Angry Planet - Why These Protests Are Different Than 1968

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Our guest today is Rick Perlstein. Perlstein is a historian and author best known for Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. He’s also written the forthcoming Reaganland: America’s Right Turn.This is more WTO in 1999 than it is 1968Why we don’t remember NewarkIs the press doing better this time?The Jimmy Carter Crisis.How the Presidency shapes the American people.Defining FascismYou can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I think the closest parallel is what we're seeing from the police, both what's being protested against, right? And one of the things, one of my kind of talking points as it's taken shape over the last three days has been, you know, the police chief in Los Angeles. before the Watts riots, the scam in William Parker used to go to the Mississippi Delta to recruit his cops, right? Because he wanted racist thugs, you know? And then I, you know, talk about one of the most searing scenes in Nixonland, which I talk about after the Newark riots, 1967, were subdued.

That's when police started shooting people in cold blood. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galtz. Our guest today is Rick Pearlstein. Pearlstein is a historian, an author best known for Nixon Land, the rise of a president, and the fracturing of America. He's also written the forthcoming Reagan Land, America's right turn. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Matthew. Looking forward to seeing what we get up to.

Yes. So Nixon Land is a chronicle of President Richard Milhouse Nixon, but also his relationship to the American people and how Nixon changed the American people. And it's also really popular right now. I thought of you for the show when I saw you tweet out that the publisher can't keep it in print. Why is it so popular right now? Why ever what people want to be doing? Because of its author, obviously.

Well, it's about generally speaking. The canvas involves, you know, the various sorts of social uprisings of the 1960s. it starts with the Watts riots in 1965, you know, which happened, you know, eight days after Lyndon Johnson supposedly ended racism by, you know, like signing the Voting Rights Act. And it's most, you know, I think galvanizing sections are about riots in 1966, 1967, 1968. And also the kind of underlying structure of the book is how Richard Nixon both kind of exploited and spurred, kind of social. division for political ends, his own political success. And the 1968 election is, for some reason, what everyone is thinking of. It's been interesting for me, Matthew. This is, I think, my eighth or ninth

interview, whether it's podcasts or newspapers in the last three days. And, you know, not a single one has said, well, tell me about the parallels between now and the WTO riots in Seattle in 1969, or the white night riots in which, you know, they're running battles between the police and gays and lesbians in San Francisco in 1979 or the Rodney King riots in 1992 that, you know, George H.W. Bush tried unsuccessfully to politicize or, you know, any of those things, you know, the Tulsa race riots or whatever. 1968 is what people think about. And I think it's because, I don't know, I'm really thinking about this in kind of a meta sense.

I think that in sort of the on the kind of ungenerous side of the ledger, people tend to kind of remember American history in terms of cliches. And the cliches, in 1968 was this second civil war year of kind of profound division, which is problematic

in that my interpretation of American history is that there's just always, it always just kind of pulses and courses with profound divisions. The other is people really, think in terms of presidential elections, right? And, you know, 1968 was a transformative political election, presidential election, and one in which Richard Nixon kind of made urban disorders a big part of his appeal to the public. So people are reading my book, which is, which is great.

People are thinking about history, which is great. But then the other reflection I have after these nine interviews is, well, it's great that people are using history to think about the present, but we don't even really know what's happening yet out there. Right. It's like, where, where, why, when about, you know, exactly, it's such a diverse movement. You know, I was trying to explain to an Italian Marxist the other night. The role of this kind of 10-year-long, continuous building of a political argument, a political tradition around response to police brutality since the shooting of Oscar Grant

by the California, Northern California transit police about 10 years ago and how, you know, as the continuation of kind of almost an explicit movement, that's very different from these kind of spontaneous kind of burning down of neighborhoods in 1965, 1966, 1967,

and, you know, how inconceivable it would have been that a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, although mostly young, which is an interesting thing too, different from the 60s, group of angry people would gather not in neighborhoods where they live,

but kind of in these central downtown areas. And, you know, not just, you know, kind of attack the store next door, but partially attacking things like, you know, the headquarters of multinational brands, you know, Nike stores and things like that. So, yeah, I mean, we, we, we, that's why people are reading Nixon land, right? Right. And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I've, I've actually become ambivalent about that. So there you are. Do you think that, I think there's something about the, the way, there's this generational thing. in America. Like, we have trouble kind of reaching back further than the previous two generations. And so that is, yeah, like, I would think, I think I would be hard pressed except for, like, in leftist circles, for anyone to really remember the WTO riots, which I do think are important. Which is a question. I mean, there's a politics of historical memory, too, right? Why do we remember some events? And everyone remembers, you know, well, obviously everyone

remembers 9-11, you know, 3,000 people died. But, you know, that was a very big deal. You know, it was really the first urban rioting of any size since 1992. And it was very big on the left. I mean, you can kind of draw a direct line between the WTO and the anti-Iraq movement, which, you know, obviously eventually became part of the Democratic Party and part of Barack Obama's appeal to the electorate in 2008. and to the Ralph Nader campaign,

and then that's before that 2000, and then to the Bernie Sanders campaign, right? Can you give us a little background on it? Because I feel like some of the audience is just not going to know what we're talking about. Yeah, that's true. How old are you, if I may ask? I am 36.

