Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Episode 7: Rick Perlstein, Reaganland, America's Right Turn 1976-1980

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Episode 7: Rick Perlstein, Reaganland, America's Right Turn 1976-1980 · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:03
SPEAKER_08: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:04
SPEAKER_08: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
0:19
SPEAKER_08: Today I'm thrilled to be speaking with Rick Perlstein, historian and author of the definitive history of the emergence of conservatism in modern American politics.
0:30
SPEAKER_08: In Reagan Land, America's Turn to the Right, 1976 to 1980, Perlstein examines both the political and cultural history of the 1970s to explain Ronald Reagan's rise to the presidency in 1980 and how that led to decades-long conservatism in Washington.
0:56
SPEAKER_08: Rick, if I'm not mistaken, you are on the 20th anniversary of your foray into this great topic.
1:04
SPEAKER_08: From what I recall in 2001, your first great volume on this theme came out before the storm, the unmaking of the American consensus about Barry Goldwater.
1:15
SPEAKER_08: Then in 2008 came Nixon Land, the rise of a president, and the fracturing of America.
1:22
SPEAKER_08: So notice the end of the consensus, the fracturing of America, 2014, The Invisible Bridge, the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.
1:32
SPEAKER_08: And 2020, the book that we're talking about today, an absolutely spellbinding, big, big book, Reagan Land, America's Turn to the Right, 1976 to 1980.
1:46
SPEAKER_08: It's a blow-by-blow account of Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976, which brought him to the presidency, and then Ronald Reagan's defeat of President Carter in the 1980 campaign.
2:01
SPEAKER_08: So Rick, 20 years at this.
2:03
SPEAKER_08: Amazing.
2:04
SPEAKER_08: Congratulations.
2:05
SPEAKER_08: What have you learned?
2:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: It's an honor.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: I hadn't really thought of that.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm not really an anniversary guy.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: And if you, of course, you count the research, it's 25 years since I've been doing this half my life.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: I have learned that America has never had a consensus.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: I think that the underlying architecture skeleton foundation of all my work is that one of the dominant variables in American history, but not one that's really formally been recognized by historians too much, is the longing for consensus.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: The belief that America is united and at peace with itself.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Even as this is a nation that was born in disunity, whether you're talking about the moment of our founding and the break from Great Britain, of course, our Constitution, which was built on a quote-unquote compromise that papered over the most profound structural contradiction between the two sections of the country imaginable, one kind of heading towards capitalism and one based on slavery and feudalism.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: And basically the consequences not only of that original disunity, but the attempt to kind of body forth as a nation through the 19th century.
3:30
SPEAKER_08: Rick, I feel the uh utter correctness of that answer because as we've been living through the disunity in recent years, everything about our long history has become a center of contention as well.
3:42
SPEAKER_08: It's uh amazing how history is itself one of the most divisive parts of the history of the industry.
3:48
SPEAKER_08: As it has always been.
3:51
SPEAKER_08: Extraordinary.
3:52
SPEAKER_08: But for me, it is so odd, and it took me a long time in my life to understand the point you just made because I was born in 1954, and I was born to parents who loved Franklin Roosevelt.
4:09
SPEAKER_08: And I grew up in a community uh where everybody loved Franklin Roosevelt, and everybody loved the New Deal and how we got through World War II victoriously and as a nation.
4:23
SPEAKER_08: And maybe in the 1950s, that ideology of consensus perhaps reached a peak.
4:30
SPEAKER_08: And then your work is really the disintegration of what turns out in retrospect to have been a 30-year, remarkable period, but a period that was a kind of unity over 30 or 35 years, from Franklin Roosevelt assuming the presidency on March 4th, 1933, perhaps to the uh battleground in the streets uh over Vietnam or the election of Nixon in 1968.
5:02
SPEAKER_08: Right.
5:03
SPEAKER_08: And then you talk about in these four remarkable books the shift in a particular direction, not only towards the end of consensus, but really uh a much more conservative politics.
5:18
SPEAKER_08: So can you take us through just the big picture of that?
5:21
SPEAKER_00: Right.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: It's very striking that speaking of Columbia University, which was in a lot of ways the intellectual center of this idea of consensus, so to bring it into the rarefied realm of ideas and intellect and you know, basically orc, who are basically telling the rest of the world what the world looks like, you know, what they're experiencing every day, the kind of people that would have been read and absorbed by, say, a Walter Cronkite, you know, or a Walter Lippmann in the newspapers.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: The fascinating thing about this period from the 1930s until, let's say, the 1970s, when the order created by the New Deal begins to break down, is that at the time in the 1960s, in which people were writing books like The End of Ideology, which by the way did not only claim that America was united, but that the Western democracies were converging with the Soviet Union, right, into this kind of mixed economy sort of social democracy.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: You see that, you know, not only in the writing of Americans like Daniel Bell, but the writing of Swedish social scientists like Gunnar Merdal.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: Basically, we'd figured it out, and all sorts of conflicts that had defined the bloody history of not only Europe but America had been solved.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: In a lot of ways, they had been solved.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: The great exception.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: That's what's so amazing.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of mind-blowing.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: So, what was it like to be within this intellectual, let's call it haze, right?
