Rick PerlsteinRecensioni
Autore di Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
Recensioni
Perlstein has previously published volumes on Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Reagan. He will, in all probability, continue his uninspired, shallow chronicles of Republican politicians with a book on Donald Trump. Those of us who have read the preceding books will avoid it: there are far too many legitimate analyses and critiques of Trump, or Nixon, to waste time with fluff.
Not recommended.
My copy of REAGANLAND comes in at well over a thousand pages, which is good news for those of us, like me, who really enjoy a history book that takes the deep dive into its subject. Perlstein brings back to life the second half of the 1970s in America, a time most who lived through it were glad to move on from and put in the rear view mirror, but his book more than makes the case that what happened during that time laid the foundation for much that followed. That “Make America Great Again” and “A Contract with America” were first heard in the 1980 Presidential campaign is one of the many things I learned in this book. And when I say it’s a deep dive, be prepared to revisit Inflation, Stagflation, the Iranian Revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah, Three Mile Island, the Panama Canal Treaty, the battle to ratify the ERA, the Moral Majority, Billygate, Lancegate, the Camp David Accords, gas lines, the killer rabbit, Proposition 13, Kemp Roth, NCPAC, the “Malaise” speech, Supply-Side economics, “the Miracle at Lake Placid,” Gay rights, Love Canal, the B-1 bomber, the Russian brigade in Cuba, the hostage crisis, Afghanistan, and host of other issues and events that defined the times. There is an incredible cast of characters ranging from idealists, opportunists, incompetents, and zealots, who made their mark. It’s a list that includes Hamilton Jordan, Bert Lance, Phyllis Schafly, Paul Weyrich, Harvey Milk, Dan White, Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, Orrin Hatch, William Safire, Howard Jarvis, Terry Dolan, Billy Carter, George H. W. Bush, John Sears, John Anderson, Richard Viguerie, Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Ted Kennedy, John Connally, and Jude Wanniski. There’s a trio of serial killers: the Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. A trio of Republican operatives who make names for themselves in the years ahead show up: Newt Gingrich, Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater—and a passing mention of Paul Manafort. Two men who would occupy the Oval Office far in the future, Donald Trump and Joseph Biden, make cameo appearances. But the book is dominated by the two main characters, one who held the Presidency, and the other, who very much wanted to take it from him: Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
REAGANAND follows two narrative paths dominated by both men, as one confronts a series of challenges from the White House while trying to hold an ever more fractious Democratic Party together, while the other maneuvers among rivals in the Republican Party and tries to convince a skeptical public that he is up to the job. The majority of the space is given over to Carter, after all, he was the President, and I must say that Perlstein writes one of the most damning accounts of the Carter Presidency I have ever read by an objective observer. He makes a good case that the problem was Carter himself, an honest and well meaning man, but one who’s apparent high intelligence blinded him to the obvious. A devout Christian who possessed a moralistic streak that often led him to look down on what he considered the grubby and demeaning aspects of politics, and those who practiced it, which included a great many of his fellow Democrats. The Carter in Perlstein’s book totally lacks the ability to see things from the point of view of others, an essential aspect of a good leader. He was a micro-manager who expected admiration for how rigorously he used his intelligence to arrive at a decision after looking at all sides first, but the American people had little patience for this public dithering, and he quickly developed a reputation as wishy-washy and indecisive. He got off to a bad start in the awkward and undignified 1976 Presidential campaign, marred by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz’s racist dirty joke, an epic microphone failure during a debate with Gerald Ford, and Carter’s own unforced error by giving a Playboy interview where he revealed a little too much. The more Americans saw of Jimmy Carter, the less they liked him, and though he won the Presidency by promising to restore honesty and decency to the White House after Watergate, those virtues began to matter less when inflation began driving prices up at the grocery store and gas station, factory assembly lines started shutting down, and foreign enemies openly flouted their contempt for a post-Vietnam America abroad. Carter had the bad luck to encounter an inflationary spiral he was not responsible for, and be handed the ticking time bomb that was the Shah’s Iran, but it was his responsibility to deal with those challenges, and lecturing Americans about “austerity,” “limits,” and “sacrifice” didn’t cut it. In retrospect, Carter’s policies were remarkably pragmatic, his energy program would have made the country self sufficient and off mid east oil before the end of the century. But he lacked the political skills to sell his vision, and didn’t try to hone them so that he could. As a result, he lost the Democratic establishment, which was still enamored with big government New Deal solutions, and was challenged for re-election by the remaining Kennedy brother who promised to make full employment a priority instead of reigning in inflation.
While the Carter White House stumbled from crisis to crisis, the opposition was getting its act together. Phyllis Schlafly led a counter revolution against the feminist movement that stopped the Equal Rights Amendment in its tracks. The increasingly emboldened crusade by homosexuals for equal rights helped prompt fundamentalist Christians to abandon a hundred years of political non-involvement and organize against gay rights initiatives and ordinances anywhere and everywhere they appeared, not to mention pushing back hard against what they saw as government intrusion on the way they ran their private Christian schools. Thus the Moral Majority was born, and in Jerry Falwell, they had a determined and charismatic leader. The heads of American corporations decided they’d had enough of paying union wages to their workers, taxes to the federal government, and having to comply with regulations that protected the environment and worker safety, and began putting big money behind Republican candidates who vowed to rid them of all three concerns. The Political Action Committee (PAC) became their weapon of choice, and money was soon in the hands of Republican operatives who knew how to put it to good use. A group of conservative economists began preaching the miracle of lower tax rates, and the wonders they would bring. The National Rifle Association, formerly an association of sportsmen, was taken over by a group determined to fight gun control anywhere it raised its head. Hard line Cold Warriors, on the defensive after the defeat in Vietnam and the rise of détente with the Soviet Union, vigorously returned to the public square arguing that America was falling behind and that Communism was on a roll. All these different factions began to walk in lock step; they had money behind them, and an enthusiasm and determination that won them many converts. The status quo, symbolized by Carter and the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress, were no match for these challengers. The country was changing though few in the media really took notice as working class home owners now came to resent the high taxes they were paying while their standard of living declined. John Wayne passed away and the fictional Texas oilman, J.R. Ewing, from the primetime soap opera Dallas, became a cultural icon. More and more, it was less about the little man and more about the big dogs.
