The Infernal Triangle (w/ Rick Perlstein)
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The author of several excellent books about the history of American conservatism, including The Invisible Bridge, Nixonland, and Reaganland, Rick Perlstein makes his triumphant return to Know Your Enemy. Drawing on Rick's wealth of historical knowledge, as well as his American Prospect column — entitled "The Infernal Triangle" — we explore the failures of American media elites and the Democratic Party to reckon with Donald Trump and his antecedents on the far right. What are the habits and genres of American journalism that inhibit an adequate accounting of Trump's rise and influence? Why do Democrats tend to adopt "conservatism lite," when faced with a far right opponent? How has Rick's perspective on studying the right changed since he began his work in the 1990s? And how will future historians make sense of these times? Listen to find out!
Further Reading
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, (2009)
— "I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong." New York Times, Apr 11, 2017.
— "The Polling Imperilment," American Prospect, Sept 25, 2024.
— "The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About," American Prospect, Aug 28, 2024.
— "Project 2025 … and 1921, and 1973, and 1981," American Prospect, Jul 10, 2024.
W. Joseph Campbell, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections, (2020)
Isaac Arnsdorf, Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, (2023)
Phoebe Petrovic, "Right-Wing Activists Pushed False Claims About Election Fraud. Now They’re Recruiting Poll Workers in Swing States." ProPublica / Wisconsin Watch, Oct 16, 2024.
Clare Malone, "The Face of Donald Trump’s Deceptively Savvy Media Strategy," New Yorker, Mar 25, 2024.
Matthew Sitman, "Will Be Wild: Reading the January 6th Committee Report," Dissent, Apr 18, 2023.
Listen Again:
"On the Road to Reaganland" (w/ Rick Perlstein and Leon Neyfakh), Oct 21, 2020
"The History of the History of the Right" (w/ Kim Phillips-Fein), Jan 17, 2024
...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our bonus episodes!
Welcome listeners to episode 102 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Sam Adlerbel, and I'm not here with my great friend Matthew Sitman because he's often Germany delivering lectures to students about, well, who knows? Luckily, Matt was here when we recorded the interview I'm about to share with you, which features a beloved returning guest and Know Your Enemy, patron saint Rick Perlstein. Most of you will be familiar with Rick's extraordinary books on the history of conservatism, including The Invisible Bridge, Nixon Land, and Reagan Land. Rick joins us for the second in our ongoing series on the 2024 election. And in this episode, we end up talking a great deal about how elite journalism continues to flail in its effort to reckon with Trump and the far right. We also hear a sneak peek about Rick's new book, as well as many other fascinating tidbits from Rick's encyclopedic knowledge of conservative history. As always, we're grateful to our partners in podcasting and in frivolous litigation at Descent Magazine. One thing they do for us is if you subscribe to Know Your Enemy at our patreon at patreon.com/knowyourenemy for $10 a month, you'll get all of our bonus episodes and a free digital subscription to Descent Magazine. And of course, if you subscribe on our patreon for $5 a month, you get access to our rich backlog of paywalled episodes. Oh, and I should mention another $10 perk is that you can join the very active and very fascinating Know Your Enemy discord server. As always, we want to thank our intrepid producer, Jesse Breneman and Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast. With all of that said, here is our interview with journalist and historian and great friend of ours, Rick Pearlstein. Enjoy. [MUSIC] All right, let's get to it. Rick Pearlstein, welcome back to Know Your Enemy. A pleasure and an honor. It is so great to have you, and it's so funny, we were saying this before we started recording, that the last time we had you on the podcast, I don't even think you really knew who we were. No, but do I now? I tell you. That's not a scrap of sit-monology or Adlerian work that I've not inhaled to the gills that is both very flattering and very concerning. Yes, and maybe your impression of this wasn't that great because in that first episode you did with us, you were with Leon Nefox. It was two of you. We didn't even give you soul billing. I also hadn't realized Leon, who I also profoundly respect, had done a new documentary on the Boston school crisis, which I hadn't heard. Whatever. Like I say, I'm very into improvisation and throwing together odd combinations of peoples and circumstances and seeing where they land. It's all good. The episode turned out pretty well given that you had no idea what the premise was. I've been doing this for a while, guys. It's almost my 30th anniversary as a winged neurologist. I realized it was almost 20 years ago. I don't know if you remember this that I first met you. Michael Cason brought you to Georgetown, and you did a talk with Steve Hayward. In 2006 or something, I do remember that. I do remember the age of Reagan, that doorstop of a book. I think maybe the Tocqueville Forum that Patrick Deneen ran and that I helped him run. It might have been some joint Tocqueville Forum. Cason was involved, and you were there. Rick Prostein, Steve