The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rick Perlstein on Goldwater, Reagan, and Trump

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

“Reaganland” is the new volume in Rick Perlstein’s long chronicle of the American conservative movement; the four books, which he began publishing in 2001, run some 3,000 pages in total. While the author is left of center politically, the series has been praised by William F. Buckley, Jr., and George Will, among others. Andrew Marantz finds that Perlstein uniquely captures the mood of the country and how intangible, emotional factors in the electorate influence political shifts. Perlstein tells Marantz that Trump is neither an aberration from traditional conservative politics nor a continuation but a throwback to an earlier, unruly time in the Republican Party, when its ideologically more disparate umbrella contained open racists, anti-Semities, and conspiracy theorists not so unlike QAnon. The Party became ever more disciplined as the Goldwater era moved into what Perlstein calls Reaganland. “Disciplining what got said, behind closed doors and in public,” he says, “was an enormous part of the political work of [Reagan’s] Administration.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Republican Convention last week was very much the Donald Trump show, co-starring the shouted stylings of Kimberly Gilfoyle. Trump talked law and order and the Democrats' post office scam. That's how he put it. And how things were pretty much perfect before, quote, the plague came in from China. Four years after accepting his first nomination, the president's relationship to the Republican Party still confuses many people, both inside and outside the party.

Is Trump an aberration within the GOP? Is he different from the party's culture and policy assumptions? Or does his presidency represent a continuity from the Reagan era onward? To answer that very complicated question, our staff writer Andrew Morantz sat down with historian and journalist Rick Pearlstein. Pearlstein has just published a new book called Reagan Land. It's the capstone of his four-volume history of the American right. Here's Andrew Moran's.

So Rick Pearlstein is this journalist and historian who he's been writing these really kind of monumentally big and immersive histories of essentially the 20th century American conservative movement. So just to set it up, you know, for those who don't know, for the last 23 years, you've been working on this four book cycle, some 3,000 pages, right?

How many pages? That sounds about right. Here we take. You know, it's like I read Dorkson, you know, the late Illinois senator used to say a billion here, a billion there, and soon you're starting to talk about real money. Yeah, I mean, let's say 3,000 pages, sure. Yeah, yeah. I've always been interested in his books because, you know, there's a lot of,

presidential biographies out there. There's a lot of books about American politics out there, but his books are kind of unique in how much they're about the mood of the country, the popular culture, what it was like day by day, week by week, to live through something like Watergate or to live through something like the late 70s where, you know, New York City is having a blackout and nobody knows, you know, where to go and everything is kind of chaotic. And that kind of feeling and that mood, you can kind of get from Pearlstein's books in a way you can't really get anywhere else. Where Rick Pearlstein starts his four-book cycle is with the 1964 race. And this was in an era when the two parties were not ideologically sorted the way they are now. There were

liberal Republicans. There were conservative Republicans. There were liberal Democrats. There were conservative Democrats. It was a coalition of regional interests, but it wasn't, you know, ideological blocks. And it was actually seen as self-defeating. to be too ideological. So the narrative was that the American right was this kind of wild west of open racist, anti-Semites, you know, conspiracy theorists, was, you know, had no kind of purchase in American politics. But the idea is that, you know, William F. Buckley comes along.

We will explore the question of the future of the GOP and of the conservative movement. I take pleasure in introducing a great man. He's this bright young Yalee, speaks fluent Latin, you know, and he starts a magazine. National Review, you know, the marquee conservative magazine that started in 1955, in which he's going to turn conservatism into basically an intellectually respectable movement. The only successful mutiny against the political scriptwriters in recent times, it having been ordained that no forthright conservative could be elected a, to any important executive authors. And that that...

Through that act, that's what allows someone like Barry Goldwater to come to the fore as a nominee for the Republican Party without that taint of open racism, anti-Semitism, and all the rest. So Barry Goldwater was this very staunch conservative senator from Arizona, and he stood for this ideological... principled conservatism, which was often called extreme, and actually Goldwater famously embraced that label. And extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

And when he got the Republican nomination, it was this surprising, shocking thing, kind of not entirely unlike when Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. But then what was supposed to happen next with Trump did happen with Goldwater, right? He lost in a landslide. So this thing that we were predicting would happen in 2016, that did happen in 1964. So then all these sort of nice, clean-cut liberal historians got to say what they wanted to say all along, which was Goldwater was always too fringe for the American electorate. He was never electable in the first place.

This just shows that if you're too extreme and you're too ideological, you're never going to get anywhere in American politics, right? And so that became the entrenched narrative. I really accepted sort of a standard narrative of the history of conservatism, propounded by conservatives themselves, that central to their political success, basically how they entered prime time, was through the act of disciplining the fringes of their coalition. So, Pursin's second book is called Nixonland. It comes out in 2008. And that's about the rise of Nixon, how he triumphs in these two big elections. then in Pearlstein's third book called The Invisible Bridge, we start getting Nixon's downfall. And by the middle of that book, Nixon is disgraced. He's left the White House. It just seems like no one of his ilk is going to be able to rise again.

