“Why was Barack Obama attractive to people in 2008? If you think about Barack Obama, there's all this anxiety about society, just kind of wracked by centripetal forces - the idea that the center's not holding, no one can talk to each other, the idea of a political system that's broken.”

American historian, writer and journalist

Rick Perlstein is an American historian, writer, and journalist known for his accounts of the American conservative movement after the 1960s. He has 117 quotes on the site. He is the author of five bestselling books. His first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. Politico has described him as a careful chronicler of modern conservatism.