“Liz Truss does not understand a word I write,” says her favourite author
Why bad ideas survive
Liz Truss’s inspiration: Ronald Reagan getting it wrong in the 1980s
In the summer of 2022, when Liz Truss was about to become prime minister, I noticed that she was an admirer of Rick Perlstein, one of the great historians of modern America.
Aspiring politicians like to tell the media about their favourite writers, even if they barely look at a book from one year to the next. It gives them a touch of class.
But there was no doubt in this case that Truss was sincere, and knew Perlstein’s work intimately.
She told journalists from the Times that she read “anything” Perlstein wrote. An interviewer from the Atlantic magazine saw a copy of Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf, the third of his four-volume series on the rise of the radical right in the United States between 1960 and 1980, and said it was just the kind of book you’d expect her to read.
Then there was a weird moment in an interview with the Spectator when an anonymous spokeswoman for the Truss campaign, who sounded very like Truss herself, explained that her rival Rishi Sunak was failing to win over Tory members because he refused to pander to their prejudices.
“If people think there is an imaginary river,” the source said, “you don’t tell them there isn’t, you build them an imaginary bridge.”
You can find that quote at the beginning of the Perlstein history of the US right in the mid-1970s that was on Liz Truss’s bookcase. And it is highly revealing. Perlstein picked it from a meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in the late 1950s. The Soviet leader told the then US vice-president that politicians must create their own reality by pandering to the fear in their supporters’ minds.
“If the people believe there is an imaginary river out there,” Khrushchev said, “you don’t tell them there’s no river out there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.”
Truss, or someone close to her was saying that Tories did not want to face facts. They wanted their fantasies confirmed, which is exactly what she did — at enormous cost to the country.
I contacted Perlstein and asked what he thought of having the UK’s next prime minister as a fan.
Let me put it like this: he may have been her favourite historian, but she was not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000. He found her astonishingly stupid.
”Liz. Can’t. Read,” he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites would crash the economy.
As they went on to do.
Truss’s notion that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves had been developed in the 1970s. The new wealth of the already wealthy was meant to boost the economy and tax base and trickle down to the rest of society.
In the fourth volume of his series, Perlstein covered the grifters who sold the idea of self-funding tax cuts and explained how dubious they were.
And yet here, 50-years on, was his devoted reader Liz Truss reading his history as a guidebook rather than a warning.
Why do terrible ideas refuse to die?
You could say in this case that Truss was so stupid she did not understand the past. This was Perlstein’s point.
Then there’s greed. If you want to proselytise for tax cuts for the rich, you will never be short of a paying audience, as the Tufton Street think tanks well know.
Finally, there’s deceit. Conservatives don’t necessarily believe that they will raise money for public services. The enterprise of pretending tax cuts are self-financing is a con designed to weaken state provision.
All three played their part in the voodoo economics of US conservatism and the disastrous reign of Liz Truss.
Here’s how…
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