Rick Perlstein

Writers like Rick Perlstein miss the ways in which Trump’s rise is a story of discontinuity.

Donald Trump’s candidacy wasn’t the first time the Republican Party was split by an outsider declaring war on the establishment elite.

Rick Perlstein's "Reaganland" charts the conservative counter-revolution that moved the US to the right.

Have historians of the conservative movement focused too much on its intellectuals?

Rick Perlstein’s epic series shows political history and cultural history cannot be disentangled.

What the election of 2016 should mean for the future of studying the past.

Trump's election isn't cause for reassessing politics as we know it.

Looking to history for an analogue to Trump’s victory does a disservice to the present and the past.

Anti-Trump Republicans revere Ronald Reagan as Trump’s opposite—yet in critical ways Reagan may have been his forerunner.

John Ganz offers a whirlwind tour of the cranks, conservatives, and con artists who helped remake the American right at the turn of the 21st century.

Farewell to the senator's son who pioneered a TV genre, helped create the Christian right, ran for president, and earned the grudging respect of Abbie Hoffman.

Carter’s austerity was part of a bigger project. It didn’t really have much to do with environmentalism.

In his history of the John Birch Society, Matthew Dallek says Republicans allowed the extreme fringe to “eventually cannibalize the entire party.”

The “forgotten American” mythology of the POW/MIA movement continues to haunt our politics today.

Clintonites taught their party how to talk about helping people without actually doing it.

Sixty years ago, many GOP leaders resisted radicals in their ranks. Now they’re not even trying.

How a party spent decades making itself white.

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are the icons of an ideological split among today’s Democrats, echoing a similar split in the Republican party of 1964.

Fifty years later, the legacies of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy still loom large.

Lily Geismer reviews the second edition of Corey Robin’s “The Reactionary Mind.”