Tag: rick perlstein
Interview: Historian Rick Perlstein On The Conservative Roots Of Trumpism

Interview: Historian Rick Perlstein On The Conservative Roots Of Trumpism

This interview with historian and author Rick Perlstein originally appeared in the Berlin daily Neues Deutschland

After Trump won the election you published an essay titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” How did Trump’s election change your view of American conservatism?

The conservatives’ own story about their evolution has been that there were two streams of conservative political activity in the US: one that was extremist and conspiratorial, often viciously racist and even violent. And then there was a mainstream movement that policed those boundaries, associated with the figure of William F. Buckley and the magazine National Review. That mainstream conservatism, as the story goes, had largely prevailed, and the extremist elements were pretty much vestigial. What Trump demonstrates is that those much more feral streams in the movement never really went away. Knowing about Trump, it was a lot easier to see in retrospect how often that extremist underbrush was part of the story.

Is Trump even a conservative in the traditional sense? The National Review published an issue during the 2016 primaries titled “Against Trump,” in which various conservative intellectuals stated that a true conservative could not support Trump, because he violated conservative principles.

Yes, but if you look at the National Review website in the years before that, pretty much everything nasty and politically grotesque that we associate with Trump could be seen in National Review, too.

But weren’t there also actual policy disagreements, regarding the economy or trade for example? Did Trump in that sense violate the principles of US conservatism?

The problem with that idea is that if you survey self-described conservatives, about 90 percent identify with Trump. So you have to question the conservatives’ own story about what was at the heart of their movement. Conservatism, in the basic sense of valuing authority and hierarchy over equality and fluidity, has taken different forms in different times and different places. In the US in the 1920s, the strongest conservative force was the Ku Klux Klan; they ran some states. I saw KKK pamphlets from that time that supported universal government-provided healthcare — because of the fear that dirty immigrants would bring disease with them. The precise policy formulae that conservatism has exhibited over time have to be analytically subordinated to the bottom line: That they are the forces of order, hierarchy, and frankly, the strong leader.

You have used the term “Herrenvolk Democracy” to describe this kind of right-wing social populism.

Yes, but Trump seems to have largely abandoned that by now. Herrenvolk democracy would have been, if he had spent a lot of money on infrastructure, which he promised to do, and provided blue-collar construction jobs; if he had worked to shore up programs that serve mostly middle-class and elderly people, like Social Security or Medicare. But instead he has gone with the more traditional right-wing laissez-faire economic program.

Tucker Carlson of Fox News, one of the most vocal supporters of the President, has recently aired a segment which was very critical of neoliberal capitalism, which he said destroyed families and the social fabric of the country.

Tucker Carlson is a proponent of “herrenvolk democracy”. This has always been a tradition in American conservatism, but very minoritarian. You would never see this kind of thing on Fox News until now. But American right-wing populism has always seen the white middle class in kind of a pincer movement between the rich liberal elites from above, and the rent-seeking, parasitic poor from below.

Steve Bannon often speaks of the Davos Class.

The form that this “herrenvolk democracy” takes seems to be a dog-whistle for anti-Semitism: the idea that unseen, mysterious moneylenders and financial elites are determining the fate of ordinary Americans.


As you said, the actual practice of the Trump administration is not much different than how a traditional Republican would have governed. Traditional, more libertarian Republicans like Paul Ryan found a lot of common ground with Trump, regarding tax cuts, cuts to welfare programs, or gutting environmental protection.

Yes, but there are important differences, too. Ronald Reagan, for example, was actually quite reverent about the idea of immigration to the United States. He was very sentimental about it, he loved the idea of people wanting to come tot he US. That was a central form that his patriotism took.

But mobilizing white racial resentment has always been central to US conservatism, such as Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”  Is this racial politics under Trump more central to the GOP, or is it just different, or more honest and open?

It’s more central and it’s more open. Historically, elite conservative politicians did a much more careful job of stoking racial resentment without actually using the language of racial resentment. There is a civil religion in America that includes equality and a rejection of ethnic particularism. You see this in figures like Reagan and Newt Gingrich and generations of conservative politicians. And then you see Donald Trump, starting his campaign in Trump Tower by saying that Mexico is sending us their rapists. He ripped off that skin of civility and was perfectly willing to show the ugliness that other people were careful to hide.

After the election, there was lots of talk about how Trump was very successful with the “white working class,” which maybe hadn’t been voting Republican before. Do you think that the social base of Trump is different than the one that elected George W. Bush or Reagan?

That’s been exaggerated a bit. He got plenty of support from richer white suburban Republican voters as well, even though that is the most vulnerable part of his support. But he did receive an enormous emotional affection from this white working class in the areas of the country that were ruined by neoliberalism. Ronald Reagan had a lot of affection in those areas, too, where his voters were called “Reagan Democrats”: unionized workers who were doing very poorly in the international economy in the late 70s. So it’s an acceleration of a trend that’s been going on for a long time.

In Nixonland, you describe how Nixon in the 1960s engineered a realignment by using racial and culture war issues to split the Democratic voter coalition and create this new social base, on which the power of conservatism rested in the next decades. Is this still the basic split in the population?

