Over Labor Day weekend I reread Michael Kazin‘s 1998 book The Populist Persuasion: An American History and was once again reminded that throughout the course of our nation’s history populism has appeared on both the right and the left. (For...
New Right
Ronald Reagan in 1975: “Why don’t we try reverse psychology and make it harder to vote?”
I am reading Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland and was struck by this passage (p.93-94): Look what happened after President Carter, on March 22, sent a letter to Congress recommending a package of electoral reforms. The president was concerned that America ranked...
On fighting “a guerilla battle at the grassroots of a generation of lower-middle-class people who feel betrayed and exploited”
Here is Rick Perlstein in Reaganland on the rise of the New Right in the 1970s: That notion–conservatism as an ideology for working people–was another New Right theme. [Richard] Viguerie’s father had been a construction worker; his mother toiled in...