I actually had some friends that were there. Yeah, yeah. I'm 51. I was born in 1969. I once had an editor said we're most interested in the periods right before we were born. Yes. We've shaped our parents, right? Absolutely.

So the 1990s, generally speaking, was kind of like the high tide of the Democratic Party's kind of romance with market thinking, generally neoliberalism, if you prefer. And, you know, one of the big policy objectives of the Clinton administration was, you know, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which really, really in a lot of ways was kind of a giveaway to multinational corporations, you know, opened up all these factories on the border where they could kind of import goods into the United States. It was supposed to be great for American jobs. It turned out to be terrible for American jobs. It really helped, you know, kind of decimate the Mexican middle class and the rural peasantry. So there was very much this kind of on the left critique around what was kind of becoming to be known as globalization.

And the World Trade Organization, basically being kind of the traffic cop of globalization. And kind of subsumed under the phrase free trade was really a kind of managed trade in which kind of nations and corporations kind of coordinated and cartelized various kinds of production. right, that made it a lot easier to move jobs overseas to chase the cheapest labor.

You know, first it was, you know, Taiwan and then China and then Vietnam. So there was really this very strong thread of activism around this. So when the World Trade Organization announced that they were going to have their annual, bi-annual, I don't even know, quadrennial, whatever, their big meeting in Seattle, which really was a part of this kind of insurgent left, the headquarters of it. There was organizing that was quite strikingly kind of across a lot of different identity lines. It was both, you know, the phrase at the time was teamsters and turtles because kind of environmentalists dressed up like sea turtles who were threatened by, you know, kind of globalization. But with teamsters and union members.

And it was very militant. They tried to make it impossible for the ministers of the various nations. The trade negotiators actually get to the place where they need to go to protest. And there were lots of broken windows. And that, of course, became a very big news story. And so basically it was a riot, right, around questions of global capitalism. And the reason I think of it now is just because, you know, it really was just like, kind of like,

Black Lives Matter and the police abuse movement is to what we've seen in the last, you know, nine days as to kind of the anti-globalization movement, aspects of the union movement that were fighting against free trade were to the WTO protests. It was the culmination of a certain kind of left-wing discourse. I'm not going to say organizing, because then you get into that weird outside agitator thing,

but this is connected to a movement in a way that, that the rioting in the 1960s wasn't. Well, I think that we have to be careful about the way we talk about riots. Because I almost think of them more akin to,

like a natural disaster is the wrong analogy, but it is a buildup and then a bursting of energy and they are tend to be loosely or completely disorganized. Because organized violence doesn't look like

what we're seeing, right? It's different. It's much different. So what, are there any parallels that you see to like the long hot summer of 1967, the stuff in 68? Or do you think that all of this is kind of, did you read that piece by the, do you know who Dave Weigel is, Washington Post reporter? He had a great.

He might have you even quoted me in one of, in his piece about this stuff. Yeah, yeah. He puts out a column called The Trailer. In one of his most recent trailers, he was like, hey, this is not like 1968, and here's why. And I think he did quote you. But you say, like, you've been on all these podcasts and everyone's reaching out and like, is there anything here? Or do you think that we're just, like, that's our cultural memories. That's the last time we remember, you know, protests like this that,

felt that violent? I think the closest parallel is what we're seeing, you know, from the police, both what's being protested against, right? And one of the things, one of my kind of talking points as it's taken shape over the last three days has been, you know, the police chief in, in Los Angeles before the Watts riots, this guy, and William Parker used to go to the Mississippi Delta to recruit his cops, right, because he wanted racist thugs, you know? And then I, you know, talk about one of the most searing scenes in Nixon land, which I talk about after the Newark riots, 1967, were subdued. That's when police started shooting people in cold blood. Yeah, no, like, get into, because I'd actually not heard of that at all until I'd read your book, surprisingly. Can you

tell us about what happened in New York, 1967? Yeah, I want to give credit to a journalist called Ron Perombo, who is gone now. But he, risked his life to publish a 1971 book called No Cause for Indictment that I was able to bring back into print several years ago from a left-wing publisher. And basically what he documented extremely, extremely, with extreme detail and care, was that the state police and the National Guard frequently, with a death cult toll, you know, of this description above 12, would shoot into crowds,

would shoot people who were bystanders, basically that there was a police riot in New York following the riot of people burning stuff down. And the reason the book is called No Cause for Indictment was that the state authorities report on this said that there was no cause to indict any of the police. And of course, the reason this was, and this gets to your question about parallels and non-parallels,

I think the reason that doesn't live in our memory of these events is that the media then was much poorer when it came to these kinds of events. I've been actually extremely impressed by the subtlety and nuance and contextualization and compassion about a lot of journalism around this stuff. Not all of it, of course. But in 1967, one of the stories I tell on Nixon land

was that there was a beloved, one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the martyrs was this kind of beloved community figure named Uncle Daddy Harris, you know. And CBS News filmed his funeral. And according to sources, I don't remember where I got this exactly. Maybe it was from Prombo.

