Archie Bunker types who spent their free time burning crosses on the lawns of newly-moved-in black families. So George Wallace's great reception among white Detroiters in '68 and '72 (he won the Democratic primary in the latter year!), or Nixon's "silent majority," or the Reagan Democrats.... this is shit going back to the early 1950s.

Thank you for the recommendation, Dr. C. I've been intending to do a lot more reading specifically re: the history of housing discrimination in the US, so this is going on the list.

(Just finished Nixonland a couple weeks back, one volume among many on my long tour through that other utterly fucked era. Although I'm taking a little break for the sake of my well-being atm.)

damn i read nixonland thinking "wow i had no recollection or awareness of how that era fit together to be so incredibly fucked up- even worse than now in 2014. But here were are and WAAAAAAAAAHHHH.

I bought this as a gift for someone yesterday, then immediately ordered a copy for myself online:

http://www.amazon.com/Landslide-Ronald-Reagan-Dawn-America/dp/081297879X

Didn't know it was out there. Looks to be very much in the style of Perlstein's books--from there to here--tracking the two of them through the mid-'60s.

Jane Mayer's Landslide, written about the results of the '84 election, is essential too.

it's been twenty years since i read it but IIRC, haynes johnson's /sleepwalking through history/ was pretty informative on the reagan presidency, though far from the deep study of conservative ideology and political formations appropriate to this thread... just good for getting the corruption and scandals and the air traffic controllers and the '87 crash in order. i bet a lot of it reads weird now, like i don't remember a ton about race or about AIDS. but it's also possible those were there but just not the things i zeroed in on as a high-schooler.

In my senior year HS government class our teacher asked us to pick a current best-seller on which to write a book report – I chose Johnson's book, and it's a decent survey.

yeah, for those so concerned about the decline of decency and ascent of racism under Trump, it's pretty illuminating to read about the Reagan era. In Strange Justice for example the racist shit dumped on Clarence Fucking Thomas by Reagan appointees when he was at the EEOC.

the more i've been reading about politics in the 30s through the 50s the more i wonder if perlstein's meta-frame may be slightly out of focus. increasingly it seems to me that the conservative turn of the late 30s, recapitulated and made permanent by that of the late 40s and early 50s is much more crucial than it's usually given credit for. essentially, in huge swaths of political terrain, the conservative coalition won at that point: severe delimitation of which parts of the new deal would be kept permanent, near-total repudiation of the federal-municipal funding arrangements used to create the public works state of the 30s (to later get a shot in the arm with the great society, but still: city problems no longer conceived of as local instances of national problems, see mason williams's book on laguardia and FDR).... and most importantly an embrace of pro-business, pro-real-estate, pro-bank solutions to almost all the critical domestic and foreign policy issues. taft-hartley ends the national expansion of union power. national healthcare is rejected. public housing is kneecapped to provide only the meanest of accommodations for groups of the least interest to the market. private housing development is massively subsidized in several ways, but only for lucrative new suburban development. etc. etc.

in tandem with this is mccarthyism which i'm convinced is also too often told through too limited of a lens. it's not just about "lives ruined" by shoddy accusations or a "climate of fear," it's about the purging of the Old Left from the overton window and from civic life.... and a huge artificial career subsidy to conservatives who got to keep their jobs and move up in the chain. what would the sixties have looked like if the top military and civilian leadership, and mid-career mid-level decision makers and interpreters of what the problems were, had not basically been pre-selected, twenty years earlier, for being not-too-lefty? all kinds of depression-era alliances shattered, strident organizations like the NAACP forced to drop planks, associations, campaigns...

IOW the "american consensus" of the 50s and early 60s represents already a substantial pile of "wins" for old gilded age conservatism that just had to wait out the FDR years and find its new footing. maybe this belongs on a bigger conservatism thread and i'm sure a ton of this is "duh" to most folks here but along with my reading of sugrue upthread, i just think maybe it's a mistake to look at goldwater onward as the return of a previously in-retreat ideology, and more accurate to see as the right waking up and reconsolidating itself to gain just a bit more ground, with the slow churn of racial politics intertwined with the rising economic security of white "ethnics" gradually making this more and more possible at more and more scales of government. or something. i dunno!

