Rick Perlstein on Goldwater, Reagan, and Trump

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2020

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

“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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.2	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.6	The Republican convention last week was very much the Donald Trump show, co-starring the shouted stylings of Kimberly Gilfoyle.
0:21.3	Trump talked law and order and the Democrats' post office scam.
0:25.3	That's how he put it.
0:26.7	And how things were pretty much perfect before, quote, the plague came in from China.
0:31.7	Four years after accepting his first nomination, the president's relationship to the Republican
0:36.2	party still confuses many people,
0:39.2	both inside and outside the party. Is Trump an aberration within the GOP? Is he different from the
0:45.7	party's culture and policy assumptions? Or does his presidency represent a continuity
0:50.7	from the Reagan era onward? To answer that very complicated question,
0:56.0	our staff writer Andrew Morantz sat down with historian and journalist Rick Pearlstein.
1:01.0	Pearlstein has just published a new book called Reagan Land.
1:04.3	It's the capstone of his four-volume history of the American right.
1:08.5	Here's Andrew Morance.
1:10.6	So Rick Pearlstein is this journalist and historian of the American right. Here's Andrew Moran's.
1:19.4	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 just to set it up,
1:31.1	you know, for those who don't know, for the last 23 years, you've been working on this four
1:34.7	book cycle, some 3,000 pages, right? How many pages? That sounds about right. Give or take.
1:40.6	You know, it's like it's it's it's it's it's it's it's like I read dorkson, you know, the the
1:43.6	late Illinois senator used to say a billion here know, the, the, you're starting to talk about real money.
1:49.4	Yeah, let's say 3,000 pages, sure. Yeah, yeah.
	...

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