Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

Chronicle of Modern American Conservatism #4

by Rick Perlstein

A Simon & Schuster book. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, Biography, Presidents, Audiobook

1117 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 18, 2020

About the author

Eric S. "Rick" Perlstein (born 1969) is an American historian and journalist. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in History in 1992. He is a former writer for The Village Voice and The New Republic and the author of numerous articles in other publications. Until March, 2009 he was a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future where he wrote for their blog about the failures of conservative governance.

Perlstein is also the author of the books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). Before the Storm covers the rise of the conservative movement culminating in the nomination and campaign of Barry Goldwater and how the movement came to dominate the Republican Party despite Goldwater's loss. Nixonland covers American politics and society from 1964 to 1972, centering on Richard Nixon's attempt to rehabilitate himself politically and his eventual successful use of the resentment of settled society against the social unrest of the day to rebuild the Republican Party.

His article for the Boston Review on how Democrats can win was published in book form under the title The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo, together with responses.

Reviews

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read all of the Perlstein books--Goldwater, Nixon, and now Reagan. I loved Nixonland and I think about it all the time. This one was not great for me. First off, it was so so long--I think unnecessarily so. Perlstein is a fun and insightful historian to read because he brings in cultural context to explain the psyche of a moment. In Nixonland, he talks about how Jaws and the Exorcist were the thrillers of the moment due to the underground threats of domestic terrorism and the cold war. In this book, he provides both too much context and also not enough. It's still a fascinating read, but it felt like a play by play of the decade. It hardly covered Reagan and focused instead on Carter. I still learned a lot and enjoyed it, but I guess I had no lightbulb moments of understanding like I did with the other ones.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Perlstein’s fourth and presumably final look at the rise of American conservatism, Reaganland is a towering monument both to conservative triumph and liberal folly. Picking up where his last volume, The Invisible Bridge, left off, Perlstein looks at the four years between Ronald Reagan’s narrow defeat at the 1976 Republican Convention by Gerald Ford and his election as president. Between that time, Perlstein writes, “enormous things were happening. They just weren’t always the sort of things that made for bold, clear headlines.” A combination of spiraling cultural grievances, powerful political movements, economic malaise and Jimmy Carter’s failed presidency conspired to make the New Right, frequently dismissed as a fringe or yesterday’s news, the dominant force in American politics. The immediate result was Reagan’s election in 1980; the long-term impact, we’re still assessing now.

The balance of Perlstein’s book, despite the title, takes place in the Carter Administration. And Reaganland does little to revise the common portrait of Carter as a well-meaning failure. Carter takes office on a message of probity and cleaning up corruption in Washington, a populist with an ever-shifting package of beliefs (liberal social policies, moderate foreign policy, conservative economics). Within months, his presidency founders: Carter’s micromanaging style renders governing effectively near-impossible, as his brash staff (Hamilton Jordan, his foul-mouthed, woman-groping assistant, comes off particularly bad) alienates congressional allies and his own cabinet. Carter finds his efforts to sell America on austerity unsuccessful; Americans, battered by a decade of scandal and humiliation, aren’t receptive to his lectures on the national “crisis of confidence.” His foreign policy seems disastrous too, with his decision to return the Panama Canal kicking up a storm of domestic protest, his detente outreach to China and the USSR floundering and his greatest achievement, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, hostage to the whims of Middle Eastern politics. All this before the nightmare of the Iran Hostage Crisis, which ignites furious indignation both at the dastardly Muslims terrorizing Americans (ignoring, of course, America’s long support of the Shah’s terror regime) and the President’s seeming inability to control events.

Though, as Perlstein shows, Carter’s wounds weren’t entirely self-inflicted. Overconfident after Watergate and the impotent Ford Administration, liberal Democrats misread the times, prescribing New Deal era prescriptions for economic growth that the public no longer had patience for: how can in the midst of energy crises and perpetual “stagflation”? Carter’s approach, though often flawed in execution, was in many ways understandably pragmatic, yet seemed to alienate Democratic power brokers as much as his personal style (leading to Ted Kennedy’s divisive primary challenge in 1980). Perlstein also makes the case that the media, emboldened by Watergate and, paradoxically, increasingly suffused by conservative columnists (like William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter who made it his mission to vindicate his boss by demonizing Democrats), unfairly blew Carter’s every misstep into a Nixonian scandal. Perhaps there was some cause in going after Bertram Lance, Carter’s budget director discovered to have shady financial dealings, or following the misadventures of Billy Carter; but like the later attacks on Bill Clinton, it seems less a case of dogged reporting than throwing enough mud at the wall to see what sticks. Inevitably, some of it did.

But the book’s core is its discussion of the New Right’s rise to power. Perlstein recounts the “culture wars” of the late ‘70s in vivid, stirring detail: the clash over the Equal Rights Amendment, early battles over gay rights and rearguard actions against school busing and racial integration. Entire chapters show how liberal organizations, from the feminist NOW to the NAACP, are constantly outmaneuvered by conservative populists who can better sell their own message while exploiting their opponents’ weaknesses - namely, smug complacency that their views are less prevailing opinions than inarguable common sense. Phyllis Schlafly’s crusade against the ERA takes on a life of its own, creating a powerful backlash against a once-uncontroversial movement. Anita Bryant spearheads a massive movement to snuff out (sometimes literally) gay and lesbian activism, just as it gains mainstream attention. Anti-abortion “pro-life” organizers, previously a fringe populated mostly by Catholics, gain extraordinary power; the National Rifle Association, formerly a moderate sportsmen’s organization, is overtaken by pro-gun militants. And the Moral Majority - media-savvy evangelists like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker - transform fundamentalist Christianity, once studiously apolitical, into a massively powerful force.

And conservative activists took notice. Rich corporate barons whom Perlstein dubs “Boardroom Jacobins” funnel money into conservative groups; libertarian activists find common cause with Birchers and Klansmen, mainstreaming their hatred into electoral politics; campaign geniuses like the vile Lee Atwater and direct mail guru Richard Viguerie flood mailboxes and airwaves with fear- and anger-stoking advertisements between elections. Their efforts quickly bear fruit. Liberal giants among the Democrats (Idaho’s Frank Church, last seen battling the CIA, and George McGovern, patron saint of liberal purists, among them) fall in targeted campaigns, while remaining moderate Republicans die (Nelson Rockefeller, notoriously, in flagrante delicto) or are written out of the party (John Anderson, so disgusted with the GOP’s rightward lurch that he mounted a third party bid in 1980). Meanwhile, a new generation of Republicans, among them Newt Gingrich, Orrin Hatch and Dan Quayle, came to office imbibing messages of ideological purity and politics as warfare: Democrats aren’t only wrong, they’re evil. They must not only be defeated, but destroyed.

