Rick Perlstein, a journalist and historian, wrote "Nixonland", a four-volume series on the history of America's political and cultural divisions, particularly on the right and the rise of movement conservatism from the 1950s to Ronald Reagan.
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Yeah, he wrote the famed Nixonland, now writes for American Prospect.
And you amusingly right always people are always like, isn't this kind of like 1968? And then now we've this year where it's like, okay, there's some parallels, some weaknesses, but I enjoyed you the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison was during this, this interregnum, where Biden was still stubbornly sticking around. He was like, you know, he was tweeting about how this country, the 10% of key voters are never going to vote for the fascist. And like, we can't worry about this. And we got to press forward. And, and you replied, does the DNC chair really think like this? Has he ever read about 20th century European history reminds me how in the 60s and 70s, how some democrats and pundits said polls indicating a Nixon landslide couldn't be accurate, you know, because people would never vote for a crook.
Yeah, it's Twitter brain, like, and it's responsiveness brain, my biggest observation going all the way back to 2015, when I was in the very first anti Trump super PAC was like, everybody that I talked to in Washington, politicians, strategists are just so responsive to like, what is happening right in front of their nose. And it's very challenging to get them to be like, wait a minute, this could end up going very badly. You know, what the opposite of kind of making every, you know, fraction of a second, you know, conflict into something that occupies all your energy, you know, is a fight you have to win. The opposite of that is wisdom, right? You know, I mean, is there no one in Washington, you know, like the giants of old, you know, who just kind of, you know, calmly sat back and I mean, think about, you know, I don't know, Game of Thrones, you're the master of whispers, who's just kind of like, you know, moving things into place and not just acting like a teenager dealing with, you know, the latest blow up in gym class.
You know, I like to say, you know, horse race journalism is great. It has its place, but it doesn't matter if the boys in the red MAGA hats blow up the track.
I mean, it's like once you came over to the other side, Tim, you saw how, you know, it's one big, one of my favorite things that I discovered in Nixon land was a detective novel written by E. Howard Hunt, you know, and kind of under a pseudonym.
