Color me unimpressed with Rick Perlstein's recent guest stint over at The American Prospect's blog TAPPED; too much book promotion ("here's another way the current Presidential campaign is like my book"), too little real insight. Today I got the deal: with a name like that, and his history, I figured he was, like, 50. Turns out, he's the age of my (younger) sister. (yes, the one with the mansion... and my two amazing nephews. Also, my very nice brother-in-law).
I figured, with a title like Nixonland, Perlstein's book was already a miss, to me; I didn't realize by how much. Perlstein, apparently is doing one of these generational sum-ups that suggest everything we suffer from now is a result of... Richard Nixon. I would have thought that too much anyway...
... but Thank God for George Will: in a preview of this week's New York Times Book Review, Will is the lead review, taking Nixonland apart and handing Perlstein a savage pan. I don't love Will... but I don't hate him either. A talented writer, and a very smart thinker, Will's high-toned Republicanism may not be my ideological cup of tea, but he's got insight into things I'll never get, and a gift for laying them out in a way that's comprehensible. Thanks to Will, I came to understand better the appeal of Reagan, and the expression he gave to a national pride that is a key part of the American psyche (one that I think Bill and Hillary Clinton understand how to express in a way that's winning for Democrats).
People (including my mom... and me on Sundays sometimes when Will says something idiotic on Stephanopolous) on the left can dismiss Will out of hand as tendentious and unaware... but he's not, really. He just thinks about this stuff differently. Often, he's not wrong... or at least, he gives good voice to the alternative view. Here is his closing to the Perlstein review:
“How did Nixonland end?” Perlstein asks in the book’s last line. “It has not ended yet.” But almost every page of Perlstein’s book illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect.
“We Americans,” he says, “are not killing or trying to kill one another anymore for reasons of ideology, or at least for now. Remember this: This war has ratcheted down considerably. But it still simmers on.”
Not really. America has long since gone off the boil. The nation portrayed in Perlstein’s compulsively readable chronicle, the America of Spiro Agnew inciting “positive polarization” and the New Left laboring to “heighten the contradictions,” is long gone.
So exquisitely sensitive are Americans today, they worked themselves into a lather of disapproval when Hillary Clinton said that Lyndon Johnson as well as Martin Luther King was important in enacting civil rights legislation. There has not been a white male secretary of state for 11 years. Today a woman and an African-American are competing relatively civilly for the right to run for president against the center-right — more center than right — senator who occupies the seat once held by Goldwater. Whoever wins will not be president of Nixonland.
That's about a clear-eyed an assessment of the current scene as I could ask. Read the whole thing here.
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