Yes, it’s still indispensable to understand our time. In fact, I have a placard from a Donald Trump rally I went to that said: “Donald Trump Stands with the Silent Majority,” which of course was the central slogan that Nixon used back then. And Trump used the same slogan as Nixon did in 1968 in his acceptance speech: “Law and Order.” Donald Trump came out of that world, the early 1970s.

The way you describe Richard Nixon’s emotional appeal seems very similar to Trump today, how he presented himself as the advocate of the common man against the arrogant liberal elites.
To quote Nixon’s vice-president Spiro Agnew, “an effete corps of impudent snobs.” He was talking about the press, but the idea is that people who are more liberal are part of this Davos Class of international ruthless snobs who look down on everyone else.

 One central concept in this regard is resentment.

Resentment is contempt mixed with envy. And even though Trump is a very wealthy man, his habits of mind are very status conscious. He constantly talks about how he went to an Ivy League school, because he felt condescension by the intellectual class that also went to Ivy League schools. Trump went to a college that was very much on the lower rung of the Ivy League. This game started with Richard Nixon. This kind of class politics is very surreal, because Trump wraps himself in all this refinement, but it’s been said that Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of what a rich person looks like. His aesthetic is very much a brutish, arriviste flaunting of wealth.

And very vulgar too, like when he ordered cheeseburgers for his guests in the White House. It’s almost like he is doing it on purpose, to provoke the liberal condescension.

That was a call back to Michelle Obama, who had a vegetable garden in the White House, and made her big public issue healthy food for children. You see Republicans rebelling against this idea, as in “eating what you want to eat is what a real American does.” While Obama was eating all this fancy food that no one knows how to pronounce. It’s very much part of the class template of American politics, and Donald Trump is playing it to the hilt.

Very few Republicans still criticize the president, Mitt Romney for example. Did Trump take over the Republican Party, or is there any chance that it could revert back to more traditional, less populist styles?

No, these people have no popular constituency. They have a lot of articulate spokesmen, but no bodies on the ground.

Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan and Nixonland:The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. 

 

Hillary’s Reckless Off-Ramp Strategy

Hillary’s Reckless Off-Ramp Strategy

Published with permission from The Washington Spectator.

published an article on August 22 arguing against a dangerous strategy apparently being pursued by the Clinton presidential campaign, as revealed in a hacked email discussion between DNC officials last spring. In an effort to expedite the defection of Republicans offended by their party’s nominee, the campaign was building up Speaker Paul Ryan as an exemplar of the GOP’s sensible, “normal” wing—all while wedging off Donald Trump as a dangerous exception to Republicanism past. I said this violated a sterling principal of sound politics: when your opponent—in this case the Republican Party—is drowning, you throw them an anvil, not a life raft.

At the time, I had no idea the Clinton campaign was busy inflating that very life raft. On August 25, Clinton’s strategy came to the fore. In a speech in Nevada, she officially anointed Ryan as the exemplar of the Republican Party’s sensible, “normal” wing, sidelining Trump as the dangerous (“alt-right”) exception. All this, of course, was intended to expedite the defection of Republicans offended by their party’s nominee.

The speech, I was dismayed to discover, proved quite popular among liberals, some of whom singled me out for not understanding the sublime cleverness of the “off-ramp” Clinton had provided for indignant Republicans. After all, the person who wins the most votes wins the presidential election. (I know, I know, Mr. Gore, I mean usually wins the presidential election.) Additionally, a president with more friends in Washington has a better chance of advancing her agenda than one with fewer friends—and that, simply, was all Clinton’s speech was about.

But it’s not so simple. For decades, the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel has been an obsession with strategizing to win this election, often at the expense of building strategic capacity to keep winning elections and control the agenda for the next several elections—and decades—to come.

Conservatives have always been better at that. “Hell, the catacombs were good enough for the Christians,” National Review publisher William Rusher intoned after Richard Nixon sold out conservatives at the 1960 convention, and sent them hunkering down once more for the long term. Four years later, organizing sedulously, they managed to nominate Barry Goldwater. They did not retreat after Goldwater’s landslide defeat; instead, they set to laying the groundwork for Reagan 16 years later. The annals of conservatism are replete with 30-year plans, self-described “Leninist” strategies, and campaigns to lard the federal bureaucracy with stealth conservatives and the law schools with quiet ideologues disciplined enough to keep their records clean from embarrassing pronouncements that might sour Senate judicial confirmation hearings long in the future.

Democrats, meanwhile, are just glad to pull off the next presidential election. The fact that the presidential victory is often followed by an agenda-crushing defeat two years later always comes as a surprise.

This year, we see the same short-term thinking in the celebration over the Republican apostates pledging their hearts to Hillary.

The latest Republican big fish to go Clinton is James Glassman, the George W. Bush Institute’s founding executive director. He’s also the con man who co-authored the book Dow 36,000. The paperback version came out shortly before the 2001 recession, just in time to tank the portfolios of the credulous who believed his buncombe that “Stock prices could double, triple, or even quadruple tomorrow and still not be too high.” Even so, Glassman was able to catapult from bestseller lists to the editorship of the online business site, Tech Central Station, which specialized, reporter Nick Confessore explained in 2003, in taking “aggressive positions on one side or another of intra-industry debates.” Which side it took depended on the interests of the Washington PR and lobbying firm that owned the site.