6:51
SPEAKER_00: So, my favorite example is something in Before the Storm, when the morning after the election, in which, of course, Lyndon Johnson, the tribune of the liberal consensus, who had just signed a massive civil rights bill that outlawed discrimination, public accommodation, you know, launches the war on poverty, inherits John F.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy's agenda and makes it real, expands the New Deal.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: The morning after, the New York Times has a headline on the front page: white backlash does not develop.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Whoa.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And I I that's in the center of the book and the papers.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: And the reason for that is people were terrified, basically, that Lyndon Johnson having signed that bill on July 2nd, 1964, was going to cause a massive kind of rush of voters to the party of reaction to the party of Barry Goldwater.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: And they're signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: The Republican candidate had voted against that act, right?
7:46
SPEAKER_00: Which was quite remarkable.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: It inaugurated a new direction for the Republican Party, the one we know now.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: Fascinatingly, the very day in which Lyndon Johnson is winning by a million votes in California, in the place that, you know, is full of these Orange County conservatives and all these people flocking to kind of join the suburban dream, that same day, one million and a half voters more, uh basically by a million and a half votes, there was an initiative on the ballot for open housing.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: And one million and a half voters more than voted for it, voted against it, voted for the right to discriminate and who they uh rented their house to in the name of liberty.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: Right?
8:25
SPEAKER_00: So at the same time as the New York Times was proclaiming that this backlash hadn't happened in California and also elsewhere, the backlash was basically continuing that original sin of racial domination of whites over blacks.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: It was completely ignored.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we're found again.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: And those kind of undercurrents are what kind of drive this first book of mine.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: Before the storm, Barry Goldwater, and the Unmaking of the American Consensus that begins in the late 1950s with this group of conservatives who never accepted the consensus.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: The main constituency we're talking about is kind of the kind of business people who own smaller companies that are not kind of publicly traded, they're not publicly facing companies, and they're basically barons of industry that think exactly like the kind of people that were shooting down strikers, you know, in the 19 teens.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: And they consider Walter Ruther the great hero of the post-war labor consensus.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: They basically consider him Beelzebub.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: And uh they feel completely alienated because the people who are running capitalism, the General Electrics and the General Motors, have accepted the likes of Walter Ruther and the labor management consensus.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: It's exactly what they're doing.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: So they're kind of feeling completely like they're martyrs, even though they might run their cities in the Midwest or in the South.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: And the fascinating thing that I introduce into the story is that they basically pick up allies among college students.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: Right?
9:45
SPEAKER_00: The same kind of college students who are disgusted by the incredibly bureaucratic and alienating and conformist society that the new left folks are picking up basically at the same time.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: And so through this book that basically covers the election of 1958 through 1964, all these people who feel completely alienated from the mainstream of American politics, even though they're fighting for values that you would think that the kind of people in power would support, it's their organizational work, right?
10:15
SPEAKER_00: It's William F.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: Buckley creating a magazine.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: It's Young Americans for Freedom, you know, organizing young people.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: It's the Goldwater Conservatives taking over the Republican Party from the ground up because the political infrastructure is so weak because it had relied upon this charismatic guy, Eisenhower, who, by the way, the original sin of Eisenhower was that he not only accepted the New Deal, he expanded it.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: He created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, he created the most massive federal infrastructure program to that point, the interesting.
10:45
SPEAKER_08: That indeed was the reason why it seemed there was a consensus.
10:48
SPEAKER_08: You had a Republican president, nothing was reversed of the Democrats.
10:52
SPEAKER_08: And one thing that you said was almost exactly the words uh that Richard Rothstein said to me when we talked about his book The Color of Law.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: Perfect example.
11:01
SPEAKER_08: Because I asked him, of course, part of the backdrop of this era was the civil rights movement.
11:07
SPEAKER_08: You mentioned the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
11:10
SPEAKER_08: It it may be the most important moment for us to discuss in a moment.
11:16
SPEAKER_08: But before that were several Supreme Court rulings, most famously Brown versus Board of Education, which desegregated the schools.
11:25
SPEAKER_08: And then after that, in the 80s and 90s and so forth, the court swung to the right, which is your story.
11:31
SPEAKER_08: And I said to Rothschild, how could the court swing so far to the right?
11:37
SPEAKER_08: And he said, Jeff, that 30 years was the exception of America, not America.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: And it's fascinating, part of the ideological infrastructure that allowed this idea that America was uniting was the idea that the South was vestigial, right?
