In his podcasts Slow Burn and Fiasco, Leon Neyfakh and his team have covered Watergate, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Iran-Contra affair, and more, making seemingly familiar stories feel both fresh and suspenseful. In the third season of Fiasco, Neyfakh turns his attention to the battle over school desegregation in Boston in the 1970s, during which white Northerners took pains to distance themselves from racist Southerners while fighting against school integration in their own city. An activist and two-time mayoral hopeful named Louise Day Hicks led the opposition to Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr.’s 1974 mandate to desegregate schools. She did so, in large part, by tapping into the sense of grievance many whites felt when presented with the prospect of progressive reforms.
By the end of the decade, Ronald Reagan and the New Right had turned organizing that discontent into a durable election strategy. The story of how the Right attained and held power is one that historian Rick Perlstein has tracked closely in a four-part history of American conservativism that began with the 2001 book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. His latest volume, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980, focuses on that pivotal period, and, like Fiasco’s latest installment, feels full of portents and lessons for the present moment. On a recent episode of the Know Your Enemy podcast, Neyfakh and Perlstein joined hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell to talk about history, storytelling, and the American obsession with innocence. This transcript has been condensed and edited.
Matthew Sitman
The political moment we’re living through makes both of your projects feel very resonant—but the people living through these historical episodes didn’t know how things would turn out. When you’re doing these deep-dive narratives, how do you think about the relationship between contingency and inevitability? How do you not play into the fact that everyone knows how it turns out?
Leon Neyfakh
For us, stripping away the inevitability is always a high priority. You want to submerge your listeners in the reality that people were experiencing at the time, and destroy our current sense that it was always going to turn out the way it did. By not treating anything as inevitable, you bring to life people who are experiencing our past as their present, and you make the story more fun to absorb.
Rick Perlstein
It’s a storytelling technique as much as anything else. People make a big deal about spoilers, that if you go to a movie and know what the ending is, then somehow it is ruined. That’s profoundly exaggerated. Writing is mind control. You’re literally channeling someone’s consciousness from second to second and telling them what to think about. When you’re engrossed in a story, that becomes your frame of reference. My former wife once told me that she forgot who won the California primary when she was reading my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. I think that happens a lot. There’s only one outcome, but there are infinite possible outcomes. One of the most useful tropes in my own writing is a certain side of cheap irony. In all four of my books, I quote pundits saying that conservatism is dead. You suddenly open up this whole terrain of reflection for the reader. Why does this keep on happening? When have I done this in my life?
Matthew Sitman
When we think about the rise of the modern Right, we often think about the idea of a backlash. There’s an action and then a reaction. But people have agency. And, Rick, in Reaganland, I’m struck by how ruthless Reagan was in wielding power and influence; and, Leon, in the season of Fiasco on the Boston busing crisis, by how that crisis came about because of people’s choices.
Rick Perlstein
Of course, people’s agency matters, but I’ve become more attuned to what used to be called a Whiggish interpretation of history: life did use to be nasty, brutish, and short, but in the longue durée—of centuries, decades, millennia—human beings do become more free and human dignity does tend to increase. And when we talk about a politician or a movement being progressive, or being reactionary, there’s something very intuitive and deep in that. The irony that I’m working with is that liberals do assume that progress is inevitable when Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama win. There is invariably a response from commentators that conservatism is not just set back, but defeated. That progress has happened and it’s irreversible. But smart conservatives understand political opportunity. The New Right’s watchword was: we organize discontent. Whether the terror is over social security or Medicare or gay rights or transgender bathrooms, the stories that human beings tell about the expansion of freedom are not uniform, but they do have a structure.
Sam Adler-Bell
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the aspirational innocence of American politics, particularly since we did an episode with Jamelle Bouie on “The 1619 Project.” Rick, you’ve identified this theme in your books, referring to Reagan’s “liturgy of absolution.” And in Leon’s podcast, we see this assertion by busing opponents that the real cruelty in American politics isn’t mean-spirited or racist conservatives but hectoring liberal elites with no skin in the game. Anti-integration activist Louise Day Hicks argued that good-hearted, working-class whites were being forced to pay for the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow—for crimes they didn’t commit.
