Factually! with Adam Conover - Everything Boomers Told You about the 60s Was Wrong with Rick Perlstein

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

In the final episode before the American election, Adam explores the history of conservative reactionary politics in America with acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein, who explains where the false narrative of the hippies “winning” the 60s came from, the historical “hinge” moments which bring progress, and how progressive and reactionary politics have evolved through the decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And look, this is our last podcast before the election here in the U.S. And so I think that rather than try to do a topic that's directly about electoral politics or voting like the one we had last week, that my incredible interview with Daryl Atkinson, one of my personal heroes, civil rights attorney. Go listen to it if you haven't heard it already. Really incredible guy. I think I'd rather take a look back at the last half decade or so of American politics, a half century which has really been defined by the rise of the conservative movement in America. You know, I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I was mostly conscious for the 90s. The 80s watch the movie because it was like, look at this

incredible historical document. Another teacher made us do a whole unit where we dissected every line of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire. And then we would have to go home and ask our parents what the lines were about because it was a song about their goddamn childhoods. This stuff was rammed down our throats. Like, it felt like, for instance, Woodstock was just constantly happening. Like, a day didn't go by where there wasn't something on TV or some old person saying,

you know, Woodstock, that was incredible. Peace and love, baby. We changed the world. And here's the thing. The basic plot points of this distorted version of history led me to believe throughout my life that from the 60s today, the forces of liberalism triumphed. Like the story we were told by those baby boomers was that the hippies saw Elvis dancing.

Then they started doing LSD. They invented peace and love. They stopped Vietnam, ushered in an era of goodwill, as while meanwhile, Martin Luther King used nonviolence to march on Washington and won civil rights before his tragic assassination. I was taught to believe the positive forces of gentle, liberal change won the day. But I realize now as an adult reading the actual history of this Time, that is so totally fucking wrong. And I'm sorry, I don't swear often in the intro of this show. I like to keep it kid-friendly, but it really is fucking wrong because it papers over the actual chaos of that time. In reality, the 60s were an incredibly chaotic time

filled with assassinations, riots, violence, terror. I mean, take the events in 1970 at Kent State, just one of countless schools that erupted in protest in the late 60s and early 70s. To protest the Vietnam War, the students at Kent State burned down the ROTC building. They set fire to it. And in reaction, the government sent the National Guard who shot and killed four students. Now, you'd think that would be a national tragedy that would galvanize the country. But no, in the days that followed, many, many Americans said that they felt the protesters got what was coming to them. The truth is, this was an incredibly violent and divisive time in American history. And the reason that Martin Luther King and the utopian piece of Woodstock are remembered and messaged to us over and over again today is that they succeeded counter to all that

violence. They were the antidote to it. But we so rarely are given the real story of that period. But more importantly, the narrative of liberal triumphalism, the idea that the hippies won is wrong because, well, they lost. Look at the last 50 years of American history and tell me which political forces you feel have been dominant. What ideology has done the most

to shape our government and our society? It wasn't the hippies, and it wasn't the civil rights movement to the degree that we wanted to. Those movements did get some wins. They helped push civil rights legislation, landmark bills that transformed American society, and the hippies, you know,

the Grateful Dead became very famous. But the story that we often don't tell is of the incredibly large white conservative majority reaction against those forces. The folks sitting at home watching the protests on TV saying, you know what? I don't like the long hairs. I don't like Martin Luther King. I don't like Martin Luther King. I don't like civil rights. Those people were real. There were a lot of them. And you know what? They voted for Nixon. Not only that, Nixon ran specifically on a platform in order to appeal to them. And he

won massively. He won two terms and made huge changes to American society. Now, at the same time, Ronald Reagan was riding that wave straight to the governorship of California. And after Ford and Carter's forgettable terms, he took the White House and he ushered in an even more extreme conservative orthodoxy than Nixon. One, again, that came from those forces of reaction against the hippies and against civil rights. And that conservative regime has basically run the country ever since. I mean, yes, there have been breaks now and again for moderate to liberal Democrats. But even those Democrats had to appeal and bend to conservative ideology. I mean, Bill Clinton cut welfare proudly while declaring the era of big government is over. And the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature legislation,

was strongly influenced by conservative ideas for health care. I mean, he famously based it on Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts. And that's not even getting to his complete indifference to corporate mergers. He basically had an unannounced policy of allowing big corporations to get even bigger. So the point being, when you look at the last 50 to 60 years of American political culture, it's a story of the dominance of conservative ideas, of the reactionary movement in American society. So where did this false sense of triumph for the forces of liberalism I grew up with come from? Where did that story originate? Even though liberalism did not win politically, the hippies never took control of the government. It did win the culture industry. It's liberal

boomers who wrote the screenplays and history books and shoved their goddamn music down our throats every day of our lives. They became teachers like the teachers in my school who made me listen to goddamn Billy Joel. And they taught, at least they taught some of us their rosy version of what went down. They just left out the violence and the reaction and the political hegemony that resulted. And the danger of this is that if we forget the violent reaction that occurred the last time we called for change in American society, we'll continually be surprised the next time it happens. But if you look at the real history, the truth couldn't be clearer.

The conservative movement is the dominant force in American political society. So we have to ask, how did it win? And on the eve of this election, where does it go from here? Well, our guest today is one of the great chroniclers of the conservative movement in America. Rick Perlstein is a historian and he's the author of four major books that tell the story of America's rightward movement, a quadrilogy, if you will. His most recent book is called Reagan Land, and I have read his previous book, Nixon Land.