11:53
SPEAKER_00: The kind of way they did politics in the South, which was basically feudalist even into the 50s and 60s, a one-party authoritarian enclave was going away.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: It was going the way of all flesh, that it was entering the modern world, which meant the liberal technocratic world.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: And one of my favorite quotations in Before the Storm, when Barry Goldwater wins the nomination at the Cow Palace in what his biographer calls the conservative Woodstock, one of his delegates from Texas says, We just moved the Mason-Dixon line up to Canada.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: And basically a lot of what we're talking about in this process from 1964 to 2021 is the southernization of the United States.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: The kind of reactionary, hyper-hierarchical, hyper-individualist, hyper-corporate-friendly, and of course white supremacist politics that had never gone away, and in fact was energized by what they called the massive resistance, the Brown versus the Board of Education, organizing to turn whiteness and your right to basically only congregate, integrate, do business with, have pleasure with people of the white race, which basically was accepted, Rothstein is the best scholar of this, as a right, basically, by people all over the country.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: And that's when we get into the next book, which is basically, you know, you talk about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the next book, Nixon Land, which covers 1965 to 1972, and a lot of ways the foundation of the whole book is what happened to the 1966 Civil Rights Act.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: So Southerners loved trolling Northerners ever since the 1940s.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: I can see even probably since the 1840s.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: You claim to be so humane, you know, you claim to be so anti-racist.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: When Strom Thurman ran for president in 1948, he quote unquote campaigned in New York.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: And he said, You people like those Negroes so much, uh, I'll send as many of them your way as you want.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Right?
13:48
SPEAKER_00: They can all live in Central Park, right?
13:51
SPEAKER_00: That kind of trolling is a big part of kind of Southern politics that was again nationalized in the way conservatives think and talk now, right?
13:58
SPEAKER_00: And that was prophecy because the 1966 civil rights was going to continue this evolution or revolution following the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was an open housing act.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: And it was going to take away the right to live in all white neighborhoods.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: And it was the first Civil Rights Act that covered the entire country equally, and it went down in flames.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: It went down in flames in 1966.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: A harbinger of that was what happened in Chicago, which is kind of a lot of ways the dramatic high point of the first part of that next book, Nixon Land, in which Martin Luther King came to Chicago to march for open housing in these New Deal neighborhoods where people worked in steel mills and loved their unions and had come from Eastern Europe and were in many ways the beating heart of the Democratic Party, and they tried to lynch him, basically.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: They threw rocks at him.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: During these marches, King and other demonstrators were struck by bricks and buffers.
15:12
SPEAKER_04: How do you feel about this?
15:15
SPEAKER_04: Well, this is a terrible thing.
15:16
SPEAKER_04: I've been in many demonstrations all across the South.
15:20
SPEAKER_04: But I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mob as hostile and of patriot as I'm saying in Chicago.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: And that fall, the open housing is filibustered out of existence.
15:35
SPEAKER_08: I have a vague memory of 1968 Fair Housing Act.
15:39
SPEAKER_08: Is that right?
15:39
SPEAKER_00: Yes, that was not the same thing as the 66 Act or Right.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: Before the storm is the first book, the storm is basically the 60s.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: One aspect of that being the urban uprisings of the late 1960s, in which African Americans were so mad they were burning their neighborhoods down.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: An open housing bill did pass in 1968, but it had almost no real enforcement mechanisms.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: And it was basically an attempt to kind of hold off what was seen as a potential apocalypse.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the reasons it passed was it included an amendment written by my friend Strom Thurmond, making it a crime to cross state lines with the intent to start a riot.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: So it was this completely unconstitutional law that tried to kind of criminalize black rage.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, the Nixon part of it, right, is this guy who ran for president in 1960 as basically a consensus figure, was kind of a Me Too Republican.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: That was Barry Goldwater's term of reproprium for people who wanted the Dime Store New Deal, as he called it the same New Deal, only cheaper.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: In 1960, he runs as an internationalist and a statesman and says, you know, he likes the idea of Medicare too, and again that Me Too thing.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: By 1968, when he runs for president, after lots of melodrama in between, he basically runs as a law and order Republican, imitating the rhetoric of this crazy actor from California who was taken seriously by no one, who won the California governor's race in 1966 by talking about able-bodied men sitting lazily on porches and getting welfare, and students who should be kicked out of their universities for protesting, and uh saying he believed that people had a right to sell their house to whoever they liked, because the Constitution, after all, enshrines liberty of property, and that's Ronald Reagan.
17:26
SPEAKER_05: We're told that we're enjoying an unprecedented prosperity, but 42 government agencies, the government has just informed us, are spending$70 billion a year on public welfare.
17:37
SPEAKER_05: And serious discussion is given by men in high place in government to the idea that there is no longer any necessity to connect work with income, and that a man simply by being born should be assured of an annual income with no need to work.
17:53
SPEAKER_05: The ancient Hebrew book, The Talmud, tells us that for a father to fail to teach his son to earn a living is the same as teaching him to steal, for that might be the inevitable result.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: So Ronald Reagan kind of is the presiding spirit in a lot of these books.