Rick Perlstein
That’s an entailment of our racial history, right? If you look back at the massive resistance movement in the South, even as the lynching tradition is being revived, the dominant public tone is, basically, “We treat our Negroes really well and they love their schools.” It obviously rhymes with, “We treat our slaves really well.” A lot of that tone in the American reactionary tradition comes from stories about race. And then you get to something very dark and strange and psychoanalytic—you’re talking about a guilty conscience, right? James Baldwin wrote that anyone white who’s awake in America knows that they’re guilty of the worst sort of depredations against the ordinary humanity of their neighbors.
When it comes to Reagan, a lot of this is a reaction formation. He comes in the wake of a very broad, general understanding—even among centrist columnists—that America was not on the side of moral right in the Vietnam War. So, there’s a strong audience for the kind of absolution that Reagan offers in the latter part of the 1970s. His ability to find innocence and optimism and decency when other people only see chaos and monstrosity is a gift he had—and a gift to conservatism. I’m sure that Louise Day Hicks had that gift too.
Leon Neyfakh
Hicks had a couple of things going for her in terms of making the “innocence” argument. It was easy for her to invite her constituents to view themselves as victims of the suburban elite. But she also had the fact that Boston is in the North and there’s a broader myth of racial innocence that made desegregation a much harder process there. The line from Hicks and other “antibusing” activists was: We don’t have segregation in the North, that’s a Southern issue. And we’re not the same as those horrible Southern bigots. So, Hicks had this very potent message: “I’m not racist. You’re not racist.” Also, in Boston, the antibusing movement coincided with the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, when Boston—the cradle of liberty—was supposed to serve as an example for the rest of the nation. And here are these people, these Black activists, who were trying to portray Bostonians as hypocrites and villains.
Rick Perlstein
So, I’m going to stab you with an American flag.
Sam Adler-Bell
Leon, I wanted to ask you about that. Rick just referenced The Soiling of Old Glory, a photograph by Stanley Forman. Can you describe the encounter that resulted in this Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph? It does crystallize the Boston busing crisis for a lot of people.
Leon Neyfakh
In 1976, there had been protests against what these activists called “busing” for years. (In the show, we tried to call it “desegregation,” not “busing,” to make it clear what the underlying crisis here was about.) And there was a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, who saw himself as part of the antibusing movement, and one day in 1976 he attended a protest outside City Hall. And when he left his house that morning, he brought with him an American flag on a metal pole. And during the protest, Rakes crossed paths, semi-randomly, with a Black lawyer named Ted Landsmark, who was on his way to a meeting at City Hall about affirmative action. Joseph Rakes ends up attacking Landsmark with his flag. Stanley Forman captured him in the act, and in Forman’s photo, it looks like Rakes is about to stab Landsmark with his flagpole. In truth—we spoke to both Landsmark and Forman—he wasn’t trying to literally stab him. He was sort of swinging the flag. I mean, it doesn’t really matter. But it matters in the sense that part of what makes the photo so bracing is that it does look like he’s spearing him. The amazing thing was that it was Ted Landsmark, of all people, who this happened to—because he was so well-prepared. He had studied photography. He knew the power of the photo. And he knew the position he was thrust into after this made the news. He gave a speech in which he gave voice to something everyone could see in that photo, which was: You can’t have this conversation and not talk about race. Which is what people like Louise Day Hicks wanted to do. They tried to strip the desegregation issue of any racial context—that’s why they called it “busing.” Suddenly, this photo comes out and here’s an angry white teenager with flowing locks who looks like he’s about to spear this Black man in a suit. There’s no empirical evidence I’m aware of that the photo truly shifted public opinion on desegregation. But we talked to people who said it exposed what the “busing” crisis was really about. There was no way, after looking at it, to claim that it wasn’t about race.
Rick Perlstein
Isn’t it interesting that in this narrative of innocence, the word “neighborhood” is so redolent? The Reagan campaign made “neighborhood,” a key word for them. The right-wing position is neighborhood schools, neighborhood schools, neighborhood schools. But by the time we get to the voucher era, they’re destroying neighborhood schools. It gets back to this old idea that basically any policy, any congeries of policies, can be right wing. It’s not small government, it’s not big government, it’s not isolationism, it’s not internationalism. Ultimately, it’s this plastic tradition in which you’re preserving hierarchy and authority, whatever basket of policies you’re using to get there.