I'm a big fan. Please welcome Rick Perlstein. Rick, thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure. And an honor. It's an honor for me to talk to you. I reading nixon land right now which is uh one of your incredible uh works of doorstopper history of uh the 20th century conservative movement in america uh it's really uh incredible giving me a great you know view of the scope of uh american political history in a way i haven't often had access to uh but i want to start by asking you i've seen you in other interviews you do express some annoyance when you are asked the question is today just like 1968 all over again because honestly when you

read this book that is one of the emotions that you have oh my god things are just you know that that's like the surface level reaction a lot of folks have. What is your reaction when people ask you that question and why? It's it's it's it's irritation. Right. I mean, you can't step in the same river twice. You can't even really step in the same river once because the river kind of keeps on moving. But, you know, I mean, you could just as, you know, accurately say is today 1970. You know, it's today 1964? Is today 1858? You know, is today 1924? When you know, America passed an immigration law that, you know, banned immigration from everywhere, except for Western Europe. America is America, right? And one of the frustrations for me is,

here's a humble brag. So when I did an an interview with david pluff who was a member of obama's you know election team and white house staff he was he was gushing that you know the president made everyone read nixon land and it was such a revelation to us and etc etc etc and that was of course you know enormously flattering it's the thing that any author wants to hear. But on the other hand, I have a kind of irritation with that. They shouldn't have to read Dixon Land, right? I mean, a guy who, you know,

grows up, you know, in Indonesia, you know, following, you know, a genocide of, you know, communists and accused communists that were, you know, so many bodies piling up in the rivers that the rivers got clogged. Or a guy who, you know, communists and accused communists that were, you know, so many bodies piling up in the rivers that the rivers got clogged. Or a guy who, you know, began his political career in Chicago during what they call council wars, when the city of Chicago

elected for the first time an African American left wing reform mayor, and the response of the majority, the white majority in the city of city council was to shut down city government and not let that guy govern. You know, it shouldn't be a revelation that America is a place in which kind of reaction, you know, and racism and just terror of social change is is just part of the script, the DNA baked into the cake, whatever metaphor you want to use. So every time I hear that, you know, I hear people saying, wow, it's a revelation to me that America can be, you know, such a violent and hateful and rageful place. And it's, of course, again, on the one side flattering, but but on the other side a bit anguishing

that's not that that's not the story we already know about this country that you know we're blessed and cursed with so that's my first reaction right i mean that sets me up for my next question really beautifully because what really strikes me when i read the book and i did not grow up in this time you know i grew up in fact in the 80s and 90s when the story of the 60s was constantly being shoved down our throats totally like the mini van commercial yeah exactly like Woodstock was being celebrated for the entire time I was like in middle school it was was just like, I felt like it was happening constantly. Like the albums were being put out. Here's the thing, Adam, in our world, like, you know, I think you grew up in like kind of suburban, like Pennsylvania, Long Island.

Yeah. Long Island. I grew up in suburban Milwaukee. In our world, it was being celebrated. You know, if we had grown up in Mississippi or rural Texas, we would be hearing about Woodstock all the time as the moment when civilization took a decisive turn towards barbarism and that we needed to go to church to redeem. Right. So it was a very I think maybe you're getting at this. It was a very particular story about the 1960s that was kind of, you know, imputed to the era in the dominant media when we were growing up. That's what I'm talking about. I mean, like what you what your book covers is, you know, again, the story I grew up with

was, wow, the 60s, we had this new consciousness. People were into peace and love and they changed politics. Martin Luther King, civil rights movement. Like it's the heroic version of the story. And then Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972 against like the one guy who came out against the Vietnam War in a timely fashion in the Senate. Right. Right. There was what is left out of the story that I grew up with was that huge amounts of America pushed back against all of those things happening against Woodstock, against Martin Luther King. I mean, Martin Luther King was villainized in the in the public press. And the entire, you know, the degree to which there were riots in the streets, right, that there was

violence in American cities, protest based violence is something that was not part of the story that I learned in middle school in my unit where we did Billy Joel's. We didn't start the fire and learned all the proper nouns. And about half of those were about the 60s. Right. They didn't bring up, you know, he didn't bring up those issues. We didn't learn about those.

And so that's what really strikes me is that, man, what a flattening of history. What a direct version of history is told by the victors. Yeah. It's an inspiring story, right? It's a story of transcendence. You know, America was, you know, racist. And then we got Martin Luther King. You know, America was sexist. And then we, you know, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, you know, sexist and then we you know billy jean king beat bobby riggs you know right america was homophobic and then we got stonewall you know uh and uh you know i call it the minivan version uh of the minivan commercial version of the 60s like when we were growing up in the 80s you know it was like you know you burned your bra you marched in the civil rights movement and then you settled down

and had a family but you're still a rebel so buy our minivan. You know? And it was, you know, a story of, by and for, a certain segment of the baby boomers, you know, who were part of that. But you gotta remember, there was a very, there was a big obsession in the 60s with the idea

that this new quote-unquote generation, right, were transforming America. Yeah. You know, there's an obsession, you know, it's the baby boomer thing. You know, this obsession with young people as, you know, this kind of redeeming force, right? But it was also baby boomers. It was also young people who were, you know, throwing rocks at Martin Luther King on the south side of Chicago in 1966.

You know, it was also young people who were, you know, voting for George Wallace. You know, Richard Nixon got, you know, a majority of the new voters under 21. That's kind of an interesting part of the story. One of the interesting things that happened in the 60s was that the voting age used to be 21. And then I think it was in 1971 that the constitutional amendment passed that, you know, lowered the voting age to 18. Because if, you know, kids could be that, you know, lowered the voting age to 18. Because if, you know, kids could be drafted, you know, sent to Vietnam, they should be able to vote. Yeah. And, you know, this was seen as this is one of the reasons that the Democrats, you know, nominated a guy like George McGovern, this idea that this new infusion of young voters,

you know, we're turning to the left. But as a matter of fact, you know, the majority of these new voters, first of all, didn't vote. And second of fact, you know, the majority of these new voters, first of all, didn't vote. And second of all, you know, voted along with everyone else for Richard Nixon, you know, who, you know, lied about ending the Vietnam War. Yeah, something that always strikes me when I look back at like photos from that period that again is left out of our story is, you know, when you see photos of white crowds, you know, protesting desegregation, protesting, you know, you see photos of white crowds you know protesting desegregation protesting you know like you said throwing rocks at martin luther king you see young people you see like 18 year olds in nice button-down shirts you know shouting cuts yeah exactly and i'm like hold on a second

those people are alive today like they're what in their they're in their 60s now they're like in prime voting age and so the story that you tell that there was a reaction a political reaction often a violent reaction to the uh you know advanced quote advances of the 60s that we don't tell the story of um is like similarly left like that those people are still around today. That they're still part of our political culture. You know, waiting for the next Q drop, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Waiting for John F. Kennedy Jr. to come back and save the world, which is like the ultimate baby boomer fantasy. You know, Kennedy never died. You know, he's going to save us once again. So why do you think that story is left out of our political history? So, well, yeah, I think there's two big reasons. One is that that that that's how Americans tell that have always told their own story, you know, as a story of progress