The genial Reagan of Perlstein’s book is less the fabulist of THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE, and more the optimistic reactionary he appeared to be at the time. After he shakes off attempts by his campaign managers to make him appear more moderate, and begins listening to those who said “let Reagan be Reagan.” He becomes the one leader all those far flung groups of conservatives and their various agendas could come together behind. Reagan was comfortable in front of audiences, and he knew how to make a point in plain language, and he didn’t come off like an old man. He disdained Communism, big government, and the high taxes that funded it, and said there was nothing wrong with America that a change of leadership couldn’t fix. He brimmed with good humor and optimism, things Carter sorely lacked, and when he faced the President on a debate stage one week before the country voted in 1980, he mopped the floor with his over confident opponent, who arrogantly thought that the former California governor and ex-movie star, who knew how to present himself well in front of a camera, would be no match his vaunted intelligence.
What I especially liked about REAGANLAND was the forgotten history it revealed, and truths obscured by the passage of time. There were once many pro-life Democrats, and pro-immigration Republicans, Reagan among them. How fundamentalist Christians and cultural conservatives were animated by a hatred of what they saw as tolerance for sexual degeneracy from the beginning; there’s a quote by an Idaho Republican voter from late in the ‘80s campaign that is chilling. How American politics, never as civil as we’d like remember it as being in the past, nevertheless descended to a new level of organized nastiness from it never again rose above after NCPAC successfully took down a slew of veteran Democratic Senate incumbents in the ‘80s election. How the liberal establishment was simply caught flat footed by the desertion of White working class voters to the Reagan banner; an anecdote of a reporter for a Socialist magazines’ visit to some bars in Macomb County, Michigan, during the Republican convention in Detroit, is most revealing. That Jimmy Carter was taken to task for being “mean” to Reagan on the stump during their campaign. It is absolutely quaint to read what the President said back then when compared what is routinely said in political discourse today. How if Carter’s campaign had just done some decent opposition research against Reagan, something that is Politics 101, they might have fared much better. It’s worth remembering that Reagan’s campaign got off to a rocky start, both in the primaries and the general election before finding its footing.
I’ve come to believe that when America went to vote on Election Day 1980, that they were voting against a status quo which stretched back to the assassination of JFK, seventeen Novembers in the past. In the years since there had been Vietnam, racial and generational strife, Watergate, an energy crisis, the social dislocation of the Women’s and Gay rights movements, and a line of leaders that seemingly couldn’t meet the challenges of their time, and restore stability and prosperity. The Iranian Hostage Crisis and inflation were just the straws that broke the patience of a country that felt like it had put up with a lot. Because of this, the voters handed Reagan to most consequential Presidential victory since FDR vanquished the Depression era Herbert Hoover, whom the defeated Carter would compared to for many years to come. On Inauguration Day in 1981, Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as President before a crowd of ecstatic conservatives as dreams and hopes nurtured since Barry Goldwater’s failed ’64 Presidential campaign now seemed within reach. They were filled with determination, and looked to the future with confidence. That day is quite a contrast when compared with another group of conservative Republicans who descended on the Capital on another January day in 2021. What happened in the intervening years is another story as important as the one told in the preceding sixteen, and I hope a writer as good as Rick Perlstein tackles that story, and produces a book as insightful as REAGANLAND.
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Adamantium | 15 altre recensioni | Aug 21, 2022 |
Adamantium | 15 altre recensioni | Aug 21, 2022 | I'm too lazy to write all that much more so I'm going to move to bullet points:
What I liked most:
Perlstein demonstrates that the conservative movement was a 60s movement through and through just like civil rights and free speech. It was cool, filled with young people, and scared political insiders. The likes of SDS and CORE had their equals in YAF, the National Review (lol), and Goldwater organizations.
The media got everything wrong. Reading their constant predictions of Goldwater's demise and the fatal damage his loss would inflict on the Republican party is a great reminder that pundits are always full of shit, and love nothing more than rubber-stamping powerful interests while being incorrect all of the time. It's even funnier now because as reporters at prestigious legacy outlets have less power to shape narratives, their pomposity increases.
It's tempting to draw parallels between the conservative takeover of the GOP and Bernie's outsider shot at the Democratic nom in 2016 and 2020. There are enough similarities to make the comparison worthwhile: ideologically committed and disciplined outsiders representing people who feel shunned by both parties coalescing around the presidential campaign of a Senator far afield of the political mainstream. These were movement candidates, powered in unprecedented fashion by small donors, animated by righteous anger at the system and targeted at political parties seen as sluggish and out of touch. It's interesting too that both Sanders and Goldwater were reluctant candidates, because of the perceived impossibility of their goal and its likelihood to ruin their comfortable Senate careers. There are two things, in my view, that ultimately made Goldwater successful and Sanders fall short. First, '64 was one of the last of the "smoke-filled room" primaries. Far fewer delegates were bound to reflect a popular vote than nowadays. The conservative political takeover of the GOP happened procedurally, through a thorough knowledge and steady application of party rules at county, state, and eventually national conventions. Sure, Goldwater encountered the same structural barrier that Sanders did: complete opposition from mainstream media in coordination with powerful capitalists and party donors. But he was able to take over the party machinery *before* popular sentiment was in his corner in a way that Bernie, or any other left challenger to the Democrats, could never do.
The second factor in Goldwater's success and Bernie's failure is that conservatism had backers among the capitalist class, whereas even mild social democracy faces unified opposition from wealth. Some capitalists may have held old-school views about civic virtue among businessmen, and others may have sneezed at such rabid racism and bellicosity, but Goldwater had enough buy-in among the wealthy to significantly bolster his movement. To be super reductive: this is also why Trump's outsider candidacy succeeded and Bernie's didn't.
What I liked least about this book:
I learned that Barry Goldwater is Jewish, a fact that fills me with unutterable shame.
1 trotta | 15 altre recensioni | Mar 4, 2021 |
trotta | 15 altre recensioni | Mar 4, 2021 | 1 Stbalbach | 15 altre recensioni | Jan 11, 2021 |
Stbalbach | 15 altre recensioni | Jan 11, 2021 | by Stan Prager (10-31-20)
In Hearts of Atlantis, Stephen King channels the fabled lost continent as metaphor for the glorious promise of the sixties that vanished so utterly that nary a trace remains. Atlantis sank, King declares bitterly in his fiction. He has a point. If you want to chart the actual moments those collective hopes and dreams were swamped by currents of reaction and finally submerged in the merciless wake of a new brand of unforgiving conservatism, you absolutely must turn to Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, Rick Perlstein’s brilliant, epic political history of an era too often overlooked that surely echoes upon America in 2020 with far greater resonance than perhaps any before or since. But be warned: you may need forearms even bigger than the sign-spinning guy in the Progressive commercial to handle this dense, massive 914-page tome that is nevertheless so readable and engaging that your wrists will tire before your interest flags.
