[ The fourth volume in historian Rick Perlstein’s critical
series on the rise of the modern GOP’s far right shows Reagan as key
in uniting a rank coalition that still epitomizes and explains much of
the Republican Party’s sway.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW RONALD REAGAN TRIUMPHED  
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Evan Thomas
August 18, 2020
New York Times
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_ The fourth volume in historian Rick Perlstein’s critical series
on the rise of the modern GOP’s far right shows Reagan as key in
uniting a rank coalition that still epitomizes and explains much of
the Republican Party’s sway. _

Ronald Reagan campaigning in September 1980., Credit: James Hughes/NY
Daily News Archive, via Getty Images // New York Times

 

In 1968, 17-year-old Patrick Caddell
[[link removed]] polled
a working-class neighborhood in Jacksonville, Fla., about the upcoming
presidential race for a high school project. He was surprised to hear,
again and again, “Wallace or Kennedy, either one.” This seemed to
make no sense. Alabama Governor George Wallace, a segregationist, was
the ideological opposite and avowed foe of Robert Kennedy, who had
pushed civil rights as attorney general in his brother’s
administration. Young Caddell had an insight: In politics, feelings
mattered more than policy. For all their apparent differences, Wallace
and Kennedy were both tough guys; they both seemed to be mad at
something most of the time. Voters could relate: The feeling abroad in
the land in 1968 (not unlike 2020) was alienation.

Later, working out of his college dorm room, Caddell became a paid
political consultant. One of his clients in the 1972 election was Joe
Biden, then 29, running for the United States Senate from Delaware.
Caddell told Biden not to attack his opponent. That would just make
him look like another politician. Rather, he should run against
Washington. Biden took the advice and won.

 

REAGANLAND - America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980
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By Rick Perlstein
Simon & Schuster; 1120 pages
August 18, 2020
Hardback:   $40.00
ISBN  13: 9781476793054

 

Photo illustration by Slate
 

Rick Perlstein [[link removed]] tells this anecdote
early in “Reaganland,” his absorbing political and social history
of the late 1970s. More than 700 pages later, Perlstein notes that
Biden, himself, went on to become “an exquisitely well-calibrated
politician.” Perlstein doesn’t point out the irony, but he
doesn’t need to. The joy of this book, and the reason it remains
fresh for nearly a thousand pages of text, is that personality and
character constantly confound the conventional wisdom. Perlstein’s
broad theme is well known, partly because he has made it so through
his three earlier volumes (“Before the Storm,” “Nixonland” and
“The Invisible Bridge”) on the rise of the New Right in American
politics. In the 1960s and 70s, liberals overplayed their hand and
failed to see the growing disaffection of Americans who felt cut out
or left behind. (Sound familiar?) But Perlstein is never
deterministic, and his sharp insights into human quirks and foibles
make all of his books surprising and fun, if a little smart-alecky at
times.

_[ Read an excerpt from __“Reaganland.”_
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One of Perlstein’s favorite sports is to poke fun at the
cluelessness of establishment commentators from the mainstream media.
In the summer of 1977, Perlstein reports, pundits were writing long
“thumbsuckers” pronouncing the near death of the Republican Party.
The Boston Globe’s David Nyhan said “the two party system is now
down to one and a half parties.” That was because, “the party of
Abraham Lincoln forgot its heritage and started neglecting
minorities.”

In fact, Perlstein points out, the “party of Lincoln” knew exactly
what it was doing: marching into the once-Democratic Solid South to
convert angry white voters into Republicans. In 1968 and 1972, Richard
Nixon had made a start with his Southern Strategy
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using code words like “states’ rights” to appeal to racists, but
by 1980, the Republican Party seemed to dispense with subtlety. Ronald
Reagan’s first major appearance of the 1980 general election
campaign was at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. This was Klan
country. In 1964, the bodies of three civil rights activists had been
found buried in an earthen dam a few miles away. Families came to the
Neshoba County Fair every year to enjoy the mule races and beauty and
pie-eating contests. “White families, that is,” Perlstein archly
notes. “Blacks only participated as employees.”