and redemption and just kind of flattened out the scary parts. Right? It's a domesticating way that our political culture, you know, deals with trauma, deals with violence, deals with our legacies, right? But the other fact is, you know, that, you know, yeah, there was this kind of baby boomer generation that, you know, took over command of, you know, the institutions of media, the storytelling media, whether it was, you know, journalism, fiction, you know, filmmaking. And they were extremely, the portion of the baby boom that, you know, was part of this protest generation was extremely, extremely self-conscious, right? That's what gives, you you know the millennials and the generation you know z and generation x folks the willies that these guys are you know supposedly so self-important

you know you do you remember the movie the big chill are you too young for that uh you know i know the name of it i i'm aware that this is a movie so there was a movie that came out it was like you know just exactly what you're talking about the big chill it came out i'm actually like checking it on my phone yeah it came out in 1983 so i was 14 right and it was the story of these people who took part in the civil rights movement they were in college together and then they get back they they get together for um a funeral and um it was all about how they were all yuppies now and they they kind of given up on their ideals and their lives were totally boring there was a sitcom called 30 something that told the exact same story right but you know the movie the big chill you know was an interesting story about this

period but it's only you know one story of. You know, another story could be told in the way that, you know, like Mrs. America on Hulu told it, you know, in which, you know, people watched in a place like, you know, a visitation from Beals Above himself, you know, that kind of story about what that meant to people who thought the world was all about, you know, kind of going to church on Sunday and maybe Wednesday night too, you know, and having a nice brood and working hard and playing by the rules and seeing kind of straying from that path as, you know, an existential threat to not only the well-being of you, yourself, and your family, but of civilization itself and possibly, you know, your ability to come back, you know, go to heaven and bring, you know, Jesus Christ back to the earth in glory. That is, in fact, the people who ended up winning the 60s, In fact, the people who ended up winning the 60s, right?

Ronald Reagan won in 1980. And part of the reason why liberals did such a poor job of kind of absorbing this and responding to this, other than kind of, you know, making this wacky kind of reaction in the other direction and becoming kind of neoliberals and, you know, starting, you know, the great incarceration, you know, and turning their back on welfare and things like that was because it was it was just not part of the understanding that this could happen. You know, every time a conservative won, it was like it was like people liberals were dumbstruck. I mean, when Ronald Reagan won the nomination for governor of California in 1966, and by the way, Ronald Reagan was seen as such a weak and poor candidate for governor that the guy who was the incumbent governor, Pat Brown, actually worked to get Ronald Reagan the nomination and then got his ass kicked by Ronald Reagan. This sounds familiar.

This is basically what happened in 2016. Yeah, and in 1980. You know, it happens again and again and again. But when Ronald Reagan won the nomination in 1966, you know, Esquire magazine, which was like, you know, the cool magazine that young men went to for, you know, their cues about what they were supposed to think. They said, wow, the Republicans in California aren't that desperate. They didn't make Lassie their Republican nominee.

Lassie, the TV dog. And then, by the way, I have in my new book, Reaganland, which covers the years from 1976 to 1980, I have a giant chart from like a 20-page spread in Esquire about how the coolest thing going is neoconservatism. And if you really want to be cool, you have to be a neoconservative. So these guys all, you know, a lot of them did become neoconservatives. And part of the reason liberals did a bad job of kind of absorbing this and responding to it in a kind of cool and collected way instead of a panic way was that it was just seen as not possible again and again. And that's true today. I mean, that's what happened in 2016 is

the exact same pattern. And so, look, as we record this, we stand on the precipice of another presidential election. Your history is right. Your books are not just, you know, histories of America. They're they're history specifically of the conservative movement. And the way that you just put it a few minutes ago really, really strikes me that, you know, I grew up with a world in which the liberals of the time, like the hippies who turned into screenwriters and newspaper reporters and all those people declared victory over and over again in the press. Wow. We changed the culture when what your books really demonstrate is the conservative, the conservatives won the conservative movement, won the forces of reaction who said, we hate the long hairs and we hate the blacks. They won all the elections. Nixon won. Then we had the English department.

the elections. Nixon won. Then we had the English department. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Carter. We had Carter, who is, you know, not a well-remembered effectual president. And then the Reagan revolution, which we're still living with today, whereas, yeah, it's it often seems as though liberals win the social victories. But that's about it. My question is like, yeah, how what when you look back at standing where we stand today, you look back at the conservative movement dating, you know, that you've covered. What is it that everybody misses about it? Like, you know, if you were to summarize it in a sentence and paragraph, like what is the soul of it that no one sees? What is it? I think I could, you know, talk about this for hours and write thousands of pages and have.

You have. Right. But I think the biggest bedrock part of the thing that liberals miss, because liberals believe in progress, and that's a great thing. And I think in the grand sweep of history, social progress is real. You know, like life used to be kind of nasty, brutish, and short. And, you know, we didn't have laws. People would bash each other over the head with rocks, you know. And, you know, now we live, you know, lifespan of 80 when it used to be 50 or whatever. Yes, there is progress. But conservatism, you know, authoritarianism, the fetishization of, you know, hierarchy and order is just part

of what human beings do, right right it's just they're always going to be right-wing people there's always going to be left-wing people and sometimes one side will lose and sometimes the other side will lose but when i you know so you're reading nixon land right yes spoiler alert the last line of the book i don't want to know what happens i'm not going to tell you what happens okay to richard nixon i'm going to tell you. The last line of the book. I don't want to know what happens. I'm not going to tell you what happens to Richard Nixon. I'm going to tell you that the last line of the book is Richard Nixon helped kind of midwife this order of battle in politics that we know now and in which Americans, you know, still want to kind of destroy each other. want to kind of destroy each other. And I actually use the phrase, kill each other over issues of politics. He created the polarization in a way that we have. And so the last line is, we're living in Nixon land still. And this came out in May of 2008. And I was blessed with good reviews, right? But a lot of the reviewers said wow that ending is completely over the top what the hell is he talking about and then when barack obama won his election in november of

2008 i was like deluged literally deluged with people telling me well i guess nixon land is over after all and one of the people who wrote a review um big democratic official who's involved in the clinton, who wrote a review saying, well, it's crazy for Pearlstein to say Nixon land is with us still. Literally, a couple of years ago, apologized to me. kind of entailment of American politics and American culture, that we are a country where, you know, half the nation, you know, severed itself from the other half, you know, for the right to have slaves. And that led to a civil war where a million people nearly, that's what historians are estimating now, killed each other, right? And that that same dynamic, you know, Right. And that that same dynamic, you know, played out and that that that the only way the seven 1876 election was able to be settled was that they let the Republican be president if he agreed to let the whites, the white South continue white supremacy. Right. This is a story we never fucking tell. Yes, the 1876 election, man, that that might be the one that people are talking about, you know, very soon. Inshallah, they won't have to.