18:15
SPEAKER_08: So can you explain now the Southern strategy about Reagan's role, which I underappreciated, how that came to be, and is that the decisive moment?
18:27
SPEAKER_08: Because Nixon's also quite interesting on certain domestic issues.
18:32
SPEAKER_08: He continues almost the momentum of progressive.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: He had no choice, right?
18:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, all through this period, Democrats outnumber Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate, you know, nearly two to one.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: And on the level of policy, the tune is being called by liberal experts.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of what Richard Nixon gets credit for as president for signing that people say, oh, Nixon was the last liberal, literally were passed with veto-proof majorities.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
19:01
SPEAKER_08: Again, I did not know that, but things like the uh Environmental Protection Agency or the Clean Air Act and others.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Environmental Protection Agency is a very Nixonian thing.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: Basically, he wanted to buy off the rage about the Vietnam War by promoting the ecology, what was called the ecology movement.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: If kids got into ecology instead of the anti-war movement, he could, you know, have his have his way with North Vietnam without any protest, right?
19:24
SPEAKER_00: And the other thing about the Environmental Protection Agency was it didn't add any new administrative capacity.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: It basically gathered it all into one place under one administrator who served at the pleasure of the president.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: So Nixon's greatest impulse was to kind of control, right?
19:40
SPEAKER_00: But he loved the idea of dividing the opposition.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: So, for example, you know, he supported affirmative action in federal contracts because he wanted civil rights activists to be mad at union members and union members to be mad at civil rights activists because the whole idea was to divide the Democratic Party in half and end up with the bigger half.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: That was Pat Buchanan's formulation.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: That was the Southern strategy.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: So the Southern strategy, right, the idea kind of coming out of Lyndon Johnson and Goldwater and the terror in the South, right, that people had seen on TV, for example, on Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, George Wallace's state troopers beating people with rubber hoses wrapped in barbed wire.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: That was kind of like the Capitol riot of 1965.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: It was a televised riot by the forces of authority.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: And all good and decent and honorable politicians, all men then, were supposed to turn away from that and recoil in horror.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: So the South's reaction would go away.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: But the founding act of Richard Nixon in winning the nomination against the late ending challenge by Ronald Reagan was a deal he made with Stron Thurman, in which Stron Thurman's delegates that he controlled promised not to vote for Ronald Reagan in exchange for Richard Nixon giving the South a veto power over his running mate, which turned out to be a kind of reactionary Maryland governor named Spiro Agnew, who was basically famous for yelling at civil rights activists on TV and saying that looters should be shot in the head.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: And Also, a deal that he would slow walk civil rights enforcement.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: And also another deal that he would protect South Carolina's textile industries.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: So during the general election, he came up with basically the idea that a presidential candidate could win the southern states, and that would kind of break the back of again the Democratic coalition.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: George Wallace comes in as a third-party candidate, which is um, which was very handy and useful for Richard Nixon, because George Wallace was the guy who used to hold these Nuremberg rallies at places like Madison Square Garden, where he'd say, if a civil rights protester lays down in front of my car, I will run him over.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: So Richard Nixon could sound reasonable if he said, I'm not going to interfere with a state's rights to make its laws in a way it sees fit.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: That's the Southern strategy.
22:47
SPEAKER_08: Yes, and I'm just thinking how uh similar to uh Trump's rhetoric we hear 40 years later.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and he got 12% of the vote, I think, but he was up to 20% until he chose a running mate who basically appeared more than enthusiastic about the idea of uh launching nuclear weapons.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: That was uh bombs away uh Lame.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: You might remember him, parodied in Doctor Strange Love.
23:15
SPEAKER_06: I have to go to war and get killed.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Strange stuff.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: And this is Consensus America.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Here's this vice presidential candidate who's saying, oh, well, you know, the wildlife on Bikini Atoll where they tested the hydrogen bomb is thriving.
23:51
SPEAKER_08: So, Rick, the 68 election, as you've described it, compellingly a shift due to the white backlash.
23:59
SPEAKER_08: Then you describe in Nixon Land and in the next two books the gathering of what is the new right during the 1970s.
24:10
SPEAKER_08: And there's an interlude also with the president Jimmy Carter, who uh comes into office as the first Southern president, I believe.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the brilliance of the Carter strategy is everyone's like the Southern strategy was tried and it failed because all the Democrats need to do is nominate a Southern governor.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: A real Southerner.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Right.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: And of course, they tried that twice and it was quite successful.
24:33
SPEAKER_08: So your thesis about the Southernization of America is literally first the Southern strategy, then the election of a Southern Democratic governor.
24:42
SPEAKER_08: Right.
24:42
SPEAKER_08: A very decent man who has a somewhat hapless period in office, as you described in Blow by Blow, and I want to go over that.
24:51
SPEAKER_08: But during the 1970s, lots of different pieces of the new right come together.
