CHICAGO There is a historian who lives in Edgewater who is changing the way we think about American political history. Specifically, hes been altering the way we think about the 60-year rise of the conservative right, from its floundering days of Barry Goldwater to the Reagan Revolution, depositing seeds that rose into a Trump. His name is Rick Perlstein and hes become, as Slate put it, the pre-eminent historian of modern conservatism. Yet he was never an academic, and has never taught regularly. His research of choice is more likely to be a mountain of old newspapers than legislation, and unlike many historians, he has never shied from revealing his political affiliations.
Hes not even a conservative.
Theres little typical about him.
He began as a serious-minded teenager scrounging history from the mildewy stacks of old magazines in a Milwaukee bookstore basement. Reagan was president then. Perlsteins 50 now.
We like to picture our historians as somehow outside of history, or at least older than ourselves, poring exclusively through hallowed documents and the testimony of elected statesmen. The popular image is the gray-bearded scholar, said Patrick Iber, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and thats not Rick Perlstein.
His obsession with American history started at 16, though not with anything obvious, not with an Alexander Hamilton or the fractures of a world war or the decline of a civilization. He began with a hunger to understand the utopian dreams and upheaval of the 1960s. Indeed, when I asked what his typical day looked like, he quoted from Jimi Hendrix, who was once asked to describe a typical day so, you wake up, and then you what? Hendrix replied, youre assuming that I wake up.
Perlstein delights in a cultural nod, in a seemingly random detail that speaks to American character. The return of an old-fashioned Superman of traditional values just as the culture war is brewing, the popularity of milquetoast talk show host Mike Douglas as Richard Nixon is ascending, the way Star Wars takes hold in a post-Bicentennial nation eager to be seen as rebels, not an empire.
For 20-plus years, beginning soon after graduating college, Perlsteins life work has been an accessible, even fun tetralogy of political histories spanning more than 3,000 pages. First, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001); then Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008); then The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014); and now Reaganland: Americas Right Turn 1976-1980 (the 1,200-page conclusion) four books that are collectively reframing the American political narrative as more than just elections and rhetoric, said Jane Dailey, associate professor of American history at the University of Chicago.
If youve found yourself staring into space lately and wondering how the United States arrived at such an ominous, uncertain and unrecognizable moment, Perlstein provides the blueprint.
Before him, our somewhat agreed-upon story went something like this: The oppressive, conformist 1950s led to the freethinking, free-loving 1960s; which led to Republicans losing badly with a hawkish Barry Goldwater, thereby forcing conservatives to redouble their efforts with the working class; all of which paid off when the liberalness of the 60s was overrun by nihilism of the 1970s and those formerly idealistic armies of campus protestors got jobs, sold out and bought stock.
Youve heard that story.
It was, in part, the sunny mini-van commercial vision of the 1960s, Perlstein says with a wide, laughing smile. And my triumph, I guess, is that I convinced people that it was all (expletive).
He retold that narrative in two ways, Iber said. He balanced left-wing activism of the 60s with the lesser-known grassroots organizing of the right; he paid attention to seemingly minor conservative victories that lay beneath the Big Chill, leading to the White House. He also combined political and cultural histories into a narrative that tells how people felt. He wasnt first. But he did it better.
That innovation sounds obvious.
But as recently as a couple of decades ago, it wasnt among the hidebound brotherhood of academic historians, around whom history coagulates. Simply, Perlsteins story made more sense, not a narrative of political theories and conventions but one where politics and culture merge.
Rick took conservatism seriously when no one would, Dailey said. And that allowed academics to take it seriously. Generations of historians had essentially written their histories, and those were ripe for revision. Rick wasnt first to reimagine that, but he expanded boundaries of the political.
Perlstein lives on a leafy lane inside an old brick building that was once part of the Manhattan Project, then a Christmas card factory. A shiny grand piano sits in the middle of the living room that he shares with his wife, Judy Cohn, a researcher at JPMorgan Chase. He settled on a long, gray modernist couch spotted with coffee stains the office, so to speak, where Perlstein spends most days, on his phone and laptop, getting calls about what he thinks of Kamala Harris and civil unrest and protests, receiving unsolicited conspiracy theories and fielding requests for think pieces. He sits shoeless, in a T-shirt. Hes short, with a bushy beard, steady smile and playful eyes.
I think Im the only person in America who doesnt want to be a pundit, he said.
Besides, he added, its a glib culture, and really, nobody knows anything.
Perlstein grew up comfortable in Milwaukee, to conservative parents. His father owned the largest courier company in the city and was very much the small businessman with resentments. He thought bureaucrats wanted to regulate him out of existence. I think he was afraid of his working-class employees. I was kind of liberal and would get into arguments about labor (with his parents). Hed say I would shed lefty ideas soon as I had to make payroll.
Perlstein had his own resentments: He hated Hebrew school. During his bar mitzvah, he gave a squeaky-voiced lecture on Soviet Jewry.
His earliest memories, he said, is watching TV evangelists and even then kind of wrapping my mind around the tribal diversity of America. By the time he was a teenager, he was obsessed with 60s activists and their radical reimaging of the world. I became a serious little guy, he said.
