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 […]