Delineating the limits of what the nexus of the American political system and business interests would accept from social welfare and revenue sharing has been the business of many historians, though. The 1938 congressional elections, after all, killed FDR's liberal majority in Congress (not the same as Dem majority, obv), so resistance to these experiments began early and never abated, not to mention Truman's own trouble keeping the coalition together.

Yeah, exactly. Not claiming it's some revelation to the world, more me shaking off the way I've always been taught this history from high school onwards.

w00t:

Leave me alone! I'm submitting my REAGANLAND manuscript on April 15!

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) March 4, 2019

For absolutely no good reason it took me years to finish Nixonland. False starts, distractions, restarting chapters or several chapters after long breaks; I'd recommended it to so many over the years despite my own slack pace. Of course it's excellent, so many "same as it ever was" echoes of contemporary politics. In fact, as I read it I fantasized at times that it was all fiction and we finally had the Great American Novel of the Trump era.

reaganland is up on amazon, comes out in august

perlstein also said on twitter that his next book is going to be about the 1830s!

Van Burenland

just realized I never finished the invisible bridge..

solid cover

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdjcYDiWkAABv-a?format=jpg&name=large

Jimmy throwing rightward shade.

I'm currently reading Before the Storm.

we won't spoil the ending

Great cover!

"From the bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power."

I can certainly understand why he wouldn't want to devote even more of his life to this project, but count me as someone who hates seeing the word "conclusion" in there. I assume this one will be typically excellent, and then I'd love to see probably two more volumes, splitting up Bush I/Dole/Bush II/Cheney/Romney/Palin/Trump in whatever way makes the most sense.

The problem I see with treating the last 20 years of US politics similarly is that NO ONE knew what the FUCK they were doing.

I see Perlstein's project as encompassing the Road to the Reagan Revolution. Like, if 1980 is understood to be the start of a long period of conservatism (which influenced even the neoliberal style of Clinton and Obama), he wants to show how the foundation was laid. How "movement conservatism" went from fringe to mainstream in just a couple of decades. So it seems complete to end with Reagan's election, even if that begins a new chapter.

I've only recently read "Nixonland," but I found it so relevant to where we are right now that I can't really imagine what I would glean from its successors. I mean, I'm sure they're great books! But it'll be a while before I get to them.

I do understand why you'd want to end with the election of Reagan--that is an inflection point that leads directly to Trump. (As Goldwater does, as Nixon does.) But obviously important stuff happened between then and now, and you could--in one volume or two--tell a really interesting story. It's almost like Dole and Romney are momentary pauses--completely insignificant in retrospect--in an otherwise ever-accelerating runaway train.

first review i've seen

https://slate.com/culture/2020/08/rick-perlstein-reaganland-book-review.html

This has probably been posted to one of the COVID threads.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/opinion/coronavirus-vaccine-trump.html

Finally found Reaganland a little cheaper and started it today. I knew the '76 election was close, but didn't realize it was almost as close as 2016 in terms of shifting a few thousands votes in two or three states.

a while ago i wrote a program that takes the results and figures out how to change the outcome of the election while moving the fewest people. i might have transcribed the results of 1976 wrong just now, but assuming i didn't, you could have changed the outcome by moving:

Move 7373 Democrats to Hawaii for 4 EVs
Move 11117 Democrats to Ohio for 25 EVs
Total of 18490 people for 29 EVs

i haven't gone further back than 2000, but that's closer than any election since 2000 except 2000 itself. the next closest was 2016, which was won by 77747 votes in 3 states. so yes! 1976 was very close.