It was just this galvanizing footage of this community outpouring of brief. And that CBS News refused to show the footage because they didn't want to be seen as sympathetic to riders. And, you know, in previous interviews, I've contrasted that to the way the shooting of the barbecue stand operator in Louisville under very similar circumstances shooting into a crowd. Everyone knows about that, you know. And the idea that this would be suppressed is not conceivable. And then, of course, yesterday MSNBC devoted, you know, two and a half hours to the funeral of George Floyd, you know. And, you know, I document in Nixon land just cavalier contempt by the media for this stuff. And the absolute conviction among the public, partly because of the media,

but partly because people were trusting institutions a lot more then and the politics of law and order or such, that in a place, a situation like the Chicago Democratic Convention riots in which, you know, white protesters were beaten mercilessly by the cops without any violent confrontation, without any violent, you know, they weren't responding to anything from the protesters. They were sitting down in the street. People overwhelmingly sided with the cops and just assumed as a matter, of course, that these kids must have been attacking the police, blaming the media for not showing that the police were obviously acting in self-defense

when this was objectively not the case. And now we have this poll result from the morning. consult that shows 50% from a ratio of 55 to 34% people are more likely to believe that the public is under threat from the police than the police are under threat from the public. So that's, you know, that's very, very, very different. I see the biggest kind of structural difference is what we're seeing now in response to George Floyd's death and, of course, you know, this building of tension over George Floyd's death, is an absolute continuum.

You can find gradations every point along the scale from, you know, silent vigils in which people lie in their back for seven minutes and 45 seconds or chant, you know, I can't breathe, as we saw at the Denver Capitol, to, you know, people stealing cars because the police are occupied, right? So in every gradation of kind of planned protest to spontaneous protests, peaceful protest, to violent protest.

It is a complete, it's all connected somehow, right? It's all connected to this event, to this rage. Maybe not, you know, kind of people taking advantage of stuff to just steal things. Although, you know, obviously there's an economic factor that there's so much privation and inequality going on right now, especially because of COVID. So, I mean, you could say that that is a political response

in a certain sense, too. Whereas, sure, in 1965 and 1966, there were civil rights marches. But actually, the mainstream civil rights movement said, basically these riots have, you know, kind of nothing to do with us. I mean, Martin Luther King said these riots are, you know, rioting is the language of the unheard. Yeah.

Right. So he had a, he had a political, you know, kind of analysis of the riots. But it was very easy for him to say, I reject this as a strategy. whereas now what do you point to as what's happening right? And that's kind of where I've become frustrated with this instinct to just immediately think of

how is this like 1968 and then of course you get into the differences between Richard and Richard Nixon and Donald Trump that's one more point I'm going to make actually which is like it's so fascinating. Why are we talking about 1968? You made a really good point.

That's what people remember. It's presidential election. Well, it's also one of these examples in which we're talking about exactly what Donald Trump wants us to talk about. He's the guy who, you know, used 1968, 1968, 1969 slogans. Right? So once again, you know, we're kind of following this guy's, you know, following this guy's wins.

He wants you to remember that. There was a weak Democrat in office, so supposedly, and that Nixon restored law and order. I'm the law and order guy like Nixon was, right? Right. And then he tried again in 1970 and ran a law and order campaign for Democratic congressional candidates. And people were like, what are you talking about? You know, you haven't restored law and order. And in fact, you seem to be intentionally exacerbating divisions within society.

So, you know, objectively, Trump looks. like, you know, as so often is the case, another Republican on steroids are turned up to 11, but that Republican is Richard Nixon in, you know, 1970, in which basically, so to speak, he lost. Right. I think that's a really important thing that we, that I keep seeing get left out of this conversation is how different the political situations really are. Trump, the law and order guy is the incumbent. You know, he's not trying to win an election. crime is way, way, way, like, it's not even, it's not even the same, right, at all the way. I haven't even talked about that.

That's a really good thing to be run into it. I mean, we're talking about, you know, murder rates, you know, doubling during the 50s and 60s, right? And there were, there were riots of various kinds for several years leading up to that election, right? Like, basically every summer. Every year. And it came out of nowhere, right? It was like, this is the thanks we get from, you know, doing all these wonderful things for African Americans. That was the discourse then.

Right. And it took, it was, it was, it was a hard thing for a Democrat to do as someone like Hubert Humphrey or Robert F. Kennedy, you know, tried to do to call people to empathy. And one of the things we're dealing with, too, is this post-2001 militarization of police stuff, which I'm sorry, you have some, you know, fascinating things to say about. And I think that that stuff being on full display and being visited on obvious innocence is something that's, I think some scales are falling off eyes in middle America, right? And that's why you're seeing, you know, as we speak, you know, on Friday, June 5th or 4th, June 5th, the looting is pretty much done for. What we're looking at now is, you know, vigil-like, um, uh, um, dignified protests

in cities and even small towns all across America. You know, um, um, Naperville, Illinois, where I live, I don't live in Naperville, I live in the city. But, you know, in DuPage County, which, you know, if you're a, if you're from Detroit, it's Bloomfield Hills. If you're, you know, from New York, it's Great Neck. If you're from Los Angeles, it's, you know, Pasadena. You know, basically this kind of bucolic suburban type situation. That was the kind of place that Nixon was appealing to in 1968 and succeeded in winning. This is a place where there actually are Black Life Matter protests going on, you know, in 2020. And it's the kind of place that Richard Nixon was appealing to in 2018, these kind of suburban swing districts that the Democrats overwhelmingly won. And, you know, the big picture political analysis of this is people don't want to support the person they see is delivering a disturbance to society, not healing disturbance to society. Right. Are you better off than you were four years ago, right? Yeah.