Perlstein, for his part, seems to have absorbed criticisms of his previous works, culling the hyperbole of Nixonland and the sprawling, messy structure of Invisible Bridge. His chapters provide brilliant mini-disquisitions on a variety of subjects, from America’s messy history with Iran and Israel to blow-by-blow accounts of the Camp David Accords, the National Women’s Convention in Houston and the murder trial of Harvey Milk's assassin Dan White. The cultural digressions that sometimes bog down his work (eg. Invisible Bridge’s long-winded disquisitions into Wacky Packages and the like) are mostly reduced to crisp observations about the meaning of Star Wars, Superman and other milestones. The glibness that sometimes marks Perlstein’s work is nowhere present here: what’s left is a book that, despite its broad scope and doorstop length, feels remarkably focused.

Nowhere does this show more than Perlstein’s portrait of Ronald Reagan. While hardly flattering, Reaganland’s portrait of the 40th President feels more rounded than his near-caricatured depiction in Invisible Bridge. Perlstein grants him human contours (his empathy for disadvantaged individuals, even as he dismisses systematic inequality; his personal distaste for race baiting, even as it grows central to his campaign) that don’t obscure the destructiveness of his anti-government rhetoric, unfettered pro-capitalism and embrace of the Moral Majority. He baffles pundits who view him as an antiquated has-been, and outmaneuvers political opponents with a higher profile (establishment Republican George H.W. Bush, Watergate hero Howard Baker) or more solid bases (John Connally, the ex-LBJ protege who becomes the darling of CEOs until he puts his foot in his mouth once too often). Whatever else might be said of Reagan, he proved incredibly gifted at selling his message, even to Americans skeptical of conservative ideology. Thus he trounces Carter in the general election, even as doubts linger about the convenient timing of Iran’s release of hostages or the fate of Carter’s debate briefing book.

Reaganland ends with Reagan ascending to the White House, having defied his opponents and vindicated all of those who clung to him, from the “respectable” movement conservatives who’d been waiting since the ‘50s for a savior to the seedier plutocrats and social reactionaries. Of course, as Perlstein shows, there’s scarcely a difference between them, except for the former granting an intellectual gloss to the inchoate anger and appetites of the latter. The unholy alliance Reagan forged remains with us, with effects painfully obvious to readers in 2020 (both of this year’s presidential candidates, appropriately, make unflattering cameos in the text). And it’s all captured in what might be Rick Perlstein’s masterpiece.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks for the memories! Rounding up because my son didn't complain the whole time and enjoyed the book.

[Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I now feel much more informed about some of the political and social origins of the shambolic U.S. presidency of 2020. And, regarding how the hell it has come to pass that my former beloved GOP party of the first president I ever voted for (Reagan in 1984) could birth and protect such an insane clown posse to and in the White House: a narcissistic, mentally imbalanced autocrat who regularly foments rabid racism, governs the country by what he views on Fox and Friends that morning, tweets tyranny and tantrums at all hours, kindles man crushes for several bad boy dictators, and is otherwise worse than I could have even imagined 4 years ago.

I have been reading a lot of these books in my search for answers and to stoke the fires to end this. I refuse to go out a “good german.“

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read two of the other books in this series (Nixonland and Invisible Bridge) and this one certainly is an identifiable sibling of the others; it's a maximalist historical appraisal of the American political landscape between 1976-1980.

Over the years, I've heard President Carter referred to as one of the country's worst presidents. This assessment (articulated almost exclusively by conservatives) has always baffled me. Looking back, I can see that he didn't inspire much fanfare - but he seemed like a decent, thoughtful, and competent president. I picked up this book hoping to learn what - outside of typical partisanship - could inspire such contempt.

Perstein does paint a useful portrait of the era, particularly with respect to the tethering of (white) Evangelicals to Republican Party politics. He also explains the rise of Political Action Committees (PACs) and the corralling of industry interests into a massive (and effective) political juggernaut. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of legacy questions that must remain a mystery: like why antipathy towards Carter remains visceral 40 years after he left office.

This is a long book. Long. Which is great. I finished it in the last days of the presidential election of 2020. Being able to mentally travel to another time, or, rather... away from my own present time? Well, that was lovely.

[David Allen Hines · Rating 5 out of 5]

This engaging and well-written book is by far the best book I have read this year! It is the culmination of the author's 4 excellent books that chart the modern American conservative movement beginning with Before the Storm about Barry Goldwater; Nixonland an excellent account of the years of Richard M. Nixon; continuing with The Invisible Bridge taking on the Ford years and Reagan's 1976 challenge to Ford's nomination to run for a 4 year term. Now Reaganland takes on where The Invisible Bridge left off and continues through the 1980 election.

Truth be told this book should properly be called Carterland. It is as much an account of the disastrous final 2 years of Jimmy Carter as it is Reagan's rise. After a very promising start, Jimmy Carter crashed and burned. A victim of his own micromanagement, too many staffers lacking experience in Washington politics, a sanctimonious attitude, and a crashing economy and rapidly changing international affairs, any president would have had a hard time, but clearly Carter was not up to the task, although history has been kinder to his ideas on energy and education. Whether it was out of control inflation, rising unemployment, an energy crisis caused by oil rationing by OPEC, supporting the Iranian Shah just as he was being overthrown, the Soviet invasion of Afganistan, at every step Carter just could nor surmount the circumstances he found himself in.

At the same time Ronald Reagan who had narrowly lost the 1976 Republican nomination, had to regroup and gain the support of a rising Christian conservative movement, some of whom questioned his sincerity, others of whom questioned his age. Like Carter, initially his staff was not wise in the ways of national politics and time and again Reagan stumbled, something not much remembered today.

While Reagan eventually won the nomination and united his party, Carter faced the disastrous challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy. Even after Kennedy lost, he divided the party and the nominating convention. The efforts of some in the Democratic party to hold onto a liberalism the public was rejecting led to Carter's huge defeat in 1980 and an even bigger defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984. Liberalism had been rejected and these people did not get it.

Perlstein does an excellent account relating the trials Carter and Reagan faced, and how in the end, Reagan found his footing while Carter slid to a dramatic fall. You will also see the first appearances of later presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and interestingly Perlstein points out how Trump later capitalized on part of an early Reagan motto, "Let's Make America Great Again."

I would still argue though this book should be called Carterland and that a book on the years 1981-1989 be called Reaganland!

Altogether this book is by far the best political history I have read in a long time. It relates events most of us can still recall, and Perlstein does an excellent job candidly reviewing the times both through direct interactions with the participants and the lens of almost 40 years of history now. Highly recommended as are the previous 3 books in this series.