Reaganland is a big book because it is actually several overlapping books. It is first and foremost the history of the United States at an existential crossroads. At the same time, it is a close account of the ill-fated presidency of Jimmy Carter. And, too, it is something of a “making of the president 1980.” This is truly ambitious stuff, and that Perlstein largely succeeds in pulling it off should earn him wide and lasting accolades both as a historian and an observer of the American experience.
Reaganland is the final volume in a series launched nearly two decades ago by Perlstein, a progressive historian, that chronicles the rise of the right in modern American politics. Before the Storm focused on Goldwater’s ascent upon the banner of far-right conservatism. This was followed by Nixonland, which profiled a president who thrived on division and earned the author outsize critical acclaim; and, The Invisible Bridge, which revealed how Ronald Reagan—stridently unapologetic for the Vietnam debacle, for Nixon’s crimes, and for angry white reaction to Civil Rights—brought notions once the creature of the extreme right into the mainstream, and began to pave the road that would take him to the White House. Reaganland is written in the same captivating, breathless style Perlstein made famous in his earlier works, but he has clearly honed his craft: the narrative is more measured, less frenetic, and is crowned with a strong concluding chapter—something conspicuously absent in The Invisible Bridge.
The grand—and sometimes allied—causes of the Sixties were Civil Rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, but concomitant social and political revolutions spawned a myriad of others that included antipoverty efforts for the underprivileged, environmental activism, equal treatment for homosexuals and other marginalized groups such as Native Americans and Chicano farm workers, constitutional reform, consumer safety, and most especially equality for women, of which the right to terminate a pregnancy was only one component. The common theme was inclusion, equality, and cultural secularism. The antiwar movement came to not only dominate but virtually overshadow all else, but at the same time served as a unifying factor that stitched together a kind of counterculture coat of many colors to oppose an often stubbornly unyielding status quo. When the war wound down, that fabric frayed. Those who once marched together now marched apart.
This fragmentation was not generally adversarial; groups once in alliance simply went their own ways, organically seeking to advance the causes dear to them. And there was much optimism. Vietnam was history. Civil Rights had made such strides, even if there remained so much unfinished business. Much of what had been counterculture appeared to have entered the mainstream. It seemed like so much was possible. At Woodstock, Grace Slick had declared that “It’s a new dawn,” and the equality and opportunity that assurance heralded actually seemed within reach. Yet, there were unseen, menacing clouds forming just beneath the horizon.
Few suspected that forces of reaction quietly gathering strength would one day unite to destroy the progress towards a more just society that seemed to lie just ahead. Perlstein’s genius in Reaganland lies in his meticulous identification of each of these disparate forces, revealing their respective origin stories and relating how they came to maximize strength in a collective embrace. The Equal Rights Amendment, riding on a wave of massive bipartisan public support, was but three states away from ratification when a bizarre woman named Phyllis Schlafly seemingly crawled out of the woodwork to mobilize legions of conservative women to oppose it. Gay people were on their way to greater social acceptance via local ordinances which one by one went down to defeat after former beauty queen and orange juice hawker Anita Bryant mounted what turned into a nationwide campaign of resistance. The landmark Roe v. Wade case that guaranteed a woman’s right to choose sparked the birth of a passionate right-to-life movement that soon became the central creature of the emerging Christian evangelical “Moral Majority,” that found easy alliance with those condemning gays and women’s lib. Most critically—in a key component that was to have lasting implications, as Perlstein deftly underscores—the Christian right also pioneered a political doctrine of "co-belligerency" that encouraged groups otherwise not aligned to make common ground against shared “enemies.” Sure, Catholics, Mormons and Jews were destined to burn in a fiery hell one day, reasoned evangelical Protestants, but in the meantime they could be enlisted as partners in a crusade to combat abortion, homosexuality and other miscellaneous signposts of moral decay besetting the nation.
That all this moral outrage could turn into a formidable political dynamic seems to have been largely unanticipated. But, as Perlstein reminds us, maybe it should not have been so surprising: candidate Jimmy Carter, himself deeply religious and well ahead in the 1976 race for the White House, saw a precipitous fifteen-point drop in the polls after an interview in Playboy where he admitted that he sometimes lusted in his heart. Perhaps the sun wasn’t quite ready to come up for that new dawn after all.
Of course, the left did not help matters, often ideologically unyielding in its demand to have it all rather than settle for some, as well as blind to unintended consequences. Nothing was to alienate white members of the national coalition to advance civil rights for African Americans more than busing, a flawed shortcut that ignored the greater imperative for federal aid to fund and rebuild decaying inner-city schools, de facto segregated by income inequality. Efforts to advance what was seen as a far too radical federal universal job guarantee ended up energizing opposition that denied victory to other avenues of reform. And there’s much more. Perlstein recounts the success of Ralph Nader’s crusade for automobile safety, which exposed carmakers for deliberately skimping on relatively inexpensive design modifications that could have saved countless lives in order to turn out even greater profits. Auto manufacturers were finally brought to heel. Consumer advocacy became a thing, with widespread public support and frequent industry acquiescence. But even Nader—not unaware of consequences, unintended or otherwise—advised caution when a protégé pressed a campaign to ban TV ads for sugary cereals that targeted children, predicting with some prescience that “if you take on the advertisers you will end up with so many regulators with their bones bleached in the desert.” [p245] Captains of industry Perlstein terms “Boardroom Jacobins” were stirred to collective action by what was perceived as regulatory overreach, and big business soon joined hands to beat all such efforts back.
Meanwhile, subsequent to Nixon’s fall and Ford’s defeat to Carter in 1976, pundits—not for the last time—prematurely foretold the extinction of the Republican Party, leaving stalwart policy wonks on the right seemingly adrift, clinging to their opposition to the pending Salt II arms agreement and the Panama Canal Treaty, furiously wielding oars of obstruction but yet still lacking a reliable vessel to stem the tide. Bitterly opposed to the prevailing wisdom that counseled moderation to ensure not only relevance but survival, they chafed at accommodation with the Ford-Kissinger-Rockefeller wing of the party that preached détente abroad and compromise at home. They looked around for a new champion … and once again found Ronald Reagan!