Nixon was this kind of shocking, alienating, angry figure. And so how can that right wing of the Republican Party ever be successful again? So you're kind of, you know, spit out into this landscape of, okay, Nixon's gone. the country needs a unifier, and everyone at the time is kind of assuming that that unifier is going to come from somewhere from the center of the political spectrum. And what Reagan Land shows is that Ronald Reagan was able to become that unifier, not from the center, but by actually picking up on the really ideological, extreme conservative commitments of Richard Nixon and just kind of putting a more optimistic, shiny gloss on them.

I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is, is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale pastel shades. One of the things that made Reagan's election so paradigm shifting was that he managed to attract an enormous amount of former Democratic voters into the Republican coalition. But by the same token, in this long campaign in 1980, he received some rather remarkable endorsements and perhaps the most remarkable was Martin Luther King's right-hand man, best friend Ralph Abernathy, in whose arms Martin Luther King had died, who gave a very warm and enthusiastic endorsement of Ronald Reagan. Now, in a lot of ways, that shows the extraordinary charm and political gifts of Ronald Reagan,

but it also shows an absolutely bedrock part of the Reagan strategy, which was that they knew that if they appeared, if what we now call you know, of white swing voters in the suburbs, you know, associated Ronald Reagan with bigotry and racism, that they wouldn't vote for him. But then as Pearlstein is putting the final touches on this magnum opus, he's writing the fourth installment of how modern conservatism came to be what it is. As he's doing that in 2015 and 2016, he's watching Trump spit on John McCain's legacy as a war hero. I like people that weren't captured, okay?

I hate to tell you. Do you agree with that? There's a war hero. And, you know, talk about how all the Republican trade policies of the last 20 years should be thrown out the window and, you know, saying the quiet part loud. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

You know, all this carefully calibrated dog whistle strategy that all these Pearlstein books show how carefully plotted the dog whistle politics. of racism has been in the Republican Party and how hard they've tried to build a Southern coalition based on, you know, appealing to racist tendencies but not saying that stuff out loud. As he's sitting down to write this book, Trump is winning a Republican primary

by saying that stuff out loud. This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish. Can you think of a time when you were writing Reagan land and then, you know, you finished a day's writing and sort of like flipped on the TV and saw Trump talking about deporting 12 million

people or saw him talking about, you know, executing the Central Park Five or something and went, I might need to revise what I wrote today. Or, you know what I mean? Did you ever have those moments? You know, it's still happening. Right. Right now, we're talking as, you know, the Q&OND cult, you know, that Democrats are, you know, involved in a conspiracy to kill children, right? Is entering the mainstream as never before. And, you know, I woke. up this week, you know, this week in which I'm promoting the book and, you know, thought, well, you know, a huge part of the anti-gay agenda that drove the Christian right during the period I'm writing that really kind of replaced segregationism as the kind of guiding rage among

fundamentalist Christians was the conspiracy theory that, A, gay, gays were recruiting children. And in the case of a very prominent minister named James Robeson, who's still around and still prominent, in the spring of 1979, he gave a broadcast in which he said that gays in widespread organized fashion were not only recruiting young boys, but murdering them. His affiliate, the place where he recorded his show, it took him off the air because this was kind of like a last straw. He attacked other religions so much. And in this particular case, the local gay group demanded equal time. And this was a galvanizing event. He became a martyr. It became one of the galvanizing events for the politicization of the Christian right going into the 1980 election.

And him and his young publicist, the fellow named Mike Huckabee, staged a rally in which 10,000 Christians hooded and hollered and basically were advocating for him to have the right to, go around saying that gays were out to murder children. And Mike Huckabee was actually interviewed the New Yorker. And he was quoted saying that there was so much feral rage in that building that if James Robeson had told people to walk down to the TV station and take it apart brick by brick, they would have done it. I'm tired of hearing about all of the radicals

and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the communists coming out of the closets, It's time for God's people to come out of the closets, out of the churches, and change America. Right, so that kind of energy is certainly not new with Trump. It probably hasn't had that much explicit representation in a place like, say, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, for whom, certainly in the case of Ronald Reagan, disciplining what got said behind closed doors and in public was an enormous. enormous part of the political work of that administration. Rick Pohlstein is a guy who writes from a left vantage point.

He writes for left as publications. He writes these books that are about the modern conservative movement, but yet he's not writing these books as polemics about why conservatism is bad. He's writing a version of conservatism that actually some conservatives recognize themselves in. Like, he's more interested in giving a really rich crime. of almost the psychological needs of the American populace, like what was it in the American psyche

or almost in the American soul that made them yearn for someone like Ronald Reagan? This seems to be one of the underlying narrative questions of this book. Why was someone like Jimmy Carter not enough? Why did America fall out of love with him? It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.