Oh, my gosh. But, you know, so so the idea the idea that people miss is that this is just part of not only who we are as Americans, but who we are as human beings. And it doesn't mean, oh, my God, throw our hands up in the air. You know, the Neanderthals are going to be taking over. It's like this is the struggle, right? Yeah. This is how one can organize. If you believe in, you know, the possibility of government to create safety and security and decency for most people. You know, if you believe, uh, that Americans can be more tolerant rather than less, you know,

if you believe that human beings can kind of shape their own destiny and are not, you know, uh, just subject to the whims of heaven, you know, um, then that's your fight.

Right. And that's what these books are trying to ultimately trying to teach us, that the struggle between kind of progress and reaction never ends. Yeah. Right. And that, you know, you are a character. You are as a citizen. You are a actor in this story. Holy shit. I mean, that's first of all, I'm a citizen. Right. Yeah. And I think you are, too. That's what you that's what you're, I'm a citizen, right? Yeah. And I think you are too.

That's what you're, that's what you're about. That's what you do. It is. It is. And the way you put that sort of dramatizes for me, like, you know, it's fun reading your books, right? Like that's lots of, you know, like jokes and sex and violence and. Oh yeah. Yeah.

But also, you know, the fundamental feeling of reading history in my mind like my favorite history books are the ones that make you go holy shit that happened like i'm reading i'm reading i'm going oh my god lbj has this massive majority then he suddenly becomes so unpopular he decides not to run for re-election within three years holy shit then the main guy running to fill his seat instead is murdered robert kennedy is murdered um like what like and i'm gripped like i'm gripping the book like oh my god what happens next i know this history but i don't really the book is making me feel it right it's making me feel oh my god the the the collision of coincidence and massive forces coming together and events and events and then I simultaneously I'm reading the newspaper and it's like Ruth Bader Ginsburg

dies a month before the election, which is which is like an equally not every year is like 1968. But, you know, anything can happen at any time. But I'm not excited when I read the newspaper today. Right. All right. We got through it. I think there's a there's a therapeutic aspect to it, right?

Right. It's like, here it was in 1968. It's 52 years later. And this too shall pass, right? Yeah. People do express a feeling of comfort for my books, you know? And, you know, that's okay. You know, that's okay.

I hope it's also a spur to, you know, action, right? I mean, it's like, you know, like afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. You know, we got to get through the day, you know, laugh to keep from crying. But, you know, we'll probably get through this. You know, we got through the Civil War. You know, we, you know, got through the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, you know. But not always for the better, man, you know, like. The Black Death. Yeah, no. Well, the Black Death killed, you know, a third of people in Europe, right? And, you know, when we like a lot of times, I don't know, I read history. I learn about things that went poorly and then changed history in ways that lasted decades,

right? That's right. That went poorly and then changed history in ways that lasted decades. Right. That's right. The end, you know, the the end of reconstruction and the disenfranchisement of black Americans for another century. Right. Or at the same time, we have like the Depression, which which was, you know, the midwife of America entering the 20th century and having unemployment insurance and a minimum wage and social security. Right. So, you know, often these kind of cataclysms are, you know, what it takes to kind of bring a nation to its senses, you know. And, you know, I think that we're in one of those hinge movements in history. You know, it's like the the the the the, the socialists in Weimar, Germany, there's big slogan was socialism or barbarism. You know, it's like, and, you know, they lost

that one, you know, but we're really kind of at a hinge where like people see the things in our society that are just, you know, unsustainable, you know, they've been kind of shoved into our face by this, you know, epidemic, you know, by that president, you know, by Citizens United, you know, by the way the Supreme Court works. You know, we're recording this during the hearings for the new Supreme Court justice. And, you know, Sheldon Whitehouse, did you watch that? Have you watched hearings? No, I've not watched any of the clips. So there's a there's a there's a there's a senator named Sheldon Whitehouse. Did you watch that? Have you been able to watch hearings? No, I've not watched any of the clips. So there's a senator named Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, I believe.

And he did a half an hour presentation. He didn't ask her a single question. He basically did like a PowerPoint presentation about how the reactionary plutocrats created a conspiracy to completely take over the judicial system. And it was freaking devastating. Yeah. I mean, if you watch this thing, I think that, you know, like, I can imagine Amy Coney Barrett, you know, just kind of, like, averting her eyes because it was, like, explaining, you know, it was amazing.

It was like, you know, Jane Mayer, you know, the one who wrote Dark Money for The New Yorker. It was like reading one of her books or reading one of his articles. And, you know, the only reason we're able to kind of like bring that into consciousness, this thing that's been happening literally for 40 years since the Reagan administration turned Supreme Court appointments into this ideological crusade

is because we've hit rock bottom. It's like the alcoholic. We've hit rock bottom. And we're like, something's got to change. Yeah. OK, I have to ask you. I've got a really burning question to ask you about exactly what you just said in the conservative movement. But we got to take a really quick break. So we're going to have to save it until after I read a couple of ads for, I don't know, like meal delivery kits or whatever. So we'll be right back with more Rick Perlstein. Please stick around. Okay, Rick.

So right before the break, you talked about the success that the conservative movement and plutocrats have had of completely bending. Don't forget the theocrats. And the theocrats, absolutely, to their will. And they've done it successfully, right? Like, one of the things that really strikes me is that, you know, liberals right now are constantly saying, ah, Mitch McConnell, he's a hypocrite. He's being hypocritical. And like, he's not even being hypocritical. He's just saying I can do it. Yeah.

It's like like all of their even when you listen to their descriptions of, hey, here's why. Here's the precedent that allows us to put Amy Coney Barrett. But how dare they define the precedent? Yeah. All he's saying is, well, currently we hold the Senate. And in in 2016, the Democrats did not hold the Senate. So they didn't have the power to do it. Like it's it comes back to power. How dare they is not a political strategy.