It's a change election or is this a change election or is this a, you know, you know. Something I, another thing I've been thinking about a lot is where you end Nixon land, that Bob Dole quote that he gave in his funeral, I think, is very telling. Yeah. I've got it right here. The second half of the 20th century will be known as the age of Nixon. Are we still living in that? Well, that was a very interesting phenomenon and speaks to kind of how liberals and Democrats, you know, kind of... You published this in 2008, I'll say.

A long-term flaw they're thinking was that they don't really see kind of reaction as kind of like this fundamental constitutive part of the American experience kind of stitch into the fabric of society. So every time a Democrat or a liberal wins, whether it's 1960 or 2008, they say, oh, we finally vanquished this monster for good. They think they've got their next FDR, right? They think they're going to get the next 30 years of. On the cover of Newsweek and the liberal magazine, the Washington Monthly, there was Barack Obama, you know, as FDR. Right. And so when people reviewed Nixon land, I got a lot of, wow, this is a great book, but what the hell is he talking about, you know, we still live in Nixon land.

And then a lot more of that in November of 2008 of people saying, you know, I mean, you could Google it. You know, Nixon land in Obama. Nixon land is over. Obama ended Nixon land. I heard the same thing in, you know, 1992 from when I was in graduate school and one of my professor I was working for said, oh, my God, it's just like, I remember, it's just like Kennedy, you know. And then, you know, one of the guys who wrote that in one of his reviews, an aide to Mayor Bloomberg, as it happens, apologized to me, right? Oh, yeah, you were right.

And apparently I learned from my podcast with David Plough that Nixon line was being read in the White House as kind of like a manual for, you know, the kind of, you know, the kind of take no prisoners, politics of the Republicans, which was, you know, of course, at the same time flattering. And disappointing because, I mean, do they really not know, you know, what happened in the 1850s? Does Barack Obama really not know what was happening when he was living in Chicago in the 1980s when it was council wars? And when, when, you know, Harold Washington became the first African-American mayor of Chicago, the white majority in the city council basically tried to shut down his government, you know. This is us, right?

Yeah, I mean, this is, like you said, this is the kind of the story. this has been part of the story of the country for the entire time the country's been around, right? The founding fathers wrote those documents, built the country, and then immediately started fighting each other. A book that's coming out the same day as mine on August 18th that's coming out that I blurbed, and I think it's probably the most exciting history book I've read in many years, called Break It Up, and it's called like a secession division and the history of like the just United States of America. And he goes back to before the founding how hard it was to basically get all these various

colonies to think about themselves as a united phenomenon at all. And how like secessionist movements immediately began. And there were literally dozens of them. Like in every decade of American history. It's just astonishing. And, you know, my big sort of project historically really takes off from that insight, which is that people kind of on some level have that they know there's just kind of unconscious, you know, knowledge that, you know, America is on, you know, like basically they say,

like, you know, civilization is four meals away from anarchy, right? I mean, we're kind of four, we're four urban uprisings away from, you know, secession, disunity, civil war, right? And we just so furiously, furiously, frenetically, trying to convince ourselves, that's not the case. You know, Union soldiers and Confederate soldiers marching down the street in the Fourth of July in New York in the 1870s, you know, a long national nightmare is over. Gerald Ford's speech in his, you know, kind of after taking the Oval Office, you know, there is no red America, there is no blue America. that this frenzy to try and believe that we're united and a peace with itself is actually a huge variable in the political culture of America itself. And Donald Trump makes that harder, and that's why one of the reasons he's so traumatic for our political culture.

Do you think there's any way to resolve that, or is that just a feature of the experiment? I think that a big theme of my last book, The Invisible Bridge, is a psychological one, which is the psychological one, which is, that the way you transcend trauma is to confront trauma and be honest about trauma and work through trauma, whether it's a family or an individual or a nation. I mean, we're thinking of what Germany did in the generations after World War II, what South Africa did with the Truth in Reconciliation Commission. And my argument in this book, Nixon land, was, I mean, Invisible Bridge, was that, you know, as the Vietnam War came to a close and American defeat,

and as Watergate came to the floor, and as American's economic dominance began to be questioned with the Arab oil bycrot, that that actually was happening. You had things like the church committee looking into the CIA and the secret government. You know, you had people questioning the president's ability to make war. You had people working through all sorts

of American traumas. And the kind of cultural role of Ronald Reagan, who was coming to prominence nationally through the 1976 presidential election, shall we say the bicentennial year, which I write about people, you would think was a good idea to celebrate because America had nothing to celebrate, but people celebrated and ended up loving. What Ronald Reagan's role in the political culture was to kind of absolve people of that obligation,

right, to kind of wave it all away. So America's God's chosen nation with a city on a head. and why are people being so negative, right? And so America will not be able to kind of deal with, you know, the racial ordeal, right, until we acknowledge that the only reason we have a nation is because we were, we ignored the racial division between the North and South. You know, we papered over this fundamental cleavage that was repressed and repressed and compromised and compromised until the repressed return in the form.