Hayward, and Little Matt Sitman in 2006. You know, I have a similar affection for the wonderful Michael Cason that you do, Matt. One of the first big things that I did that really set me on my path was an article for lingua franca magazine where I was an editor. It's called Who Owns the Sixties, the opening of a scholarly generation gap. And I mean, I really, really loved Michael Cason and what he did in his book, The Popless Persuasion. And, you know, as kind of a puppy, kind of mid-20s intellectual coming out of the Midwest, he was one of the, you know, really welcoming people who engaged me seriously and what I was interested in. Well, Rick, we wanted to have you on as the second of our conversations with our friends who we think are really smart and interesting, thinking about kind of where we're at with an eye toward the election, but also, you know, beyond that. The first was our conversation with Dorothy Fortenberry, and we wanted to have you on in part because I love your column at the American Prospect, The Infernal Triangle, which I've learned also as the name of your next book. So we're going to pick up with some of what you have been writing about lately, but before we dive in too much further, what does the name Infernal Triangle mean? Why did you pick it for this column and kind of, what were you hoping it says about this moment we're in? Yeah, well, one more kind of dive back into the miss of time. Kind of in the early 2000s, you know, after I came out with my first book, The Goldwater One, I was very involved in what they called the Netroots, the early blogosphere, which was not basically not only people writing blogs about, you know, the horrors of the Bush administration, but also kind of moved into the real world through institutions like move on, Daily Coase did kind of some organizing, the Netroots nation, and really kind of reached its apotheosis with the Howard Dean campaign, which was really kind of the institutional embodiment of this new way of thinking about liberal politics, kind of in the wake of Clintonism, in the wake of neoliberalism, and also in the wake of kind of the Democratic parties almost surrender to the logic of endless war after 9/11 and the Iraq war. So I kind of imbibed kind of a way of thinking kind of a paradigm that I think no one has ever really recorded as a historical moment in which people in this world tended to kind of tack between three different subjects. It was, you know, the increasing authoritarianism of the Republican Party, the enduring patriot militia kind of formations in the case of a blogger named David Nyewert, or Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo brought down a Mississippi businessman who, you know, praised the Confederacy, you know, and kind of deeply understood how much of conservative Republican politics was kind of laundering nostalgia for segregation and that sort of thing. And just writing about how the Iraq war would be a disaster and was a disaster. And the reason they were doing that also was because, you know, the Democratic Party really wasn't kind of getting across this kind of stuff. I think it was just this idea that unless we, as usual, meet the Republican Party halfway, we're going to lose middle America. Right. So there's a very strong critique of the Democratic Party and its failings. And, you know, the apotheosis of that was, you know, the loss of John Kerry in 2004. You know, he was going to be this towering warrior who was going to humiliate the fake, you know, draft Dodger George W. Bush. And the fact that the media was completely complicit, compliant, almost aiding and abetting, you know, the lies that got us into the Iraq war. And there was a very strong media criticism component about that, you know, whole vocabulary. They talked about the tire swing, which was kind of like the quasi romantic relationship that a lot of journalists had to figures like, you know, John McCain, were obsessed, they were with, you know, the deficit, then reforming social security. So one of the big political accomplishments to this early net roots was pushing back after George W. Bush won in 2004 and claimed he had a mandate to privatize social security. And the Democrats were, we need to meet him halfway, but a lot of activists in the net roots said no way. And, you know, that might have happened, had it not for the net roots. But it was, you know, very much abetted again by the same kind of media sins, the both sides journalism, almost institutional bias towards Republicans because of the need to balance a party that lied cheating stolen a party whose habitual way of thinking about politics was to kind of behave like So this idea that American politics was being screwed up in the early 2000s by this kind of mutually reinforcing relationship with I named it and the infernal triangle. So the three corners of the triangle are an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party, a factless Democratic Party, and a news media political journalists, totally unprepared to deal with those realities. Yeah, glad that's all over, huh? But that's the thing. I mean, it's, it's quite remarkable. You know, the book starts with like a very long, I don't even call it introduction, I call it an overture, because it kind of has all the themes of the book.
Transcription truncated.
Historian and journalist Rick Perlstein joins to explain what Democrats and the media are (still) getting wrong about the threat from Trump and the far right.