[Brian Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

After four books totalling 2,982 pages of text by my count (call it 3,000), Perlstein lays his great epic of the rise of New-Conservatism to rest. For two decades, he chronicled two decades of that movement that continues to ripple through our political fabric today.

So, the above numbers will give any reader pause. Especially if you don't need to wait for the last two to arrive for years as I did so that I could take a breath. That is a lot of political history and those are a lot of pages. I "only" had to read 2,500 pages in an English major class covering the Victorian novel! But this was well worth it, as Perlstein bridges the evolution of the Republican party from the party of Eisenhower and Nixon to that of Reagan, and Gingrich, and eventually the MAGA crowd. Those last 40 years are implied throughout these four books, but you can see the seeds embedded deep in the radical soil.

I distinctly remember reading the first book, "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus", partially, in a scrap yard as my father and I laid our trusty old brown 1983 Ford truck to rest. He was laid off from Ford in 1980 as part of the economic crisis that is laid out in this book leading to the election of Ronald Reagan. Indeed, my earliest political memory is November 4, 1980, when we glumly accepted his victory on election night. That is where this narrative essentially ends (with a page long notice of the end of the 60s on December 8, 1980 and the fur coats draping Inaugural Ball coatrooms as Reagan took office). That book detailed the reaction to JFK in the early 60s which led to "radical" Barry Goldwater's ascendancy into the nominee of the Republican Party despite his bona fide credentials as a far right Republican (government in all its forms was the enemy - no desegregation, no Social Security, but nuke the Ruskies). The John Birch society and especially Phyllis Schafly (both of whom make appearances throughout the series) denigrated the fall of American morality as they saw it: racial integration and intermarriage, men who grew their hair long, women daring to search for meaning outside the home, birth control, the Equal Rights Amendment (still not ratified in 2021), abortion, and many public issues that we take for granted as guaranteed today. It led to a massive landslide by LBJ, partially by a grieving nation honoring JFK but also a ratification of the New Deal and progressive policies.

Then, "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America". If history is written by the victors, this book tells the story of conservatism in the abyss, reeling from the landslide victory of LBJ and the rise of ratified Civil Rights into law as well as the Great Society (these were the years where public benefits programs run by the government saw their absolute zenith - even more than the New Deal). Oh yeah, and the cultural ascendancy of the 1960s. To paraphrase Hamlet, how did we go from this to this? How did Richard Nixon pull off the political comeback of a lifetime? What forces bubbled within the Republican Party (and decimated the Democratic one) to lead to Nixon's election? To his popularity? The book ends in 1970, frozen before Watergate, with Law and Order the words of the day and truly reactionary politics leading the way to rejecting Woodstock with the shootings at Kent State. A certain actor turned Governor of California is leading the vanguard. So does the escalation of the Vietnam War, promised to be ended by Nixon, into carpet bombing of Cambodia.

"The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan" does exactly that, tie the self immolation of Nixon's Presidency with the Watergate scandal (well detailed there) into the ascendancy of the forces that would rally around the charisma of Ronald Reagan to "lead" the party. The book ends in 1976, as Reagan loses to Ford by the most miniscule of margins and the Democrats turn to their own outsider in Jimmy Carter. The John Birch Society and Phyllis Schafly metastasized into much more overtly hostile forces inhospitable with the role of government in American life. The battle over Roe v. Wade is worth the price of admission alone.

Then "Reaganland: America's Right Turn: 1976-1980". There simply isn't a more complete and detailed analysis of American politics during the Carter Presidency. Everybody makes an appearance, from George H.W. Bush (obviously) to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, to Roger Stone and Paul Manafort (worked on Reagan's campaign) to Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Clinton's only losing campaign was for re-election in 1980 (doomed with the Democratic party), Bernie's began in 1980, and Trump's public profile began in 1979. While I initially thought Perlstein was going the cross the T's and dot the I's much more forcefully, he doesn't need to. By the time Reaganland is finished, the hypocrisy of the Religious Right, the money behind conservative forces, the hatred of progressivism, the superficial salesmanship of American values without core policies in place other than the (more often than not) selfishness of tax cuts for me but not for others, and the supremacy of the loudest voice in the room. It's not hard to see where the future after this book lies: the amplification of those voices at Fox News (CNN only makes its start here with the Iranian hostage crisis) and the wholesale embracement of demagogues like Donald Trump, forsaking morality if the price paid leads to victory. It's a four volume series that details how the Conservative brand bought modern victory at the price of its own soul.

That durable old "Brown Bomber" from Ford survived for 25 years. The "New Right" or "neoconservative" movement has lasted much longer. But the Brown Bomber did more to make my life a better and more loving place. 40 years after the end of the events in the book, are you better off now than you were 40 years ago? Is America? I'm not sure we are. These books tell how we got there. Here. And beyond.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reaganland ends Rick Perlstein’s four volume history on the rise of modern conservatism in American politics with looking at how the former actor and governor became the embodiment of the 1980s. Beginning with how Ronald Reagan might or might not have failed to help President Gerald Ford in the 1976 then how he became the four-year front-runner to challenge President Jimmy Carter as the economic, cultural, and political landscape shifted under the feet of the Establishment without them noticing.

Perlstein sticks to the trademark of this series with interconnecting cultural, entertainment, and societal issues with politics and history as nothing happens within a vacuum. The women’s rights, gay rights, and abortion rights developments of the early part of the 1970s, brought “organized discontent” from “moral” individuals who brought the “culture wars” that the country has lived with for the past 40 years into the mainstream of politics. Conservative background powerbrokers and boardroom Jacobins latched onto these “moral” crusades as well as the groundswell of taxpayer discontent and manipulated campaigns against consumerism to better their political fortunes and corporate profits. Then there was the continuing economic issues from inflation, energy, and unemployment all interrelated during the late 1970s that ultimately undermined the Carter Presidency than anything else beyond the borders of the nation. Finally, all the factors above that combined to make the 1980 Presidential campaign, not only one of a monumental shift in the political landscape but also historically misunderstood as to why Reagan won and Carter lost.

Unlike previous books, Perlstein didn’t need to give biographies of the major political figures of the era as they had already been covered though he did give minibiographies of individuals of lesser stature but who’s unknown impact would last for years. As I mention in my review of the previous book, Perlstein just goes after Carter and the major figures in his Administration but Reagan and his entire campaign doesn’t escape savaging as well throughout the book especially during the Presidential campaign. Perlstein doesn’t have to manipulate the facts to make the Christian Right, aka Moral Majority, come across as unchristian and unconstitutional in their portrayal in the book as what was covered in this five year period could be copied and pasted from anytime up until 2020.