of almost a million corpses of Americans killing each other. And it'll just, yeah, you can't push that stuff down, right? It has to be resolved or else it'll keep coming out. Well, this is the Freudian thing, right? It's a hydraulic thing. You know, it's like when you push it down, it comes out in even uglier fashion. And, you know, it's like in Nixon, in my first book before the storm, the way this manifests itself is that the period before Kennedy's assassination and Goldwater and basically

the 60s, that's the storm. It's called, why it's called before the storm, was a period. which this this frenzied, uh, top of your voice declamation that America had solved all its problems and was united was at its high tide, you know, in that 1961, 1962, 1963 period. And that the reason the 60s were so ugly and concoffinous was in part because that was the return of what we had repressed, that all those tensions were obviously there, racial tensions, tensions about America's role in the world, uh, Cold War tensions, and that suddenly Americans were, you know, killing each other again over them.

Do you see yourself as like a historian or a chronicler of 20th century American conservatism? Well, I always say that, you know, my books aren't about presidents. They're about, and you actually, I really was appreciated in the way you actually introduced me as a person about how it's, the Nixon's about how the American people change, right? That's the subject, right? That's, I mean, that's, to me, that's what made the book so good. What made it such a unique. Yeah, right.

In the preface, I say, like, the star of Nixon land is the voter who, you know, voted for Lyndon Johnson because it seemed the only obvious same thing to do, and then voted for Richard Nixon in 1972 for exactly the same reason. So that's my big subject, right? And presidents and presidential campaigns are kind of wet stones in which kind of like that, that's, kind of that blade is kind of sharpened, you know? It's like that's how,

you can see what Americans kind of longings are by the leaders they're attracted to. That basically, um, this, um, political scientist and biographer named, um, shoot, what is his name? His, his,

McGregor, James McGregor Burns, uh, that he wrote this book called leadership. And one of the things he talks about is that, um, leaders and their followers have this kind of symbagery. psychiatric relationship where leaders, the followers or the constituency of a leader,

kind of serves a psychological, deep-stated psychological need in the leader. I mean, it's like even, so metaphorically, it's Barack Obama's kind of need to have, you know, this kind of unified identity, you know, after living this life, you know, and this stormtops sea. Yeah. Searching for his father. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Okay. Yeah. I never thought of it that way, but yes. Richard Nixon is the Orthogonian, right? And he just kind of repeats that wound over and over again and wins the loyalty of people who identify with his struggle to be kind of taken seriously by the cool kids, right? So I'm really fascinated by that.

And so conservatism, you know, that's another kind of layer of abstraction. You know, I'm really fascinated with, you know, who's on the inside and who's on the inside. outside, you know, how societies kind of solve the problem of distributing resources and power and, you know, the history of the struggle for freedom and the struggle for stability, which are obviously at loggerheads with each other. That's the left versus right struggle, which is, you know, pretty fundamental to any political community. All right. Let me ask the story.

question then, and I may be about to show my ass about not knowing everything you've written, but we'll find out, where's your Jimmy Carter book then? Well, that's it. Reagan Land is a Henry Carter book. It goes from 1976 to 1980. Well, there we go. Let's see. And, you know, I mean, the Jimmy Carter in 1976 campaign. Unfortunately, it's kind of the primary campaign is in Invisible Bridge and the general election campaign is in Reaganland. You know, I mean, maybe it's a screenplay where I write about the Carter campaign because that was a just such a fascinating thing. And so much was a part of, um, a man kind of responding to the longing of the public for honesty, you know. And a big part of, um, the political crisis that Jimmy Carter

faced was he basically had these very strong political instincts towards things like austerity and sacrifice. And that just wasn't what he talked about when he was running for president in 1976. You know, when he's kind of like, you know, going to the public on TV and saying, you know, you need to make do with less. He's like, was that what we voted for? I don't remember. I thought we voted for the guy who was like, you know, really honest and was a peanut farmer and promised not to lie to us, you know. Yeah. Then he's, then he's talking about American malaise, which he didn't actually say, if I recall correctly, and getting attacked by swamp rabbits. Right. You got all or all the time. Yeah, exactly.

part of the book. And, you know, the reason Reagan, uh, was successful in 1980, you know, in the abstract was again, the same invisible bridge, bridge reason that he was able to kind of answer Jimmy Carter with bullshit and say, uh, no, we don't need to sacrifice America, um, literally. And if you look at his, you know, 1980, uh, acceptance speech, he says some, some people say we have to make do with less. No, never have to, you know, make you less. Our opportunities are boundless. This is America, bitches, you know, to the moon, you know, to Mars, you know. And that sounded pretty darn good.