Yeah, it feels good on Twitter, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything. And when I look at the conservative movement, I see a movement that has successfully wielded power far more power. Yeah. That's what's so fascinating about that's what's so fascinating about this Lincoln project. You know, these folks who make these absolutely devastating anti-Trump commercials and, by the way, make way too much money doing it. They've kind of turned this into a grift, kind of like monopolizing the attention of liberals who are kind of hungry for someone to bring it to the to the enemy. Right. The fact is that these guys are all former Republicans and they they cut their teeth in a movement that takes power seriously. And that's what I try and demonstrate in my books about how they took power seriously and thought in terms of not just like

the next election, but the next decade, right? And, you know, the kind of structures of how liberals see the world and conservatives see the world really are different. You know, when people, you know, like kind of say these sentimentals, oh, we all want the same things. We all deep down, we all agree. Well, that's, you know, not really true. Yeah. You know, if you believe that, you know, the Bible ordains, you know, what the family should look like, you believe something different from me. So liberals and conservatives see things very differently. That's a banality, right? But I mean, even the same words, like the word principle, right? Where are the principled conservatives, you know? For a liberal, principle means fairness. It means transparent procedures.

It means following the rules. Yeah, equity. Equity and just kind of, you know, yeah, consistency. So I tell, you know, kind of a little parable that, you know, a principled liberal senator, you know, if he is like rushing to the Capitol to do a to pass a deciding vote for a crucial issue and there's a little old lady who needs help across the street, he's going to be a principled liberal and help her across the street. You know, a principled conservative, if there's a vote, you know, to put someone in the Supreme Court for the next 50 years, who can reverse all the progress that we've made since the, you know, the Supreme Court of the 1930s, which said like, you know, it's okay to have a minimum wage. It's okay to have social security. If he's a principled conservative,

he's going to knock her aside and rush to cast that vote. Because principled means, you know, being serious about achieving your ends. It doesn't matter the means you use to do it, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, if you just kind of go, wow, maybe we can shove it in Lindsey Graham's face that, you know, he says one thing yesterday and a different thing today. That actually might be a good political strategy. And one of the things we're going to be discovering soon is whether he's still a senator. Yeah.

Which is kind of astonishing, too. But it's not a good legislative strategy. Yeah, it's not going to affect his behavior. That's right. each other according to how effectively they, you know, kind of look the other way when it comes to being called out on things like their hypocrisy. I just saw a really fascinating documentary because I'm writing an article about C. Everett Koop and public health during AIDS compared to public health during COVID-19. And I saw a really interesting documentary called Outrage.

And it came out maybe like four or five years ago. And it's about all the conservative Republicans who passed all these anti-gay, anti-LGBT laws while they were in the closet. And it actually outs a bunch of them. And it's really fascinating. things that was so fascinating was one of the formerly in the closet republicans who liberated himself by coming out points out that the republicans who are in the closet look at the republicans who come out of the closet as as you know pathetic weaklings there's this kind of nichey and kind of if you're really tough you're gonna like you know be able to kind of live a lie with greater skill greater aplomb and that again makes you a more principled conservative the one who's really

willing to do something the one who's willing to deny you know their very core of their their being in order to you know advance the ideological cause and a lot of these guys you know, advance the ideological cause. And a lot of these guys, you know, they are like Leninists. You know, they see the world in terms of trying to, you know, transform the world according to cosmic stakes. Why would Amy Coney Barrett, you know, surrender herself to the humiliation of being seen in history as the person who upended every, you know, tradition and norm, you know, just to, well, it answers itself. Be the person who gets to be on the Supreme Court and completely reverse, you know, liberalism, you know, forever.

Yeah. Why would she want that? Well, why did, you know, Fidel Castro, you know, survive on grubs and leaves in the Sierra Maestra mountains while waiting for his chance to take over Cuba. You know, again, it's power, right? Yeah, it's it's domination. Yeah. You see, it's almost that you get the sense that Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, they wouldn't if they lose this election, they'd be fine with it if they got her on the court to us or it would be suboptimal.

But they're like, hey, we've done our we've done what we set out to do. Yeah, they did. They go down in history as the people on our swords. It would be suboptimal, but they're like, hey, we've done what we set out to do. Yeah, they go down in history as the people who – Fell on our swords. Yeah, that makes them more heroic. It's like we took these risks. We were willing to kind of put ourselves out there in a way that might get rejected by the electorate. But it's because of us that the government is not going to guarantee people's health care. But it's because of us that, you know, the government is not going to guarantee people's health care. So they have to, you know, they have to work for us harder.

And they can't, you know, it's like it's a way it's a vision of the world in which, you know, there are rulers and ruled. And if people depend on their jobs for health care, you know, they will know their place. Right. I mean, you literally had Lindsey Graham in his debate with his African-American opponent saying he was asked by, you know, can you tell your African-American constituents that they're going to be safe in South Carolina? And did you hear this clip? He said something like, and I'm not making this up. African-Americans are perfectly safe in South Carolina as long as they're not liberal. You know, the world gets divided into, you know, it's like the people who are us and the people who are them. And, you know, he's willing to extend the grace of including African-Americans within

the fold of the us as long as he they agree to know their place. And the fundamental thing that liberals seem to not do is that like like no no Democrat would run and say, oh, Republicans are going to have a bad time in when I when I'm governor. Like, yes, like Brett Kavanaugh, you know, winning, winning, you know, like saying in his saying in his hearing to be Supreme Court justice. Well, I'll I'll I'm going to get you, you know, once I'm on the Supreme Court. Yeah. No. When you know, when when when when when the the Democrats took over the Senate. And this is not, you know, terrible. You can still win elections, you know, because luckily we have most of the people because our politics are in the interest of most of the people. You know, it's like this is you know, this is a little bittersweet that we're such nice

people. You know, I wouldn't want it, you know, to be necessarily totally not the case. But when the Democrats took over the Senate when Obama was president and Patrick Leahy become the head of the Judiciary Committee, he actually extended the process called the blue, the blue slip process, which allowed a member of the opposite party who was from the state of the nominee to veto a nomination that Obama might make. So he literally extended the privilege to the Republicans to veto any nominee that they didn't like. Right. Again, he extended the ambit of fairness. When Republicans took over the Senate, they stole a Supreme Court seat.

