C/D: Rick Perlstein

(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

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.