Reagan’s bizarre defenders: Rick Perlstein, phony centrism and the strange attack on history (Salon)

[YoungDemCA]

Found this article from January by Paul Rosenberg. Excerpts below.

snip:

[Rick] Perlstein’s got a point. Dispelling centrist and progressive myths about the right has been one of his key motivating factors as a historian from the beginning, and nobody really likes having their myths smashed to pieces—though some mind a lot more than others. However, Perlstein’s myth busting is not just to “expose conservative hypocrisy” or some related concern, as some have mistakenly supposed, but to get centrists and progressives to actually see what conservatives are doing, and why it’s not hypocritical in light of their worldview and values. “To beat conservatism, grasshopper, learn to think like a conservative,” Perlstein wrote in a blog post I’ll return to below. Thus, far from distorting his vision with respect to conservatism, as his centrist critics suppose, Perlstein’s political commitments fuel his motivation to be accurate, precise and insightful.

snip:

....if we focus on the American right itself, what Perlstein is pointing out must surely be true—if the right were “sensible,” as centrists and progressives generally understand the term, they’d have packed up shop following Goldwater’s defeat. Not being “sensible” in those terms is part of their defining core. The interesting question, then, is just what does that mean? How do different sorts of logic work? If one sort of logic applies to “sensible”/“reasonable politics,” then what sort of logic applies to “insensible”/“unreasonable politics”—and this instance of it in particular?

snip;

Two things must be noted right away: First, that Perlstein is talking about the American right collectively, not about any one individual in particular. The behavior he’s referring to is what we can observe about how the actually existing American right behaves in situation after situation—doubling down in opposition to any kind of gun safety legislation after Newtown, for example, or refusing to pass comprehensive immigration reform after losing the 2012 election—when all “reasonable” expectations point directly in the opposite direction. Particular individual conservatives who do act reasonably certainly exist, and if they’re prominent enough they get publicly disowned for their troubles, unless they choose and manage a more graceful exit. The above-mentioned Damon Linker, author of “The Theocons,” is one such individual, and like several others has come to be seen as more of a centrist (think John Dean or Kevin Phillips, though not Bruce Bartlett), though that’s not where he began.

Second ,that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a political movement being “unreasonable”—it depends on what they’re being unreasonable about. After all, the leaders of black slave rebellions such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner were surely unreasonable in their demands, and generations later, their unreasonableness triumphed. So merely noting that the American right is not sensible or reasonable does not automatically say nearly as much as some people seem to think about the subjects described; one must ask what they’re unreasonable about—and why. This is not an attempt to attack and slander, but to truly understand.

snip:

It’s not that all conservatives want a theocracy at heart; there are different kinds of conservatives, after all. But they all share in this general tendency to see things dualistically in terms of immutable end results, which is psychologically quite satisfying, at the expense of commitment to democracy, which is always a somewhat messy affair. It is, quite simply, a mistake to keep thinking that conservatives are just liberals with a different set of policy preferences. “They are different species,” as Perlstein says. They inhabit different imagined worlds. And it’s not a sign of bias, or ideological distortion to recognize this. It’s a sign of realism, and sanity.

Perlstein dives even deeper in his series “Thinking Like a Conservative,” which revolves around a few key insights and some of their more salient consequences. For the most part, these are relatively easy to state, and even grasp, at least in theory, but grasping them in practice is far more difficult, evidently. For example, in the first one, on mass shootings and gun control, his point is simple—no amount of gun deaths like Sandy Hook will convince conservatives to change their minds, and convince them to embrace “common-sense” gun legislation, because their “common-sense” response was dramatically different from liberals’—the whole “good man with a gun” routine, in response to an ever-growing string of horrific shootings. This ties into what I’ve written before about the role of heightened negativity or threat bias driving conservatives, documented by cognitive scientists.

snip:

I couldn’t help but notice how the same lack of cognitive empathy can be seen in others as well—although not in such an extreme, cartoonish form. To begin with, why did Perlstein even write that series in the first place, if there wasn’t a need to overcome a lack of cognitive empathy on the part of progressives and centrists when it comes to understanding how conservatives think? What’s more, Perlstein’s centrist critics appear doubly afflicted: They fail to grasp how differently conservatives see things, and they fail to grasp what Perlstein is thinking when he writes about them. They might be quite surprised to learn, as Perlstein told me, “A lot of people have told me that when they read my book about Nixon they sympathized with Nixon for the first time. And felt even affection for him. Some have said the same thing about Reagan. And certainly about Goldwater.”

The most helpful framework I’ve discovered for dealing with such differences in how people see things is Karen Armstrong’s articulation of the mythos/logos distinction in explanatory systems of thought: logos deals with how things work in the world, while mythos deals with giving life meaning—and everything within life, as well. As knowledge advances, all logos converges into an all-encompassing framework, a process that increasingly threatens mythos, which responds in part by imitating logos, thus giving us Creationism, for example. But reactionary conservatives aren’t the only ones who make meaning of the world—we all do. We all have some form of mythos, however well-developed or broadly shared it may be—although Armstrong makes the point that mythos only fully comes to life in forms of ritual enactment.

For Perlstein’s centrist critics, as centrists, the idea that conservatives see the world differently is itself an extremist idea that must be rejected out of hand. But that simply reveals how limited their own mythos is—a mythos that pretends to be all-encompassing, because it “listens” to “both sides” even if (as the examples of these reviews reveal) it doesn’t actually understand either one of them.

For Perlstein, understanding the conservative mythos is absolutely essential—both for progressive activists who want to be politically successful, and for historians who want to get the history right. This insistence on seeing conservatism clearly does not reduce the richness and complexity of the world, as his critics assume. Just the opposite, in fact. It makes for a much richer, complicated story of what our history has been about.

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/24/reagans_bizarre_defenders_rick_perlstein_phony_centrism_and_the_strange_attack_on_history/

[hedda_foil]

1. What a great piece! It sounds like Perlstein has captured the conservative mind in all its glory.

Not only that, but it seems he's also figured out the effete centrists. Wow!