24:59
SPEAKER_08: Not only the racial issues, which are clear, but the rise of Christian fundamentalism as a political movement.
25:07
SPEAKER_08: The backlash actually to the nascent environmental movement you describe, or the libertarian ideology economically, the tax cut ideology, which maybe one could argue has always also been part of American history, uh, because uh we were born in a tax revolt and we remain in it in a tax tantrum to this day.
25:30
SPEAKER_08: But could you talk about this gathering of the different coalitional forces?
25:35
SPEAKER_08: Right.
25:36
SPEAKER_08: And how do we understand, I'd say, the the most basic issue, which is that the white working class, which was the core of the New Deal Democrats, ends up as the core of the new right uh Republican National Party.
25:54
SPEAKER_08: Right.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of moving pieces there, but let me start with the that key word that you raised.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: The coalition is important, right?
26:01
SPEAKER_00: So any successful politician in a nation as diverse and uh contentious as ours has to pull together a coalition.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: Uh the two major pieces of the coalition that are new, you're an economist, the margin is important.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: What's on the margin, right?
26:16
SPEAKER_00: What is what does Reagan add to the previous status of forces, right?
26:20
SPEAKER_00: And the one is basically a group of people called the New Right moving into the Christian right.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: Same people, basically.
26:27
SPEAKER_00: And the key insight that the New Right, which was basically a name for a bunch of very, very cunning organizers that are very conservative and have a profound power lust and go right up to the edge of, let's say, cutthroat tactics using campaign finance laws and big lie propaganda at that time.
26:48
SPEAKER_08: Their This is Richard Vigory, Liet Water.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: Richard Vigory, Paul Warrick, Howard Phillips, and lesser lights.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: Very with lots of allies.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: Their profound insight is that they love Barry Goldwater and they want the same policies that he advocated in 1974, but he lost because he spoke very frankly about policies like privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority, privatizing Social Security, ending the progressive income tax, ending farm subsidies, all these things that are extremely popular and that people have a very intuitive grasp help them, right?
27:29
SPEAKER_00: This is the state writing checks to ordinary Americans and building the middle class.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: So their profound insight is they actually take the things that people are viscerally angry about, that a lot of political pundits, especially, say are the things just the sort of things we shouldn't talk about, because then you're kind of poking the bear of the divisions in American society and say, no, this is exactly what we're gonna do.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: They actually prospect for division, right?
27:54
SPEAKER_00: They search it out very aggressively.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: The paradigmatic case is 1974, in which fundamentalist Christians in the hollers around Charleston, West Virginia, are enraged about the textbooks that the cosmopolitan liberals who are on the school board of Kanawha County, West Virginia, have chosen for their children.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: It's uncannily like critical race theory.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: Basically, they're saying that they're making they're making our kids read James Baldwin and Learning to Hate America.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: And the most profound rage was about a textbook that asked students to compare the Greek myth of Androcles with the Christian myth of Daniel in the lion's den.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: What, a Christian myth?
28:34
SPEAKER_00: No, this is revealed truth.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: Right?
28:36
SPEAKER_00: So they're trying to force uh satanic, anti-godly textbooks down our throats.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: And it becomes so passionate that activists, again, very familiar, dynamite the school board, throw bombs through the windows of schools.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: And instead of saying, oh my god, this is horrifying, this nascent new right in the form of their think tank, the Heritage Foundation, sends uh representatives to Kanawha County, West Virginia.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: They send a lawyer to represent the guy who's accused of bombing the schools, and they send organizers to introduce them to other anti-textbook organizers around the country, for example, in Texas.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: Again, this idea of the southernization of the United States.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: And that is the paradigm for how they basically create a base of people who are union members, white working class people, and they make the terrain of politics a cultural division instead of those wonderful social democratic values that the Democrats since the New Deal have delivered.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: You know, the Tennessee Value Authority.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: I'm a big bass fisherman.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: There's lakes all over the South that are named after dead Democratic politicians, right?
29:43
SPEAKER_00: Where people get to enjoy fishing and electrical power that the Democrats gave them, right?
29:47
SPEAKER_00: No one shoots Santa Claus.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: They're saying, well, you know, guess what?
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Santa Claus is turning your kid into a pagan, right?
29:54
SPEAKER_08: Rick, it's interesting you.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: I just came up with that formulation.
29:57
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, it's it's interesting you mentioned heritage.
30:00
SPEAKER_08: When I was just in grad school, suddenly a number of foundations emerged.
30:05
SPEAKER_08: Heritage was one of them.
30:06
SPEAKER_08: Olin Foundation was another.
30:08
SPEAKER_08: Right.
30:09
SPEAKER_08: They use this space to kind of create policy arguments.
30:11
SPEAKER_08: But by the way, you know, our Goldwaterite.
30:14
SPEAKER_08: As an innocent grad student, I didn't understand that this was part of a political movement.