How important is the personality of the president in shaping the American people? I think it's really, really important. I mean, if you look at, you know, this kind of epiphenomenon of the Donald Trump era, right? I mean, in a lot of ways, you know, here's this, here's this cop, right, whose name is Chauvin. He looks like, you know, like, you know, it's a bully and back to the future, right? And he's just like, you know, looks like, you know, the guy who steals your lunch money, right? And here's this guy, this kind of modest, sweet, gentle giant, you know, who, you know, has, you know, like a checkered past, right, from poverty. privation. And then the striking thing is they might have known each other, you know, working at the

same bar. So we don't really know that, you know, but like it certainly lets us kind of insert a narrative. They were in the same world. Yeah. Well, it lets you insert a narrative in which this white bully is murdering this innocent black person, um, um, um, um, because he can on camera, knowing he's on camera, posing for the camera, uh, having his hand in his pocket, I've used, even heard very unpleasant reflections that maybe he's even touching himself, you know, and, you know, thinking that he can get away with it. Well, that really does seem like at least a symbolic concatenation of the era of Donald Trump, right, the personality of Donald Trump. So if you look at these kind of epiphenomenon of, you know, high schools with minority

basketball teams, playing white basketball teams and getting, you know, Donald Trump slogans, at them. Right. You know, that kind of casualization of cruelty, you know, people proudly going around, you know, not wearing masks. I mean, obviously, that's directly, you know, modeling the president's behavior, but it's also a kind of more broadly a Donald Trump story in the world, you know, that we're not interconnected and that the whole point of life is to, to dominate, right? And not, you know, sacrifice to any collectivity. right? And then you have, you know, like on the other side of the ledger, this guy, Franklin Roosevelt, of whom it was said, you know, he did not have a first class intellect, but he had a first class

temperament. This guy who kind of grew up rich, had profound privation in his life because of his polio, and kind of developed this empathy in which he almost seemed to, and I wrote about this in an essay I wrote about a Roosevelt biography, I almost seemed to kind of in his, in his, in his, in his private cogitation say, you know, everyone should have the security I had growing up, right? And was able to kind of bridge that gap between what it means to have kind of a secure and prosperous and happy and fulfilled life and what it feels like to be denied that. And that was kind of embodied in his personality. You know, he was a very democratic person, right?

And I read about that too. You know, he talked about in his famous, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, he talked about his, um, uh, he talked about his, um, uh, uh, he talked about his famous, you know, we don't have anything to fear, but fear itself speech, uh, in which he, he basically said, um, uh, none of this is any of your fault, you know, this, this was done to you. Whereas I contrast that to Jimmy, uh, a statement Jimmy Carter made when he visited California during the 1979 oil crisis when she said, this is all your fault. You did this. You've been too selfish. Yeah, not something Californians want to hear from someone from Georgia. Well, it was actually kind of fun because, you know, like everyone was blaming it on California

because it started in California in May. And so like there was a senator from Illinois saying, well, of course, they're like this car obsessed culture and they're really selfish. And then like the next year it happened all over the country. Yeah. So that was kind of a nice comeuppance for the Golden State. I want to switch tracks here just a little bit and talk a little bit more about riots and protests in general. So we're all sitting in our houses, some of us are out on the streets.

But everyone's watching all this stuff all the time right now. We're all taking it in. And I'm wondering, something that struck me as I was reading this is like your, like, Nixon land has all these great, like, personal moments from these areas of protests. And I'm wondering, like, what is the process of writing about the history of something like this? Because it is so chaotic. And with these, it's going to be a little bit different.

You're a writer asking a question about writing. Yeah, exactly. Like, how do you, and history, like, how do you write a history of a movement that is so chaotic and has so many different discrete stories built within it? Right. How do you look at something? Yeah, you make choices, right? And, you know, I always say writing is mind control. You know, it's like you tell people what to think about, you know, from second,

millisecond to millisecond. You know, you kind of control their consciousness from the amount of time they're kind of training their eyes and the words that used to only exist in your head, you know, and now are out there in the world, right? So in a really kind of chaotic situation, you know, you basically find storylines, you know, beginning, middle, and end, conflict, you know, what is happening, here, you know, because any event, you know, there's a universe and great of sand. You know, you can write 10,000 words on any event, 10,000 pages on any event. But, you know, like, you know,

sometimes, you know, a storyteller has the camera up in 20,000 feet, sometimes. They have it in, you know, two millimeters, right? And you tack between those things. And you start with how people, other people have told the story. Because even, you know, like any, you know, like any, almost any and almost any trace of the past comes through it through some kind of storytelling mediation, even if it's only, you know, a reporter deciding to what to report, right?

And if you're looking at kind of, one of the things you'd start with the secondary sources, how has this story been told? I mean, most grandiose, you know, the 1960s was previously told as this inspiring story of social protests, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the, It was laid low by, you know, whatever, you know.

