C/D: Rick Perlstein

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.

"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.