In the hot sun, before an adoring audience, on a stage crowded with
Confederate flags, Reagan began with a football story and some corny
jokes, and then plunged into the red meat of his speech, about the
wickedness of federal interference in the lives of ordinary Americans.
But then, Perlstein notes, a strange thing happened. Reagan, one of
the most sure-footed stump speakers ever, began to get “wobbly.”
Instead of pausing for his punch lines, he rushed ahead. He seemed to
want to get the speech over with.

 

Orlando Sentinel
The enthusiasm drained from the crowd. The speech was a bust. Reagan
actually dropped in the polls in Mississippi. He recovered later,
taking every Southern state but Jimmy Carter’s Georgia. Still, the
plain fact was that Reagan was not comfortable playing the race card,
and he couldn’t hide it.

It’s a small, redeeming moment in Perlstein’s overspilling
narrative, but the glimpse into Reagan’s conscience is
characteristic of Perlstein’s storytelling. Reagan is hardly a hero
to Perlstein, whose own politics are to the left. But in this
description, the former movie actor turned politician is intensely
human, and capable of empathy, or at least shame.

Reagan is also sly, especially at outfoxing condescending liberals. In
1980, Jimmy Carter’s campaign advisers, along with most of the press
corps, underestimated him. “They presumed the public would see what
they saw. Which was that Carter was smart and that Reagan was stupid.
And that therefore Reagan would lose any debate,” Perlstein writes.
“Which overlooked the fact that Reagan had _won_ practically every
debate he had participated in — going back at least to 1967, when he
appeared on the same TV hookup with Robert F. Kennedy to discuss the
Vietnam War, and twisted his opponent into such knots that Kennedy
subsequently yelled, ‘Who … got me into this?’ and ordered
staffers never to pair him with ‘that son-of-a-bitch’ ever
again.”

At their final debate in late October, virtually tied in the polls,
Carter started in on Reagan for having advocated, “on four different
occasions,” for “making Social Security a voluntary system, which
would, in effect, very quickly bankrupt it.” After Reagan responded
with a wandering anecdote about an orphan and someone’s aunt, Carter
bore in and attacked Reagan for opposing Medicare. Now, Carter warned,
Reagan was trying to block national health insurance.

As Perlstein tells it, Reagan looked at Carter smilingly, his face
betraying “a hint of pity.” Then the old cowboy rocked back, and
with an easy, genial chuckle, delivered the knockout blow. “There
you go again!” he said, beaming. The audience gave a “burst of
delighted laughter. … Jimmy Carter was being _mean_ again.”

With one deft jab, Reagan had finished off his opponent. A few days
later, the Republican candidate won in an electoral vote landslide.

The 1980 election marks the end of this book, and, Perlstein says in
his acknowledgments, the end of his four-volume saga on the rise of
conservatism in America, from the early stirrings of Barry Goldwater
to the dawn of the Age of Reagan. One hopes Perlstein does not stop
there. “Reaganland” is full of portents for the current day. Among
the fascinating and disturbing echoes is his description of the night
the lights went out in New York City in the midsummer of 1977. The
city went feral. Looters ran wild. The police force, diminished by
huge layoffs, seemed helpless to restore order. At the time, a
congressman named Ed Koch was running for mayor. Koch was known as a
liberal, but after the mayhem, he ran on a platform that featured
bringing back the death penalty. He won. One wonders, in our own
uncertain era, what the future will hold for Joe Biden, whom we meet
on Page 8 of “Reaganland” as a Patrick Caddell-made populist
candidate on his way to becoming “an exquisitely well-calibrated
politician.” Maybe, some day, Rick Perlstein will tell us that
story.

 

_Book author RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of the New York
Times bestseller The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the
Rise of Reagan; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the
Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of
the best nonfiction books of 2007 by over a dozen publications;
and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los
Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books
of the year lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
the Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been
published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington
Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among others. A
contributing editor and board member of In These Times magazine,
he lives in Chicago._

 

 

_[Essayist EVAN THOMAS is the author, of nine books, most recently,
First: Sandra Day O’Connor.”  An American
[[link removed]] journalist
[[link removed]], historian
[[link removed]], and author
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writer, and editor at Newsweek
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he was at Time Magazine
[[link removed](magazine)]. Thomas began his
reporting career at New Jersey’s  The Bergen Record
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