Rick Perlstein
Rick Perlstein
Eric S. "Rick" Perlsteinis an American historian and journalist, who has won wide acclaim for his chronicles of the 1960s and 1970s and the American conservative movement. Perlstein is the author of three bestselling books and is the winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Politico has dubbed Perlstein "a chronicler extraordinaire of modern conservatism."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
CountryUnited States of America
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Everyone on the Left has a favorite story that allows them to kind of excuse Reagan, explain away Reagan, say he was dumb, but unless we reckon with that kind of emotional intelligence and his ability to kind of speak to the aspirations of the American people, the less liberals are going to be able to understand the soul of his appeal.
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Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.
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As a general rule of thumb, Democrats do better in national elections when the year's defining issue is economic fairness, and Republicans do better when the defining issue is national security.
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Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.
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Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall.
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Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.
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For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly.
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As an adult, I've always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents' circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal.
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America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me.
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When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.
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What is considered 'conservative' and what is considered 'liberal' changes in any given era.
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There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.
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Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip.
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Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.