Last week I drove over to Lawrence, that wonderful isle of blue in a sea of red, to hear Author Rick Perlstein, the most erudite chronicler of the modern conservative movement, give a speech at the University of Kansas. The faculty guy who introduced him joked how lucky we were to not be watching the Republican debate that night. If you haven’t read Perlstein’s books, Before the Storm (about the Goldwater campaign of 1964), Nixonland, and The Invisible Bridge (about Nixon’s impeachment and the rise of Reagan), you should. They are absolutely delightful. Perlstein paints a vivid picture of what things were really like, fusing culture and politics to show what has happened to the U.S. in the last 50 years. There’s more to come, he promises.
Follow me below the mutant sheaf of Kansas wheat for more.
The Rick-man riffed on how Goldwater expressed shuddering fear at the anger and irrationality of some or of his followers: for instance he disavowed one group of his minions called Mothers for a Moral America, which blamed President Johnson for moral decay, including the introduction of the topless bathing suit. And Reagan famously signed one of the nation’s first major liberal abortion laws as Governor of California, and fought back a referendum to fire all gay teachers.
So it was no surprise the bulk of Perlstein’s remarks were about the improbable candidacy of Donald Trump, whose populist rage against immigrants is still surging and shows no sign of letting up, yet.
Perlstein noted that Trump’s rise was predictable given the odd Republican coalition of economic royalists and low information rubes. He didn’t compare Trump to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, but he could have. Trump promises jobs and security to a fearful audience and it’s working well.
“The man and the mob have a symbiotic relationship,” he noted, citing Trump’s followers aversion to politics as usual and longing for “a businessman” to set things right.
We saw it with Ross Perot in 1992: Perot transformed himself from an insider’s insider to a purported outsider, and developed a core following of right, left, and middle of the road – people who had given up on the system and wanted a man on a white horse to lead them. There were boomlets for Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and others that went nowhere, too. Only in la bella Italia did communications magnate Berlusconi reach the Presidency, only to wind up in prison after three terms full of corruption and crime. In a country where one President (Gerald Ford) pardoned his predecessor (Richard Nixon) and the holdover Reagan and Bush I minions made a deal with the Clintonistas to not prosecute them for Iran-Contra, and then Obama let his Bush II gang off the hook for Iraq, that’s probably too perfect an ending. Men on white horse are seldom what they seem to be.
On the other hand, Trump’s fierce advocacy of jobs and taxing the rich resonate. Who knows, he could still go Third Party and make Bernie Sanders his running mate. He promised he wouldn’t, but we all know, all politicians lie.
Those of us expecting a snoozer between Clinton II and Bush III next year are probably going to get proved wrong, as conventional wisdom usually is.