In Before the Storm, the 2001 history that made his reputation, Rick Perlstein put his readers inside the skin of a pimply college freshman cast adrift on a sprawling concrete campus in the 1960s. “Wearied from his first soul-crushing run-in with Big Bureaucracy,” the imagined student is buying his required texts in the campus bookstore when he happens on a slim book with big type. He flips it open and “standing, reads fourteen short pages inviting him to join an idealistic struggle to defend the individual against the encroachments of the mass.”
It’s not news that Goldwater’s landslide loss in the 1964 presidential race sowed the seeds for the conservative resurgence. But Perlstein, who wasn’t even born until 1969, describes exactly how that happened, in 600-plus pages of prose whose fluency, fairness, and precision drew rave reviews from William Kristol and William F. Buckley on one hand and the Village Voice and the rabidly Democratic netroots on the other. He’s followed Before the Storm with a deluge of articles and in-depth blog entries that raise provoking questions about the future of American politics. Besides Nixonland, Perlstein has had a hand in two other books coming out this year: a reissue of The Tribes of America by Paul Cowan, due in May, and Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents, due in June.
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Having moved from the conventional notion of the 1960s as leftist to the unconventional notion of their also being rightist, and on to the even less conventional realization that the two sides had a good deal in common, Perlstein landed a book contract. He spent what he calls “three years in paradise” rooting through the conservative movement’s bountiful archives. At the Hoover Institution, he learned how Milton Friedman never turned down a speaking request, no matter how small or hostile the audience. At the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum), the Clarence Manion papers revealed the “astonishing” 1950s origins of the right-wing direct-mail machine.
Perlstein visited many surviving participants in the early conservative movement, who he says were “unbelievably generous with their time.” He was welcomed, politics notwithstanding, because he was paying them the ultimate compliment: close, careful attention. And the compliment has often been returned. When the book came out, conservative blogger Orrin Judd wrote, “I can’t emphasize enough how open minded and generous Perlstein is in examining the ideas and motivations of those on the Right (whose politics were after all antithetical to his own).” And in a recent e-mail to me, William F. Buckley describes Perlstein as “a first rate writer [who] has a streak of conscience that keeps him from hamhandling conservative ideas.”
The blog had a clear-cut mission beyond reiterating the Bush administration’s failure du jour. Perlstein kicked things off by quoting Goldwater (“I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size”) and Ronald Reagan (“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”). In reality neither man was able to do much serious pruning. But with W. as president and Congress under the control of uncritical Republicans, Perlstein wrote in his April 18 post, “we’ve been able to witness a natural experiment: What would have happened if Goldwater and Reagan had been able to get their way?” The answer according to Perlstein: “E. coli conservatism.”
Peanut butter’s just the beginning. From airport delays to coal mine safety to collapsing bridges, Perlstein and other bloggers have been making the case that conservatism is a failure—not because of incompetence or cronyism but because it is not and cannot be a governing philosophy. (Past posts by Perlstein and other Campaign for America’s Future bloggers can be found at ourfuture.org/thebigcon.)
On the simplest level, empathy and solid historical research are the high road to good advocacy. (Or, if you prefer, the most devastating intelligence is gathered by a spy who at heart is half traitor.) Before the Storm has inspired and instructed the netroots, a vital part of the Democratic coalition these days. And it has unmasked some conservative fictions passing as history. Perlstein quotes Goldwater’s version of his family history: “We didn’t know the federal government. Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.” In fact, as Perlstein points out, the Arizona frontier was almost entirely a government creation. “The money to build Big Mike’s first Goldwater’s store in 1872 came largely from contracts for provisioning Army camps and delivering mail.” It’s hard to take Goldwater’s ideas quite as seriously after that.
