"Fabricated the World as He Wanted to See It, in Ways Unprecedented at the Time but Which Have Become All Too Familiar in Years Since"

"But Reagan was also a brilliant politician. He had a performer's grasp of character and humor as well as an instinctive sense of when to micromanage. Several times in the book, Perlstein reproduces Reagan's own painstaking revisions to the work of his speechwriters, rewrites that often had little to do with content and everything to do with rhythm, cadence, rhetorical inflection. Even more than 40 years later, the folksy charm drips from the page. Reagan's acting career is often referenced through middlebrow fare like Knute Rockne, All American and kitsch like Bedtime for Bonzo, but his longest-running role was as the host of General Electric Theater. He was a pitchman, and it was this skill that he most effectively put to use in his post-acting life."

Jack Hamilton at Slate reviews Rick Perlstein's Reaganland: America's Right Turn, 1976-1980.

"An Individual American Is More Likely to Get Struck by Lightning Than to Commit In-Person Voter Fraud"

"Trump may have brought the Republican Party into a new era, but such attitudes long predate Trump. For decades, complaints about 'voter fraud' have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore—and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn't enough to win elections."

At Talking Points Memo, Rick Perlstein and Livia Gershon discuss the history of "voter fraud" accusations.

"Defined the Culture War Almost Entirely in Racial Terms"

"Ethnonationalism is a form of conservatism, and overlaps with standard-issue Republican conservatism in several ways, but the two philosophies diverge in ways that can leave their adherents bitterly at odds. (Buchanan worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but ran as a primary opponent of George Bush and Bob Dole, and left the party altogether to oppose George W. Bush.) Programatically, ethnonationalists differ from standard issue Republicans like George W. Bush or Paul Ryan in that they oppose free trade and immigration. Their orientation is nostalgic, rather than glitter-eyed about the future. Like traditional conservatives, they distrust federal power, but extend their circle of rhetorical enemies to include the corporate elite. Most importantly, unlike standard conservatives, who tend to disregard race, ethnonationalists have a deeply, explicitly racialized view of the world.
"All those ideological markers appeared in Trump's address."

Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to Donald Trump's speech accepting the Republican Party's nomination for President of the United States.

As does Rick Perlstein at The New Republic.

The Whole World Is Watching

"Republicans brayed that Democrats, who were happy to align themselves with the forces of social change in 1960 and 1964, had by 1968 been subsumed by them. The low-tax, anti-government rhetoric that defines modern Republicanism has its roots in the simmering white resentments that emerged in the late nineteen-sixties, animated by the belief that the federal government had become a tool for redistribution of white wealth into the hands of undeserving black and brown communities. Donald Trump represents the full expression of that belief."

Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker connects the 2016 presidential campaign to 1968.

As does Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

As does Rick Perlstein at In These Times.

"Once Again Rendered a Prophet Without Honor"

"On April 16, in Los Angeles, Chairman Brock assured Reagan that he now opposed the election reform package. An issue of the RNC magazine First Monday ran an article on 'Fraud and Carter's Voter Registration Scheme'; then subsequently, under Brock's own byline, another headlined the 'Democratic Power Grab.' John Rhodes, after what The Washington Post called 'unremitting opposition for his original stand,' directed his House Republican Policy Committee to adopt a statement of formal opposition. When the first item on Carter’s reform agenda, extending public financing to congressional elections, came up for consideration, New Right organizer Richard Viguerie drummed up one of his patented direct-mail scare campaigns, and the measure was filibustered to death. The other items expired soon after: a more perfect democracy, sacrificed on the altar of right-wing political expedience."

Rick Perlstein in The Washington Spectator brings up Jimmy Carter's doomed 1977 proposals for expanding voter participation.

"I Would Have Turned Him Over to the FBI for Destroying the Left!"

"But movies are made mostly to entertain. Burrough does more, offering lessons to absorb. One involves the inner logic that leads sensitive souls of various ideological predilections to embrace violence for political ends. The number of American leftists studying bomb-making over the last couple of decades may be vanishingly small, but the number of Americans is not: Timothy McVeigh and his drums of fertilizer; the Tsarnaev brothers and their pressure cookers; abortion-clinic bombers; young Minnesotans scouring the Internet for ways to travel to Syria to join ISIS--all of them are seekers of a certain kind of Dostoyevskian fantasy of communion. They are radical narcissists detached from reality, certain that their spark would ignite the great silent masses who share the same sense of futility and frustration. They see society as a powder keg almost ready to blow."


