C/D: Rick Perlstein

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.