No surprise then, he studied history at the famously serious University of Chicago. Ethan Michaeli, who attended college with Perlstein (then became an investigative reporter for the Chicago Defender and author of a 2016 history of the Black newspaper), remembers his friend as not so dissimilar from his histories. He Hoovered up information, processed it and spit out a narrative verbally, before he even wrote a word. Which sounds like X-Men, but Rick was distinguished even there, in a place famously full of young people with strange abilities. Perlstein went directly from Hyde Park to the graduate program at University of Michigan, but never finished: At 25, he got a $35,000 trust fund and moved to New York to work at Lingua Franca, the once beloved magazine devoted to intellectuals and academics. Perlstein imagined himself as a budding intellectual. (In fact, he met his first wife through a singles ad in The Nation.)
The origin of his histories began at a 1994 conference for historians that he covered for the magazine. His piece, Who Owns the Sixties?, the cover story, came out of a generation gap playing out at the conference, between the historians who lived through the 1960s and those who came of age in the 70s and 80s. His story was so provocative and reinterpretive, the piece itself generated mainstream press (from the Tribune and others), which led Perlstein to a book deal.
This all sounds obvious now, he said, but then, historians seemed to forget Nixon won 49 states (in the 1972 election). There was narcissism among the creative class of boomers who didnt seem to recognize the supporters of George Wallace were boomers, that people throwing rocks at Martin Luther King had been boomers. This was generation who went to Ivy Leagues, protested Vietnam, got out of the draft. Many were radicalized, but a lot happened inside a bubble.
Perlstein focused instead on the roots of the New Right, which evolved into modern conservatism one aligned with religion, skilled at networking and churning out best-selling manifestos that few liberals even noticed. Actually, by the early 90s, remarkably, conservatism remained relatively fresh ground for historians. For years, after Goldwater was crushed (in the 1964 election), there was a sense among historians hed been too extremist for Republicans, that his was not a viable future, said Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, the leading professional organization for historians. But Rick saw (Goldwater) was on to something, that someone like Phyllis Schlafly (the conservative Illinois activist who helped doom the Equal Rights Amendment) would not be easy to dismiss. Which, if you leap ahead, is how you arrive at a figure like (conservative architect) Newt Gingrich, which brings us to a Mitch McConnell.
Perlstein, he added, also proved himself different by not being shy about his politics, straddling activism, journalism and history, making no pretense to the scholarly distancing a lot of historians assume. Indeed, in January, Perlstein becomes president of In These Times, the 43-year old Chicago-based magazine of progressive politics; last year he was active in the campaign of Alderman Andre Vasquez. Perlstein says he considers himself a citizen first, but people are welcome to judge for themselves whether that takes away or adds to my value as a historian.
Initially, older, traditional conservatives appeared grateful for the care and attention that Perlstein paid to a history that hadnt yet received its due. Yet by 2017, even prominent conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published an essay titled Rick Perlstein, Youre No Herodotus.
His four books may be epic, exhaustive, nearly day-by-day histories, though they are far from dispassionate or flattering, to Democrats or Republicans. You would pressed to identify a single hero. Reaganland which reads like a rocket despite its length, and being a history of the Carter years, falsely remembered as a sleepy trudge has a Reagan who exonerates a nation of racism and doubts while quietly anticipating Armageddon; its Carter is fearful that the country is sliding towards amorality, though the man himself proves arrogant and distant, unable to summon the emotional resonance Reagan wields. The book feels rollicking this way, and surprising in its detours, veering to serial killers and the religious right, Hollywood and Love Canal. By the time we reach the 1980 presidential election, your memory feels pocked and muddied. Carter, for instance, did not not lose the presidency because of American hostages in Iran; in fact, it wasnt even the primary issue for many voters and those who were concerned sided with Carter.
My books are about reverse engineering the outcome of the inevitable, Perlstein said. We know who won. We know the issues. But how did they get important? Theres nothing obvious there. You know what happened, but you dont know the possibilities.
But pinballing as the books feel, there is a steady theme that spans all four, he said. Its our deep American longing for consensus when there is none. Its an unbridgeable chasm. The biggest narrative that people miss is just how fragile the working peace in this country actually is.
Donald Trump appears in Reaganland, as an unassuming walk-on. His presence, though, the book arriving when it does, is an existential backdrop. Soon after his inauguration, Perlstein wrote a widely circulated piece for the New York Times Magazine about how historians himself included had told a tale of American politics far too constricted to anticipate the election of a Trump. Historians were, in a sense, not unlike the political establishment: They assumed a boundary of respectability and could not imagine widespread support for anyone running solely on resentment; they were too focused on the intellectuals of politics to take the fringes seriously.
Perlstein said he did recognize Trumps significance, just not his chances. What comes across then in Reaganland is how close the mainstream really is to its fringes. In researching, for example, he paid more attention to the popularity of white supremacy in 1979 than he might have if Trump lost.
That said, I told Perlstein if anyone might have anticipated the tribal divisiveness of 2020, I would have bet it would be himself, clued into undercurrents of culture. He smiled and brought me to a bookshelf in the back of his home stuffed with materials you might not expect to see in a historians home memoirs about open marriage, Time/Life histories, rants, tracts, trash. He found a pamphlet from Jerry Falwell, on the end of the world, on his wish for imminent conflict.
Perlstein flipped to the last page and read:
And what a glorious day that will be!
Then he laughed like he hadnt read it dozens of times already. This, right here, he said, waving the book like it was on fire, this is how far from the center someone accepted as a respectable actor in American life actually was! Its amazing were even alive in 2020! Nobody knows anything!
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How the heck did our politics get here? Chicago historian Rick Perlstein has the answer in his fourth book, 'Reaganland.' - Greater Milwaukee Today
