Was the Trump phenomenon a historical accident? Reinterpreting the history of the American right
Rick Perlstein, an independent historian and journalist, became the main spokesperson for this sentiment in an op-ed for The New York Times published in April 2017: "The professional guardians of America's past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump." A sense of urgency gripped the profession; books written after 2016 are now appearing in bookstores.
These historians do not merely revisit the trajectory followed by the right in the 20 th century; they also question the destiny of the US as a whole. Certain preconceived ideas about what the country thought it had become are being challenged. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, advances in feminism, openness to the world, the defense of liberty – all of these developments appear much more fragile in light of these new works. They debunk a persistent myth, which was the source of an initial error in how the history of the right was written: that of the liberal consensus, or even the American consensus.
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