30:20
SPEAKER_08: But if you could say something, because a fascinating part of this is the political marriage or coalition of the wealthiest Americans.
30:30
SPEAKER_08: Right.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's that that gets the next part of the coalition, which is the corporate part of the coalition.
30:34
SPEAKER_08: They're able to bring the working class and the richest together, which is an amazing political feat.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: It's remarkable.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: It's really fun to tell this story, right?
30:42
SPEAKER_00: And the halo has kind of just visited me from above through my skylights.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: So we'll consider that the spirit of Ronald Reagan shining down on us.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: And what he's telling us is well, you know, these corporations like the General Electrics and the General Motorists, who have accepted unions as basically the price of doing business and consider themselves partners with the regulatory state, the administrative state, as they call it now, right?
31:07
SPEAKER_00: What happens in the 1970s is their profits start declining.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: A lot of this has to do with the third world saying that the resources that are beneath our soil belong to us.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: This is, you know, the Arab oil shock of 1973, just to you know take one example.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: That was my dissertation, by the way.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: So it's very important.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: What about you know Jamaican bauxite, right?
31:25
SPEAKER_00: So so there's all sorts of ways in which corporations are like, wow, maybe we need to revisit this American consensus, this labor management accord, this accord with the state, and the kind of companies that form the base of Goldwater, right?
31:38
SPEAKER_00: I talked about those smaller corporations that were kind of like more sort of Midwestern, you know, basically there were suppliers for General Motors, and I narrate this happening, the meetings in which it happens, they basically prevail upon the blue chip companies that they have to become Goldwaterites.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that work is in fact done by the intellectual cadres, the Heritage Foundation's Irving Kristol, right?
32:03
SPEAKER_00: That's where the neocons come in, these former Marxists who've switched sides but are no less apocalyptic in basically how they see the world work.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: And Irving Kristol begins writing op-ads in the Wall Street Journal saying, if you have a foundation, Mr.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: CEO, you'd better use that money to defend capitalism against the socialists, or else you won't have a corporation, right?
32:25
SPEAKER_00: And so these people are kind of rushing into what becomes the Reagan Coalition.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: By the way, Reagan is not the head of this coalition in the late 1970s.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: He's still still seen as this embarrassing actor.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: Part of the fun of telling this story is they all want John Connolly.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: Right, the former Texas governor who has completely charmed the media with his louche and charismatic ways.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, so now you have this coalition, and literally it's the same people introducing the new right to the corporate lobbyists.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: I have a meeting at Richard Vigory's home in which all these people I'm talking about meet with the lobbyists for companies like General Motors, and they say, and then it's election coming up in 1978.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: We got to start throwing our money to conservative challengers instead of Democratic incumbents who are committee chairs.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: They become insurgents.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: I call them the boardroom Jacobins.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: Now, where does Jimmy Carter come in?
33:17
SPEAKER_00: This poor sad-sat guy who inherits this economic ordeal where suddenly you could tell the story much better than I, Keynesianism suddenly doesn't seem to work.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: It's like riding a bicycle that slips the gear and you pedal and it doesn't work anymore, and you're getting stagflation, which is theoretically impossible, right?
33:33
SPEAKER_00: And this whole virtuous circle that drives the New Deal into the mainstream of American politics, which is that the government spends money, puts it in people's pocket, they spend it, they stimulate the economy.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: It's a bottom-up center-in growth strategy that you've written about quite eloquently, right?
33:50
SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, because of exogenous factors, I would argue, it makes all the intellectuals and the people under the Capitol Dome and the advisors who advise them say, wow, we got to try something different.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, 10% unemployment and 10% inflation.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: And you have these intellectual entrepreneurs who are offering up on a platter these panaceas.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: And the fascinating thing about it, my favorite part to write, maybe your favorite part to read, was the ones who won that intellectual fight were not the ones who had the best Greek letter equations, but the ones who had no equations at all, no models, no footnotes, but were able to tell the most simple, digestible, politically palatable story, which is that if you cut taxes for everyone, you'll get the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: And that's where you get your colleague, Mr.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: Mundell and Laffer and all these literal quacks, right?
34:42
SPEAKER_00: Who still come back under Donald Trump and prevail upon even the Democrats to cut capital gains taxes.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: And this whole system that had given the Democrats this profound political power joining, again, corporations and working class people, just like the Republicans did.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: It breaks down and provides this opportunity for these ideological entrepreneurs, of which Ronald Reagan is one, to basically platform this idea that we can make America great again.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: That's my four books.
35:18
SPEAKER_08: Available at a website near you.
35:20
SPEAKER_08: Amazing and important for people to know that Make America Great Again was not Trump's invention.
35:27
SPEAKER_08: It was Reagan's slogan, written by the Madison Avenue firm that they fired.
35:31
SPEAKER_08: Ronald Reagan's slogan in 1980.
35:34
SPEAKER_08: Almost nobody knows that.
35:37
SPEAKER_08: Except my readers.