The 1980s is seen as the decade of Ronald Reagan thus this book title, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980, perfectly encapsulates how that came to be. Rick Perlstein’s final volume of how modern conservatism took over the Republican Party and changed the political landscape as well as the political Establishment completes a 22-year story yet also feels historically hollow, which is the book’s major drawback. Without analysis of how the trends of 1958-1980 influenced the next four decades, the volume’s end was both sudden and underwhelming for a reader that had spent their time reading it.

[John Devlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bushwhacked, hornswoggled…by myself.

The one downside of e books are the lengths of some grand paper carcasses are hidden by pixels.

Had I known this book was 1,000 pages I’d never have started but once started like most book devotees I was loathe to admit defeat.

The author is on the Left and he consistently impugns conservative motives and he loves to add some zinger about some moralizing Christian Politico who gets caught up in some gay dalliance.

The reason the book reaches two stars is bc it’s a granular examination of the political landscape. The tempests in a teapot: Panama Canal, Salt II, briggs initiative all give a reader some perspective. Social security, solar panels, govt growth, and debt all show not much has changed.

Reagan was too old to be president at 68.
Forty years later, Biden was 78 and up to the task, yeah right.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

How did the straight man to a chimp wind up becoming President of the United States? By the time this book begins America is in the midst of its own Cold war, with politics a zero-sum game. Reagan must convince voters he is not an extremist while luring the far right, especially Christian fundamentalists, by preaching gloom on the economy and fear from foreign foes. President Jimmy Carter hobbles from one crisis to another. How could America go from 1976, when the GOP faced near extinction, to a Reagan landslide in 1980? This last volume of Perlstein's tetralogy helps explain the who, when, where, and why this happened. Dazzling if depressing reading.

[Aaron Million · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fourth volume in Rick Perlstein's magnificent chronicling of the rise of the conservative movement in America, and it is huge, clocking in at 914 pages before notes. Perlstein picks up with the election of 1976, pitting the unelected and embattled Gerald Ford against the D.C. outside from Georgia, former Governor Jimmy Carter. Perlstein then takes us all through Carter's term up to the election of former California Governor Ronald Reagan four years later.

While there is - as one might imagine - a ton of information contained in a book this large, what really crystallized for me at the end is that there are three main, interchangeable parts to Perlstein's sprawling narrative. First, there is the rise of the religious right (or New Right as Perlstein often says) that helps propel Reagan to victory with a take-no-prisoners approach to accomplishing their goals. Second, there is at times the unbelievable stubbornness and intransigence (many would say incompetence) of Carter. And third, there is the story of how Reagan - despite a whole host of unforced blunders on his part - managed to convince the electorate that he would be a more effective occupant of the Oval Office than Carter had been.

A very large portion of the book is taken up with the growing power and militancy of the evangelical Christian movement. They had many issues that they railed against, but the ones that energized them to oppose the most were abortion, gay rights, the fight for ratification of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), with gun control being on the list but not really near the top (which is certainly a change from today). Racism also played a part - a big part, in my view, although Reagan and others would get indignant whenever someone accused them of being or implied that they were racists.

As Perlstein shows, things were really out of control in the country during the late 1970s. The economy was in free-fall, suffering from stagflation (high inflation that would not go down, coupled with high unemployment due to things like the American auto manufacturers closing plants due to losing market share to foreign car makers). Anti-abortion protesters were bombing abortion clinics. Jim Jones had taken his cult of "People's Temple" followers to British Guiana and then had them commit suicide. Gas shortages plagued the country in 1979, with long lines of cars waiting for hours to get gas, often with fistfights breaking out amongst angry motorists. The shah was overthrown in Iran and then a group of Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took the diplomatic staff hostage. Gays were attacked all across the country, even in super liberal San Francisco where openly gay City Councilman Harvey Milk was assassinated along with the city's Mayor. Women's rights were also under attack, not so much by men but by right-wing women such as Phyllis Schlafly, who successfully torpedoed the push for the ERA.

Honestly, all of these things - collectively for sure if not also individually - made for a grim read. Part of that is because some of these same fights are still going on over forty years later. Abortion is one of THE most polarizing topics in American society today. And the slew of anti gay and trans legislation at the state level over the last few years makes one want to despair if homophobia can ever be marginalized to the point where it is hardly noticeable anymore (I don't see that happening, at least not in my lifetime, despite the enormous progress that has been made in that area). Look at how much racism - never far from the surface at any time in this country's history - has really reared its ugly head again in recent years. Much of this book felt like reading echoes of many of the issues that continue to plague America.

As infuriating as it is to see so many of these problems remain unresolved today, it is just as bad to read about it from back then. Take, for example, the Milk murder. He and Mayor George Moscone were shot to death in their offices by a disgruntled and vehement homophobe, Dan White, who had recently resigned as a City Councilman. Despite obvious guilt (he sneaked into the building through an open window to avoid the metal detectors at the front door), he was acquitted because the city of San Francisco in essence threw the case. Despite a significant gay population, the city's police force, many of its residents, and the new Mayor, Diane Feinstein, didn't seem to want White convicted nor did they try very diligently to do so. White ended up being convicted only of manslaughter, with jurors buying his defense that the murders that he committed were not premeditated despite a basket of evidence to the contrary.

Also going on at this time were the repeals of gay-rights ordinances in various cities around the country. These events were largely fueled by Christian preachers imploring their flocks to push back against something they thought was sinful. Abortion was put in this category too, with protestors pushing for a national abortion ban (sound familiar?) and shreiking that those who had abortions or performed them were baby killers and deserved to be punished, and that God would approve of harsh punishment for such offenders. This movement was helped along by people such as Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, who managed to flood the country with pamphlets containing photos of aborted fetuses and imploring people to vote against any politician who was not strictly pro-life. If I had to sum these people up in one word: fanatical. And that is why they achieved so much success: they were relentless and unwilling to even attempt to compromise with the pro-choice faction. They were energized and angered and they mobilized their forces to help Reagan win and also to displace many long-time Democratic Senators such as Frank Church and George McGovern.

A few quotes that are in the book were really telling. First, on page 848, from Robert Billings, who was the religious outreach director for Reagan's presidential campaign: "People want leadership,... They don't want to think for themselves. They want to be told what to think by some of us here, close to the front." On page 872, Perlstein quotes Martin Marty, a scholar on religion, that the people who make up the so-called Moral Majority believed that "if you aren't their kind of Christian, you're a second-class citizen," and "logically they are going to impose their particular brand of theology and lifestyle on the rest of us."