The former Bedtime for Bonzo co-star and corporate shill had launched his political career railing against communists concealed in every cupboard, as well as shrewdly exploiting populist rage at long-haired antiwar demonstrators. As governor of California he directed an especially violent crackdown known as “Bloody Thursday” on non-violent protesters at UC Berkeley’s People’s Park that resulted in one death and hundreds of injuries after overzealous police fired tear gas and shotguns loaded with buckshot at the crowd. In a comment that eerily presaged Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” remark, Reagan declared that "Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect … that people … will make mistakes on both sides." But a year later he was even less apologetic, proclaiming that "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with.” This was their candidate, who—remarkably one would think—had nearly snatched the nomination away from Ford in ’76, and then went on to cheer party unity while campaigning for Ford with even less enthusiasm than Bernie Sanders exhibited for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Many hold Reagan at least partially responsible for Ford’s loss in the general election.
But Reagan’s neglect of Ford left him neatly positioned as the front-runner for 1980. As conservatives dug in, others of the party faithful recoiled in horror, fearing a repeat of the drubbing at the polls they took in 1964 with Barry “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” Goldwater at the top of the ticket. And Reagan did seem extreme, perhaps more so than Goldwater. The sounds of sabers rattling nearly drowned out his words every time he mentioned the U.S.S.R. And he said lots of truly crazy things, both publicly and privately, once even wondering aloud over dinner with columnist Jack Germond whether “Ford had staged fake assassination attempts to win sympathy for his renomination.” Germond later recalled that “He was always a man with a very loose hold on the real world around him.” [p617] Germond had a good point: Reagan once asserted that "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal," boosted the valuable recycling potential of nuclear waste, and insisted that "trees cause more pollution than automobiles do"—prompting some joker at a rally to decorate a tree with a sign that said "Chop me down before I kill again."
But Reagan had a real talent with dog whistles, launching his campaign with a speech praising “states’ rights” at a county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. He once boasted he “would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964," claimed "Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine," and bemoaned the Voting Rights Act as "humiliating to the South." A whiff of racism also clung to his disdain for Medicaid recipients as a "a faceless mass, waiting for handouts," and his recycling ad nauseum of his dubious anecdote of a “Chicago welfare queen” with twelve social security cards who bilked the government out of $150,000. Unreconstructed whites ate this red meat up. Nixon’s “southern strategy” reached new heights under Reagan.
But a white southerner who was not a racist was actually the president of the United States. Despite the book’s title, the central protagonist of Reaganland is Jimmy Carter, a man who arrived at the Oval Office buoyed by public confidence rarely seen in the modern era—and then spent four years on a rollercoaster of support that plummeted far more often than it climbed. At one point his approval rating was a staggering 77% … at another 28%—only four points above where Nixon’s stood when he resigned in disgrace. These days, as the nonagenarian Carter has established himself as the most impressive ex-president since John Quincy Adams, we tend to forget what a truly bad president he was. Not that he didn’t have good intentions, only that—like Woodrow Wilson six decades before him—he was unusually adept at using them to pave his way to hell. A technocrat with an arrogant certitude that he had all the answers, he arrived on the Beltway with little idea of how the world worked, a family in tow that seemed like they were right out of central casting for a Beverly Hillbillies sequel. He often gravely lectured the public on what was really wrong with the country—and then seemed to lay blame upon Americans for outsize expectations. And he dithered, tacking this way and that way, alienating both sides of the aisle in a feeble attempt to seem to stand above the fray.
In fairness, he had a lot to deal with. Carter inherited a nation more socio-economically shook up than any since the 1930s. In 1969, the United States had proudly put a man on the moon. Only a few short years later, a country weaned on wallowing in American exceptionalism saw factories shuttered, runaway inflation, surging crime, cities on the verge of bankruptcy, and long lines just to gas up your car at an ever-skyrocketing cost. And that was before a nuclear power plant melted down, Iranians took fifty-two Americans hostage, and Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. All this was further complicated by a new wave of media hype that saw the birth of the “bothersiderism” that gives equal weight to scandals legitimate or spurious—an unfortunate ingredient that remains so baked into current reporting.
Perhaps the most impressive part of Reaganland is Perlstein’s superlative rendering of what America was like in the mid-70s. Stephen King’s horror is often so effective at least part due to the fads, fast food, and pop music he uses as so many props in his novels. If that stuff is real, perhaps ghosts or killer cars could be real, as well. Likewise, Perlstein brings a gritty authenticity home by stepping beyond politics and policy to enrich the narrative with headlines of serial killers and plane crashes, of assassination and mass suicide, adroitly resurrecting the almost numbing sense of anxiety that informed the times. DeNiro’s Taxi Driver rides again, and the reader winces through every page.
Carter certainly had his hands full, especially as the hostage crisis dragged on, but it hardly ranked up there with Truman’s Berlin Airlift or JFK’s Cuban missiles. There were indeed crises, but Carter seemed to manufacture even more—and to get in his own way most of the time. And his attempts to reassure consistently backfired, fueling even more national uncertainty. All this offered a perfect storm of opportunity for right-wing elements who discovered co-belligerency was not only a tactic but a way of life. Against all advice and all odds, Reagan—retaining his “very loose hold on the real world around him”—saw no contradiction bringing his brand of conservatism to join forces with those maligning gays, opposing abortion, stonewalling the ERA, and boosting the Christian right. Corporate CEO’s—Perlstein’s “Boardroom Jacobins”—already on the defensive, were more than ready to finance it. Carter, flailing, played right into their hands. Already the most right-of-center Democratic president of the twentieth century, he too shared that weird vision of the erosion of American morality. And Perlstein reminds us that the debacle of financial deregulation usually traced back to Reagan actually began on Carter’s watch, the seeds sown for the wage stagnation, growth of income inequality, and endless cycles of recession that has been de rigueur in American life ever since. Carter failed to make a good closing argument for why he should be re-elected, and the unthinkable occurred: Ronald Reagan became president of the United States. The result was that the middle-class dream that seemed so much in jeopardy under Carter was permanently crushed once Reagan’s regime of tax cuts, deregulation, and the supply-side approach George H.W. Bush rightly branded as “voodoo economics” became standard operating policy. Progressive reform sputtered and stalled. The little engine that FDR had ignited to manifest a social and economic miracle for America crashed and burned forever on the vanguard of Reaganomics.