That's the version I was weaned on growing up. I call it the, I call it the minivan commercial version of the histories. You know, like, we protest in the streets. We burned our bras. And now we have four kids and, you know, work for the man, you know, the big chill, right? Right. Well, you know, in my mother Jones piece, I talk about how, you know, when I asked my parents to tell me there's a story about the 60s, you know, hoping, you know, they went to some protest or something. something. It was, well, when there was a riot in Milwaukee and we couldn't go downtown and we

had a pool party at our house for all our friends who also couldn't go downtown to work at their businesses that they own, you know? Yeah, and that's sure, you know, if that helps in your answer. But, you know, just, you know, secondary sources are really, you know, in the case of the Newark Riot, you know, that's basically a paraphrase of this guy Perombo's book. You know, that's why, you know, history is fundamentally a collective enterprise in which you kind of You show your sources and you acknowledge your sources, but you're basically kind of working with materials and stories that, you know, you inherit. How do you think this process is going to change or has been changed already by social media? Because now you have all these firsthand accounts captured on video, thousands of them.

Then how do you take that and write Trump land, you know? Yeah, yeah, that's really an interesting question. People are really saying interesting things about it. If you go to like an American Historical Association conference, there'll be really interesting people who are doing, you know, kind of data collection, you know, a guy who was writing the history of the,

of MySpace. And, you know, there's lots of, there's actually lots of data visualization stuff going on. Right. So like, you know, like, you know, those word clouds, right? So, you know, in a way, once you have big data, it doesn't necessarily make a story harder to tell. You can kind of see.

the shape of the story, right? A coral reef is made of, you know, like lots of different, you know, kind of individual pieces of coral, but you still see the reef, right? So it's not like necessarily that kind of reality kind of becomes more chaotic. And it's not necessarily the case that powerful people still don't have the power to shape narratives. I mean, you know, people talked about, oh, now that everyone's going to be like a publisher, you know, people are not going to be able to dominate, you know, powerful people are not going to be able to dominate how people interpret reality in the same way. Well, the Bush administration had no problem, you know, launching a classic top-down conspiracy theory about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction,

laundering it through, you know, the New York Times and meet the press, right? And in the same way, Donald Trump is creating a storyline that's structuring its own resistance. that's no less evident and clear from the fact that's, you know, made up of a billion different representations instead of a million, right? Right. But, um, it's, uh, you know, there's the internet archive, which is creating, you know, kind of cataloging everything. Um, you know, if I were, if I were like, if I, my dream would have been to write my books since 1968,

all based on 90% based on TV footage instead of newspapers because that's how people experience reality. Unfortunately, the news footage is all at the television news archive and Vanderbilt, you know. Right. And, you know, because that's how people, you know, experience it. But, you know, like I have a file, you know, now that Corona has passed us by, it's kind of like I'm not using it much.

I have every email I get from like a activist organization or a newspaper that talks about Corona goes my file. And I can imagine kind of like, you know, donating that file, you know, to an archive. You know, this is what a person like a liberal, politically active, literate, educated person, how they would have, you know, kind of had the corona crisis mediated for them, you know, in 2020. through the media they consume specifically. Right. I mean, my,

my attempt is always to kind of reproduce what kind of like a marginal, you know, kind of like relatively aware, if not, not obsessed person would kind of consume during the period in which I'm writing about these. Did you take a, did you take a trip to Vanderbilt and like sit and watch archived? I once actually made a overnight trip there. Actually, it might have been a trip where I like went in the morning

the day because I was just like so obsessed with seeing this one very famous news program, which was the one in which Ted Kennedy was interviewed by Roger Mud right before he announced his campaign, which kind of tanked his campaign because he did so poorly. And I'm really glad I did. What did, just out of curiosity, how did he tank it? What was the? Well, actually, most famously, people remember things in a certain way. It's kind of take us full circle in discussion as we kind of draw to close. People remember him taking his campaign by being asked why he was running for president

and not being able to come up with the answer that it wasn't full of stutters and ums, right? But I think it had as much to do in that same interview with the kind of imagined reconstruction of the Chapo-Quitic accident, create crisis, murder, whatever you want to call it. And we're talking about how narrative works, right? And how kind of we're always kind of have stories in our head

even as we tell other stories. watching that, it was very clear to me that the way that was visually represented, they had a camera in a car that was just like the one that Kennedy was driving looked like a horror movies, killer eye view from a slasher film, which were just becoming popular then. Right.

So, you know, like Carl Rove says, you know, TV is, you know, politics is TV with the sound off. You know, it's like, I think that was the far more kind of galvanizing that maybe this guy wasn't the guy you want with his finger on the button that you wouldn't quite be as cool in a crisis as you would want him to be.

Okay, tell me about Reagan land. It's coming out in August. It's coming out in August. It starts with the first paragraph of the book is about how it's just after the 1976 election and Ronald