Now onto Reagan. If you like Reagan, I have a difficult time thinking that you will like Perlstein's treatment of him. He depicts Reagan in a mostly negative light, starting with his damaging fight against Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Reagan lost, narrowly. His loss sharply divided the party, as Reagan represented the increasingly vocal far-right portion of it, while Ford was a traditional Republican in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower - conservative on economic issues, strong on defense, moderate on social issues. If Ford had not been the incumbent President, I don't think that there is any way that he would have won the nomination. He barely did so as is. In the general election campaign against Carter, Reagan barely did anything. He and Ford did not like each other, and Reagan had to be pressured to campaign for Ford. He only did so reluctantly, and not often at that.

Once Carter was elected, Reagan used his daily five-minute radio commentaries and his newspaper columns to go after Carter for issues such as the Panama Canal treaties (Carter worked to turn the Canal ownership over to Panama, something that Reagan and conservatives were adamantly opposed to). Reagan propagated falsehoods about the situation: "We're being asked to turn over a $10 billion investment" when the actual amount was $1.02 billion (page 125). He accused Panama of having "...the highest per capita debt... of any nation in the world" when in reality the U.S. debt was four and a half times greater. Reagan was not one to let facts get in the way of whatever story he was trying to tell at the time.

Perlstein has a really good, objective analysis of Reagan's views on homosexuality, coming on page 376: Reagan wrote in a letter that "I have never condoned homosexuality, and certainly do not support the abolition of criminal laws regarding sexual conduct." Yet he also said that gays were "not contagious" and worked to protect the privacy of anyone on his gubernatorial staff who was. Perlstein: "This was a Reagan pattern: often strikingly unempathetic when it came to the effects of policy on millions of people, he could be achingly so in defense of individuals, especially those he could identify with or knew personally."

Perlstein also analyzes Reagan when it comes to race, on page 673: "Ronald Reagan doted upon his lack of racism, even as he opposed anti-racist public policies. When people criticized him for opposing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he protested that his objection had been only that the law was 'humiliating to the South'. When they pointed to his opposition to California's open housing law in 1966, he said that the overriding moral issue was the sacred nature of property rights. He kept a quiver of anecdotes at hand to explain how the heroic actions of individuals had already solved America's racial ordeal, like the sports announcers, himself included, who successfully organized against the official Major League Baseball guidebook's assertion, 'Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,' integrating Blacks into the league. (There was no such guidebook, and he stopped broadcasting a decade before baseball desegregated.)" That to me is quintessential Reagan: he tells a story that sounds really good, and seems believable, until you look into it and realize that it has little or no truth whatsoever.

And then sometimes he was a little more transparent, such as when he spoke at Bob Jones University (page 723): "On January 30, Ronald Reagan appeared to a delirious reception in the auditorium of the Christian institution of higher learning in South Carolina wrapped up in federal litigation to preserve its right to exclude Black students:... a 'great institution', Reagan proclaimed. Regarding the IRS guidelines, he said, 'You do not alter the evil character of racial quotas simply by changing the color of the beneficiary'."

But lest you might think that Perlstein is a Democratic partisan, think again because he lambastes Carter every bit as much as he does Reagan. In recent years, Carter's reputation has undergone an improvement, with the now-common mantra of "horrible President, great ex-President" being shown to be an oversimplification. But I have to say that, after reading Perlstein's recounting of Carter's presidency, it is difficult not to just shake your head and want to ask Carter - repeatedly - "WHAT were you thinking?"

First, and maybe most important, is that Carter came across as all doom-and-gloom; a scold who lectured Americans on how they needed to tighten their belts and do without, and make sacrifices. Gas rationing. Energy shortages (Carter wanted people to set their thermostats at 65 in the winter and 80 in the summer. 80! Goodness sakes.) Austerity measures with the economy. His infamous "malaise" speech in the cardigan sweater. He came across as the Sunday School preacher that he was - sermonizing about how Americans need to alter their habits to get through difficult times.

To be sure, Carter was not the first nor the last President to call on the American people to make some type of sacrifice for the common good. But he was not an FDR who could pull that type of thing off. Part of the reason for that is that Carter did not balance the negativity with a message of hope and a vision of better days ahead. Part of the reason is that he lacked the charisma of someone like his opponent, Reagan, who could connect with people through stories (even if they were sometimes wholly invented or derived from a partial truth). And part of the reason is that he did it so much. Like all the time. People don't like being lectured. And they especially don't like being lectured so often that the messages themselves lose their importance. Nor do they like being continually lectured when they do not see things improving. And unfortunately, things did not improve much during Carter's presidency, despite some serious accomplishments such as the Panama Canal treaties, the deregulation of several industries. and some forward-thinking environmental actions.

In some respects, Carter had a very productive presidency. BUT, that was not apparent at the time. Only in hindsight does he look better than when he was in office, and even then he was a seriously flawed President who so mismanaged his relations with Congress that he struggled to get much of his agenda through a Democratic-controlled Congress. He had such dismal relationships with fellow Democrats that Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy mounted a serious (and damaging) challenge to Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination.

Carter also came across as strange: firing most of Cabinet in a mass purge despite some of the Secretaries doing good jobs; inviting groups of people up to Camp David to criticize him and tell him what they think he needed to do to turn things around; trying to beat a rabbit with an oar while fishing in a river; telling the country during his lone debate with Reagan that he asked his twelve year-old daughter Amy what was the most important issue in the election. Contrast that with the genial Reagan, always cracking jokes and generally having a pleasant demeanor. The only surprise was that Carter kept the race as close as he did until almost the end.

There were a few things that I thought Perlstein brushed past too quickly or didn't discuss. While he did write about the Iran hostage crisis, he breezes past the disastrous rescue attempt that resulted in a fiery helicopter crash, killing eight servicemen. I think that was a real blow to Carter's re-election chances, as it gave the impression that he and his government could not solve that awful situation. Very little is written about Carter's environmental endeavors. His wife, Rosalynn, is almost non-existent in the narrative, despite being a large influence in his presidency. Nancy Reagan does not appear too often either, despite her steadfast devotion and protection of Reagan from anyone or anything that could hurt him.

However, in a book this large, you have to stop at some point. And Perlstein's focus was on the rise of the right, so it is understandable why some areas or people who were not integral to that movement would not be featured here. This is an excellent book, and if you aren't scared off by its length, it is well worth reading. But it is not light reading nor, given that so many of these problems still afflict the country today, is it inspiring. I found it to be a bleak, but important, read.

Grade: A

[Alex Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A old gaffe-prone celebrity with a hazy command of the facts harnesses right-wing disaffection to a plutocratic agenda and wins the presidency against a dull Democratic candidate who hardly anyone seems to like.

Donald Trump? No, Ronald Reagan.