35:38
SPEAKER_08: Your readers do, but it's amazing that Trump could recycle that as his own without almost any comment.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: He has this kind of feral cunning in which he picks up the little bits and pieces of things that he came up with in that 1970s New York reactionary.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: By the way, we talked about the 1966 Housing Act, we talked about Richard Rothstein, we talked about the idea that white people have basically a right, a civil right.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: It was almost treated like to live in white neighborhoods.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: Of course, Donald Trump and his father were sued by the Justice Department for writing C on applicants' applications for housing and not allowing them to rent Trump housing.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: So basically, Donald Trump is born of this crucible as well.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: In addition, he makes a little cameo in there as the hero who's going to rescue New York from its own doldrums, for which the New York Times upheld that myth and then apologized for when they reported on his taxes, in which they're like, wow, we wrote this profile of him in 1979.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: It turns out to be nonsense.
36:38
SPEAKER_08: Rick, it's a great story and extremely insightful how the different pieces are glommed onto this growing coalition, including the shift of the big business from a kind of mainstream view to this new right view.
36:54
SPEAKER_08: Could you just say a word, explain the role of Lewis Powell in this?
36:58
SPEAKER_08: Because I find that fascinating for American history.
37:02
SPEAKER_08: He played an extremely important, distinctive role that lives with us till today and in a not very happy way.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: One of the fascinating things about this kind of culture war strategy doing politics is a lot of what actually determines people's lives and what really shifts is, for example, a Supreme Court that uncontroversially, you know, is basically empowering corporations at the expense of workers again and again and again and again.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: But these are not necessarily the things we read about in the newspapers.
37:31
SPEAKER_00: Lewis Powell was a corporate lawyer from Virginia, tobacco lawyer, for example, who defended tobacco companies against the regulation that they were poisoning people.
37:41
SPEAKER_00: And I think it was in 1971 when he writes this memo in which he basically says what I point out the Goldwater rights were telling the corporate elites that unless you guys basically actively defend capitalism against the barbarians at the gates like Ralph Nader, you won't have capitalism anymore.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: Now, the fascinating thing for a historian is people have been issuing these warnings since basically the New Deal.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: There are lots of Powell memos.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: The reason this one became so famous was this guy was nominated as the Supreme Court.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: The very next year.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: It came out in his hearings.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: It didn't really have a huge effect during the first half of the 1970s.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: That was still pretty much a period in which Gerald Ford, for example, was signing legislation establishing fuel economy standards for cars, one of the stories I tell.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: But uh in the later 1970s, this was one of these ideas that was kind of on the shelf, right, for ideological entrepreneurs to pick up.
38:38
SPEAKER_00: And it was a memo that was written for the US Chamber of Commerce, which very much was this kind of ineffectual organization because it represented so many different factions of American capitalism.
38:48
SPEAKER_00: But in the late 1970s, under a guy named Richard Lesser, basically forms itself into this kind of Marxist class for itself and begins to kind of model itself on these new right organizations using direct mail, using mainframe computers to send issue alerts to companies in sectors that they would appeal to and not to those that wouldn't, to push a very radical anti-government agenda.
39:13
SPEAKER_08: We have to add the last point that Van Powell writes the lead opinion for the Supreme Court saying that corporate political giving cannot be regulated because it's merely free speech.
39:26
SPEAKER_08: And so he completes the legal framework for an assault by big business on American regulation, basically, on American politics, opening the floodgates for big money in politics to an extraordinary extent.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: The uh judgment and opinion of the court in uh First National Bank of Boston against Pilato will be announced by Mr.
39:49
SPEAKER_01: Justice Powell.
39:50
SPEAKER_01: This case is here on appeal from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: It involves the right of corporations to express their views on issues submitted to a referendum vote.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: Appellants are banks and business corporations doing business in Massachusetts.
40:09
SPEAKER_01: The state statute makes it illegal for a bank or business corporation to spend money in favor of or against a referendum question.
40:20
SPEAKER_01: The only exception is where the corporation can prove that the issue materially affects its business or property.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: The statute also expressly provides that any question related to individual income taxes shall not be deemed to affect materially a corporation's business.
40:43
SPEAKER_08: Rick, we don't have that much time.
40:45
SPEAKER_08: We've covered Reagan land, but I want you to cover the next 40 years and the next eight minutes.
40:50
SPEAKER_08: I want to ask you this.
40:51
SPEAKER_08: Around the time of Reagan's election, I don't remember whether it was soon after or before, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a renowned historian uh of the day, wrote that uh American politics swings like a pendulum between the public uh service and and the private.
41:09
SPEAKER_08: So there's a progressive era followed by a conservative era of the 1920s, then comes the New Deal era.
41:17
SPEAKER_08: And I was kind of told, well, okay, then the pendulum has swung.
41:23
SPEAKER_08: Reagan will be there maybe 12 years, maybe 15 years.