And I think where other people might look to some specific political outcome or they might look to the hostage crisis or they might point to this or that speech, I think Pearlstein's move is much more often to set a mood and talk about why the mood of the country was out of step with the mood that was being conveyed by a particular campaign or by a particular White House. 1970 was the era of Star Wars and Rocky,

and that was what people were clamoring for. They wanted these very clear-cut stories about good versus evil. They wanted the heroes to triumph in the end, and Star Wars was not a Jimmy Carter type of film. Star Wars was a Ronald Reagan type of film. You know, so that's really more the kind of analysis you get in these books. Obviously, you get a lot of politics, and you get a lot of, you know, who did or didn't vote for this or that bill.

But in the words of another conservative figure of this century, Andrew Breitbart, he had this phrase, politics is downstream of culture. And I think that's the sense you get from reading these books, that culture and politics are certainly all mixed up together. And there's this kind of intangible mood of any given moment that I think, a person would probably say is only fully knowable in retrospect that he's trying to unearth that I think

sometimes can explain as much or more than a political science analysis can. There is this constant appeal for reactionary ways of seeing the world. The world is a scary place. America is a scary place

and people want to revert to easy truths and binary black and white ways of seeing the world. And that's just a scary place. that's just a constant in American history. Rick Pearlstein is the author of four volumes on the conservative movement. Reagan Land was published this month, and he spoke with Andrew Morantz, who's a staff writer for the New Yorker.

I'm David Remnick. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Rachel Syme is a staff writer who covers fashion in its many forms for the New Yorker. She's written for us about the trend toward high-rise jeans, a history of the track suit, and now she's going to show off the must-have fashion item of 2020, and I do mean must have, the face mask. Rachel, how are you doing? I'm doing okay. You getting out of the house much? I wish I was more, but I'm taking a lot of

walks. I took a bike ride to Central Park this weekend. Did you wear a mask? I did wear a mask. Good, because that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about masks and mask fashion, because in a time like this, we could use a little diversion, I think. I think so. Let's let's divert. So what is the mask of choice that I should be looking at or we should all be looking at? Well, listen, I'm no doctor, so I can't tell. But I think, you know, mask wardrobes are becoming a whole thing. You know, people have like a daytime mask and an evening mask. I mean, there's everything from the basic medical sort of paper masks all the way up to masks that cost hundreds of dollars, if not thousands of dollars. For example, Burberry,

recently announced that they will release a mask in their trademark plaid with the red and the brown stripes, you know, like if you're going out fox hunting, that kind of a vibe. Ah, fox hunting. Yeah, that's, I think, $130. Off white, which is Virgil Eblos label, made a mask that just says off white, like they always do. They branded everything. So the era of conspicuous consumption persists even during the plague? I mean...

Too weird. Unfortunately, yes. What is the selfie mask? The selfie mask is a very creepy thing that you can get where you basically send in a selfie to a company. There are several companies that are doing this now and they will print a mask with like the bottom half of your face so that it really looks like you. But it also kind of looks like a clownish, uncanny valley version of you like you're wearing a permanent clown smile of yourself. Is that a good look? I mean, I think it's actually nightmarish.

I feel like it's something from like a David Lynch movie. I don't know that I would. I feel like they're terrifying, but people want to look like themselves more than ever. I think people feel that a mask that blocks half their face. I mean, no one can see you smile. No one can see what your facial expression really is. So I think people are trying to figure out ways to be more transparent, which leads us to this transparent mask called the leaf,

which is this, the best way I can to describe it is it's a clear version of when you're in an airplane and the oxygen mask drops down. It's kind of like a little bit of a, it kind of looks like that very close suction to the face type thing. It's plastic and transparent. And then kind of also, though, has like a not transparent part about the chin. So it looks a little bit like you're wearing like old school like orthodontic head gear. That's a memory that everybody will want to come back to. Yeah. But at the same time, part of me just encourages people while we're in this mask phase of 2020 to embrace all these new options. All right. Well, what I want to know is what is the most expensive mask in the world?

Well, apparently a $1.5 million diamond and gold mask is coming out only for the purpose of being the most expensive mask in the world, just so they can say they did it. That's just such good news. I mean, you're, you know, maybe it's an investment piece. Rachel, thanks so much. No problem. I'm definitely putting down a deposit for the $1.5 million mask with its diamonds and gold and N99 filters. Yeah, I can't wait to see you in it. Rachel Syme is a staff writer, and you can read her work, always a delight, at New Yorker.com.

And that's our show. Thanks for joining us. And please don't miss us next week when I'll be talking with Bet Midler. The one and only about her new show. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.