More than just describing how Reagan went from punchline to president, Rick Perlstein's Reaganland is a sweeping political, social, and cultural history of late 70s America, cataloguing everything from gas shortages and the Iran hostage crisis to the conservative themes of The Deer Hunter, while zeroing in on the tectonic shifts in American politics that laid the groundwork for Reagan's landslide victory in the 1980 election, and his subsequent conservative revolution. The echoes of present-day America are hard to miss, and Perlstein is keen to lean into them, with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden receiving mentions.

"We organize discontent," claimed New Right mandarin Howard Phillips. And indeed, the story of the late 70s (and Reaganland's center of gravity) was the ferocious right-wing backlash against the sociopolitical revolutions of the 60s. Evangelical Christians angered by the advances of abortion rights, gay rights, and women's rights, corporate executives eager to roll back the welfare and regulatory state, and neocons disenchanted with the Democratic Party's dovish turn post-Vietnam all coalesced under the conservative banner, cheerfully led by the former California governor, Ronald Reagan.

The narrative begins in 1976 with Reagan deflecting charges that his primary campaign and subsequent lethargic campaigning for Gerald Ford played a role in Ford's narrow defeat to Jimmy Carter in 1976. Dismissed as too old and too right-wing for another presidential run, Reagan confounded the critics by tapping into this groundswell of conservative angst and presenting it with a warm, optimistic, and charismatic veneer. And angst it was, as Perlstein recounts the political and cultural wars of the late 70s with literary panache: the initially noncontroversial Equal Rights Amendment was stopped cold in its tracks by social conservatives who feared it would undermine women's traditional role as homemakers; gay rights ordinances in Miami and Wichita were rolled back by a tidal wave of homophobia, fanned by hucksters like Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell; conservatives furiously denounced the US transfer of the Panama Canal back to Panama under the jingoistic slogan of, "We bought it; we built it; it's ours."

Reading the blow-by-blow accounts of these fights, it's striking how many of today's conservative grievances are actually tropes borrowed from this period. “Make the libs mad!” was quite literally in the stump speeches from Phyllis Schlafly as she campaigned against the ERA. Jimmy Carter's proposed electoral reform package in 1977 that included, among other things, universal same-day registration and abolition of the Electoral College, was defeated by a lobbying effort led by Ronald Reagan under cries that it would lead to wide-scale voter fraud. We can at least pay Paul Weyrich, another New Right influencer, the complement of honesty when he said at a 1980 evangelical conference that he didn't want everyone to vote. The more things change, the more they stay the same, indeed. One can't help thinking after putting down this book that Reagan's key political innovation was putting a smiley face on an essentially ugly movement.

Yet Reaganland is about liberal capitulation as much as it is about conservative ascendency. The ill-fated man whose presidency overlaps this period, Jimmy Carter, is depicted by Perlstein as an honest technocrat who missed the forest for the trees; the man who could sit down and read the federal tax code while not realizing that the ground was shifting from beneath him. The postwar liberal consensus, undergirded as it was by economic good times, unravelled as new economic challenges arose - high inflation, sluggish growth, and energy shortages - and a business-fueled counterattack sought to hack away at the welfare state. The passage of Proposition 13 in liberal California, which limited property taxes to 1% of assessed value, seemed to augur a new era of fiscal conservatism. Instead of fighting these trends, however, Democrats surrendered to them. Carter led the way by proposing austerity budgets, deregulating large swathes of industry from banking to natural gas, and installing anti-inflation hawk Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve Chairman, whose interest rate hikes struck a hammerblow at American manufacturing. Perlstein is pretty explicit that the Democratic turn to neoliberalism began under Carter, not Clinton.

In foreign policy, Carter found more success, crafting the signature achievement of his presidency: the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the first time an Arab nation made peace with the Jewish state. Ultimately, though, Carter was undermined by the twin 1979 shocks of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The entire Iran saga is deftly told by Perlstein, who makes an interesting case that the media blew the crisis out of proportion by turning the fate of the hostages into a public spectacle. Still, the traumatizing events of student radicals paralyzing a global superpower, combined with the failed rescue attempt of the hostages in April 1980 - only compounding the humiliation - was practically a walking metaphor for the Carter presidency: inaction, weakness, and failure.

A perfect storm of events - economic stagnation, social discontent, and foreign policy humiliation - combined with affable patriotism were enough to sweep a man widely derided by the media as a buffoonish lightweight into the White House, setting the table for the conservative policy revolution that followed. After four years of having Jimmy Carter scold them for indulgent materialism and suffering from a "crisis of confidence", Americans decided to vote for the man who wanted them to have their cake and eat it too. Reagan famously posed the devastating question at the 1980 presidential debate with Carter, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" If four years was enough time to pass a harsh judgement on Carter's presidency, then it's fair to suggest that forty years is enough to pass a verdict on Reagan and Reaganism: it did an enormous amount of harm to the country, and the current occupant of the White House seems a fitting capstone to the entire conservative project, which Perlstein has so masterfully and laboriously analyzed over the course of his remarkable (and now finished) series.

[Sarah D Bunting · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chilling parallels to/foreshadowing of present day. Leave this excellent book until Nov 6.

[David Dayen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a long break from this one, read two other books before finally returning to it. That was not due to the material itself, carried off with typical Perlsteinian brilliance. He not only has a command of the time period and an eye for detail, but an understanding of how culture repeats back on politics and reveals what other pundits and wags see as surprises. The Thucydides of the age should not be allowed to stop at the 1981 inauguration. We demand more!

[Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this book might be “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, how we moved from a nation of rational people who relied on expert advice to solve problems to a nation where at least some favored lies to gain political power, to support repression (their repression of others) and most importantly the end of the American Dream.

From 1945-1973, the United States and indeed the world enjoyed unprecedented prosperity that had never really been known in human history. Nixon, while he tried to cope with Watergate allowed America to become embroiled in one of the periodic wars that plagued the Middle East since the end of the Ottoman Empire, oil was embargoed and that was the end of that! There had been signs previously of economic problems due to the ongoing Vietnam War, which Johnson and Nixon wanted to fight, but they didn’t want to pay for. However, nothing had as profound an impact on the fate of the future of the United States.

People had grown used to a certain lifestyle. The first oil shock of the 1970s turned the United States from a nation where a single wage earner was sufficient to keep a family of four to the need for two adults to be employed. By 1975, as this book notes 50% of the female population was employed. During WWII, this figure was only 25%.

This economic environment made people seek answers to an array of questions. And in a time honored fashion many sought and found scapegoats. African Americans were viewed as receiving too much from too many liberal Democrats. Playing these attitudes would emerge as a key strategy for electing Reagan, destroying the New Deal coalition and increasing the misery of the American electorate. Gays and newly emancipated women were other convenient targets.

