Person

Rick Perlstein

Bylines

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Trump Isn't the Apotheosis of Conservatism

Writers like Rick Perlstein miss the ways in which Trump’s rise is a story of discontinuity.
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Lessons From the 1964 Republican Convention: Declaring War on the Establishment

Donald Trump’s candidacy wasn’t the first time the Republican Party was split by an outsider declaring war on the establishment elite.
Reagan in car

What the Rise of Reagan Tells Us About the Age of Trump

Rick Perlstein's "Reaganland" charts the conservative counter-revolution that moved the US to the right.

How the GOP Became the Party of Resentment

Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

Reaganland Is the Riveting Conclusion to a Story That Still Isn’t Over

Rick Perlstein’s epic series shows political history and cultural history cannot be disentangled.
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Trump and the Historians

What the election of 2016 should mean for the future of studying the past.

Trump's Predictable Rise

Trump's election isn't cause for reassessing politics as we know it.

Don’t Look to History for an Analogue to Trump’s Victory

Looking to history for an analogue to Trump’s victory does a disservice to the present and the past.
Photo of Marion "Pat" Robertson

How Pat Robertson Shepherded His Flock Into Politics

Farewell to the senator's son who pioneered a TV genre, helped create the Christian right, ran for president, and earned the grudging respect of Abbie Hoffman.
Jimmy Carter at a podium against the backdrop of an American flag.

Is Jimmy Carter Where Environmentalism Went Wrong?

Carter’s austerity was part of a bigger project. It didn’t really have much to do with environmentalism.
Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right

‘Birchers,’ a Well-Told, Familiar Entry in the ‘How We Got to Trump’ Genre

In his history of the John Birch Society, Matthew Dallek says Republicans allowed the extreme fringe to “eventually cannibalize the entire party.”
POW/MIA flag draped over an empty chair with a photo of a soldier.

Have You Forgotten Him?

The “forgotten American” mythology of the POW/MIA movement continues to haunt our politics today.
Picture of former President Bill Clinton looking downtrodden.

The Disastrous Legacy of the New Democrats

Clintonites taught their party how to talk about helping people without actually doing it.
Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican National Convention

How the GOP Surrendered to Extremism

Sixty years ago, many GOP leaders resisted radicals in their ranks. Now they’re not even trying.

The Republican Choice

How a party spent decades making itself white.
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How Biden vs. Sanders Echoes a 1964 Republican Party Split

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are the icons of an ideological split among today’s Democrats, echoing a similar split in the Republican party of 1964.

Misremembering 1968

Fifty years later, the legacies of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy still loom large.

Conservatives and Counterrevolutionaries

Lily Geismer reviews the second edition of Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind.”