Reaganland

June 1, 2020
Following The Invisible Bridge (2014), Perlstein takes Ronald Reagan to the doors of the White House. "Ronald Reagan insisted that it wasn't his fault," writes the author, the "it" in question being Gerald Ford's loss to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. That victory had been a squeaker: Carter came out of the Democratic National Convention 33 points ahead of Ford but wound up with only 50.08% of the popular vote in the end. Carter was well-meaning but hapless--and sometimes even arrogant in his apparent refusal to tone down his moralizing in favor of the sunny optimism that Reagan radiated. Yet, as Perlstein closely documents, Reagan's every move was scripted, vetted by a powerful political machine. He knew exactly what he was doing when he gave Ford the most lukewarm of endorsements. The author clearly charts political trends that began with the 1976 election and carried through to Reagan's election in 1980, among them the rise of technocrats such as Donald Rumsfeld and the comparative decline of realpolitik practitioners such as Henry Kissinger. We are living with still other trends today--and a young but staggeringly mendacious Donald Trump figures in Perlstein's pages--including the rise of the religious right and white nationalism and a replay of the culture wars of the 1960s, with Pat Buchanan calling Watergate "the climactic battle in a political civil war that raged in this country for ten years" and a host of other Republican players devoted to crushing the rights of gay people and women. In fact, in this long but never-a-wasted-word account, much is depressingly familiar, including tax giveaways to the very rich and the political exploitation of what a Reagan aide called middle-class "discontent, frustration + anger." Other moments seem at once distant and contemporaneous, from confrontations with Iran and North Korea to episodes such as Jonestown and the murder of Harvey Milk. A valuable road map that charts how events from 40 years ago helped lead us to where we are now.

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Starred review from June 22, 2020
Resurgent conservatism defeats enervated liberalism in this sweeping study of the Carter administration and the rise of Ronald Reagan. Political historian Perlstein (The Invisible Bridge) concludes the saga of right-wing insurgency he started in Before the Storm, his magisterial account of the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, with this chronicle of intensifying 1970s political clashes. It’s partly the story of a grassroots uprising of conservative Christians, free-market fundamentalists, and anti-communist zealots who fought the liberal establishment on taxes, gay rights, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment, and found a champion in Ronald Reagan. It’s also about liberalism’s crisis under Jimmy Carter, a populist-turned-bloodless technocrat—Perlstein dubs him the “Engineer in Chief”—who addressed inflation and energy shortages with policies of economic austerity, budget cuts, and deregulation that hurt working-class Democrats, many of whom were then drawn to Reagan’s social conservatism. Perlstein masterfully connects deep currents of social change and ideology to prosaic politics, which he conveys in elegant prose studded with vivid character sketches and colorful electoral set-pieces. (“The camera cut to Reagan, who was rocking back and forth in his place, beaming like a boxer whose opponent had just lowered his gloves,” he writes of Reagan’s celebrated “There you go again!” quip during the 1980 presidential debate.) The result is an insightful and entertaining analysis of a watershed era in American politics. Agent: Tina Bennett.

Starred review from August 1, 2020

In this latest work, Perlstein (Nixonland) focuses on the four up-and-down years of the Jimmy Carter administration and how that period birthed much of the conservative politics still alive and well today. Told in chronological order from Carter's inauguration in 1977 to Ronald Reagan's in 1981, Perlstein details the issues Carter faced: administration scandals, an energy crisis, culture wars, inflation, and a treaty for the Panama Canal. The author argues that Carter failed to engage the Democratic base, responding to the energy crisis and and inflation, for example, with austere measures that pushed many voters toward Republican candidates. Modern conservatism, Perlstein contends, is good at drawing stark narratives and fostering a hunger for "simpler" days. Ronald Reagan stepped into the political void, giving interviews and writing op-eds to solidify an expanded base of voters responding to his brand of social conservatism. He spent four years running to be President, and when the 1980 election came, he won by a landslide. One comes away from this book with a better understanding of how Carter was so thoroughly defeated. VERDICT Perlstein casts a broad net, riffing on everything from Ted Bundy to New York Mayor Ed Koch, but that is part of the package here; by the end readers have more insight on the rising tide of conservative politics.--Keith Klang, Port Washington P.L., NY

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