For decades, as faithful readers of the books that Rick Perlstein has been writing for the last 24 years, there had been groups who were struggling against the direction of the country. Ridding the country of segregation was something they tended to oppose (indeed many soldiers of the Reagan revolution were fans South Africa’s apartheid state), but the breakdown of the traditional hierarchy, because it wasn’t working, was another. A convenient fiction in which American life before 1963 mirrored the situation comedies that were popular in the 1950 was hatched. And this was as accurate as the contention that people in the 1930s cavorted like the heroines of Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers musicals during the depression or film noir was an accurate depiction of the 1940s and 1950s. God was back, nostalgia was back, people were looking for Bedford Falls.

Into this picture stepped two people. First was the feckless Jimmy Carter who really was not only unsuited to be president of anything, but he lacked anyone around him who could provide competent advice on governing. He would be the gravedigger of the New Deal. The notions of using government to advance the interests of the nation as a whole had created a generation of college educated home owners with provisions for old age. Unions had enabled wages to go up, producing a standard of living that was the envy of the world. Carter would undermine most of these elements and become surprised that swathes of the New Deal coalition would defect to Reagan in 1980 after he had destroyed their livelihoods, imposed a regimen of “sacrifice and suffering” and underestimated his opponent. When not imposing economic hardship on working class Democrats, Carter obsessed over symbolism, trying to focus on the long run, forgetting Harry Hopkins’ dictum, “people don’t eat in the long run, they eat every day”

While Carter fiddled over whether to wear a cardigan sweater on TV, the Republicans were organizing, raising money, defeating progressive legislation, demonizing welfare mothers and homosexuals and beginning the slow process of getting people to vote consistently against their economic interests for the next 40 years. Phyllis Schlafly was able to defeat the ERA by warning that lesbians were getting federally funded abortions (Republicans have loved the poorly educated since the 1970s and the poorly educated have been counted on to support their own victimization as they took stands against this nonsense).

At the center of all of this was the father of lies himself, Ronald Reagan, an effective speaker, because he gave the same speech over and over, beginning in the 1950s, in touch with cultural conservatives who led housewives to insist on lower salaries and expensive daycare when they had to go to work. Religious conservatives, who after opposing integration, opposed abortion. Hawks rightfully fearful of the Soviet Union, but not really understanding their enemy. Then there were the boardroom Jacobins, the business leaders who though unable to produce products that the American public would buy, insisted that unions and government regulation were the cause of all their ills. We’ve seen how well that has worked out, haven’t we? The free market is neither kind nor caring. Supply side economics, never proven, merely asserted insured business would receive the government support that previously had gone to consumers and had prevented people from enjoying a “Grapes of Wrath lifestyle during hard times. There were plenty of hard times to go around in this book and this era.

The Republican strategy that allowed Reagan to become president and to continue the decline of the middle class was to promote discontent, even if it meant demonizing the imaginary. Back in the 1970s liberal secular humanists, abortion crazed lesbians, labor unions that kept wages low, marijuana crazed hippies promoting crime. Back when this strategy of promoting hatred was rolled out random shootings were random. The last 40 years of promoting division has made the rare a common place occurrence. Yes, people may have been seeking a return to traditional values, but the destruction of a sense of community to gain political power that this strategy introduced made the realization of that goal impossible. Returning to even an approximation of the time before 1963, in which this time all people have a share in the common good is impossible as long as this strategy remains essential to political campaigns. And in 2020 we can see where the last 40 years have lead us.

Rick Perlstein has done a fabulous job of chronicling this period. This marks the fourth in a series of books looking at the rise American conservative movement and in my opinion, the decline of the American Republic. This is is an incredible book. Please do not be put off by its length. Everything here is worth reading and worth knowing.

[Ted Hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review because there is a lot that I liked about it, but it also had some things that disappointed me. It addresses four years in the life of the nation (1976-1980) and it takes over 900 pages to do it. On the positive side, the author has obviously spent a tremendous amount of time researching the little "vignettes" that his books are know for, stories that really show- in big and small ways- how the nation's politics and culture was turning hard in a conservative direction. But there were times when I found myself slogging through descriptions of events that tended to bog the story down without adding any additional insight to the narrative. I really think that a third of this book could have been edited out and the story would not have lost any of its quality (it probably would have been a better book). One thing that I really liked was how many of the names that popped up in this book still resonate in our own world: Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Joe Biden, Jerry Brown, Orrin Hatch, and Pat Robertson, among others. It's clear that today's cultural divide has been emerging for decades and that Ronald Reagan was more of a "vessel" for the resentments and goals of the growing conservative consensus (much like the role the previous president served to a similar group of Americans). Unfortunately, as was true of Perlstein's other books, there are far too many factual errors. Here are a sample of the ones that I caught:

New York has 29 Electoral votes, not 21.
Dan Quayle elected to Senate in 1980, not 1976
Susan B. Anthony was not at Seneca Falls in 1848
Plessy v, Ferguson was in 1896, not 1897
Lenin died in 1922, not 1942
CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt was Teddy’s grandson, not FDR’s nephew
Omaha Beach was in 1944, not 1945

I could not take the time to double check every questionable claim in the book- it took long enough simply to read it. If one were to undertake this book, it should be approached as one would approach a movie about history: it can provide the reader/viewer with the broad brush strokes of the events and trends, but don't count on it for accuracy. On the back of the dust cover is a quote about the from the Wall Street Journal: "Hard to top for entertainment value." I agree; it is an entertaining read (if overlong), but it doesn't reach any deep or unique conclusions. Like a movie when the lights come on, when the reader reaches the end of the book (election night 1980), the book is over without any sweeping conclusions or insights. Too bad; it is a missed opportunity.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great stuff, great end to the quadrilogy.

Two things stuck out. One being how astonishingly right-wing the mood in America was in the late 70s. The defeat of the new left, without a coherent replacement, left technocratic liberals and accommodationist unions to face off against a business community that finally got its act together, an evangelical movement that was politically engaged for the first time and absolutely rabid about feminism and gay liberation, and a tightly organized network of conservative political and funding apparatuses that was reaping the rewards of 20 years of work. Public mood shifted hard to the right, and conservative organizing both made that opinion seem even further right than it was and absolutely bamboozled complacent liberals and Democratic politicians, who thought the righteousness of their beliefs would win out. Instead they got outhustled by the conservative PACS and campaigns, and were either voted out or fully caved to the new rising political tide.

The second thing was how much Carter sucked. I knew he was bad, and acted as the tip of the spear on neoliberalism. But boy did that guy suck.

[David Snower · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the switch from Carter to Reagan our country fucked up.

