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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Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama's reelection.
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The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy - they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all.
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Republican governors are more lunatic than they used to be - as attested by all the ones so eager to turn down free federal money to qualify more of their poor citizens for Medicaid under Obamacare. Meanwhile, some states have taken the money only to hoard it.
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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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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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It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.
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The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs.
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We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.
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I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.
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Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.
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Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.
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Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party.
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Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls - before the public even knows to call them 'issues' at all.
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The reason inflation was brought down to manageable levels, by the time of Ronald Reagan's re-election, was directly attributable to Jimmy Carter's very courageous act, hiring a Federal Reserve chair, with the charge to induce a recession. That recession was probably the reason he didn't win a second term.