Yeah, that's a big difference. And what I really want to get your view on is like the arc of the conservative movement overall. Right. Like when I've seen this rendition of of the movement as looking at it sort of in parallel with FDR's movement in a way that it, you know, this movement that, you know, got started with Goldwater, uh,

came to power with Nixon, became turned into an ideology with Reagan and the Reagan revolution, um, was so powerful that we're still living in its shadow and that subsequent even, yeah, subsequent liberal presidents. This is what really struck me,

have had to sort of bend to it in the same way that, you know, subsequent conservatives to FDR's regime. Yes. Liberals ran against Herbert Hoover for another like 50, 60, 70 years. Yeah. And Clinton is a Reaganite Democrat. You know, he's a conservative Democrat. And even Obama has his compromises with that. You know, he's a conservative Democrat and even Obama has his compromises with that. And so in the view that I've read, we are now reaching the end, the dying gasps of that movement that Trump. I've heard people say that Trump is a despite, you know, the way it looks, a weak president and that we're due for another realignment. And, you know, when you look at the demographics that the sort of white reactionaries are now in the minority, whereas they were in the majority in the in the 60s, and that, you know, they're going to install the judiciary as their sort of last hold on power,

but that things are going to shift. And I'm sure as a historian, you're annoyed by being asked to be a prognosticator. But I'm curious what your feeling is about that view. No, I mean, I'm comfortable with that, you know, to talk about that. First of all, I have to preface everything I say with what I said in the first place, which is that being conservative is something conservative people do. It's not going to go away. It's not going to go away in America. So let's just talk about this chapter of, you know, the reactionary movement in America. You know, there was a chapter of reaction in America that kind of rose in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s. And then there was a Civil War and a different chapter opened, right? So let's talk about that. So yes, it does really

seem that these cats are kind of running on fumes. You know, they're squeezing blood from a stone. And I mean, all you need to do is look at the polls that say that, you know, look at the polls that say that, you know, Donald Trump has, you know, 40% support. But unfortunately, we don't really live as I'm sure you talk about a lot in your show. And you got a great thing about the Senate, right? We don't live in a democracy. You know, you gave a great rap about how, you know, every citizen of Wyoming has three times more power in the electoral college than every citizen of California. So it's not just, as we know, a question of getting a majority of the votes. And we also know that Donald Trump isn't running in an election.

He's running to maintain power so he doesn't have to go into exile in Saudi Arabia or Russia. And this is the guy who has the keys to the nuclear suitcase, right? So it's not as simple as who gets the most votes. But at the same time, the reason they have to take such extraordinary methods and that they have to cheat is that they just don't have the numbers anymore. But reactionary movements

have never really had the numbers. They've always had to use things like force and subterfuge and con jobs of, you know, saying, you know, that, you know, the guy next door who wants to get married to his boyfriend is going to, you know, steal, you know, your keys to heaven or whatever, right? So it's not as simple as, you know, who has the most votes or even who has the most electoral votes. But they do seem to be, you know, entering the end of the road. I don't think that Donald Trump is a weak president simply because he's – what he's done is he's kind of created a structural shift in the Republican Party such that – or

a party that at least had to pretend that it honored, you know, certain sorts of liberal democratic values no longer has to pretend. Donald Trump has kind of given them permission to actually say that Mexicans are, you know, coming here to rape our women, you know, not that we honor our, you know, as George H.W. Bush, the little brown ones, his Mexican-American grandchildren, right? You know, it's like, you know, George W. Bush had to say Islam is a religion of peace, right? Because he understood that to kind of fully weaponize the darkest impulses of the mass, you know, leads to violence.

You know, Donald Trump doesn't care about that. Well, it has led to violence. Yeah. So, I mean, it's the cornered rat situation. We're in a dangerous situation where, you know, the forces of darkness are desperate and willing to try anything. generation of people who have been at, you know, the shit end of the stick when it comes to neoliberalism, and, you know, majority, majority domination, that we have this amazing generation of politicians. And, you know, Joe Biden, for all his problems has had the wisdom to say, Look, I'm a transitional figure, you know, I'm the bridge this next generation.

So yeah, I'm not going to prognosticate. But, you know, I do think that there's – I don't think we're at this sort of, you know, sad dead end of history. You know, all empires end, you know. But, you know, I think that – and, of course, we're facing, you know, structural calamities of the sort our parents and grandparents even during World War II never had to face because we're talking about the extinction of life on Earth here. But I think progress is possible and it really lays in our hands. But when you look at – OK. First of all, I agree. I don't want to say but to your optimistic vision at the end too quickly.

But other folks I've talked to on this show, for instance, we've talked to the political scientist David Hopkins, talked about how the parties are very differently constituted. One of the strengths of the conservative movement seems to be that it's unanimity. It's homogeneity. They're authoritarians. Yeah, well, they agree, right? One of the strengths of the conservative movement seems to be that it's unanimity. It's homogeneity. They're authoritarians. Yeah. Well, they agree, right? They, they, and they, they care a lot about a small number of issues that they really give a shit about. They will abandon any principle in order to accomplish them. I think they would readily admit. And they're you know, despite the fact that they're the minority, they're also more united on what they believe in, whereas the Democratic Party is a coalition of disparate groups that do not agree. And so I assume that so so let's accept the premise that I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat. There you go. Will Rogers said that.

So let's let's and that was a long time ago. It still seems to be true today. Let's accept your premise that, you know, this is the last gasp and that we've got a new crop of, you know, political figures who are rising up. I assume you mean like the AOCs of the world.

And I said, I'm talking about, I think Sierra is a lot of ways. It's like a Reagan like figure. Sure. To make what seemed to be extreme seem rational. Yeah. And she's,

she's extraordinarily popular and you can sort of see that you could take heart in that way. Right. But at the same time, I look at the party and I say, well, hold on a second. She's at war with her own party the entire time.

She is, you know, Nancy Pelosi is trying to sneak up behind her and Garrett her. Little bit, little bit. Little bit. Yeah. Look, Adam, you know, don't you think in diversity is our strength? That's a sentimental.

Yeah, that's a sentimental bromide. But I'm kind of serious, right? It's like, you know, when you have organizations that are authoritarian and fall in line behind the leader, they're strong but brittle. Right. I mean, you can deal with the physics here. You know, they shatter very easily, right? There's no pliance, right? There's no give, right?

But the fact that, you know, the Democratic Party, you know, is a coalition made up of lots of different elements. I mean, I think structurally, there's a lot of stability there that doesn't exist in a brittle kind of authoritarian formation. And we've seen this, you know, kind of again and again in history. It's like, I don't want to completely go full Godwin's law on you. But the fact that like, you know, the Nazis were completely committed to, you know, death camps and genocide. If they weren't, they probably would have won the war, right? And, you know, the Republicans are, you know, committed to all kinds of crazy stuff that,

you know, that, you know, look,, they are so brittle that they completely pissed away the possibility of having any Hispanic American support forever. Forever. Yeah. And that was their authoritarian brittleness, right? And they could bring Hispanic Americans in. I have many friends who are from that community and say, there's a shitload of very conservative people. Spanish-speaking. know, yeah. Yeah.

