C/D: Rick Perlstein

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.

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.