Diverging Majority
Pundits have always been desperate to claim the arrival of permanent majorities in American politics.
Rick Perlstein
Rick Perlstein is a contributing editor of The Baffler. He is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, among other books. He lives in Chicago.
He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. He lives in Chicago.
Fascism for Dummies
May 19, 2017
Would the Holocaust have happened if Moe Howard was Chancellor of Germany? The Gulag, if Stalin was swapped out for Stan Laurel?
I’m Sticking with My President
May 10, 2017
During Watergate, Nixon’s diehard defenders in the party were looked upon as clowns.
The Politics of Smart
March 13, 2017
Rick Perlstein talks to Baffler editor in chief Chris Lehmann about the curious identity of smartness. . .
Outsmarted
The empty presumptions that inform the cult of smartness across yon political spectrum.
Time Bandits
Our political past is rarely prologue.
Tick Tock
Southern California has always been a place confused about time. The people there escaped the dead hand of the past in municipalities that they conjured, ex nihilo, out of orange groves, and where they built—as Nathanael West mocked in The Day of the Locust—houses resembling ...
Three Cheers for George Scialabba
November 3, 2015
John Summers
When the balance of trade between George Scialabba’s pension plan requirements and his age came to an agreement, and his long dreamed-of chance to break free of his day job at last presented itself, he retired from Harvard University, where he had served with ...