Because conservatism is fundamentally corrupt, Glassman was rewarded with the editorship of the American Enterprise Institute’s magazine, where he helped pump up the housing bubble with arguments for George W. Bush’s “ownership society” that home-buying should be made easier and that taxes on dividends must be cut. As he wrote in 2005: “People who own stocks and real estate—who possess wealth of their own—have a deeper commitment to their community, a more profound sense of family obligation and personal responsibility, a stronger identification with the national fortunes and a personal interest in our capitalist economy. (They also have a greater propensity to vote Republican.)”

For his slithering service, Bush named him his Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and put him in charge of selling the glories of the American way of life to the Middle East. After Bush’s second term ended, Glassman snagged his current position as executive director of the George W. Bush Institute.

But what’s the harm? Don’t right-wing grifters’ votes count the same as horny-handed tillers of the soil? Won’t the news that famous Republicans are breaking for Hillary help ordinary Republicans stomach the switch, too? It’s not like Glassman is going to be her treasury secretary. Democrats have an election to win, and it’s less than two months away—doesn’t Team Clinton want to pile up as many supporters as it possibly can?

The flaw in this argument is that it overlooks something: the potential problems come in the longer term. Large numbers of supporters of only glancing or provisional commitment to your governing agenda, shoehorned into your tent in time for Election Day, can become quite the liability for effectuating that agenda when it comes time to govern.

Just ask Jimmy Carter.

Carter was elected president in 1976 by riding a wave of disgust with untrustworthy government, a victory foreshadowed in 1974 by the election of a passel of what became known as Congress’s “Watergate Babies.” Many of these fresh-faced political youngsters retired as legendary liberal lions: Representatives George Miller and Henry Waxman, Senators Tom Harkin and Chris Dodd. A lot of them, however, were explicitly like Gary Hart. As I wrote in my book on the period, The Invisible Bridge:

Hart was the rock star of the 1974 Democratic candidates. . . . His outmaneuvered opponent, the once-popular two term conservative incumbent Peter Dominick, said he seemed to be “trying to get to the right of Attila the Hun. . . .” His stock speech, “The End of the New Deal,” argued that his party was hamstrung by the very ideology that was supposed to be its glory—that “if there is a problem, create an agency and throw money at the problem.” It included lines like, “The ballyhooed War on Poverty succeeded only in raising the expectations, but not the living conditions, of the poor.” That was false: the poverty rate was 17.3 percent when LBJ’s Economic Opportunity Act was enacted in 1964 and 11.2 percent as Gary Hart spoke. But such claims did speak to the preconceptions of people whom Hart claimed must become the new base of the Democratic Party: the affluent suburbs, whose political power had been quietly expanding through 1960s via redistricting and reapportionment. He called those who “clung to the Roosevelt model long after it had ceased to relate to reality,” who still thought the workers, farmers, and blacks of the New Deal coalition were where the votes were, “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats.” He held them in open contempt.

The 1976 elections brought even more not-so-liberal Democrats to Capitol Hill, while in the White House, Jimmy Carter wore contempt for the pet causes of the Eleanor Roosevelt-types (Keynesian deficit spending, unions) on his sleeve.

All in all, it was a complicated, transitional time in the history of the party. Carter also came into the White House pledging fealty to some ambitious liberal goals: a landmark full-employment bill that would include a government jobs program if unemployment fell below three percent; national health insurance; a law making it easier to join a union and harder for bosses to get away with punishing workers who did so; a federal agency devoted to advocating for consumers.

When the 95th Congress convened in January 1977, with 292 Democrats and 143 Republicans in the House and only 38 Republicans in the Senate, the universal presumption was that all of Carter’s initiatives would pass. None of them did.

There were many reasons for this. One of them was because Jimmy Carter simply didn’t want some of these laws to pass: that was the case for the full-employment measure. He nominally supported it because his advisers told him he had no choice if he wanted to remain a credible leader of the Democratic Party, as was the case with labor-law reform. He was foursquare for the consumer agency, however. He was even more passionate—it was his favorite campaign promise—about passing a progressive reform of the tax code.

In the end, each failed more miserably than the last. The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment bill “passed”—in a form so eviscerated that it earned the nickname the “Humphrey-Hawkins-Hatch” bill, after conservative Republican freshman Orrin Hatch, who successfully gutted it with amendments. Consumer agency and labor-law reform fell to what were at the time the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns in history.

The tax-reform story was the most extraordinary of them all. In January 1978, Carter announced his ambitious plans to revise the tax code in order to make the rich and corporations pay their fair share. He was delivering on his most aggressive campaign promise: he would fix a tax code that he called, on just about every stop on the campaign trail in 1976, a “disgrace to the human race.” Ninety-six percent of the population would have seen benefits from the reforms he proposed. Drafting off their shocking success scuttling the consumer and labor bills, the right wing doubled down. Republicans introduced a radical reduction in corporate tax rates, promising the loaves-and-fishes deception that would become so familiar in the Reagan years—that the benefits would trickle down to enrich all Americans.