Some readers might be intimidated by the size of Reaganland, but it’s a long book because it tells a long story, and it contains lots of moving parts. Perlstein succeeds magnificently because he demonstrates how all those parts fit together, replete with the nuance and complexity critical to historical analysis. Is it perfect? Of course not. I’m a political junkie, but there were certain segments on policy and legislative wrangling that seemed interminable. And if Perlstein mentioned “Boardroom Jacobins” just one more time, I might have screamed. But these are quibbles. This is without doubt the author’s finest book, and I highly recommend it, as both an invaluable reference work and a cover-to-cover read.
In Hearts of Atlantis, Stephen King imagines the sixties as bookended by JFK’s 1963 assassination and John Lennon’s murder in 1980. Perlstein seems to follow that same school of thought, for the final page of Reaganland also wraps up with Lennon’s untimely death. In an afterword to his work of fiction, King muses: “Although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened.” If you are more partial to nonfiction and want the real story of how the sixties ended, of how Atlantis sank, you must read Reaganland.
[Note: this review goes to press just a few days before the most consequential presidential election in modern American history. This book and this review are reminders that elections do matter.]
Review of: Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, by Rick Perlstein https://regarp.com/2020/10/31/review-of-reaganland-americas-right-turn-1976-1980...
PODCAST: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-d42x2-f0f2d4
I reviewed Perlstein’s previous books here:
Review of: The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein https://regarp.com/2015/10/11/review-of-the-invisible-bridge-the-fall-of-nixon-a...
Review of: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein https://regarp.com/2018/08/28/review-of-nixonland-the-rise-of-a-president-and-th...
The events in this volume coincide with most of my college years -- years in which my interests were my studies and my friendships, with current events something to just shake my head at with dismay. So there is a lot about the 1976 presidential campaigns in this book that I hadn't known about at the time. We all thought Ford was a pretty bad president, but herein are the facts of just how bad. It's also very good on tying together the events in Reagan's life with his emerging political "philosophy", if it can be called that. The first Republican president to be rather on the dim side but just so folksy and seemingly harmless, the book shows how right-wing politicos and pundits were brought into his inner circle and kept his schtick going.
I found the book enlightening on the persona of Jimmy Carter. He was a cagey dude who polished a persona that obscured his almost total lack of ability. He had a great organization and his single real talent was pulling the wool over the eyes of the populace. I don't doubt that there are aspects of him that weren't artificial, but I think they were more of a religious nature. He only beat Ford because of almost a total sweep of the Southern states in the election. Maybe they thought he was truly one of them. Maybe he was.
It was a bizarre election year. You could imagine that Rockefeller would have bailed out, or that Birch Bayh would have been the Democratic nominee, or any of several other outcomes. It's all here, the train wreck of the aftermath of Watergate.
Perlstein sticks to the trademark of this series with interconnecting cultural, entertainment, and societal issues with politics and history as nothing happens within a vacuum. The women’s rights, gay rights, and abortion rights developments of the early part of the 1970s, brought “organized discontent” from “moral” individuals who brought the “culture wars” that the country has lived with for the past 40 years into the mainstream of politics. Conservative background powerbrokers and boardroom Jacobins latched onto these “moral” crusades as well as the groundswell of taxpayer discontent and manipulated campaigns against consumerism to better their political fortunes and corporate profits. Then there was the continuing economic issues from inflation, energy, and unemployment all interrelated during the late 1970s that ultimately undermined the Carter Presidency than anything else beyond the borders of the nation. Finally, all the factors above that combined to make the 1980 Presidential campaign, not only one of a monumental shift in the political landscape but also historically misunderstood as to why Reagan won and Carter lost.
Unlike previous books, Perlstein didn’t need to give biographies of the major political figures of the era as they had already been covered though he did give minibiographies of individuals of lesser stature but who’s unknown impact would last for years. As I mention in my review of the previous book, Perlstein just goes after Carter and the major figures in his Administration but Reagan and his entire campaign doesn’t escape savaging as well throughout the book especially during the Presidential campaign. Perlstein doesn’t have to manipulate the facts to make the Christian Right, aka Moral Majority, come across as unchristian and unconstitutional in their portrayal in the book as what was covered in this five year period could be copied and pasted from anytime up until 2020.
The 1980s is seen as the decade of Ronald Reagan thus this book title, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980, perfectly encapsulates how that came to be. Rick Perlstein’s final volume of how modern conservatism took over the Republican Party and changed the political landscape as well as the political Establishment completes a 22-year story yet also feels historically hollow, which is the book’s major drawback. Without analysis of how the trends of 1958-1980 influenced the next four decades, the volume’s end was both sudden and underwhelming for a reader that had spent their time reading it.
1 Steve_Walker | 15 altre recensioni | Sep 13, 2020 |
Steve_Walker | 15 altre recensioni | Sep 13, 2020 | They are also just rollicking good narrative political histories.
1 JFBallenger | 15 altre recensioni | Sep 1, 2020 |
JFBallenger | 15 altre recensioni | Sep 1, 2020 | The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein is a political history of the United States from the late 1960s to the Republican Convention in 1976. Perlstein holds a BA in history for the University of Chicago and did graduate work at the University of Michigan in American Studies. His previous books include Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
This is a book that covered most of my childhood and brought back a flood of memories. It not only covered the politics but the culture too. Vietnam, Patty Hearst, POWs, Legionnaires disease, horse meat, Dirty tricks, Berkeley student protests, changing sexual ideas, ERA, bicentennial, The Exorcist, Henry Aaron, The Freedom Train, streaking, Evel Knievel, textbook wars, WIN, Born Again, Weather Underground, and Saturday Night Live are all included in this troubled period. From Nixon’s disgrace, to Ford’s healing America, to a Georgia peanut farmer all give rise to a man from California, Ronald Reagan. “People wanted to believe. Ronald Reagan was able to make them believe.” Perlstein captures not only the history but also the spirit of the times.
Perlstein gives detailed biographies of Reagan and Betty Ford. Betty Ford was quite progressive for her time and made quite a stir with her opinions. That was part of the history I did not remember. President Ford, I remembered mostly for his pardoning of Nixon and Chevy Chase’s impersonations on Saturday Night Live. Ford, not Carter, was the “nice guy” president. Ford wanted to heal the nation and return the nation to prosperity. His efforts at times almost seem comical, WIN -Whip Inflation Now was one of the better known programs. My take is, that more than anything, Ford was the bridge that allowed the healing.
In the background are the other players. Kissinger maintains a large role and smaller roles by still familiar names like Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson start the beginnings of the Moral Majority and the Christian Right. With Jimmy Carter, Billy Carter is also brought forward and rival Scoop Jackson.
