Reaganland w/ Richard Perlstein
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2023
⏱️ 56 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 is an edited rebroadcast of RTN #199, which originally aired on June 14, 2021. Both the original episode and this rebroadcast were edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming to Curiosity Podcasts. |
| 0:04.4 | America loves its founding fathers, but that's a tough act to follow as a founding son. |
| 0:11.3 | If you do not rise to the head, not only of your profession but of your country, |
| 0:16.2 | it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy. |
| 0:20.7 | John Quincy Adams never escaped the long shadow of his father, John Alexander. going to your own laziness, slaveliness, and obstinacy. |
| 0:25.3 | John Quincy Adams never escaped the long shadow of his father, John Adams. |
| 0:31.5 | He failed as a one-term president, but became an extraordinary ex-president. |
| 0:36.0 | He could see the coming civil war, and was trying desperately to stop it. |
| 0:41.9 | I'm Bob Crawford. As the basis for the Ava brothers, I've spent a lot of time in tour buses reading American history, and John Quincy Adams deserves a second look. Join me, Patrick |
| 0:48.9 | Warburton, and Nick Offerman, as we bring the sixth president to life. We'll travel back to the start of this fledgling nation, torn between slave and free states, to a bitter presidential campaign against Andrew Jackson. |
| 1:04.8 | Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before? |
| 1:09.0 | Letter from Philadelphia threatening organized opposition and civil war if Jackson |
| 1:14.9 | has not chosen. |
| 1:17.8 | And we'll follow John Quincy Adams to the halls of Congress. |
| 1:21.6 | But he did want to reclaim his greatness after he'd been knocked down after his presidency |
| 1:26.5 | actually had been something of a failure. |
| 1:28.9 | We'll learn about his reluctance to join the abolitionists, |
| 1:32.3 | only to later champion liberty for enslaved people |
| 1:35.7 | by arguing a landmark case before the Supreme Court. |
| 1:39.3 | I yielded and told them that if by the blessing of God my health and strength should permit, I would argue the case. |
| 1:48.8 | We'll bring you inside the uprisings, legal battles, and political brinksmanship that threatened to |
| 1:55.1 | shatter the fragile union, and the toll Adams' ambition took on his family. |
... |
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