It didn’t even take Reagan’s election to get there. In October 1978, a Congress with more than two-to-one Democratic representation voted for the first time in history to make the tax code more regressive. In each of the progressive measures that was defeated, the deciding votes came from first- or second-term Democratic congressmen. The reason for this poor fortune for the New Deal legacy, paradoxically, was precisely what was understood to be the good fortune of the Democratic Party: habitual Republicans disgusted with their party after Watergate were voting for Democrats for the first time. Many of the Watergate Babies represented traditionally Republican suburbs. They went to Washington and voted their constituencies. It was one of the reasons—though there were many—that Jimmy Carter geared up to run for his second term with the albatross of a failed presidency around his neck.

The parallel to Hillary Clinton is partial, of course. If she wins, there will almost certainly be a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, not a Democratic supermajority. Unlike Jimmy Carter, all evidence—despite what the conspiracy theories of Hillary-haters on the left suggest—points to her as a politician who is publicly committed to a far more Rooseveltian vision of the economy. In a little-covered speech in August to the Detroit Economic Club—an audience of business people, as New York magazine reported—she “reiterated her opposition to the TPP in the strongest terms she’s ever used on that subject,” and “called for a public health-care option in all 50 states, free public-college tuition for the middle class . . . and paid family leave.”

Yet, as Politico reported, Team Clinton was simultaneously pursuing “a behind-the-scenes recruitment effort that’s been months in the making,” winning over Republicans disgusted by Trump, like failed Hewlett-Packard CEO and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, and Matt Higgins, former press secretary to Rudy Giuliani and McCain 2008. Leslie Dach, a former executive at Walmart (which just happens to be the most savagely anti-union corporation in America), has headed these outreach efforts since last spring. Was Dach vetted for her accord with the position, as Clinton put it in the Detroit speech, that “strengthening unions doesn’t just serve members, it leads to better wages and working conditions for all employees”? Would Higgins, the Giuliani flack, feel comfortable in a room with the Mothers of the Movement, the collective of mothers of victims of police violence who spoke so eloquently at the Democratic National Convention? Does the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute expect Clinton to aspire to the sterling example of George W. Bush’s public-policy accomplishments, in exchange for the votes Glassman intends to deliver?

Iwish I saw evidence that Team Clinton even cared about these concerns. As a campaign senior strategist said, “Campaigns are always looking for ways to build your coalitions of voters. To the extent we can add to that by appealing to some moderate Republicans and some Republican-leaning independents—that’s worth some energy. It’s not going to consume the campaign, but it is worth the energy.” You know when it’s not worth the energy? When it weakens your party in the long term.

Or, if it attenuates the coalition of legislators on Capitol Hill that will be needed to get done what Hillary Clinton says she wants done—if not in 2017, perhaps in 2019, when a Democratic House majority might be within more realistic reach. That was the fear expressed by the DNC’s communication director in the May 2016 email I wrote about in August: efforts “to embrace the ‘Republicans fleeing Trump’ side, but not hold down ballot GOPers accountable” might be great for getting more votes for Clinton, but these come at the price of fewer wins for Democratic congressional candidates.

What might pose even greater danger is success: if the Clinton people are right and Democrats up and down the ticket harvest greater-than-expected dividends with a “we’re not Trump, come on in, normal Republicans, the water’s fine!” message. Politicians are greedy and short-sighted, almost always placing electoral victory ahead of long-term legislative accomplishment. If Democratic congressional candidates outperform their own expectations and attribute their success to cross-over voters who are ideological twins of the Higginses, Glassmans, and Whitmans, once in office they may work to hold on to those voters.

If that happens, here is an all-to-predictable eventuality for 2018. Political parties are greedy, too, and it’s not a stretch to imagine that the party could begin recruiting candidates who “build your coalition of voters” by “appealing to some moderate Republicans and some Republican-leaning independents.”

As I’ve written, we have been down that sad road before. In 2006, Rahm Emanuel, then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, “aggressively recruited right-leaning candidates, frequently military veterans, including former Republicans.” Democrats won the battle, taking the House back from the Republicans for the first time since 1994. But they lost the war:

The 2007 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. One of his winners, the football star Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, would not even commit to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and was one of many Rahm recruits to vote against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care.

The adventure ended with the biggest Republican House majority since the 1920s.

People will say this is an argument for purity. It’s actually a plea for practicality. Hillary Clinton will almost certainly win the presidential election on November 8. That’s merely the battle for today, when anti-Trump votes come cheap. But this election is not just about rescuing the nation from Trump. It’s about rescuing the nation from conservatism. That’s the long march. It cannot be won with conservatives in tow.

Rick Perlstein is The Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.

Photo: Rick Perlstein is The Washington Spectator’s national correspondent

Diverse And Perverse: The Coalition That Trump Built

Diverse And Perverse: The Coalition That Trump Built

The convention began with a prayer for God to bless his chosen political party, from a black preacher who announced it was fitting and proper to do so “because we are electing a man in Donald Trump who believes in the name of Jesus Christ.” And because “our enemy is not other Republicans, but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.”