Another revelation for me was just how contested the Republican primary of 1976 turned out to be. Ford nearly became the first sitting president not to win his party’s nomination since Cester A. Arthur. The Republican party was deeply divided between Ford and Reagan. It took the floor vote at the convention to nominate Ford before the result was known for sure. Ford came very close to losing and may have loss if it wasn’t for Reagans choice of running mate -- Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania.
What makes The Invisible Bridge a great book is the writing. I knew the history before reading the book. History records that it was Ford and Dole in 1976 and not Reagan and Schweiker, but reading the book creates a sense of suspense. There are several situations where history may have been very different, and I just never realized how close things came to being very different. Perlstein writes a history book that wants to be read and keeps the reader’s interest through to the end. An outstanding modern history.
And those were deep wounds, as Perlstein takes time to give the reader a wider picture of the times and the culture. This was the era of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping; when a member of the Manson family attempted to assassinate the President and a mentally ill police informant followed her up with another assassination attempt two weeks later. An Arab oil embargo in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War jacked the price of gasoline at the pumps, and resulted in long lines at stations, making the term “energy crisis” a household word. Out of control inflation ate away at wages, as trips to the grocery store became an exercise in sticker shock. Jobs disappeared, and the sense of economic security a generation of Americans had taken for granted seemed to vanish overnight. “Peace with Honor” went down the drain in Southeast Asia, as South Vietnam collapsed and the Communists rolled into Saigon, leaving Americans to grapple with fact that over 50,000 brave young men had seemingly died for nothing. A hidden history of domestic spying and harassment by the FBI was exposed, while the CIA’s dirty laundry, including plots to assassinate foreign leaders, were dumped before the public at Senate hearings. A crime ridden New York City went broke and needed to be bailed out by the taxpayers. Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin became part of daily life for many. Feminism and Gay Rights movements challenged and upended the social order. Cults and “self help” gurus flourished, as some joined the Moonies, while others checked out EST and Primal Scream theory. The movie AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and the TV show HAPPY DAYS, cashed in on a wave of nostalgia for the supposedly simpler 1950’s. Other films, like JAWS, THE GODFATHER PART 2, CHINATOWN, THE PARALLAX VIEW, and NASHVILLE, expressed the fears, paranoia, suspicions, and divisions of the times. Parents in West Virginia revolted against “pornographic” textbooks, white working class citizens of Boston turned violent when their children were bussed across town to black schools, and a lot of American women took a look at the Equal Rights Amendment, and wanted no part of it, and wanted no part of it in the Constitution. These events are all things Perlstein recounts in his book, often with an ironic eye.
The main focus of the book is on the politicians who dominated the times: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser extent, Jimmy Carter. None of whom come out of the book unscathed. I thought Perlstein did a good job recounting Nixon’s fall in the Watergate scandal, but what caught my interest more was his writing on the return of the POW’s from North Vietnam, which the Nixon Administration tried to spin into a great American victory narrative. We’d fought and fought, and bombed and bombed, for years, and years, and years, and at long last, our heroes could come home. Never mind anything else. That was the narrative Nixon and his men tried sell to a weary and, sadly, indifferent public. The truth, like it often is, was much more complicated. Gerald Ford is portrayed as a bumbler, in over his head, easily parodied by Chevy Chase on SNL. “Damned if he did, damned if he don’t” is how Perlstein dismisses him. I think history has been much kinder Ford than Perlstein; a man whose basic decency served him and the country well in the long run. I won’t argue with anybody when it comes to the faults and failures of Jimmy Carter’s leadership, but Perlstein, like many of Carter’s critics, appears to have a personal dislike of the man, and the culture he came from. Carter has always been a hard man to like for many, and no doubt Scoop Jackson, Morris Udall, Frank Church, Lloyd Bentsen, or Birch Bayh, all competitors of his for the 1976 Democratic Presidential nomination, would have been more successful as President, but they either ran bad campaigns, or simply lacked a compelling message that resonated with voters. One thing Perlstein does give Carter the proper credit for is that he, and his supporters, outworked every one of his rivals in 1976. Sometimes it is just a matter of wanting it more.
Ronald Reagan, more than anyone else, gets the most attention from Perlstein. The portrait he paints is of a glib and genial fabulist, ever able to project optimism no matter what, no doubt a reaction to a meager and trouble filled childhood spent in the mid west. That Reagan could spin anecdotes and stories, and present then as true, has been well documented elsewhere, but Perlstein does a good job of pointing out just how well Reagan could bend, or break, the truth, and how well that talent served him. I think Perlstein runs into the same problem many of Reagan’s biographers run into: it’s simply impossible to really understand what made him tick. The man was not introspective, like many of his generation, never bothering to look deep, and certainly never bothering to explain himself to the wider world. He expected to be taken as he appeared: honest, sincere, and forthright, which is how his many supporters saw him: a man who had no use for Communists, liberals, protesters, and anyone who had a bad word to say about America. In him they saw a leader who told it like it was, or at least, how it should be. The truth was, of course, more complicated. Betty Ford would be savaged by conservatives for “permissive” views on abortion and sex, but there is little doubt that the First Lady and her husband were far better parents than the distant, and disinterested, Ronnie and Nancy Reagan.
Perlstein does a good job of detailing what at the time was one of the least noticed, certainly by the mainstream media, stories of the mid 70’s: the rise of the right wing political activist. For decades, but especially in the 1960’s, it had been the political Left that had organized, taken to the streets, marched when necessary, stood in the way if that’s what took, on behalf of their causes, be it for better wages and working conditions, equal rights for minorities, or against a war they considered a crime. But those protests against bad textbooks in West Virginia brought together house wives, social conservatives, and evangelical Christians to fight for a common cause. Same for the parents in South Boston, who stood against a Federal judiciary who had taken their neighborhood schools away from them. Then there were the women who were horrified at the prospect of unisex bathrooms, women being drafted into the armed forces, or being compelled to pay alimony if the ERA became the law of the land. Others feared what they saw as a resurgent Soviet Union, and the prospect of America losing the Cold War, while others bristled at the idea of America “giving back” the Panama Canal to a tinhorn dictator. America was changing, and they didn’t like it, and they were going to change it back, if only they could find the right leader. They got organized fast, and often with far more discipline than their compatriots on the Left, quickly building a fundraising apparatus like none before. They took a big chunk of the old Democratic working class and middle class constituency away from the party of FDR and JFK, which now seemed have been taken over by anti war pacifists, affirmative action advocates, and politicians who never met a tax hike they didn’t love. This New Right would be scorned by liberals and progressives as racists, reactionaries and Bible thumpers, and not taken seriously. They heard the laughter and derision on the Left, and it just made them work harder.
