This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 19th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

In his new book, Reagan Land, Rick Perlstein traces the rise of the conservative movement through Jimmy Carter's time as president.

We talked about the Carter years, regulation, and the coalitions and fights that produced the Reagan presidency.

Where were conservatives and more broadly, where was the Republican Party in 1977?

What was the sort of general mood and thought about where they were in the world?

They were going the way the wigs.

When I say that the opinion journalists of America

entered thumb sucker season, you know,

in kind of like August when Congress was out of session

and everyone asked to kind of write stories

about, you know, the meaning of the universe.

They were all writing that the Republican Party

was in a worst position than had any American Party

been in over a century and they were quite specific

that the reason was its takeover by the Conservative wing.

Policy people, economists probably especially like to look at presidents as just sort of a

series of decisions or policy ideas that are separate from whatever circumstances that might have produced them?

As if they can choose history from a catalog.

Right, and so when you look at Jimmy Carter, who's obviously all over this book because it's about his time in office in part,

you know, if you're looking at this from a regulatory perspective in a particular

libertarian regulatory perspective you look at the presidency of Jimmy Carter and

you look at that series of decisions you say wow this was this is some some pretty interesting good

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