Rick Perlstein in The Nation reviews Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.

"I Feel That We Lost the Struggle at That Time, and I Think the Biggest Reason Is Ronald Reagan"

"But whatever you think about his intelligence, what's unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that’s more fun, right? It's more fun to feel good than feel bad. That's part of our human state. And also that's what leaders are for. Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan’s brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that? But the consequences of that absolution are all around us today. The inability to contend with climate change. The inability to call elites to account who wrecked the economy in 2008. The inability to reckon with the times when we fall short."


David Dayen in Salon talks with Rick Perlstein about Perlstein's new book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.


Michael Kimmage reviews The Invisible Bridge in The New Republic.


As does Frank Rich in The New York Times.


Harold Pollack in The American Prospect interviews Perlstein.

"I’ve Been Waiting for a Book Like This for a Long Time"

"But it also bears a political argument we need to absorb. Explained Connor in Chicago, 'The John Birch Society built the most effective, best-funded right-wing populist organization in the United States of America. Now, not all my friends on the left want to hear this. It’s so easy to say, "These people were crackpots."' But Robert Welch 'was a brilliant man. That doesn’t mean he was correct about anything. But he was a brilliant man. And he loved to sell.' And what comes through strikingly in the book is that, even as Welch and his organization were excoriated, the stories they told, frequently through carefully disguised front groups with pleasant-sounding names—say, the one from the 1960s about how sexual education was teaching children how to be sexually promiscuous; or the one in the early 1990s promoting the impeachment of Bill Clinton—were sold quite effectively to the broader political culture. They achieved things."

Rick Perlstein at The Nation discusses Claire Connor and her new book, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right.

The Final Comedown

"The stickers they distributed included read ones reading 'REGISTER COMMUNISTS, NOT FIREARMS,' and tiny one members would slap on restroom walls or inside phone books featuring an image of rifle cross hairs, and this text: 'See that old man at the corner where you buy your papers?… He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure.… Traitors, beware! Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.'"

Rick Perlstein in The Nation recalls the Minutemen of the 1960s.

"The Oilfield in the Placenta"

"In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains."

Rick Perlstein in The Baffler connects political and commerical mendacity.

One Bright Shining Moment

"To the liberal Democratic faithful, Mr. McGovern remained a standard-bearer well into his old age, writing and lecturing even as his name was routinely invoked by conservatives as synonymous with what they considered the failures of liberal politics."

David E. Rosenbaum in The New York Times reports the death of George McGovern.

Rick Perlstein at The New Republic compares McGovern's past with the present.

"The Best Account I’ve Read of How the FBI Corroded Due Process and Democracy"

"Here Reagan enters the multilayered narrative. The former movie star, who helmed TV’s General Electric Theater, begged the bureau to let him turn 'Communist Target—Youth' into a teleplay. Since the trial resulting from the FBI report had led to an embarrassing acquittal (the student who had supposedly started the riot by leaping a barricade and beating a policeman had been forty feet away when the incident occurred), Hoover shunted Reagan off. The one thing the FBI dreaded more than anything else was embarrassment, though it is typical of Reagan’s cast of mind that he would have been indifferent to such embarrassment. In Reaganland, there only were good guys and bad guys, and anyone who hunted Reds for a living was good. Which was why, long ago, T-10 had become one of the best informers the FBI ever had."

Rick Perlstein in Bookforum reviews Seth Rosenfeld's Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power.

"The Most Dishonest Convention Speech ... Ever?"

"I’d like to talk, instead, about what Ryan actually said—not because I find Ryan’s ideas objectionable, although I do, but because I thought he was so brazenly willing to twist the truth."

Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic reacts to Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention.

As does Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly.

Jonathan Chait at New York writes that Ryan's "deep dishonesty largely reflects the fundamental gap between the radicalism of his agenda and his need for public acceptance."

Postscript:
NPR provides transcripts of Paul Ryan's and Mitt Romney's speeches at the convention.

And Rick Perlstein in The Nation writes about his time at in Tampa.

The Ghost of Lee Atwater

"Of course, Romney isn’t interested in the facts; he's interested in associating Obama with black and Hispanic undesirables bent on collecting welfare benefits and robbing white elderly people of their health insurance. The son of a politician who walked out of the 1964 Republican convention because of its opposition to blacks could well end up encouraging anti-black sentiments at the 2012 Republican convention. Like Poppy Bush, Romney is not a racist himself. He is, arguably, something worse: A man who, because he has no particularly pronounced views himself, is willing to say just about anything to get himself elected president."