Without a doubt, the high point of the decade was the Bicentennial celebration on July 4th of 1976, a day of simple pride and gratitude, where a divided country put their disputes on hold for a short while. But something else of note happened that Bicentennial year, a battle for the Presidential nomination in both parties that were among the all time great political throw downs. In the last section of his book, Perlstein does this epic struggle justice. The Democrats had a huge field of candidates, but it would be Carter, with his anti-Washington message, and promise to restore integrity to government in the wake of Watergate, who quickly jumped to the head of the pack and became the front runner. But it was not a done deal until the last primary in June, as Carter’s fortunes rose and fell from one week to the other, as he won and lost primaries against spirited opponents like the never say die Mo Udall, the late entry candidacies of Senator Church and Governor Jerry Brown of California, not to mention a nearly successful movement to get Hubert Humphrey into the race.
But it would be the Republican battle that would be the most hard fought, and consequential. Try as he might, the beleaguered Gerald Ford could not please a restive right wing in the Republican Party, who didn’t like his wife, Betty, not to mention détente, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Reagan was their man, and initially, it looked like the former movie star and ex California Governor would unseat a sitting President seeking the nomination of his own party. But Ford had some real talent working for him, namely a young Dick Cheney, and they managed to defeat the insurgent in a string of early primaries, starting with New Hampshire. Within a matter of weeks, Reagan’s campaign was on the ropes and out of money. The situation was so bad, even Nancy was urging him to drop out. But Reagan rolled the dice, and made a last stand in North Carolina in late March. Hitting Ford hard on the issue of détente (appeasement to conservatives), and the Panama Canal, while getting a lot of help from Senator Jesse Helms’s New Right organization, Reagan won in what turned out to one of the most decisive Presidential primaries ever, going on the win in Texas, and a string of other states. With this new momentum, Reagan was able to pull even with Ford in the delegate count, and take the fight all the way to the Republican Convention in Kansas City in August. Some reviewers have complained that Perlstein’s book is slow and dull in the final hundred pages, as it winds through ancient arcane political history: the ill-fated Richard Schweiker Vice Presidential choice by Reagan, the hardball politics of the fight for Rule 16-C, the battle to squeeze delegates out of the uncommitted Mississippi delegation, the near chaos on the convention floor as Reagan and Ford delegates tried to outdo each other in demonstrations whenever the First Lady or Nancy Reagan entered the hall, to the writing of the platform, where the Republican Party came out squarely against the ERA, gun control, and legalized abortion for the first time. If any of this had gone differently, American history as we experienced it in the ensuing decades would not have happened.
Like I said, Perlstein’s book is thick and deep, it’s not a casual read, and many would think by just covering the years of 1973 to 1976, only half the story is being told, but he makes the case well the events of these years made not only the 1980’s possible, but likely inevitable. This book is the story of how the conservatives who got bloodied in the disastrous Goldwater campaign, endured the calamities of the Nixon years, began to build a national political machine that would take control of the Republican Party, and make it a political juggernaut in the decade ahead. It’s one if the best short histories of Reagan the man, the sportscaster from the Mid West, who became a likable Hollywood leading man before discovering his true calling as a politician. The GE spokesman, and later California Governor, who gave speeches extolling free enterprise, denouncing the evils of big government and Communism, and most of all, expressing his undying faith in the goodness of America no matter what, and to millions in this country who felt it had lost its way, he was the man who would lead it back to the greatness of bygone times. Even for someone like me, who does not consider themselves a conservative, this is a good story, and an essential one in understanding the times we live in.
THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE ends on the last day of the 1976 Republican convention, with Ford nominated, Reagan vanquished, and at the ancient age of 65, seemingly too old to mount another campaign in the future. Around that time, an episode of ALL IN THE FAMILY had a defiant Archie Bunker shout, “You’re getting Reagan in 1980.” We know who laughed last, and it makes wonder if Rick Perlstein doesn’t have another book in him.
1 wb4ever1 | 20 altre recensioni | Dec 20, 2019 |
wb4ever1 | 20 altre recensioni | Dec 20, 2019 | I am reading Rick Perlstein backwards, which is less ironic than perversely logical, since the nation is itself tumbling rapidly backwards into the kind of hate and racism and division by any other name that Nixon championed so expertly in the era that he once commanded. My first read was Perlstein’s latest, from 2014: The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, his splendid analysis of how it was that after Nixon went up in flames, Reagan managed to emerge from the ashes and with a shrug and an “aw, shucks” declare that there really wasn’t any fire at all. Though Reagan had unrelentingly defended everything noxious that Nixon was about, after the ignominious fall virtually all of Nixon’s political capital clung to Reagan but none of his toxicity. But by that time, the political landscape, indeed the entire nation, had been irrevocably altered by the Nixon phenomenon that had turned politics into a zero-sum game, and divided Americans into distinct groups of us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys, patriots vs. traitors, solid citizens vs. arrogant elites. It was hardly coincidental that Nixon surveyed the universe through a similar lens that only detected black and white, that ever filtered out any and all gray areas. And by the time Nixon had finished with America—or America had finished with him—he had forever after transformed it into “Nixonland.” That is the remarkable thesis of Perlstein’s brilliant study of the 1960s, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, first published in 2008.
Nixon endured a forbidding childhood beset by poverty, the death of a sibling, and ever grim, unyielding parents who enforced such a rigid religious fundamentalism that it bordered on abuse. An enthusiastic but mediocre athlete, Nixon instead scored academically and distinguished himself in debate, but at his hometown Whittier College he was snubbed by the “Franklins,” a prestigious literary society comprised of members from prominent families. He responded by leading the effort to forge a rival society of “Orthogonians” for those like himself who might not otherwise get a seat at the table with the elite. This was to prove a defining moment in the life of Richard Nixon that Perlstein argues set him on an unrelenting path that would carve a cleft in America that ever clings to us like a poisonous film on the flesh of the nation that simply will not wash off.
Nixon seems to have never gotten over his rebuff by the Franklins, and the wrath that was born of that rejection fueled a resentment that he wielded like a hammer for the rest of his life. It was not simply the “us vs. them” mentality—but that was certainly part of it—but it ran much deeper and was far more vicious, because it was at root about whether or not you were “like us” or “like them,” and if you were “like them,” it meant that you were “the other,” and therefore not worthy of the same rights or the same respect we might require for ourselves. Nixon was neither the first nor the last to turn his opponents into “the other,” but he was indeed the first to successfully take that into the White House and weaponize it on a mass scale. The clarion call to the “silent majority” to stand up for the America they loved was a dog whistle to the Orthogonian hard hats that bloodied Franklin hippies on the streets of New York in 1970.
