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.”
Now if Perlstein is wondering how he failed to anticipate the rise of Trump, well, all I can say is get in line. Those of us on the institutional right have been asking that question for a while now, largely because Trump, who not that long ago was a pro-choice Democrat and remains one of Chuck Schumer’s biggest donors, flat out repudiates much of conservatism’s ideological and policy agenda.
However, the TL;DR of Perlstein article is basically this: Historians failed to anticipate the rise of Trump because they tried, wrongly, to understand conservatives on their own terms rather than acknowledge they are a bunch of violent, radically anti-government racists. You can read the essay yourself and decide if I’m overgeneralizing, but Perlstein concludes by saying that future historians looking to understand Trump need to forgo attention paid to the movement’s intellectuals and instead highlight “conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage” and “risk being impolite.” This sidesteps a very important question of how much conservatism is responsible for Trump. The president is nominally a Republican, so clearly there are links to conservatism. But few would deny that Trump is also a populist, and that is a very different intellectual and political tradition.
The fact that Perlstein has trouble making this very basic distinction is evidenced by how he gets facts wrong. “National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the ‘Never Trump’ crusade,” he writes. “But Trump won — and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had supposedly banished, with Goldberg explaining simply that Never Trump ‘was about the G.O.P. primary and the general election, not the presidency.'”
The suggestion that Goldberg has rolled over and embraced Trump post-election is simply absurd. He remains one of Trump’s most dogged critics on the right, precisely because he argues that embracing Trump constitutes a rejection of conservatism. It’s also not as if Goldberg hasn’t been prolific on this exact subject, nor is he alone. That Perlstein doesn’t understand this, or chooses to ignore it, doesn’t bode well for his grasp on understanding the right in the present moment. (Goldberg has written a response to Perlstein that’s worth reading, and it appears that, among other things the Times’ fact checker was embarrassingly asleep at the wheel.)
Much of the rest of the piece is devoted to unpacking “Trump’s connection to this alternate right-wing genealogy” wherein Perlstein tries to lay the historical blame for fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and a host of other appalling -isms at the feet of the right. I don’t want to belabor this discussion too much because history is very messy by nature, and it’s not as if there aren’t connections between conservatism and unsavory arcs of history. But mostly, Perlstein indulges himself in the proud tradition of liberal historians redefining everything that’s bad to be conservative by default, so as to insulate the reprehensible behavior of fellow travelers.
Case in point: Perlstein spends hundreds of words talking about the historical development of the KKK as if it’s just assumed the organization is the fruit of conservatism, when it was in many respects a thoroughly progressive institution and most closely affiliated with the Democratic party. Heck, when Barack Obama was inaugurated there was still a former Exalted Cyclops belonging to his own party in the Senate who famously said, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
Then there’s this bit. “Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life. The story begins with Father Charles Coughlin. … ” Let me stop Perlstein right there. Coughlin was an anti-Semite and a demagogue, but there’s simply no way a fair-minded person could describe a man taken to pronouncements such as “capitalism is doomed and is not worth trying to save” as being of the “far-right.” Ironically enough, the man who’s done the best work in recent years debunking the liberal article of faith that Coughlin was a creature of the conservative lagoon is Jonah Goldberg. (Similarly, the author of Liberal Fascism could no doubt have a field day with how Perlstein tries to make America’s historical flirtations with fascism the exclusive domain of the right.)
The piece is full of such questionable assertions, but the real problem is its basic insincerity of the premise. It’s not as if Perlstein, studious historian, woke up one day and decided his vocational responsibility as a historian demanded he warn America of the dangerous ideologues among them. Perlstein has been engaged in this egregious anti-conservative punditry for years. Take his 2014 column from The Nation, “There Are No More Honest Conservatives, So Stop Looking For One.” The column begins this way:
Well, alrighty then. Good to know that people who don’t share Perlstein’s liberal politics are some combination of dumb and dishonest. I’d suggest that maybe the problem is that Perlstein is so ideologically blinkered he has trouble conceding that there are people whom he disagrees with whose opinions might prove to be right, in both senses of the word.
Perlstein’s caustic demonization of half the country is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment, and the fact this sentiment has been widely shared among the left and media elites a long time before Trump came along explains a lot. The natural response for a political and cultural class this unfairly besieged is to find a champion who can push back on equal terms. This is an unhealthy state of affairs, but it’s also how we got Trump.
Such cheap and easy attacks on the right, however tendentious, are still being rewarded, regardless of whether they are fair and constructive. In fact, I’m almost inclined to suggest that the kind of commentary Perlstein is offering up contributed to the election of Trump more than anything by Jonah Goldberg and the elements of the institutional right that wagered real consequences to oppose him. But why risk being impolite?
