The History Department hosted Rick Perlstein, a historian and journalist from Chicago, for the 16th-annual Shriber Lecture on Thursday. Held in the Innovative Technologies Complex’s Symposium Hall, the lecture focused on Perlstein’s upcoming book, “The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way,” which covers American politics from the year 2000 to the present.

Perlstein is a New York Times bestselling author of a four-book series tracing the rise of American conservatism. In 2001, he received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his first book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” and made a dozen “best of” lists with his second, “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.” Over his career, he has contributed to major outlets like The Nation, The Washington Post and The New Yorker.

Perlstein said his book’s title, “The Infernal Triangle,” refers to what he believes is the tendency of political discourse since the early 2000s to waver between three points: the “increasing authoritarianism of the Republican Party”; the Democratic Party’s inability to resist it; and the poor “performance of elite, mainstream political media in explaining what was going on.”

During the talk, he discussed a section of his book exploring the 2000 U.S. presidential election, which pitted incumbent former Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, against George W. Bush, the then-Republican governor of Texas. On Nov. 8, one day after the election, a preliminary Florida vote tally showed Bush around 1,700 votes ahead in that state, which carried 25 electoral votes. With neither candidate earning the 270 electoral votes required to get elected, the presidential election came down to Florida.

Under state law, an automatic recount was triggered, trimming Bush’s lead to an even slimmer 317-vote margin. Gore then asked for a manual recount in four counties. On Nov. 26, Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state, certified the election results before all recounts were completed, showing Bush up by 537 votes.

“So Bush worked to affect a favorable outcome by cementing the impression that he had already won,” Perlstein said. “On the day those pitilessly neutral computers took away his 1,457 votes, he stepped up to a podium designed to look like the one in the White House press room and announced he was quote, ‘in the process of planning in a responsible way, a potential administration in the best interest of this country.’”

On Dec. 8, after Gore filed a lawsuit, the Florida Supreme Court ordered all state counties to recount undervotes, or paper ballots that were not fully punched. Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 7-2 that the state court’s order was unconstitutional. A bare majority of justices further held that no constitutional recount could be implemented before a Dec. 12 deadline.

Perlstein said Gore was initially going to concede soon after Fox News proclaimed on Nov. 8 that Bush won the presidency. When he switched course, William Daley, Gore’s campaign chair, was sent to publicly announce “they were taking their concession back.”

William Daley is the son of Richard J. Daley, the former Chicago mayor whom some conservatives accuse without evidence of “stealing” the 1960 presidential election from Richard Nixon. Perlstein said this connection between the two elections furthered Republican claims regarding fraud, which is seen in current rhetoric.

“Its truth, though never proven, is still a Republican article of faith, crucial context for understanding how Republicans think about presidential elections all the way through Donald Trump’s 2020 ‘stop the steal’ remonstrations and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that followed,” Perlstein said. “Democrats can’t win without cheating — it is an article of faith for many political junkies of all descriptions, most decidedly including those inhabiting the nation’s most prestigious newsrooms.”

In an interview after the talk, Perlstein said it was important for students frustrated with the Democratic Party to understand the historical context that explains current political realities. He pointed to the recent retirement of Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, as opening up an opportunity for more active voices in government.

“When I think of polarization, I think of a barbell with equal weights,” Perlstein said. “When we’re talking about a 10-pound weight on one side and 100-pound weight on the other side, right? So if you say, ‘Oh, we’re polarized,’ it’s just not an accurate picture of that barbell.”

“So unless we have an accurate picture of what the Republican Party has been doing and the Democrats’ inadequacy in fighting it, then we can’t fight it,” he finished.