Perlstein’s book is as much a masterful history of America in the tumultuous 1960s as it is a chronicle of Nixon and how he put that indelible mark upon it, a reminder of how much those days seem like a study of an entirely different country from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, a time of great violence and radicalism that—it should not be forgotten—barely touched the vast majority of Americans who simply went about their lives anonymously in what was also a postwar economic boom in the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world. I was a youth in that era, and the truth is that more Americans listened to Pat Boone than Jimi Hendrix. Nixon knew his audience—the former, of course—and he knew how to transform them into vehement foes of the latter.
It was Nixon’s genius that he could identify these two emerging America’s and exploit the divisions there that he could actively shape, and compartments that he could adeptly construct, that would admit no shades of anything that was not an “either” or an “or.” There were the patriotic Americans who had defied economic depression and world war for a better life—only to see it put in jeopardy by unwashed longhaired cowardly druggies manipulated by communists from abroad seeking to undermine our democratic institutions; and, lazy unmotivated welfare recipients who demanded entitlements without a willingness to put in a good day’s hard work; and, most especially, violent, radical blacks who refused to be grateful for all that was being done to assist them with their seemingly endless and relentless demands. And there was now more opportunity with these same black people! There was the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln—which had long been the not-always-reliable-friend but a friend nonetheless to African Americans against the scourge of the Southern branch of segregationist unreconstructed Democrats—who now with Nixon’s Machiavellian sleight of hand could almost silently (with a swelling cohort added to his “Silent Majority”) exploit the national Democratic Party’s embrace of Civil Rights to actively turn Republican backs on blacks and instead entice the great white backlash of the South to join their ranks. (Reagan took this baton of this “southern strategy” and skillfully ran with it under the same barely disguised cover; Trump does not bother with even a token shellacking of the ulterior motives here. And Trump doesn't need batons: he has far more effective and not-so-subtle dog whistles. Neither Nixon nor Reagan would consort with Nazis; Trump finds good people among the crowd.)
Nixon was hardly the first politician to capitalize upon fear, upon hate, upon racism, upon xenophobia, upon a misguided fantastical nation that the very essence and identity of traditional values central to a national identity were under attack and needed to be actively defended before it was too late—but he was the first American figure of national prominence to successfully parlay this tactic into a kind of art form that drove a great and enduring and unrelenting wedge into the country that has never since been bridged, and perhaps never will be.
That Nixon wedge has long been exploited, by both Reagan and his descendants, but never so cruelly and with such baseness as it has been by Donald Trump, who not at all coincidentally was a student to all of the lessons Nixon taught, and who has associated with a lot of same villains that have been key to the rise of Nixon: Roy Cohn, Roger Ailes and Roger Stone among them. Much of the wreckage Nixon left behind was superficially paved over by Ronald Reagan, and there is no little irony to the fact that Reagan’s campaign slogan—"Let’s Make America Great Again”—has been disingenuously expropriated by Donald Trump. And Trump, it must not be forgotten, has like Nixon styled himself a great defender of “law and order,” even as it becomes increasingly clear that his administration may turn out to be the most criminally corrupt in American history.
The author wrote Nixonland nearly a decade before Trumpworld, but yet it seems to eerily presage it. Perlstein’s magisterial work may not only be the best book written about Nixon and the 1960s, but should also be required reading for anyone who wants to try to comprehend the madness that besets the nation today. Of course, Nixon was a far more clever fellow than Trump, and the Republican Party of his day was not the cult of personality of its current iteration, wagging a collective tail at the master of tax and tariff scams calculated to enrich a select plutocracy, and Nixon’s motives were more about leaving an enduring mark in the history books rather than the cheap Trumpist thrills of amassing trinkets and celebrity stardom, but nevertheless there is much of then that has come back to haunt us now. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does thyme,” Mark Twain was once alleged to quip. We can only hope that the last stanza of that rhyme ends for Trump much as it did for Nixon, forty-four years ago this month …
1 Garp83 | 33 altre recensioni | Aug 28, 2018 |
Garp83 | 33 altre recensioni | Aug 28, 2018 | Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.
Perlstein finds the core of this movement in the types of families that own a manufacturing business that employs everyone in a town that feel that increased taxes, regulations, and labor representation don't benefit them at all. They rail against the liberals who have sold out the country to "socialism" while also opposing the big city corporate types who control the Republican party and chose Eisenhower over their favored candidate Robert Taft in the first place (ironically, the movement they create would allow big conglomerates to gobble up family-owned businesses in future decades). There's also a youth movement in the 1960s, but not the counterculture, which creates the Young Americans for Freedom organization who also push for conservative values. Considering how many significant right-wing leaders of the past 60 years were born in the late 30s/early 40s, this cohort had great staying power.
This movement coalesces behind department store owner Barry Goldwater who single-handedly flipped Arizona from Democrat to Republican when elected to the Senate in 1952. Goldwater's organizing skills and confrontational speech style helped him gain support throughout the country. This included the South where white voters had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War but now saw the national Democratic Party taking stronger Civil Rights stances. Goldwater's insistence that Civil Rights legislation and New Deal programs were a threat to freedom, that Soviet-influenced communism was creeping in everywhere, and that the U.S. needed to be more aggressive militarily including using nuclear weapons won him followers while also terrifying a greater number of people.
The second half of the book focuses on Goldwater's 1964 campaign for President. It is sprawling in detail and challenging to keep track of all the figures involved in the Republican primary campaign as well as Lyndon Johnson's administration. It's refreshing that Democrats in 1964 had no compunction about calling out Goldwater's extremism and danger, instead of calls for bipartisanship and a "strong Republican Party" that we hear today. The news media was similarly unequivocal about the danger of Goldwater instead of playing "both sides" debates. That dangerous and insurrectionist right wing ideologues have essentially been normalized today is part of Goldwater's legacy.
Goldwater lost the 1964 election in a landslide with Johnson still holding the record for percentage of popular votes received. But Perlstein notes that in many ways Goldwater won by losing. A speech late in in the campaign by a Goldwater surrogate electrified the conservative movement. The man who gave that speech, Ronald Reagan, will be a key figure of the rest of Perlstein's series of books.