#199 Reaganland w/ Rick Perlstein
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2021
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today's Republican party looks a lot different than it did just a few decades ago, but it rests on many of the same organizations and ideologies that formed the modern conservative movement in the 1970s. In this episode, Rick Perlstein joins us for a conversation about his newest book Reaganland: America's Right Turn, 1976-1980 and how Ronald Reagan, Orrin Hatch and other prominent Republicans were able to harness the social and political forces of the 1970s to form the modern GOP.
Rick Perlstein is the award-winning author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, including Reaganland (Simon & Schuster, 2020), Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2009) and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Bold Type Books, 2009), as well as a board member at InTheseTimes.com. You can follow him on twitter at @RickPerlstein.
In this conversation we also discussed Rick's recent article "This Is Us: Why the Trump Era Ended in Violence," The New Republic, January 20, 2021.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is in the loop, the Legion of Osiris Podcasts. |
| 0:03.9 | Osiris is creating a community that connects people like you with live experiences and |
| 0:08.3 | podcasts about artists and topics you love. |
| 0:11.6 | Get in the loop at Osirispod.com. |
| 0:20.7 | I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:22.3 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:23.5 | And this is the road to now. |
| 0:26.2 | Bob, how are you doing, man? |
| 0:28.3 | I'm doing okay. |
| 0:29.7 | I'm doing well. |
| 0:30.9 | Doing well. |
| 0:31.2 | It's been to be out on the road again, are you? |
| 0:32.9 | Yeah, yeah, we're getting there. |
| 0:34.4 | We got a couple, uh, got a couple hurdles to jump over before we can get out on the road, uh, some family stuff. We got to deal with and take care of. Um, so it's hard to think about the road when you got these other thing, other obstacles, uh, before you. But yeah, like, um, you know, I said last week in the, in the introduction that I'll be gone until August. And it's just, |
| 0:56.7 | there's just, you know, one thing after another, the next six weeks are going to just be |
| 1:02.4 | really, really busy and really important. The next six weeks will be really important |
| 1:10.4 | for what happens in the next three |
| 1:12.0 | or four months. So, you know, just got one thing at a time. But yes, we will be back on the road |
| 1:18.6 | in July. Your tour dates are up. That's great. I, I mean, I know last time I said we, I thought |
| 1:24.6 | about us going to Montgomery, but I just took my first, like, trip somewhere. |
| 1:28.5 | I went out to El Paso, just want to give a shout out to my cousin James, James Sawyer, who just a few days ago was promoted to Sarge Major in the U.S. Army, which is the highest rank there is. |
| 1:41.0 | It's like less than 1%. |
... |
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