And they've shoved them out of the party. But at the same time. But there's going to be generation of generation of immigrants who come and they're going to join the Democratic Party and revivify it and add new issues. And there's going to be new activist communities like, you know, the trans community. Who are they going to choose? Right. They didn't even exist as a political force 10 years ago. Right. Yeah. But but at the same time, the, you know, the conservative movement's ability to enforce its will through people say, OK, they got to get in there. They got to do a new Voting Rights Act.

They got to make D.C. and Puerto Rico states and they need to expand the Supreme Court. Basically, they need to move immediately to make structural changes to push back against the structural changes that the Republicans have made to entrench power. That's right. And then I look at Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and I say, doesn't seem like the kind of thing they're not going to they're going to do. Right. Doesn't seem like Joe's going to want to pack the Supreme Court, maybe the statehood thing, but it seems like a tough road to hoe. And that seems to be to be because of that consensus building. Well, no, we can't do anything that'll make anybody too mad. Right. Right. They seem susceptible to the argument. This is definitely the generation that's in charge of the democrats democratic party's way of thinking about the world but guess what

they are literally in their 80s and you know look look i'm going to go back to history right i'm not going to prognosticate i'm going to say that when america was at its like highest level of plutocracy when like industries literally own senators. You know, in 1916, that's when the nation, partially because of World War I, history is full of ironies, passed for the first time an income tax. Right. That let me tell you something that's going to completely like, you know, like no one knows about this because I don't know why. People don't want to understand that the only reason progress has moved forward is when the forces of liberalism and decency have actually played that kind of constitutional hardball. But this is like in 1961 when like the civil rights, you know, the racist South was like, you know, just kind of deeply in control of how Washington worked. John F. Kennedy

was able to increase the size of, this is like completely, sounds completely in the weeds, of the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives. But that was like the stopper point of all progressive legislation. So he did kind of like the court packing thing with the House of Representatives. He increased it from 8 to 11. It was run by all these Southern reactionaries who, you know, blocked, you know, Social Security increases,

blocked civil rights, you know, blocked Social Security, blocked Medicare. And it was only because he did that one procedural thing, kind of, you know, adding liberals to this one committee

that every bill had to go through that Lyndon Johnson was able to pass civil rights, was able to pass Medicare, was able to passon Johnson was able to pass civil rights, was able to pass Medicare, was able to pass Medicaid, was able to pass the Clean Air Act, right? So, you know, yes, you know, there are all these minoritarian choke points, and you can recite them, the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court. But, you know, sometimes when things get really dark, you know, you can make these kind of structural changes that can kind of open up the government to the actual forces of the majority, right?

So, you know, we're talking about DC statehood, you know, we're talking about Puerto Rican statehood, we're talking about increasing the size of the Supreme Court to unpack it, right? Not to pack it, but to unpack it, unpack the federal judiciary. You know, Georgia increased the size of its Supreme Court in order to, you know, in 2016, in order to block, you know, the progress of progressive legislation. This stuff has always happened, right? and push for the possibility, because we're citizens, right, that the next generation of Democrats will do the right thing because, you know, this previous generation's, you know, kind of quiescence in the face of Republican dominance. This generation is still spooked by Reagan. Reagan completely bit them on the ass. A lot of the people who became the most important forces in moving the Democratic Party to the right were people who were completely humiliated

by the 1980 election. Bill Clinton lost his governor's race. Right. And he's like in Arkansas. And he's like, wow, how can I get those kind of white working class voters? And that's when he became Bill Clinton. And you still hear that today. I mean, you know, I was watching Kamala Harris talking to Mike Pence and, you know, on climate change, you see them play defense. You know, you see, well, you're going to ban fracking. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, on climate change, you see them play defense. You know, you see, well, you're going to ban fracking. No, no, no, no, no, we're not. No, we're not. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, than making the stronger argument of like, hey, my state is currently on fire. That costs more money than taking climate action.

And it, in fact, would be cheaper to take this action, which is popular. And one by one, that generation of Democrats is being knocked off by a new generation. Yeah. Well, I have to ask this. You are speaking. You used we more than once to talk about liberals and Democrats. I'm a liberal. But your work of history is enjoyed by conservative historians, is my understanding. You're not seen as, maybe I'm wrong, but this is my understanding of how your work has been received. You're not seen as a partisan shill, but as having done good, you know, having done

justice to the history of the conservative movement. Is that the case? And why do you think it is? Less so than it was once. I mean, I should say that I don't care who likes my stuff. I just write it the way I want to write it. You know, people like it. Great. If they don't like it, devil take the high most. I've been blessed to have like a very wide readership and a passionate readership.

So I doing it my way has worked out just fine. I think that mostly the response of the – I have a bunch of Republicans and conservatives who I know and help me with the book, who are involved in the events of the book, and they've been quite positive about it, including some former Reagan officials. But mostly it's been ignored. know uh uh but mostly it's been ignored uh okay you know it's like why would i care about their opinion uh when you know the republican party run by the conservatives have completely surrendered themselves to you know a lunatic authoritarian right it's like they've almost kind of surrendered their right to be taken seriously right it's like i i love this show on TV. It's a French show called A French Village, A Ville Francaise. And it's about, it's about, you know, like, what happened when the Nazis took

over this village in France during World War II. And, you know, it's like, they talk a lot about, you know, after the war, these guys were collaborators, right? It's like, what we're talking about is collaborators with a dictator, you know, do I care if a collaborator with a dictator likes my work or not? No. Fair enough. Well, I want to I want to ask this. My producer, Sam, is a big fan of your Facebook page. First of all, he wanted me to say. And on a recent thread there, he said someone made a criticism of your work that when you're talking about conservatism, you don't engage with the ideas of conservatism as much as you might. And you replied, I believe, something effective that you think the ideas are are not that related to the politics itself. I mean, I think that's true about ideas in general and politics.