41:27
SPEAKER_08: I think Schlesinger put it as a 20-year.
41:29
SPEAKER_08: So I expected that Bill Clinton was going to push the pendulum in the other way.
41:37
SPEAKER_08: Unfortunately, Bill Clinton triangulated to use his uh famous expression, and doubled down on the conservative agenda in many ways, not dissimilarly to how Eisenhower had built on the FDR agenda.
41:54
SPEAKER_08: Then came George W.
41:55
SPEAKER_08: Bush.
41:56
SPEAKER_08: I said it could never be worse than that.
41:58
SPEAKER_08: Little did I know.
41:59
SPEAKER_08: Uh then we had Obama, I said, well, that's the shift back.
42:03
SPEAKER_08: That was followed by Trump.
42:05
SPEAKER_08: So I want to ask you the big trillion dollar question now.
42:09
SPEAKER_08: Now we have to do it in$64 trillion questions.
42:13
SPEAKER_08: Is the pendulum gonna swing back or is it there ain't no pendulum.
42:19
SPEAKER_00: There's no pendulum, that's the point.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: Let's say that a social theorist for all his flaws, who's a lot smarter than Arthur Scholestinger or Karl Marx.
42:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: Men make their own history.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: You're telling me they're growing to.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, you know, it's like you're a social scientist, right?
42:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's a small end problem there.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, if there's six or seven pendulum swings in American history, that's noise in the system.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: If we had a thousand data points, maybe that would just be, you know, doot doot do yes, there's no pendulum, right?
42:48
SPEAKER_00: You know, our history in a in a quasi democracy is what we make it, right?
42:54
SPEAKER_00: And Where are we?
42:56
SPEAKER_00: I think that where are we?
42:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean it's a very interesting we're into uh, you know, I mean, I'm this is one of my Marxist days.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: I go back and forth, right?
43:04
SPEAKER_00: Although I really like Carl Polanyi much better.
43:07
SPEAKER_00: But um, I think that the socialists in Weimar Germany had a slogan, socialism or barbarism, right?
43:12
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a hinge movement in which, you know, either we're gonna kind of descend into the morass of the pitiless war of all against all, or we're gonna begin to build a system that's fit for human beings to live in.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: And I really feel like this is the kind of movement we're in.
43:26
SPEAKER_00: Right now, as we speak, the House of Representatives is holding a hearing, you know, investigating the armed mob who rampaged the seat of government looking for congressmen to lynch.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine, you know, someone told you that would be happening, you know, when you were in college at Columbia?
43:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just like, you know, mind-blowing, right?
43:44
SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, we have a Democratic president who is speaking on one side of a labor dispute, on the side of labor for the first time more aggressively than even Franklin Roosevelt ever did.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, is proposing massive infrastructure.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: Think of those dams that built all those lakes, right?
44:02
SPEAKER_00: But these ones are actually to help the environment instead of harm it, right?
44:06
SPEAKER_00: And universal broadband and maybe some free college, and we're seeing a reckoning with America's racial past that, as all such reckonings have brought a profound backlash.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, we have a young generation of not only politicians but activists who grasp that the panaceas of this former generation that swept up a lot of Democrats in its wake is why we ended up in this perilous state, right?
44:33
SPEAKER_00: So it's a movement, I think, really on the hinge between peril and promise, and demands acts of creative and energetic citizenship by all people who care about reality and justice and freedom.
44:47
SPEAKER_08: Between peril and promise sounds like a great title.
44:50
SPEAKER_08: Uh, so I'm gonna ask you as a close as a closing question.
44:53
SPEAKER_08: Peril and promise, pretentious.
44:55
SPEAKER_08: Well, it's phenomenal.
44:56
SPEAKER_08: You've given us the most uh comprehensive, richest base for understanding where we are right now, and as you describe it, it is indeed a hinge moment.
45:06
SPEAKER_08: Rick, let me thank you for your remarkable work.
45:09
SPEAKER_08: Thank you for a fantastic conversation today.
45:13
SPEAKER_08: I'm uh just grateful.
45:15
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
45:15
SPEAKER_08: It's a pleasure.
45:16
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
45:18
SPEAKER_08: Next month I will be in conversation with Dr.
45:20
SPEAKER_08: Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, a brilliant historian, scholar, and activist for indigenous peoples all over the world, with a remarkable lifelong commitment to social justice.
45:32
SPEAKER_08: We will be discussing her new book, Not a Nation of Immigrants, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.
45:43
SPEAKER_08: In this book, Dr.
45:44
SPEAKER_08: Dunbar Ortiz debunks the pervasive myth that our country was proudly founded by and for immigrants.
45:52
SPEAKER_08: It was in truth founded by white European settlers who dispossessed the Native peoples while also enslaving millions of Africans and African Americans.
46:04
SPEAKER_08: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
46:06
SPEAKER_08: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.
46:14
SPEAKER_08: I would love to hear your thoughts as we continue to develop the series.