I have no doubt that this “summer of the pandemic” will be remembered by many of us as one of the most surreal times of our lives. We’ve been locked down, isolated, and living sort of disembodied life on the internet.
For me, it’s also been a weird journey into the past as I binge watched the seven seasons of “A French Village” and pondered survival and moral quandaries one must face when the Nazis come to town. I felt more emotional immediacy about that question than I expected and it’s frightening.
But I also spent much of the past few weeks reading the last volume of Rick Perlstein’s great series on the rise of the conservative movement, “Reaganland, America’s Right Turn” which goes on sale today. I’ve enjoyed all three of the previous books tremendously. They chronicle my youth, after all. But this one really hit home. I cast my first vote for president during this period. And I didn’t cast it for Jimmy Carter. I cast it for Gerald Ford, I’m ashamed to admit.
I didn’t like what I saw as Carter’s sanctimony. His religiosity offended me. I thought all the talk about how he would never lie was phony. It was an unfair assessment, based upon a youthful cynicism born of coming of age during Watergate and the Vietnam war. I just didn’t believe him.
Perlstein addresses this cultural shift from 60s idealism to 70s cynicism throughout the book and it all rings absolutely true to me:
70 percent of the electorate told pollsters they had no intention of voting in November at all. One of them, a rabbi, wrote a New York Times op-ed. “I was one of the millions who rejected Barry Goldwater’s foreign policy, voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson, and then got Mr. Goldwater’s foreign policy anyway. I, too, voted for law and order and got Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. And now I think of the man who promised Congress that he would not interfere with the judicial process, and then pardoned Mr. Nixon as almost his first official act.” So: no more voting. “If Pericles were alive today, he might be inclined to join me.”
The epidemic of political apathy spread particularly thick among the young. During the insurgent 1960s, the notion of universities as a seedbed of idealism was accepted as a political truism for all time. No longer. A university provost explained that he was seeing “a new breed of student who is thinking more about jobs, money, and the future”—just not society’s future. College business courses were oversubscribed. But politics? “Watergate taught them not to care,” a high school civics teacher rued. A college professor gave a speech to his daughter’s high school class, rhapsodizing about the excitement of the Kennedy years. “A few minutes into my talk I realized we weren’t even on the same planet.” He asked if they would protest if America began bombing Vietnam again. “Nothing. In desperation, I said: ‘For God’s sake, what would outrage you?’ After a pause, a girl in a cheerleading uniform raised her hand and said tentatively, ‘Well, I’d be pretty mad if they bombed this school.’”
I wasn’t that apathetic and disengaged. I voted. And I followed politics closely. But I didn’t feel much hope that things could get better — or perhapsmore importantly, it didn’t occur to me that things could get worse. When Reagan won, I sobered up. And I’ve never taken that for granted again.
Perlstein has been tracing the origins of the conservative movement going all the way back to Goldwater in each of the volumes in his series. But it’s in this one that we see how they truly gained power within the Republican Party. They dominated American politics for the next 40 years. And it’s worth remembering that much of what we think of as Trumpism today really isn’t that different from the conservative movement revolutionaries of the time.
For instance:
Paul Weyrich knew how to organize. He always claimed his awakening came while sitting in on meeting of liberal activists trying to pass a federal open housing bill — another of those legends that became right-wing holy writ. A think tank officer was commissioned to write a research report. A White House staffer was instructed to keep the president on task. Senate aides were dispatched to ride herd on Capitol Hill. Civil Rights leaders agreed to flush protesters into the streets. This was how liberalism had stolen Americans’ conservative birthright, Weyrich reflected. “I saw how easily it could be done with planning and determination and I decided to try it myself.”
Weyrich was a former radio newsman from Wisconsin who turned his political hobby into a vocation after working for Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 1968, he converted to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, having concluded that his natal Roman Catholics had fallen to liberalism. In 1971, Weyrich and a former Senate staffer named Ed Feulner raised $250,000 from the beer magnate Joseph Coors and $900,000 from the petroleum heir Richard Mellon Scaife to found a more combative alternative to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank which, fearing for its IRS tax exemption and its reputation for scholarly probity, was loathe to take sides in partisan disputes.
For men like Weyrich, who drew their moral imagination from legends of the twilight struggle between lightness and dark as limned by former Communists like Whittaker Chambers, probity was counterrevolutionary. “We’re not here to be some kind of Ph.D. committee giving equal time ” the Heritage Foundation’s first research director explained. Indeed, Weyrich soon quit, finding Heritage not nearly aggressive enough.
This view that liberals are ruthlessly aggressive, not to mention super organized (hah!) is one of the founding myths of the conservative movement. They always used this as an excuse to push the envelope. But I think we all assumed the underlying conservative ideology was at least somewhat sincere.
The Trump experience makes us look at all that differently. It was never really about the ideas at all. It was about the “birthright” — and racism was the primary motivation from the very beginning.
The aggressiveness Weyrich convinced himself was necessary to secure his “birthright” was the same aggressiveness Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters believed was necessary to defeat his enemies. It is the same mentality that drove the bogus Whitewater scandals and the partisan 2000 Supreme Court decision, swift-boating and birtherism and, inevitably, Russian collusion, sabotage of the voting system and a president who says he won’t accept the results of the election unless he wins and muses repeatedly that he may serve a third term.
This is essentially all they are, it’s all they have ever been.
The book is full of wonderful cultural and sociological observations about the period culled from thousands of news reports, magazines, interviews and popular culture of the era and as with all his books, is both informative and wildly entertaining. Perlstein really knows how to turn a phrase. As we look to what will almost certainly be a highly stressful fall with the pandemic, the economic distress and this most important election, I highly recommend settling in with “Reaganland.” It certainly won’t make you want to go back to the good old days. The old days weren’t that good.