I mean, it's like intellectuals like to talk about ideas because that's their that's their bag. You know, yeah, that's our thing. But I think that in general, you know, politicians don't decide what they're going to do because they read some book you know they respond to a variety of incentives you know economic political moral and sometimes intellectual but most often kind of the ideas are often kind of um codifications ex post facto after the stuff happens to explain, you know, why they did what they did, not why they should do what they do. So, I mean, that wasn't really it was it wasn't really specifically about conservatives. But I mean, my experience of, you know, kind of looking in the archives and figuring out how conservatives think about how they kind of talk to each other very early.

You know, I read lots of letters from businessmen in the 50s who were the first people to back Barry Goldwater. And I didn't see them say, well, as Friedrich Hayek says in the Constitution of Liberty, they managed to figure out that they wanted small government and wanted, you know, didn't want, you know, didn't want liberals to win,

you know, without reading books about it, right? It came from their own experience. So that's basically my, intellectual history is interesting. It's useful sometimes. But, you know, I think the role of ideas in history, you know, it's just I think it's overplayed by people who are interested in ideas. Yeah. It's also every two bit political commentator says, well, we don't we're not interested in people. We're interested in ideas. We talk about ideas on this show.

And at the end of the day, they're still taught. Yeah, it's like a cliche. But at the end of the day, they're taught yeah it's like a cliche but at the end of the day they're not really what they're doing yeah that's yeah no comment what tv show is the one where they talk about atheists uh what is the uh i i have to ask how do you go about, whenever I read work like yours, you give such a breadth of history. You're not just doing, say, I'm massively impressed by Robert Caro's work as well. But at least he is just going to the LBJ archives and reading every single letter because he's writing about the life of one person. You cover not just Nixon or Reaganagan but also the entire world that they inhabit in this really broad way how the fuck do you go about researching such a thing like how do

you go i mean i imagine okay i can go read the newspaper in 1968 and see what people were writing about but how do you go from that to know, writing a really gripping narrative of those years? What's the process here? Neurosis, Adam. Rank sheer neurosis. No, I mean, I my my method is basically to try and expose myself to what kind of an ordinarily aware human being citizen, you know, would be what would kind of, would cross their kind of transom. And a lot of it is just, you know, reading the newspapers. You know, you look up an article and if you go to newspapers.com and pay $50 a year for the subscription, it's the whole newspaper. You can see the ads, you can see the movie reviews, you know.

You know, I spend a lot of time just doing what us nerds do. I go on YouTube, you know, there's tons of stuff from them on YouTube. You know, I go to the TV news archive in Vanderbilt. If I really was really doing my job, I would live in Nashville because they have an archive at Vanderbilt that literally has every news broadcast since 1968. Wow. Yeah. I crawl, use bookstores, and grab up pamphlets. And, but I also, you know, I stand on the shoulders of other historians. That sounds pretty violent. I, I, uh, history, history is a team sport, you know, we're in this together and the works that other historians work on, you know, so there's a lot of kind of

give and take with other historians. Um, but, um, you know, just, I, I try to find subjects that, you know, allow me to cast my net as widely as possible so you know i look at what movies people are watching and see what they might explain about what was in people's heads when they were seeing those movies you know uh because they're the way we live our life and you're a perfect example you know we don't see a barrier between politics and culture you know and ideas you know and sociology and economics you know it's all kind of mushed together right yeah uh and that's the way i try and you know write history and um you know if i were writing about the 1620s it would probably be tougher but you know um

there's an enormous amount of stuff online and you know you find stuff in archives too i mean archives are basically just people's basements you know so if you go to like you know um say you know the archives of this guy mike deaver at the hoover institution you know a lot of what he does is just kind of have files and files of articles that might interest ronald reagan you know or pamphlets you know or um you know just kind of crap you. You know, we read other people's mails. You know, that's what historians do. And yeah, you make a pile of that stuff. And then you look at the pile for a long time and try and find the story that's inside the pile.

You know? Yeah. I mean, what I love about your work is that you give that view of, hey, here's what history looked like to people as it was happening. Like the story that I've, and like I said,

I grew up at a time when the sixties was rammed down my throat. The thing that was not present for me until I read your book was like, Oh, a lot of people were really frightened because there was what's going on in the cities, right? That there's, there's all of these protests, there's riots,

there's, you know, violence. There seems to be domestic violence happening on a scale that people weren't familiar with and that that was fundamentally frightening. And that was eye opening because that's not the, you know, that ground that I ground level perspective, that I level perspective is seemingly lost a lot of the time. Yeah. And I try and just kind of keep that in the forefront. You know, it's like just to take an example from Nixon land. You know, I once interviewed a guy who was elected to Congress in 1964 from Iowa to a seat that had been traditionally Republican.

So he won on kind of Lyndon Johnson's coattails because it was one of those times in which it seemed like conservatism was on its way out. And he told me he knew he was going to lose in 1966 when he went to a farmer's meeting and they asked him about the rumor that black panthers were going to come to the city come to come to town on motorcycles and start a riot you know which is like you know that's that was the experience of people in rural america in 1966 when bernie mercedes were burning down you know a lot like the guys who saw that you know like who saw like you saw the hippie bus in Oregon and thought that it was like some Antifa kind of like battle tank. You know, the world is scary. And one of the first primary instincts of human beings is to figure out a way to create order and make the world make sense.

And that's a powerful impulse for politicians to exploit. That's at the core of the work. But also, you know, the fact that, you know, people in the exact same way derive energy and meaning from creating connections and figuring out new ways to connect with each other and love each other. And that's the liberal part of it. What do you. OK, so as we record this again, staring down the precipice of the election, people listening to this, it'll either be right before the election or it'll be right after it. People might be elated. They might be devastated. They might have complicated emotions about it. They might be in the streets with a rifle yeah very much so um what perspective do you have on like you know i imagine as a

historian you'll be looking at those events with a little bit of a broader lens with a little bit of like having seen you know the the revolving pendulum of history to mix a metaphor, go back and forth a couple of times. What keep on rolling? What additional perspective, what, what, what perspective would you like to give to those people to take, to take with them?

Does that make sense? It's all up to us, man. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like, you know,

what is it? In Lawrence of Arabia, you know, like Lawrence of Arabia is tooling around and all the guys are always like, it's just written that, you know, and, and, and Lawrence says, nothing is written. You know, we write our own future, you know? So La Luta Continua. Well, man, Rick, I think that's a wonderful note to leave it on.

Thank you so much for being here with us. Yeah. Keep on fighting brother. All right. Thanks so much. Well, thank you once again to Rick Pearlstein for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did, please, please, please, you know what I'm about to say? Leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. It really does help us out. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Dana Wickens and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Conner,

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