Rev. Mark Burns is a devotee of the “prosperity gospel.” At a Trump rally in March, he had said: “There is no black person, there is no yellow person, there is no red person, there’s only green, people! Green is money!”

The game Trump and Burns are playing is an old one. A candidate, party, or movement can’t be racially divisive if black people are out front spouting its praises. Early in the 1960s, the John Birch Society toured a black former Communist Party member who affirmed that, yes, Moscow did really intend to turn America’s Southern states into a black-run colony of the Soviet Union—and that this whole civil rights thing was all a communist plot. In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan had a black loyalist on the Republican National Committee, Dr. Gloria Toote, to help him make his case that the “Negro has delivered himself to those who have no other intention than to create a Federal plantation.”

Even George Wallace kept a pet Negro for the same purpose: Clay Smothers, a state legislator from Texas who once introduced a bill to ban homosexuals from public university campuses. In 1977, when the federal government sponsored a historic national women’s convention in Houston, chock full of feminist and gay rights activists, Smothers spoke at the massive counter-rally Phyllis Schlafly organized across town. “I have enough civil rights to choke a hungry goat. I ask for public rights. . . . Let’s do something about these misfits and perverts over in the Sam Houston Coliseum. I want to segregate my family from them!”

In Cleveland, Pastor Burns had competition. Sheriff David Clarke Jr. of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, a black version of Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, took the stage on the opening night. Dressed in full formal cop regalia, Clarke bellowed, “Ladies and Gentleman, I would like to make something very clear. Blue! Lives! Matter!”—predictably dragging in Rev. Martin Luther King’s “seamless garment of destiny” to make the case. Clarke calls Black Lives Matter a “hate group,” and is one of the rare law enforcement officials to ally with the National Rifle Association.

He likes riding in parades on horseback, wearing a cowboy hat, and posing with rifles. In 2006 he forced his deputies to sit through mandatory evangelization sessions from something called the Fellowship of Christian Centurions. In a series of radio advertisements in 2013 he advised residents of Milwaukee that because the local constabulary could no longer protect them they should arm themselves. He hosts a “David Clarke: The People’s Sheriff” podcast on Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” platform.

Clarke was such a hero in the House of Trump that one of the biggest draughts of applause on the final evening of the convention came when his face merely appeared in the film clip introducing the candidate.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re still on Night One. Let me tell you what else happened, in case you couldn’t bring yourself to watch. Or, if you did, some madness you might have missed.

There was the pimping out of grieving parents: three of them, all identified on the telescreen above a chyron that read: “VICTIM OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS.”

Two of the three had lost children in car accidents for which undocumented immigrants were responsible—and as everyone knows, red-blooded, native-born Yankees never are. “I call them illegal aliens,” Sabine Burden said, to roars. The driver only got 35 days in jail for the accident. Because Obama.

“We are electing a man in Donald Trump who believes in the name of Jesus Christ.”

In Berlin, 80 years ago, the sign would have read, “VICTIM OF JEWS.” It’s always someone.

On Tuesday I spent an emotional morning with my hosts, Henry Halem and Sandra Perlman Halem, who have lived for 48 years in Kent, Ohio, where Henry was an art professor at Kent State University and was on campus on May 4, 1970, when four students at a Vietnam War protest were shot to death by National Guardsmen. Henry and Sandra relive the day like it was yesterday.

Sandra is a playwright and the oral historian for the Kent State Memorial. I studied Kent State closely for my bookNixonland. On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon went on TV to deliver an Orwellian argument about how he was shrinking the Vietnam War by expanding it, by invading neutral Cambodia. He had no choice, he explained: “My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years . . . great universities are being systematically destroyed . . . If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

A few days later, to a gathering of employees in the halls of the Pentagon, Nixon sharpened the contradictions between those Middle Americans and their sons fighting loyally in Vietnam—“I’ve seen them, they’re the greatest”—and “these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.”

A politically opportunistic Republican governor named James Rhodes barked out a briefing to visiting journalists: “They’re worse than the Brownshirts and the Communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.

And I want to say this: they’re not going to take over a campus.” That rhetoric set the table for Middle America’s response to the wave of student protest that followed.

Some veterans of Kent State, desperate to wrench meaning out of the meaningless, cling to an interpretation of what happened next as some sort of elite conspiracy: the president passing down an order through his loyal janissary Rhodes, down through the ranks of the National Guard units he commanded, to stage a useful little massacre to show the homegrown dissidents who was boss.

Sandy Halem, who has interviewed hundreds of witnesses on all sides of the tragedy, knows better. These scared, poorly trained weekend warriors were not crack cadres of centurions, but ordinary people who read their newspapers and watched their Walter Cronkite and heard students preaching about revolution and anarchy. Saying things like, as Jerry Rubin had on the Kent State campus a month earlier, “Until you are prepared to kill your parents, you aren’t ready for revolution.”

The young protesters naively presumed the guardsmen’s guns could not possibly have been loaded (the black students, better schooled in the ways of the world, knew they were, and had already high-tailed it off campus). They threw rocks, tossed back tear gas canisters, and mocked the soldiers. The guardsmen who loosed the volleys of 67 shots almost certainly believed they were acting in defense of their lives. They had been conditioned by their president and their governor to believe they were facing down monsters.

