Rick Perlstein is a respected historian, and not without reason. Though he is an outspoken man of the left, his first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, earned praise from the right for being a well-researched and relatively nuanced account of a critical developmental era for modern American conservatism. His two books since then, Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge, have a more mixed reputation regarding how Perlstein chronicles the right’s path following Nixon and Reagan. (His treatment of Reagan and willingness to employ dubiously sourced attacks on him bear mentioning.) But they are nonetheless works of history worth reading.
So then—and I mean this sincerely, as I know Perlstein to be a friendly and inquisitive person—I find it genuinely head scratching how Perlstein could publish something so terrible and, frankly, ahistorical as his current essay in New York Times magazine. It’s titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong: A historian of conservatism looks back at how he and his peers failed to anticipate the rise of the president.”