Reagan is furiously insisting. that it's not his fault that Gerald Ford lost because he didn't do much campaigning for him. And people said now that he's practically responsible for Gerald Ford losing and he's really old, his political career is over. And so that's one storyline is basically him kind of putting together the political team

and coalition to become president against this backdrop of the Carter presidency. And then also these social movements of kind of the religious right taking shape, and then also a related movement of corporate America really beginning to organize in a serious way against the liberal state and liberal regulation forming that part of the coalition. And coming up with absolutely brilliant propaganda, doing things like convincing the majority of Americans that the way to save the economy is to lower taxes on capital gains. You're a historian. I know that you've written about how

that you wrote that New York Times piece about how like Trump, like you study conservatism, but Trump, you know, took you by surprise. What do you see happening? Do you see, how do you see things playing out? Right. I mean, I don't do the predictions, but I definitely can say what to look for, right? Yeah. And, you know, the biggest thing that separates kind of Trumpism from Reaganism or, you know,

basically conservatism since Goldwater is that there's always this sense that there's enormous political capital to be gained by mining the lizard brain fears of the public. This is basically well understood. That's basically the story of Nixon land. But there also always was this tempering understanding that this is a dangerous game and that we have to kind of put up a firewall and kind of, say one thing in public that we would say one thing in private that we would never say in public. And that's where, you know, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, is, right. And, uh, the thing that

changes Trumpism is, the Trumpism transformed is the dog whistle becomes the train whistle, Donald Trump has kind of taught Republicans that they don't actually have to erect that for a firewall that they can tear it down. And what seems to be possibly happened. happening, although it's early days, is that we're seeing a little bit of buyer's remorse from certain portions of the Republican coalition. You know, this is, this is, you know, I'm sure that something you've been doing a lot of thinking and reading about, you know, what's General Mattis up to, what's the Joint Chiefs of Staff up to, what's Luce Murkowski up to, you know, you know, is, is, what are the never Trumpers up to, you know, is. I have a cynical view of a lot

of some of that is I feel like what I'm seeing, especially from the military establishment, is the writing of cover your ass letters, you know, of the ability to now distance yourself from a president that's becoming unpopular because... Well, that's almost, yeah, right, that's almost Mikowski's tweet. She said, now say the things we've been thinking. Exactly. But those words might have consequences, right? They may. You're right. They may.

If people are covering their ass up and down the chain of command, you know. It's an indicator. Cover your ass if you're the one with a rifle in your hand and a protestant in front of you and you're in order to shoot, right? Especially in air of social media. So who knows? Who knows the dialectic grinds on, you know? You might not be interested in history, but history is interested in you. Yeah, it's going to happen to you regardless.

All right. I got one more. It's one more question if you can, if you've got a little bit of time. Okay, so something I've been struggling with. And this is such a weird semantic fight that I think we have. And we've discussed in the background of the show, like trying to put together an episode about this. Do you consider Trump a fascist? And what's the definition of a fascist? And is that even a worthwhile category to be. talking about. My wife just asked from behind the wall. That's a good question. So a member of my family left Germany in 1939 when they were 10 years old. So it's very interesting to hear their reflections on this kind of stuff. And he's always had his antenna up. So I think, yeah, once you get to the point of, you know, cordons of soldiers in front of the Lincoln Memorial in a, you know, kind of semiotic display of power. So such, you know, the aesthetics of

fascism are so important, right? We know that now, right? This, you know, basically I don't really think there's much to gain by splitting hairs and saying it's not fascistic, right? What's fascism when the principle

or the people, you know, kind of seeking the aspiring dictator is bad at it, right? who has no has no saver or skill for tactics and strategy right that's an interesting question and that's what I kind of want to keep open which is like you know we have these

categories of analysis that are useful but we always have to be kind of interrogating them so maybe you know 50 years from now we'll have a word for what's happening now and 50 years from now we'll say oh is that thing happening now, right? But I mean, I don't think there's any, there's anything to be gained from flinching from the fact that

there is no part of the fascist book, playbook that is not, as we speak, being effectuated. And so that, you know, because I'm a good liberal and kind of activist intellectual. This is the part of the interview where I say, and whether it succeeds really is up to us.

You know, it's up to our democratically elected officials who will respond to us. You know, what is going to happen? You know, Masha Gessen or Ann Applebaum has been talking about, you know, how the Senate now resembles Victor Orban's parliament. Yeah, the collaborators that. Yeah, not only collaborators, but figureheads, right? So, you know, and will it win? that's kind of the question that's up in the air.

I think it's important to remember with fascism. My kind of baseline is always that in the Umpartou Echo essay. And to remember that he says it's fuzzy, it changes. It doesn't always look the same way, but it has certain features that are important. In America, it's going to come bearing a cross and a flag. Yeah, exactly. And the thing of it is, you know, the fascist takeover of Europe, you know, led to all sorts of progressive things in the end, right?

Yeah. And we are inheritors of that progressive tradition. And the fact of the matter is crisis can cause transformations that make the world a better place. So let's keep open that possibility. You know, now that we see, you know, cities, you know, kind of shutting down police budgets and thinking about how they can, you know, sort of renegotiate police contracts. just to kind of take a small thing. And society begin to think of, wow, maybe next time there's a global pandemic,

we should think about some sort of social insurance that lets people not have to starve to death, right? So, you know, we'll see. The crossroads is a dangerous place to be, but it's also exciting. It's full of possibilities, right? Some of them wonderful. If we can make it happen. That's right. That can be the last word, I think.

Yeah, I think so. Normally we end the show on a really depressing note. So it's actually kind of nice to have some hopeful stuff at the end, I think. So let me do this. Rick Pearlstein, thank you so much for coming on the War College and walking us through this. Thank you, Matthew. It was really a pleasure to talk with you this hour. That's it this week, War College. Listeners, please stay safe out there.