Timothy Noah at The New Republic explains why Mitt Romney keeps talking about welfare and Medicare.

As do Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times, Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly, and Jonathan Chait at New York.

Ron Fournier in National Journal writes that the "Romney campaign is either recklessly ignorant of the facts, some of which they possess–or it is lying about why (and how) it is playing the race card."

(And a few months later, Rick Perstein at The Nation presents audio recording of Lee Atwater's infamous 1981 interview on exploiting racism.)

Not His Father's Party

"As the newly elected governor of Michigan, George Romney marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. Throughout the turbulent 1960s, George Romney argued, at considerable political cost to himself, on behalf of a Republican Party that would welcome newly enfranchised African-American voters and reject the coded language of Southern strategists and repurposed segregationists. In 1964, as one of the nation’s most prominent Republican elected officials, he refused to endorse Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy. He complained that Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was gearing his campaign toward disaffected Democrats in Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi, had broken faith with party members who valued 'basic American and Republican principles.'
"While some Republicans responded to the outbreak of rioting in American cities by blaming Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty initiatives, Geoffrey Kabaservice recounts in his brilliant new analysis of the decay of the Republican Party, Rule and Ruin (Oxford, 2012), how Romney argued that government was not doing enough."

John Nichols at The Nation contrasts George and Mitt Romney.

As does Rick Perlstein in Rolling Stone.

"To Walk Forthrightly into the Bright Sunshine of Human Rights"

"The motion carried. The Southerners walked out and ran Strom Thurmond for president. When Harry S. Truman won nonetheless, Democrats were on their way to becoming the party of civil rights. Hubert Humphrey catalyzed that change."

Rick Perlstein in The New York Times salutes Hubert Humphrey upon the Happy Warrior's one-hundredth birthday.

Sucking In

"Darkness fell across the land. Things fell apart. The year was rung out with the unlikeliest Top 40 hit ever—Merle Haggard's mournful country dirge 'If We Make It Through December.'"

In The Nation, Rick Perlstein surveys histories of the 1970s.

"A Social Historian’s Social Historian"

"The next Sunday’s Times was a repeat. The lead op-ed was a précis of his book’s arguments—by George Chauncey. And the Book Review pined for a sequel (Chauncey is completing that project, The Strange Career of the Closet, this summer). Some time later Chauncey wrote an obituary of John Boswell for the London Guardian, noting that gays 'who never met Boswell spoke of him with an awe bordering on reverence and with the deepest sense of gratitude.' Meanwhile, on June 28 Stonewall was being celebrated in the streets, and in New York Chauncey experienced a Boswell-like moment: marching in a parade with friends, 'bystanders would yell at me, "Love the book!" It happened to me a dozen times that day.' His tone suggests wonder; the week changed his life. 'I had lived alone with this world I was recreating for such a long time, and suddenly everyone was invited in.'"

In a 2003 University of Chicago Magazine article, Rick Perlstein profiles George Chauncey.

"There Is Him and Then There Is Everybody Else"

"Rick Perlstein, author of 'Nixonland,' sees a strong resemblance between Mr. Ailes’s political experience and his approach to television.
"'Like Richard Nixon, like Spiro Agnew, Fox News can never see itself as the attacker,' he said. 'They are always playing defense because they believe they are always under attack, which attracts people that have the same personality formation. By bringing that mind-set, plus the high energy seamless stream of the aggression of talk radio, he has found an audience.'"

David Carr and Tim Arango in The New York Times profile Roger Ailes.

"No One in America Should Go Broke Because They Get Sick"

"This is what reform is about. If you don’t have health insurance, you will finally have quality, affordable options once we pass reform. If you have health insurance, we will make sure that no insurance company or government bureaucrat gets between you and the care you need. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. You will not be waiting in any lines. This is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance. I don’t believe anyone should be in charge of your health care decisions but you and your doctor—not government bureaucrats, not insurance companies."

In The New York Times, President Barack Obama explains why America's health-care system must change.

However, Ralph Nader, interviewed on Democracy Now!, calls instead for "full Medicare for everyone," regardless of age.

Rick Perlstein in The Washington Post traces the paranoid style of right-wing politics in the 1950s and 1960s, and Nancy J. Altman in the Los Angeles Times depicts the conservative opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's creation of Social Security in the 1930s.

But Paul Begala in The Washington Post notes the compromises that Roosevelt made to argue that today's health-care reforms may not at first be the ideal overhaul.