"America’s Kind of Crazy—and it Doesn’t Go Away” - A Conversation with Rick Perlstein, Author of Reaganland

Inside the Hive

Vanity Fair

News

4.2 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2020

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1977, Jimmy Carter entered the White House with as much public goodwill as any president in modern times (an 80% approval rating) on the promise of restoring decency through political restraint and shared sacrifice. Sound familiar? On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Joe Hagan talks to historian Rick Perlstein about the latest edition to his spectacular three-volume history of the modern right wing, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, which documents the presidency of Carter and the emergence of Ronald Reagan in the wake of Watergate. When the bill came due for Carter's “ideological profligacy” of aiming to please everyone, Perlstein says, Carter crashed and Reagan rose to power on a strategy of “organized discontent,” building the reactionary coalitions that would haunt America for the next four decades. Perlstein’s history is a blueprint of the politics that brought us Trump—and a cautionary tale for President-elect Joe Biden. "We can’t change the past,” says Perlstein, "but we can live with our eyes open." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Inside the Hive. We are back. Another week we live to tell the tale. I'm
0:07.5	Emily Jane Fox. I'm here with my co-host Joe Hagen. Hello Joe.
0:12.4	Hello Emily Jane Fox. It's a pleasure to be back here with all the people.
0:17.0	Always.
0:18.0	Guys, it seems like you loved last week's episode. We're so excited. I loved it loved it to Joe I think you loved it so fun
0:26.2	we'll be we'll be sure to keep having conversations like that one if it was so
0:31.6	important I think it will continue to be so important and we will keep bringing you that kind of guest, that kind of conversation.
0:39.0	But thanks for continuing.
0:40.0	That was Mara Healy, the attorney general from Massachusetts, talking about the prospect of litigating,
0:49.5	indicting, soon to be former President Donald Trump, who seems to be, he'll be the last
0:57.8	to know that he's the former president appears.
1:00.8	But yeah, that was an amazing interview you did last week. The people seem to love it and we'll be bringing you more of that, of course, in the coming months.
1:10.0	Now, you know, there was an article sometime this week talking about, you know, the sort of different
1:17.6	views of what is going on in the country between Trump and Joe Biden and Biden is saying, hey, it's going to be a dark winter he's
1:24.0	saying you need to we need to get real here and Trump's still living in a fantasy land
1:27.9	and it sort of brought to mind speaking of guests. We have Rick Perlstein, the author of a
1:39.6	fantastic book called Reagan Land, America's Right Turned 1976 to 1980. We have him on the show
1:48.3	today and he's going to be talking about the birth of the right wing that we have all come to know over the
1:58.7	last many years how it came about in the after the ashes of Watergate and the collapse really of Jimmy Carter's
2:06.8	presidency and how it was built, the blueprint for it. And one of the things that you find and we all know is that, you know, there
2:17.9	was a view, a Reagan, Kim's smiling Ronald Reagan of California, you know, puts a happy smiling face on this sort of, you know, kind of, um,
2:32.0	scroognelike economic policy that he's going to deliver to the world and that will
	...

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