Recalls Halem: “The next day, when I returned to school, in Akron, Ohio, a teacher came to me, and he swore that he knew somebody at Robinson Hospital who said, ‘Allison Krause had syphilis, and a knife on her leg.’ I was told that!”

Allison Krause was one of the four students killed that day.

“I said, ‘What are you saying? That that’s a crime? Because, if she did have syphilis, that was a reason to shoot her?’”

Which is where Donald Trump comes in, Halem observed. This is how political violence works. “You begin to take all kinds of ways of changing people’s perception: who the Other is. And as soon as you can lower the Other—which, you know, Trump has done wonderfully. He’s used the word rapist. That’s a horrible word. Murderer . . . One group has been lowered; a different group has been raised. And the difference is that the one group can tell the other group to leave. Put on buses and taken away.”

“Those of us who understand what that kind of language did in World War II are thrilled that the Germans gave up war—because they were good at it. They understood that ability to lower the human threshold.”

What she said next might make us wonder whether Trump isn’t, in a certain respect, worse.

“My concern today is that he has no understanding of the power of his words. My fear is that he doesn’t understand he has a book of matches in his hand. And any time he dehumanizes a group—a group, not an individual—he allows people who are either in charge or are supposed to keep the peace, or the police, or whatever, he makes them afraid just enough that the hair trigger pulls.”

I ventured to the convention hall, to hear who would be dehumanized next.

“You know, it used to be called ‘invasion.’ Now it’s called illegal immigration.”

I’m interviewing a minister of Christ’s Gospel from Cleveland, Janet Porter, who in the 1990s had been a spokesperson for John Kasich’s House Budget Committee. Back when “he was a conservative,” she says. Chris Christie has wrapped up his already-infamous speech that had delegates braying for Hillary Rodham Clinton to be hanged from the neck until she is dead. For sins like once saying that Assad of Syria was a “reformer,” a common, bipartisan opinion at the time. Yet the Torquemada of Trenton piled at her feet the 400,000 corpses who died “at the hands of the man Hillary defended.”

“We must ask this question: Hillary Clinton, as an awful judge of the character of a dictator-butcher in the Middle East, guilty or not guilty?”

“GUILTY!” of course.

Guilty of not overthrowing Assad in Syria; though the mob had already also found her guilty of not not overthrowing Qaddafi, rendering her responsible for “Libya’s economy in ruins, death and violence in the streets, and ISIS now dominating the country.” Then she was charged with personally arranging the kidnaping of “hundreds of innocent young girls two years ago [who] are still missing today.”

For haven’t you heard? The crimes of Boko Haram that happened after Hillary Clinton was secretary of state are hers alone to answer for, because she had complied with the request of the Nigerian government and the pleas of academic experts on Nigeria to refrain from designating Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization, in part because that would make it illegal for NGOs to even communicate with members of the group to urge them to renounce violence, or to conduct scholarly inquiry.

And, of course, she was the one who planted the bomb that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi.

I observe to my interviewee that, as a historian, I’ve never observed this intense lynch-mob mentality at a political convention.

“Well, you know, what’s interesting is, if we look at the facts, Hillary Clinton is really getting away with murder.”

What does Rev. Porter mean by “murder”?

“Well, look at our ambassador in Libya. And by the way, he was an open homosexual. She should be prosecuted for a hate crime. . . . She turned her back on our American ambassador and let him die.”

I ask her how this all compares to 1983, when during Lebanon’s civil war the Reagan administration ordered sentries at the U.S. barracks in Beirut to keep their weapons unloaded and the gate wide open, and a truck bomb killed 241 U.S and 58 French servicemen and six civilians.

I ask her about Reagan’s response—“Anyone who’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.”—after a second jihadist attack killed 24 at an embassy annex in Beirut the following year because security precautions requested by Congress had not been completed. (I can be mean that way.)

She mumbled, “Well, you know, everyone makes mistakes.” Then moved on to Clinton’s “pattern, of not mistakes, but actually things that are systematically costing American lives.”

I later do a little research. Rev. Porter’s rap sheet at People for the American Way’s “Right Wing Watch” reveals that she advocates for a law to outlaw abortion from the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected. Her “Don’t Target Our Daughters” campaign has focused on Target’s “invitation to predators”— by which she means the retail chain’s nondiscriminatory restroom policy. She has, “long warned that increasing acceptance of gay rights will turn Christians into criminals who will eventually be rounded up and tossed in jail.” And she produced a documentary arguing that LBGTQ activists should be criminally charged for “grooming” children for homosexuality.

And this was just someone I buttonholed at random for a reaction to Chris Christie’s speech. Throw a rock in this crowd, and you’re likely to hit someone who pines for the days when justice was served by throwing rocks.

I sought out a moderate Republican state legislator from Illinois I had interviewed the previous Friday and asked what he thought about Chris Christie’s auto-da-fé.

“The Democratic convention, the Republican convention,” he responds, “let me tell you, Rick, they come here and they drink the Kool-Aid.” That’s just the way it is.

