Best-selling author Rick Perlstein will talk American politics in Hall Center lecture

A question for Rick Perlstein, should we make our way out to Lawrence, KS tonight:

Sixty years ago Democratic Party grandee Dean Acheson said: Republicans are an essential part of America. They are the party that understands economic growth, and represent those for whom America is working, and for whom economic growth is sufficient.

Today, however, when I look at the Republican Party, that is not the party I see.

I see a party that caters to plutocrats–but increasingly to heirs and successful rent-seekers, not to real entrepreneurs. I see a party that caters to a bunch of white identity-politics practicing Fox News-watchers whom it scares by saying bad guys are coming to get them–for Pat Buchanan, Jews; for Ron Paul, Blacks; for Donald Trump and Kris Kobach, Mexicans; for Sam Brownback, Californians; and for the mayor of Irving Texas, Muslim immigrant anchor-baby teenage-engineers.

You have written three big books of the history of this transformation. But you are only halfway through. Can you give us now the one-paragraph synopsis of what the bottom line will be when you will have finished writing all eight volumes of your history?