Perlstein frames it like this (on the very first page of the book): 64,510 more votes in Texas and 7,232 more in Mississippi and Ford wins. He also presents a couple of other scenarios involving three states that would have changed the result.

i'm going to send him an email!

well, i tweeted at him.

Move 7373 Democrats to Hawaii for 4 EVs
Move 11117 Democrats to Ohio for 25 EVs

this should say republicans obviously.

he liked my tweet so I trust the first edition will be recalled and pulped

does it matter what order you read his books in?

They stand alone, but ideally you'd want to read them in order.

Unless you are an amazingly dedicated US political history junkie, you'd want to spread them out with a bit of breathing space between. I've read three of them, not in order. They're quite worthwhile even for those like me who lived it as it happened.

I've only read "Nixonland," but as much as people like the first one, right now I can't imagine going backwards from there, only forwards.

But in the first one, you get Barry Goldwater chugging a can of "Gold Water" soda and exclaiming, "It tastes like piss!"

Before the Storm is still my favourite, the one where I knew the least going in (and I read it during the 2008 election, which was perfect).

i read nixonland then before the storm. i don't think i missed out on much by not reading them in order, but i'm going to read the other two in order because why not.

A couple of hundred pages into Reaganland. I like how Perlstein will often work today back into the story: in early '78, "young Joseph Biden of Delaware" pays a visit to Carter to tell him that Jewish leaders distrust him because he's a Baptist, that Democrats in congress don't like Hamilton Jordan, and that Ted Kennedy is taking steps towards running for the nomination in 1980.

I finished the book. It's like a long slow-motion trainwreck, which actually left me kind of depressed. He does a good job of showing why Reagan was elected, but the anti-ERA and anti-gay rhetoric of the 1977-78 period that he recounts in detail, and then the evangelical resurgence that followed made me despair for any hopes I ever attributed to my country. You can clearly see, nostalgia aside, that the US has been a doomed hate cult since the mid '70s.

Long slow-motion trainwreck is good description of the '70s in general--producing lots of great movies and music along the way.

Reading it in one sustained gulp in August also depressed me, especially learning (again and again) the incompetence of Carter's political shop.

I somehow made it through the first two volumes of Perlstein's GOPocalypse quadrilogy without walking in front of a bus but I really need to wait for the impending repub interregnum before I even think about tackling the next two.

xp Yeah, I remember a lot of Carter's blundering (I was 12 in 1980) but reading the full scope of it just makes you shake your head over and over. I remember seeing the morning paper and experiencing the mild shock that Reagan had won. In hindsight it seems inevitable. I think we all want to locate a period of time in our youth when the world seemed more rational, but I can no longer think of the late '70s that way, because it was full of so much ugliness.

felt it was the weakest (title previously held by the last one): picks up where invisible bridge left off and just bores forward four years at a perfectly even pace of newspaper-reading and broadcast-transcribing. before the storm and nixonland were structured around theses (goldwater as john the baptist; nixon as architect-avatar of our current party system and political psyche); invisible bridge has excellent stuff on pre-politics reagan— def better than the morris bio altho there’s prob a book or twelve on hollywood reagan specifically that i’d like to read— but the 70s sections already seemed swollen to me, so much re-re-re-demonstrating in creeping chronological order that people were rly freaked out. this one is that basically unbrokenly and the returns have diminished, tho i did enjoy hating carter. (no idea why it’s called reaganland btw; it’s about carter.) nb i’m not saying i put it down for three straight days. my hand cramped up.

I've read them all and I got the distinct impression that in this last one Perlstein made an effort to downplay the broad cultural reporting/analysis and zeitgeisty stuff whenever it didn't have a direct influence on the political narrative; likewise the recounting of natural disasters and crimes and accidents which made up a perhaps too large part of Invisible Bridge. I'm sure he was criticized in book reviews for including too much of that. Leaving most of that out of this book was probably "correct," but it results in a more boring book.

I got Reaganland on audiobook for a change of pace and the narrator is not helping things, just incredibly boring.

it's a shame because the readers for Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge audiobooks were excellent, this one is not good!