I ask if he was comfortable with the chants.

He pauses uncomfortably.

“It’s a political convention.”

I tell him about the chilling interview I just did with the minister.

You’re gonna hear some crazy stuff at both conventions. That’s just somewhat part of the game.”

I think of a quote from a wise old conservative that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

A few other acts were on the undercard on Wednesday:

Laura Ingraham, always leading the party’s anti-immigrant crusade: “I asked, ‘Mom, why are people burning the American flag?’ And she looked at me, and she answered, ‘Honey, because their parents didn’t teach them about respect.’” The radio hate-talker belies her panegyric on respect by describing Hillary Clinton as “the woman who orchestrated America’s decline.”

Phil Ruffin, a magnate in casinos, dog tracks, petroleum, convenience stores—and real estate deals like the Trump International Tower in Las Vegas: “If Donald tells you something, put it in the bank.”

Florida Attorney General Pam Biondi: “Lock her up—I love that!” A phrase she would be wise to avoid after accepting a $25,000 donation from the Trump family foundation four days before announcing she would not be joining a probe of Trump University.

A Hispanic state senator from Kentucky: “Hispanics believe what Republicans believe.” (Did I hear a boo?)

Another black preacher, naturally.

A fracking magnate, lying about “American energy independence.”

A pyramid scheme huckster. (I’m saving a whole article for her.)

On Thursday, when Ivanka Trump introduced her father, I returned to the most haunting thought that Sandra Halem left me with.

“You have to be able to be willing to walk through sewage to go where these people are going,” she observed. “It scares me. It really gets scary.”

She had disappeared into a dark place then gathered herself to say, “I come from a family where there was sexual abuse.” She recalls Donald Trump saying were Ivanka not his daughter, he would want to date her because she’s so hot.

“You don’t ever talk about your daughter sexually. Ever. . . . He is sexualizing her. He is giving her away sexually. He is putting her in a box.”

“Why does he do it? It makes you more powerful.”

You shudder when you hear something like that, when you write something like that down.

Donald Trump spoke.

Then the Most Reverend Roger W. Gries, auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, prayed.

He began with a cackle: “You brought another championship to Cleveland tonight,” he said, in direct address to God and the Republican Party, which then received his benediction as God’s one true holy political vessel.

He prayed for “those about to be born, and those about to see You at the end of life.” He prayed for those present to be imbued with “the courage to bring the pro-life platform of this 2016 platform of the Republican National Convention to fulfillment”—the kind of right-wing homily Catholics hear at Mass every Sunday. He prayed for “all our beloved safety forces.” He prayed for “all our men and women in uniform.”

Boilerplate, really.

He sought God’s blessing for “all those who seek to serve the common good by seeking public office, and especially Donald J. Trump and Michael Pence.” Then he prayed that “we will bring America back to life, bring America back to work, and bring America together, one nation under God.” I wondered if he meant that this Trumpian God he worships believes that America under Barack Obama is dead.

I told myself I was being ungenerous, and kept listening. And recalled something I thought I heard earlier in his benediction.

I reviewed the tape. And there it was: a Catholic bishop had indeed beseeched the Almighty to make Donald Trump and Mike Pence “worthy to serve you, by serving your country.”

His country.

God is a Republican.

America is his chosen land.

Donald J. Trump is his prophet.

These thugs actually believe it. God help us that they might be stopped.

Rick Perlstein is The Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.

Don’t Save The Speaker—Let Him Go Down With The Trump Ship

Don’t Save The Speaker—Let Him Go Down With The Trump Ship

Published with permission from The Washington Spectator.

When your opponent is drowning, the old saying goes, throw him an anvil. Is Hillary Clinton throwing hers a life raft instead?

In May, the Democratic National Committee’s communication director Luis Miranda wrote to the DNC’s chief operating officer, Amy Dacey, with a serious complaint. The e-mail, part of the trove released by WikiLeaks, began this way:

The Clinton rapid response operation we deal with have been asking us to disaggregate Trump from down ballot Republicans. They basically want to make the case that you either stand with Ryan or with Trump, that Trump is much worse than regular Republicans and they don’t want us to tie Trump to other Republicans because they think it makes him look normal.

They wanted us to basically praise Ryan when Trump was meeting Ryan, or at a minimum to hold him up as an example. So they want to embrace the “Republicans fleeing Trump” side, but not hold down ballot GOPers accountable.

That’s a problem. I pushed back that we cannot have our state parties hold up Paul Ryan as a good example of anything. And that we can’t give down ballot Republicans such an easy out. We can force them to own Trump and damage them more by pointing out that they’re just as bad on specific policies, make them uncomfortable where he’s particularly egregious, but asking state Parties to praise House Republicans like Ryan would be damaging for the Party down ballot.

What a document!

Rarely has the tragedy of the Democratic Party across these past several decades of Republican radicalization been rendered in such crystalline form. Continues Miranda, “We would basically have to throw out our entire frame that the GOP made Trump through years of divisive and ugly politics. We would have to say that Republicans are reasonable and that the good ones will shun Trump.” He concluded, “It just doesn’t work from the party side,” then added a P.S.: “It might be a good strategy ONLY for Clinton (which I don’t believe), I think instead she needs as many voices as possible on the same page.”