Matthew Sitman
For those of us interested in the Right and the postwar conservative movement, it’s easy to fall into the story they tell about themselves: there’s a straight line from a band of intellectuals writing for the National Review to Reagan’s triumphant election. But there’s also the question of the conspiracy theorists and the people outside the boundaries of respectable debate who are actually very historically important, but are brushed out of tidy narratives that focus on certain elites or intellectuals.
Rick Perlstein
When I was starting Before the Storm, I was enraptured by the idea—that really came from talking to these guys directly—that they were a scrappy band of underdogs. But then I realized that these are—literally or figuratively—the same people who Richard Nixon gets on board when he wants to break into offices. Nixon thought that if you want a job done, get a “healthy right-wing exuberant” to do it. The idea that, somehow, they sanded the rough edges off of conservatism is just nonsense. It becomes a different story when you realize that something a lot more cunning and subtle is going on. The scholar John Huntington talks about the Birchers as a vanguardist formation as opposed to the popular front of the National Review.
Matthew Sitman
Rick, earlier you used the term “accretion” to describe how issue after issue builds in Reaganland. You unfold the backlash to the Equal Rights Amendment, the backlash to gay rights, the rise of evangelical conservatives. It paints a picture of everything building toward someone like Reagan winning.
Rick Perlstein
In a lot of ways, that was made to happen. The whole idea of “organized discontent” is about local problems, tensions, and fears. The little counterrevolutions breaking out all over the country. And a big part of the New Right’s political work was getting on the ground and connecting people all over the country who had similar grievances. Literally, in The Invisible Bridge, I have the Boston busing controversy and the Kanawha County West Virginia textbook wars in the same chapter because when protestors against liberal textbooks dynamite the school-board building in West Virginia, the Heritage Foundation sends lawyers to defend them.
Sam Adler-Bell
Leon, were there moments where you saw cross-pollination between different kinds of cultural grievances that helped build the “antibusing” movement?
Leon Neyfakh
The best example is the effort to build “the new Boston,” the urban renewal projects that resulted in certain working-class neighborhoods getting razed. That was a really powerful lever that Louise Day Hicks was pulling as she was talking about schools. She wanted to portray both of these issues as the work of suburban, liberal, smug elites who wanted to tell her constituents what to do. Meanwhile, they don’t have to pay for any of it because they don’t actually live in the city. And there was some truth to that critique. The urban renewal policies were enacted thoughtlessly in many cases. (And they affected Black communities as much as they affected white communities, if not more so.) In Boston, there was a very potent thread that connected urban renewal and school desegregation and that worked to Hicks’s advantage. And in 1967, she ran against the perfect candidate—Kevin White was the embodiment of the establishment. Judge Garrity, who delivered the desegregation order, was exactly the same way. One of the things I’ll never forget is someone screaming to him, basically, “How about you send your daughter to one of these schools? I hope she gets raped.” It was this primal, elemental rage, this sense of unfairness, that this guy was going to tell us what sacrifices to make for the greater good. And, meanwhile, he doesn’t have to contribute at all.
Matthew Sitman
This comes up in your book a fair amount, Rick. I was struck by the phrase “normal people,” like “normal people” being put upon, or people saying, “What about normal Americans?”
Rick Perlstein
Well, that means “white.” The brilliant labor historian Jefferson Cowie is writing a book about how “freedom” is white. The most important historical documents I’ve ever discovered were the letters to Senator Paul Douglas in 1966 from the residents of Chicago communities through which Martin Luther King was marching for housing equality. It was all, “What about the civil rights of white people?” And “normal people” was used interchangeably. When whites are asked to “sacrifice” anything for the sake of equality, the trope that is often reverted to—and Attorney General Bill Barr just used it the other day—is slavery. You know, basically saying, “This is as bad as slavery. You’re now going to enslave us.”
Leon Neyfakh
One of Louise Day Hicks’s slogans was “Boston for Bostonians.” It’s not quite “normal people,” but it’s basically the same idea. Real Bostonians are people like us, people who are white. Her other big slogan was, “You Know Where I Stand,” which is also playing on that same thing: You and I are both normal, not like these other people.
Excerpted from the Know Your Enemy: On the Road to Reaganland podcast, originally aired on October 21, 2020.