I can still live with it though, it could be worse.

As someone who has recently had to start wearing varifocals and was considering the audiobook route for this (also: cheaper), I am disappointed by this news.

Worst audiobook I've ever listened to was Debbie Harry's autobiog. She sounded bored as fuck, and my 6 year old is a more expressive and fluent reader (my 6 year old is fucking ace tbh).

I lugged my copy of Nixonland with me while commuting all over London for the 6 months or so I was reading it. The first half of it solidified to a brick of mulch after I left a non-waterproof rucksack in a pond of cider at a Hawkwind gig; luckily, I'd already read further than that by then.

for people that can't afford subscriptions or wanting to try before you buy, audiobookbay.nl could be your friend.

cheers calzino, will check it out

Plugging away...Wow: the first president angry enough at the press to skip the correspondents dinner wasn't the obvious, it was Carter in '78. He sent Hamilton Jordan instead, charged with "(telling) them how we feel about them."

hi nerds

just started Before the Storm so i guess i can start coming to the meetings now

:D

I think this was already shared somewhere on a politics thread but it's worth the read:

https://newrepublic.com/article/160975/trump-era-always-going-end-violence

So many community organizational skills you can learn from those John Birchers in Before The Storm...

...Which they of course stole from the Communists.

sorry to spoil the series for you but the good guys win

hi nerds

just started Before the Storm so i guess i can start coming to the meetings now

:D

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, January 20, 2021 11:01 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Cool, let us know when you get to the part when Palpatine issues Order 66.

Once I feel like I've processed some of the trauma of the past four years, I suppose I will finally dive into the second two volumes.

I'm still plodding along on Reaganland two months later, usually opting to read other stuff. It's thorough, but I find he doesn't do as much of what I really liked with the last two, which is to take a page or two and write about The Exorcist or Nashville or whatever. It feels like a lot of community organizing (tax revolts, religious right, etc.) and the minutiae of legislation.

the revolution begins in Hollywood and ends in hotel conference rooms

A month later, and up to about pg. 600, I'm finally starting to warm to Reaganland: Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome, Carter taking off for Japan in the midst of gas lines and a massive trucker's strike (very similar to yesterday's headlines; at least he didn't blame Amy), the Comiskey Park debacle, and now he's just about to give the Malaise Speech, which Mondale and others are desperately trying to talk him out of. I find that speech endlessly fascinating, especially how it's used in 20th Century Women. I was about three months away from turning 18 and have no recollection of the speech or attendant controversy at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIpmsIgmd_g

The malaise ("Crisis of Confidence") speech actually gave Carter a huge polling bump right away--17 and 11 points in a couple of polls Perlstein cites. But then he upended his cabinet (not expecting the speech to be so successful, that had already been planned), and Hamilton Jordan's Studio 54 coke scandal broke. Which turned out to be concocted by Steve Rubell as leverage against an impending tax audit.

I'm trying to remember if that was the last front-page celebrity scandal that turned out to be entirely false. Can't be--that's 40 years ago--but I'm drawing a blank. They all turn out to be true (or at least are denied but never disproven).

Perlstein says the paperback edition is ready and it will be free of the shocking number of typos and errors that are in the hardcover. That is something I found very distracting and mean to complain about here.

*meant to

I've noticed a few. I wouldn't say shocking--six or seven (in 600 pages)?--but maybe I've missed some. Having self-published and let mistakes creep in (favourite ever: mixing up Jack Black/White three or four times), it actually gives me some comfort that a big publisher would do the same.

I dunno, I started counting them and the number got really high. I would have gladly proofread the book for him for some modest fee, say $300.

That's the surprising thing, that there's even one or two. It's Simon & Schuster--you'd think they'd have a small team on such a lengthy book.

the paperback edition is ready

Kinda hoping the publisher will box all four up into a set. I've read Nixonland, but none of the others, and I'd absolutely buy that.

in my very very very short resume as a published historian, i have already had a couple moments of getting copy-edited pre-final proofs sent to me and only at that phase, me noticing crazy errors like "the the." this is not because the editors were bad, just a matter of them being human imho. i'm the one that sent them the crummy text in the first place and probably they burned out fixing 99 other mistakes and missed the 1.

i also have to assume (I have no real idea) that in this day and age of print media, budgets for things like this have probably been pared back - would not surprise me if one editor is now doing the work that formerly would have been three people's. i'm just grateful they caught the other 99 mistakes and gave me the chance to catch the 1! but if i ever have anything out there as long as perlstein's books, i'd be shocked NOT to find some typos!

One that made me laugh (not a typo): a reference to "the forty-year-old president of Canada" on page 668.

Pg. 756; the darkness at the end of the tunnel is visible...In view of what Obama and Biden inherited, this Irving Kristol quote from 1980 that Perlstein digs up resonates: "The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems* to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards."

*created by forcing through tax cuts

i haven't read this yet but he has a new piece in TNR https://newrepublic.com/article/161603/john-birch-society-qanon-trump

"john-birch-society-qanon-trump"

Weird endorsement for Kennedy in 1980: the parents of Mary Jo Kopechne. (Would you want the reminder?) Senator Biden endorsed Carter with, Perlstein notes, "practically an apology":

"Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he's not the second coming...He's not going to go down in the history books...but he is doing a good job."

Today in REAGANLAND, an ambitious difference-splitter "endorses" Jimmy Carter, " not the finest thing since wheat cakes...not the 2nd coming...but...doing a good job." Tho, "If you're looking for an Irish Catholic Democrat to support, wait until 1984 and one of us will be back." pic.twitter.com/8E2vYNRgRA

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) April 22, 2020

Biden, on the other hand, is definitely the finest thing since wheat cakes

The Kopechne endorsement almost struck me like Hillary getting Monica Lewinsky's endorsement in 2016.

Eh, by that point, it was probably just water under the bridge.

I checked with Alan Alda, and he said it's okay if I laugh.

Finished Nixonland.

Boy, does that book go up a notch once Nixon begins recording his conversations.

Finished. (Reaganland). Exhausted. Possibly the longest book I've ever read.

I thought it a breeze -- I gobbled it. Did it bore you?

At times, yes--when he waded into stuff like Moral Majority meetings, or anti-tax amendments and such. I found there was much more of that than in the previous three books. I like it best when he steps back and connects what's going on politically to the culture out there. And there was some of that--like how Reagan's defense of the Vietnam War was initially assumed to be catastrophic by the press, but that meanwhile they completely missed that The Deer Hunter was indicating something else was plainly underfoot.

Yeah. I loved those bits.

Good podcast with the LGM folk: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/10/lgm-podcast-reaganland

My next book, with @littlebrown + editor @pronoydsarkar—on what has happened to America since 2000, and how it can unhappen. Short, sharp, and out in time for the 2024 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. And it will take no prisoners. Now leave me alone for 18 months! pic.twitter.com/OHbpk4dNK2

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) May 17, 2022

I've read a couple of those here's-how-to-fix-things books (which this sounds like), and can think of many I haven't; wish he'd continued on with what he was doing.

The "short, sharp" thing makes me wonder if he needed to give himself a "little" project break between what he was doing and the "leave me alone" bit makes me hopeful he's getting back to it. Dunno.

I thought so too. Also: cash flow.

He's already answered the question the next book would need to answer--"How did Trump happen?"--but I still want him to write it.

I remembered a book called "After Strage Texts" after reading about TS Eliott's "After Strange Gods" and discovered it literally un-google-able": only TS and stuff about texting. It can't even come up (without subtitle) in an Amazon search! https://t.co/XFrDEooZZx

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) February 10, 2023

True, I also get no results for "After Strage Texts"

"After Strange Texts" otoh...

I've looked for ASG for a couple years. Not even my uni library has a copy.