You read this, and 20 years of Democratic Party history flashes before your eyes.

You see the mid-1990s, when President Bill Clinton, kneecapped by his botched initiative to welcome gays into the military, the defeat of his healthcare plan in 1994, and the Republican takeover of Congress the same year, responded by taking Dick Morris’s advice and defining his administration via the neologism of “triangulation”—living halfway between the screaming lunacy of Newt Gingrich on the one side, and the Congressional liberals in his own party on the other, thus enshrining a false equivalency that Democrats fighting to preserve the social safety net and perhaps to even expand it must be, well, just as extreme as the guy who said, “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”

There was 2004, when John Kerry’s Democratic National Convention team—at the height of the Iraq debacle, a faltering economy, and a series of corporate scandals capped by the collapse of a fraudulent company called Enron, run by one of George Bush’s old pals—vetted all speeches to make sure they didn’t criticize George Bush. (“Bush will come up this week,” explained Kerry spokesman Stephanie Cutter, “but we don’t have to tell the story of George Bush because the American people are living it every day. What we’re talking about is the future.” Only old man Jimmy Carter, God bless him, exercising a former president’s prerogative, dared defy the ukase.)

Then there was 2008 when, waking up to the smoking ruins all around them, the American people repudiated conservatism so thoroughly that Republican pundits like David Brooks began opining that their party’s “stale, government-is-the-problem, you can’t trust the government” rhetoric was “a disaster for the Republican Party.”

And when, instead of throwing ’em anvils, our new president made Kerry’s 2004 mistake all-but-official party policy. As he put it of our friends on the other side of the aisle in 2010, “no person, no party, has a monopoly on wisdom,” and it was time to find “common ground.”

Republicans, of course, do things differently. On the campaign trail in 1984, Ronald Reagan would say of the previous, Democratic, administration, “We were being led by a team with good intentions and bad ideas—people with all the common sense of Huey, Dewey, and Louie.” He called the Democrats’ ideology “snake-oil cures.”

The economy had bounded back that year from 10 percent unemployment, thanks to the delayed effect of austerity policies put in place by Jimmy Carter and his Fed chairman Paul Volcker. Reagan endorsed that course by continuing it, while making hay politically by assigning responsibility for every bad thing that had ever happened to the other party, and every thing good to his own.

This was his political job as he saw it: etching the Democratic Party in the minds of the electorate as not normal.

That’s the key word in the e-mail I quoted above: “normal.” That Clinton’s advisers “basically want to make the case that you either stand with Ryan or with Trump, that Trump is much worse than regular Republicans and they don’t want us to tie Trump to other Republicans because they think it makes him look normal.”

It would take more pages than there are minutes in the day, of course, to document fully the ways Paul Ryan Republicanism—“regular” Republicanism—should not in any way, shape, or form be considered “normal.” Let one example stand for zillions: the time even-handed Ezra Klein scoured and scoured Ryan’s 2012 vice-presidential acceptance speech, worried he’d be seen as unfair if he ran an article by one of his colleagues that found only one true statement in the entire text—but was forced to admit that even that one statement was an exaggeration: “even the definition of ‘true’ that we’re using is loose. ‘Legitimate’ might be a better word. . . . Ryan’s claims weren’t even arguably true.”

And, of course, Paul Ryan’s Republican Party nominated Donald Trump. The party did so with Paul Ryan’s eventual blessing. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s new campaign chief Steve Bannon publishes a web empire, the Breitbart News Network, that made its bones savaging Ryan—which renders him more vulnerable within his own party than at any time since he came to Congress in 1999. At best, he’s treading water. Now is not the time to help him swim.

You can understand why Hillary Clinton feels she needs to preserve a relationship with Ryan. If she becomes president, after all, she needs to work with the Speaker of the House. But if the eight previous years have taught us anything, it’s that the Speaker of the House (if the Republicans hold on to their majority) will not believe he needs to work with her. There’s a scenario, of course, in which he might be forced to work with her: if the verdict this November 8 is so devastating for the Republicans, up and down the ticket, that even Paul Ryan knows there must be a reckoning with his party’s radical past.

But it has to come up and down the ticket. Republican congressional candidates have to be tied to a Trumpism that is understood as the apotheosis of the recent history of the Republican Party. Because if they are not, it would be oh so easy for the survivors to say, on November 9: It ain’t me, babe. I’m a Ryan conservative, not a Trumpite. We Ryanites are normal, respectable folk. After all, even Hillary Clinton says so. And, when we utter that oath of office once more in January, and take our seats in the Capitol, we promise to go back to doing normal Republican things: treating the Democratic President as an illegitimate imposter; treating the responsible media as terrorist-abetting, lying cheats; making sure the economy works for the one percent, and shredding the government functions that work for the rest.

Congratulations, President Clinton. On that day, you will have “won.” But you will also have lost the best chance we’ll have in a generation to do what Franklin Roosevelt did: turn the Republican Party into pariahs.

Rick Perlstein is The Washington Spectator’snational correspondent.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore