Post-War Prosperity to "Lifeboat Economics"?

An interview with acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein is a bestselling American historian who has written extensively about post-60s conservatism in the U.S. He has published four books, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014), and Reaganland: America's Right Turn, 1976–1980 (2020).

I spoke to Rick ahead of the release of a new edition of Before the Storm. We mostly talked about Reaganland, although our discussion touched on his other books too. During the interview, I wanted to get a sense of how he connects the politics of the Reagan era to those of the Trump era.

Note: There are two moments where my internet cut out for about thirty seconds. I did what I could to preserve the conversational thread, but I marked the moments so the reader is aware.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Marco Lama: I want to start generally, how the book [Reaganland] started for you, what the seed was.

Rick Perlstein: I got obsessed with the 1960s when I was a teenager. I would go to this used bookstore in Milwaukee called The Renaissance Bookstore. It was a time in which there was a certain narrative, even a mythology, about the 1960s that privileged the experience of baby boomers. Young baby boomer activists who, as the story goes, arose out of this sleepy 1950s seized America by the throat, called it to its better angels, and burned out in this radical Blaze of Glory by the 1970s but left behind this freer and fairer nation, which in many ways they did. But this story was almost like a heroic narrative about the people who did that work and them telling their own story. It left out the fact that if you look at it from one perspective the right wing won. When Eisenhower was President, conservatives were very disappointed by him, because he basically adapted the reforms of the New Deal, and it was much in the same way when I was writing this in the 1990s, in Bill Clinton’s second term—another two-term President—the Democrats had very much adopted a softer version of Reaganism. So part of my fascination was just as a political actor and a citizen, how does an ideological faction take over a party that’s very committed to moderation, centrism, and I always conceived of it as a series.

First, I thought three books, and it turned out to be four books. I conceived of it out of this obsession with the 60s that started when I was a teenager—burning down buildings and the Black Panthers and the anti war movement—and came out of this bored out of my head at the 1980s. You have the privilege or curse of living in interesting times. 1980s, not so interesting. And so I would go to this used bookstore and find all these fascinating 60s books. But I always, always ran across these books from the 60s that claimed [for example] that the Beatles were a communist conspiracy. So I always had this evolving sense that, in fact, the 60s resembled much more of a civil war. That started me down the path. I was like 26 years old when I started this project. 30 years. It’s pretty crazy. The book before that, The Invisible Bridge, was originally conceived to go from 1972 to 1980 but when I got to like page 900—I mean, I do tend to go on. So that’s how the project came about. They’re all kind of written under the influence of the period in which I was writing them.

The first one in the 1990s, very much thinking about why a party gets enraptured by moderation and how ideologues react against that, at a time in which that was happening in my life with the Democrats. Nixonland was written during the George W Bush years, in which a lot of portents of the authoritarianism we’re seeing now were present in the Iraq War, in the war on terror. The Invisible Bridge was written during the Obama years, and a big theme of that is America was becoming a much more self critical and mature nation after the loss in Vietnam and after Watergate. It’s a story about how Ronald Reagan enters the scene, releasing people from that obligation to look hard at their past, which, obviously, is a huge theme of what we’re seeing in the MAGA world.

[The internet cuts out here for about thirty seconds.]

Rick: My interpretation, and historians interpretations generally, of the conservative movement has changed with the rise of Donald Trump, rooted in a lot harsher judgment. To give one example of something that I don’t think would have been in Reaganland had it been written 10 or 20 years earlier, there’s a lot about the Ku Klux Klan. I realized in my research that the Ku Klux Klan was actually becoming a serious force in a lot of these elections and became an issue in the 1980 election. I think I might have tucked that away as a curiosity. Something that’s always been present in my book—but bringing it much more to the forefront—is how a conservatism within the Republican party, that sought to be mainstream, was always fighting against much darker impulses within its own coalition.

Marco: You mentioned when Reagan is urged to start talking about states rights, and he goes to the, I’m blanking on the name of the fair—

Rick: The Neshoba county fair. It’s really a fairly famous moment.

Marco: Yeah. So that stood out to me. It seems like there’s a reluctance on his part, but it’s still something he’s willing to do.

Rick: Which is interesting, because that’s a bit of revisionism for me. The Democrats, in a rare outburst of aggressiveness, really, really jumped down his throat about that. Because they were so good at framing that as a terrible thing, which it was, in its way, it’s very strongly remembered in the political history of America. But I think if you asked people what it had been like, the reluctance wasn’t something people thought about, and that’s such an important theme in thinking about the right. The question of the dog whistle versus the train whistle. That they’re always trying to make what they’re doing sound respectable, but there’s always this menacing undercurrent underneath. The Neshoba County Fair moment was really interesting because, like I say, he was also going before the Urban League, this black group, the same week, and he did get a lot of black support. So, these raise really perennial questions about how reaction works in American politics and how deeply rooted it is in race, how it relies on these forbidden impulses that liberals are often overconfident that we’ve placed in the past.

Marco: I have a question about the NAACP that I want to touch on in a little bit, but I’m wondering if you can talk more about how you see the period that you cover in this book as being part of the process that ultimately leads to Trump’s presidency in 2016 and then where we are now. Trump appears in the end, when he’s the hot shot real estate guy.

Rick: Oh, he was such a huge fixture of my childhood in the 1980s. He was this very Reaganite figure, culturally, because it was kind of kissing goodbye to the 60s attitudes about populism, through this very pseudo-aristocratic worship of wealth. Compare Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, where they’re using the most plain paper, and he’s wearing the most plain suit, and people were pushing back against the aristocratic trappings of the presidency, and that was symbolic of a certain kind of turn away from American arrogance. Among a certain group of Republicans, former Republicans, and maybe mainstream Democrats, there’s this desperate wish to see Trump as a discontinuous break with a more respectable Republican Party. But, if you notice, there are lots of figures hiding in there who are very prominent in the MAGA right, like this guy Roger Stone. He’s the guy who delivers a suitcase with $100,000. Or Rupert Murdoch, who really plumped for Ronald Reagan in 1980, and Ronald Reagan rewarded him by giving him American citizenship, so he could own TV stations. But, at the same time, there are important discontinuities. Do you remember the debate in the Texas primary between George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan, where they’re competing with each other to see who can say the nicest things about Mexican immigrants?

Marco: No, I don’t particularly remember that episode,

Rick: Or even, Ronald Reagan’s most celebrated campaign appearance during the 1980 election was with the Statue of Liberty in the background. He’s talking about how important immigrants are to the American dream, and that can be a little misleading, because, on the one hand, during his presidency, he did sign this very liberal immigration reform that gave amnesty to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. Inconceivable now in the Republican Party, but, at the same time, he was very harsh to other kinds of immigrants, like refugees from Haiti.

Marco: Do you see that as reflecting something that’s characteristic of him as a president or as just opportunistic? I wanted to bring up the episode in the book where the NAACP winds up voting against Jimmy Carter on energy regulation. I found that so interesting, because, on the surface, it looks like there’s just been a shift, and people are disgruntled with the government in a specific way. But actually, it turns out that a lot of these people are oil lobbyists, and they basically shove out the rest of the group and get them to vote and appear as a unanimous body, and this delights Reagan.

Rick: Who claims that it’s just a grassroots emanating from the folk, because that’s how he saw the world. He had these goggles that always made everything look like the world was either good people or evil people. That made him easily manipulated by certain kinds of people. I would say that the word “opportunism” is a really important one. Because the trauma of the 1970s was that Americans, and especially American elites, really thought they had everything figured out. America had figured out the secret to creating limitless prosperity, and Keynesian economics could manage the economy in a way that would create endless, equitable growth. This is really in the third book in the series, The Invisible Bridge, the 1973 the Arab oil embargo. You see its echo in 1979 with the energy crisis. Energy as a variable in the economy wasn’t something people even thought about as a vulnerability. I don’t know if I have this in Reaganland, but it’s one of my favorite quotes. One of his energy advisors told Richard Nixon that soon energy would be so cheap it wouldn’t even have to be metered. Suddenly, first the Saudi Arabians and then the Iranians, are grabbing the American economy by the balls. The stagflation that I write about in both my books was literally seen as impossible. You either had inflation or you had unemployment, and so you could just balance them out. Unemployment and inflation at the same time was like anti-matter and matter suddenly combining. That’s where the opportunism comes in. Why are all these bad things happening? One answer might be, Oh, well, there’s too much corporate power. There were a lot of people in the 1970s who said the oil crisis was created by market manipulation by the oil companies and that we should nationalize them. There was a very interesting figure in the book named Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who is generally remembered as a very conservative Democratic senator, because he was very hawkish, and a lot of the people who supported him later became Neo-conservatives and joined the Reagan administration. But he also was quite liberal when it came to industry and corporate power.

[The internet cuts out here for about thirty seconds.]

Rick: When I talk about the supply side economics, [there were] people who said this is happening because corporations don’t have enough power. There was was too much regulation. [This is how] the bad guys—my judgment, maybe yours—infiltrated and manipulated the NAACP. There’s this great quote from a radical community organizer named Saul Alinsky. He said every movement starts as a crusade and ends as a racket. So, when you get a reformist organization like the NAACP, they can become quite establishment and staid. The history of the NAACP is pretty interesting, because it’s always been a very establishment organization. They had a lot of distrust for people like Martin Luther King as too militant. So, there are a lot of characters in Reaganland who are on the right, especially the corporate right, anti-labor right, anti-regulation right, who have been biding their time, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for soft spots, looking for weak spots, and the energy crisis was one of them. The idea that we need deregulation because prices have to be cheaper, because that helps working class people, is something that these guys have always had in their bag of tricks. It’s why the crypto industry would get rappers to say this is a way to beat the system for people who are locked out. So, you have all these operators who are always looking for these opportunities, and they had their heyday with the rise of Ronald Reagan and what looked like the collapse of the effectiveness of this progressive, activist government that was supposed to deliver us into, what I quote in my first book as “a dreary, centrist utopia.” It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.

Marco: So, I’m curious where you locate the shift from Keynes to to Friedman.

Rick: Friedman was arguing the same ideas since the 50s. People literally thought it was crazy. He just kept on making the same argument, and his movement arrived. So, when would the shift have been?

Marco: He wins the Nobel Prize in 1976, right?

Rick: Right.

Marco: And by that point, that’s close on the heels of people still writing about him as somebody who’s ideas don’t make sense.

Rick: Yes, absolutely.

Marco: But he’s being embraced at a high level.

Rick: I think it was a very shocking thing.

Marco: So, do you have a sense of why that started to happen? What was it? Was it energy?

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. This wave of prosperity that was going to last forever just suddenly collapsed, and people didn’t predict it. A lot of the energy that drove Reaganism was based on the fact that a lot of the policies from the Great Society that expanded the New Deal were based on this assumption of a prosperous society. They talked about a post-scarcity society, and that’s all over Nixonland. The reason the hippies were the hippies was because they didn’t think they had to get a job, because there was so much money everywhere. They were literally cheating welfare. It was seen as this moral imperative that we have such a rich society, we can live off the table scraps, which is the same logic that had Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society speech saying we could have a society of nobility without squalor. He sounds like a counter-cultural prophet. All that was based on this absurdly colossal economic growth that people had decided was America’s birthright but really was this one time trick that had to do with the rest of the world being bombed to oblivion during World War II, and all sorts of other things.

One of my favorite stories in The Invisible Bridge—maybe I even mentioned this in Reaganland—is about affirmative action. The idea that you could give African Americans preferences for jobs. Everyone knew it would be controversial, but there’s so many jobs, right? So, again, because of this post-scarcity ideology, there wasn’t this sense of a zero-sum, if we give one slice of the pie to someone else, the other person doesn’t get a slice of the pie, because the pie just keeps on getting bigger. John F Kennedy used to say a rising tide lifts all boats. Getting back to this story, the supreme court approved of—I forget what year it was, maybe 1975—an affirmative action program to make sure that African Americans got apprenticeships in a certain factory, by which time the factory had long ago closed. That’s an allegory of what happens when policies that happen in a post-scarcity era suddenly are carried forward into a scarcity era. You see so much of that in Donald Trump’s basic ideology of the world as zero-sum. If one person gets something nice, it has to be taken from someone else, so you have to have this eyeball scratching war of all against all. But all these figures, whether it’s Dwight Eisenhower, John F Kennedy saying rising tides lift all boats, Lyndon Johnson talking about the Great Society—Richard Nixon kind of sees it coming, so he’s very gloomy about this kind of stuff—but Ronald Reagan still has that optimism. America is going to be prosperous forever. Of course, a lot of the prosperity that he did bring in was this unequal prosperity. The economic growth numbers were pretty good by his second term, but so was the poverty rate.

Marco: You’re reminding me. There’s an article that came out in the New Left Review in 2022, I think, called “The Seven Theses on American Politics”.

Rick: Is this the political capitalism guy?

Marco: Yeah, Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner.

Rick: Yeah, [John] Ganz is really into that guy. At first I was very skeptical, because I didn’t really see political actors acting the way he claimed they were. But Ganz really has me convinced that those guys are on the money. I talked about this a lot in The Invisible Bridge, but especially in “The Board Room Jacobins” chapter [from Reaganland], that there were falling rates of profit, and that’s why these guys were like, We gotta go to war. We had bought into this post-war consensus that, as corporations, we’re partnering with the state to create this broadly shared prosperity. That’s the basic Keynesian idea. There’s actually a Marxist who predicted this in the 1940s [Michal] Kalecki, you ever heard of him?

Marco: No.

Rick: You’ll like him. He wrote a very famous, very short essay that was absolutely prescient, because no one saw this coming. In the early 1960s, you could read very, very mainstream intellectuals saying that economies are becoming so technocratic and managed, and we’ve figured out how to create prosperity so well that, actually, the Soviet Union and American economies are going to converge. There’s going to be no ideological difference between them. And it was just like, never predict. Don’t trust anyone who predicts. Kalecki was like, No, the minute there’s a decrease in the rate of profit, these guys are going to practice lifeboat economics, and they’re going to lash out against labor militancy. A figure like Paul Volcker, who basically became a hero for saying everyone had to live with less, became the hero of the story in a way that would have been inconceivable at a time when economics was all about sharing the bounty of a prosperous society.

Marco: I’m curious then, can you imagine an alternative history in which scarcity politics winds up not actually—the conservatives don’t actually find a way to seize on it?

Rick: It’s a very tough thing, and that’s why you have to, in a way, grant some slack to people in the Democratic Party who are dealing with a situation in which the old story no longer signifies to people. It’s very easy to beat up on Bill Clinton, and I do in my next book. I think the alternative history would be someone who would’ve said, We need to retrench for a short period of time and see how things go and really commit to ratcheting back up more social democratic reform when prosperity comes back, which, of course, it did. But the people who might have made that argument did not have the money on their side. They didn’t have the cultural narratives on their side. It was very easy to say, All this bad stuff we’re experiencing, economically, socially, culturally, it’s not the result of greedy capitalists, but dirty hippies, and too much fornication, and socialism. And it would have taken a very shrewd leader.

One guy who might have been able to pull it off was a guy who’s in all my books, Hubert Humphrey. I talk about the Humphrey-Hawkins law that Jimmy Carter endorsed, which was literally a law to say, if unemployment got above 3% the government would create jobs. And then a bunch of economists said, No, it’ll create inflation, including Democratic Party economists, and it was just completely neutered. Then you get into the very interesting cultural valences and generational valences. Hubert Humphrey was—you can look up an op-ed I wrote about him on the 100th anniversary of his birth—was a great Minnesota social democrat like Tim Walz. He was hated by baby boomer leftists because he ran for president in 1968—he was running as Lyndon Johnson’s running mate—and he wouldn’t criticize the Vietnam war, until he did, like a week before the election. It’s really uncanny, because it’s the exact situation that Kamala Harris got into with with Gaza. You can only have one President at a time. So, he was this old dinosaur, but he was also the guy who understood that the working class was becoming increasingly vulnerable at a time that no one talked about that.

You can read every speech of every candidate in the 1976 election, and you can see no recognition that—because it’s so new, since 1972, and it went all the way to basically the present—working class incomes have stagnated. There was no perception that this was actually a structural feature of the economy, except maybe in New Left Review or Studies on the Left coming out of Madison. I mean, it’s a tragic story. You had very few voices who said, We have a really good thing with this whole New Deal Order, and we have to preserve it at all costs, even if we have to sacrifice it temporarily. It was more like, Oh, we tried that and it didn’t work. Now we have to try something else. Republicans said it, Democrats said it, Paul Volcker said it, Reagan said it, Jimmy Carter said it.

Marco: Can you talk a little bit more about the parallels to the politics of scarcity we’re seeing now and how that’s reflected in an actual economics of scarcity.

Rick: Yes, think of it within the Democratic Party. You have Zohran Mamdani who’s saying, What if we made buses free? And people just go berserk as if he’s like, We’re gonna hand out thick juicy steaks on every street corner. Even though he can show the numbers and show the most infinitesimal tax hikes could pay for it, and then on the other corner you have this initiative out in California for a wealth tax. I think it’s something like a one time wealth tax of one percent of wealth over a billion dollars, and Gavin Newsom’s like, No, we’re gonna chase the job creators out of the country. It’s just so built into the ethic that, yes we’re living in a scarcity society, scarcity economics, and it just saturates us from every corner. Within the world of corporations, you get enshitification. Companies like Zoom are trying to squeeze as many pennies out of us as they can.

I like to think in parables, historical stories that get at the poetry of different objective circumstances, and I think about how I went to Ellis Island, the first stop for immigrants coming to America for decades and decades and decades, since the 19th century. They would see the Statue of Liberty and see the poem, We invite the teaming, wretched masses from the Earth to come to America. So I went there right after Trump was elected in 2024, and I was like, Wow, I haven’t been here since I was a kid, in the 80s, when it was renovated and turned into a museum, and it’s basically the same museum that they built during the Reagan era. Right around the same time, they also restored the Statue of Liberty, so it was seen as this national project that we should honor our immigrant past. What was remarkable was how accommodating the policies were towards immigrants and how humane they were. They had a law that if an immigrant had to be sent back because they were sick, the ship company had to pay for their passage. This is to incentivize them to have healthy conditions on their ships. There was a law that you could not come to America and claim you already had a job, because then people in Europe would basically create indentured servitude.

Slowly—until the back of the system broke in 1924, in which they created this insanely restricted immigration law that people like Jeff Sessions and Steven Miller, quite frankly, want to go back to—you saw this restrictive attitude creeping in through the 1910s and nineteen-teens, and one of the first ones was they required immigrants to have five dollars before they would be let into America, because, again, this anxiety—which, of course, completely false, because immigrants actually add more to the economy than they could ever take out. Everyone who studies things objectively knows this, who isn’t a racist. They had these phones at different parts of the museum, and people would tell the stories. One of the people telling the story was one of the immigration clerks, and he said, What people would do is one person would have the five dollars and he would show me the five dollars and then they were pass it to the person behind them and he would show me the five dollars, and the same five dollar bill would just go down the line.

Of course, the first thing I wanted to do was write about this and talk about how much more welcoming we were in a time in which we didn’t believe that everyone was scrapping for every last penny and that every dollar given to someone was a dollar taken from you, but I was afraid, if I wrote about this, that Steven Miller would find out about it, and they would close down Ellis Island, and they still haven’t. So a sense of whether there’s scarcity or plentitude is a very big determinant of the kind of possibilities we have, and, of course, I think, as you understand, because you read something like New Left Review, we don’t live in a society of scarcity, we live in the society of inequality and fantastically concentrated wealth. That was just a huge cultural shift. There used to be a lot more of a sense of public responsibility among the ruling class, quite frankly. To take it full circle, a lot of opportunistic people took advantage of the vulnerability that always exists and the willingness of people to see their neighbors as their rivals and their enemies and used it to create a politics of plunder, based on anxieties over things like immigration and race.

Marco: Do you do you have time for for one more question?

Rick: And then I’ll ask a question to you.

Marco: Ok, cool. Maybe it’s two questions. Do you think the actual productive capacity of the country has anything to do with with the stories of scarcity that people are able to tell?

Rick: Like, objectively speaking?

Marco: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I mean I’m gonna just say that I don’t really have the expertise to speak with any authority on that.

Marco: Yeah.

Rick: But a lot of this is, I think, ideological. The fact that so many of the “Masters of the Universe” invest in this notion of AI really seems to suggest that they want to do away with people and workers. A lot of these things are, in fact, choices. You can have an economy that is based on good jobs, that a reasonably competent high school graduate can do with training, and that actually is what they have in a country like Germany, in which there are just enormous resources that capitalists have to invest in training of their employees, in a way that’s outsourced here in America—you know, the story in America, we socialize the risk and privatize the wealth. It’s important to remember that there are always choices in how you arrange the productive capacity of a society. The bad guys make it seem like it’s just a trick of fate, but don’t trust them.

Marco: Or like, This is the process of history. This is a natural phenomenon.

Rick: Yeah, Bill Clinton was very big on that one. We don’t have any choice, basically. The world’s becoming globalized, so we have to pass NAFTA to globalize the world. It was a pretty cunning trick, and it was probably good faith on his part when he said it was going to create millions of jobs, but it cost millions of jobs.

Marco: Right

Rick: So, the question I have for you is what are your thoughts generally about the Democratic party? Is it an institution you identify with? Do you feel like it’s done and dusted, or do you feel like the old bad guys are going to die out and a better generation is going to replace them.

Marco: I mean, obviously I hope that a better generation replaces them. It’s funny, I was talking to my dad [during] the last few weeks of the most intense period of all this ICE horror, and he was really incensed and telling me to write to my representatives. It was the first time I noticed in myself a kind of cynicism that is just so baked in to, I think, a lot of younger people. My knee-jerk reaction is almost, like, basic survival, like, keep your head low kind of thinking.

Rick: Yeah, well that’s been the theme of our conversation.

Marco: I realized that for a different generation of people that’s totally not the case. I also notice a tendency among myself and people of my generation that there’s more of a willingness to do what you need to do to get by and a general cynicism about institutions and politics.

Rick: Yeah, well, obviously the bad guys took advantage of that. There’s a good little maxim I have about that. You used to be able to burn down a bank in the 60s and get a job there after you graduated. That’s the theme of the conversation.

Marco: Thanks so much, Rick.