Just to give a sense of the change—Carter was (of course) the humble peanut farmer who didn’t have enough money to stay at hotels during his presidential campaign so he slept on supporters’ couches. He had “an engineer’s mind and a preacher’s heart”. For his inauguration his clothes were a little less formal, and he stepped out of the motorcade on the way to the White House to walk down the street holding his daughter’s hand and waving at people, and for his early addresses to the American public he wore cardigan sweaters like Mr. Rogers and talked about how we need to be less materialistic and care about each other more.

At Reagan’s inauguration there were so many private jets owned by CEO’s coming into DC that air traffic control had a freak out, he wore a black suit and white bow-tie, and held an inaugural ball where “fur coats so overloaded the coat racks that they resembled great lumbering mastodons out of the prehistoric past”. Reagan was a precursor of Trump in oh-so-many-ways, that he was an actor, had a penchant for just making things up for his speeches (this seems not to have been in that nefarious a way, but that he was just a little loose with the truth I guess), and was really into conspiracies before he became president (he once wrote that the government had a cure for cancer and was hiding it)

What’s nuts is that up until the election the race between them was seen as neck-and-neck (Reagan of course then became an exceeding popular president, but before he was elected people were kind of afraid of him). Most pollsters had Carter slightly on top. Carter ended up losing in a landslide, with only 49 electoral votes.

What had changed was that a very small group of people behind Reagan had completely changed the electorate by politicizing previously un-politicized aspects of Christianity. Before people didn’t really vote so much on religious issues, and the country was actually moving in a pretty socially progressive direction. With Carter’s backing, we were moving towards way more acceptance of homosexuality and empowerment for women. Like Obama though (particularly Obama’s 1st term) people were frustrated with the slow progress and seeming ineffectiveness. Again, it was a pretty small group of people—Jerry Falwell, Richard Viguerie and Orrin Hatch, (and to some extent Anita Bryant and Phillis Schafley) that got congregations and congregations of religious people across the country to vote. These movements very quickly got protections for gay people overturned in some of the most liberal cities of the country—Eugene, St. Paul, San Francisco... largely bc people on the left were turned off from voting and less engaged with politics than they were a decade earlier.

Somehow Carter began to be seen as un-Christian. Carter, who taught Sunday school, and continued to do so even when in the White House.

But anyways the point is that the country was going in a fundamentally different direction and then a small group known as the new-right fundamentally changed everything by bringing in a fuck-ton of people who had never voted before. Kind of similar I think to how Trump brought in a bunch of the well... lumpenproletariat. This is why I still think Trump will win.

Carter was genuine, honest, and often unlucky.


He also gave one of the most original and bold speeches in American history, which had the biggest popularity boost of any speech ever (like +17 points from one speech!). History has now rewritten this event (the crises of confidence speech) as a brutal failure. Maybe it’s because it clashed so heavily with the vision of the unbridled, greed-is-good America Reagan revolutionized.

[Neil Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perlstein wrote 4 enthralling books for this project that shows why our country is currently a political hellscape and we're all probably going to die soon. This last one, which shows Reagan's 1980 triumph, is a fine culmination that threads the hard-right conservative movement from Goldwater to Nixon and then to Reagan. What's left unsaid is where this tradition has led since, but the reader will have no trouble connecting the dots.

Perlstein is a master synthesizer of thousands of sources and weaves together a compelling narrative that is somehow suspenseful even if you know your history. He is better at anybody in recreating political events, like Reagan's tv speech for Goldwater in the first book, the riots at the DNC in Nixonland, Nixon's prevarications in front of the camera in the 3rd, and Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy's imbroglio at the 1980 convention. Just amazing, spellbinding writing.

Besides these vivid setpieces, what really sticks with the reader is how the right has played by different rules than the ineffective liberals and left since 1968. Reading this concurrently with early history about Bolsheviks is almost shocking. The end goal is power and the means with which they grab it--whether it's through lying, stealing, spreading innuendo--can always be justified. And democrats never cease to amaze in how they walk right into their traps time and time again.

If you haven't read this, I'd start with the beginning of the project and work your way to this finale. It'll change the way you view politics and your understanding of the contingent nature of American history.

[Diana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not like this book at all. First of all the title: this is not a book about Reagan. I guess if you read the full title you can discern that by the years it covers. My bad for taking the title at face value and assuming it was about Reagan. The Carter/Reagan campaign begins about halfway through this very long book and the book ends with Reagan’s inauguration. This is really a book about Carter. And let me tell you, Carter is not very interesting.

Second, the book covers events and subjects in mind-numbing excruciating boring detail. For example the IRS proposed a rule at one point that would impose some sort of fine on religious schools that refused to integrate. Evangelicals showed up en masse for the public hearings. Okay, that’s interesting. But the book drones on and on and ON about the hearing and practically reads the transcripts into the text. Any subject that comes up gets that treatment, back to the beginning of time, what everyone said, every detail. The only way I finished the book was by allowing it to play in the background and allowing my mind to wander once I had grasped the concept and grew bored to tears with the impossible amount of detail.

I’m amazed by the positive reviews. I was excited to read this book. It was a great disappointment.

[Duane Vorhees · Rating 2 out of 5]

A devoted reader of Perlstein's epic history of modern American conservatism (from Ike's "theft" of the Republican nomination from Taft in 1952 to the election of Ronald Reagan), I was mostly disappointed in his final volume. It was too long, with too much irrelevant detail, and dealt mainly with Carter's stumbles as president instead of Reagan's rise. The sharp, incisive analysis of his previous books was largely lacking, or at least hidden by the dense prose, and Perlstein's humor usually missed its mark.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely epic account of rise of conservatism during the Carter years. Overflowing with detail and choice bits of pop-cultural history, this staggeringly complete and exhaustively researched tome is a true pageturner that upends many general assumptions about the politics of the period, helping us understand in greater detail and with tremendous nuance how the Republican Party rose from the grave under the guidance of keen political organizers of the far right.

[Zach Feece · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s always more, it’s always worse, but it’s never new.

Essential reading if you want to understand the last 40 years in American politics.

[Reid tries to read · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 1976 election between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter featured two of the most cynical candidates to ever run for the oval office. Neither candidate held an opinion that hadn’t been painstakingly crafted by their behind-the-scenes pollsters and public relations experts, which was exemplified at a debate between the two when a technical glitch led to Jimmy Carter’s mic not working. The two candidates refused to take charge of the situation, instead choosing to sit painfully, awkwardly still for nearly an hour, and refusing to even wipe their sweat unless they were certain the cameras were off. The men who were in the running to control the most powerful office of the most powerful country in history could not even move without their PR teams telling them to. It was an election that less than 50% of voters would participate in. A new politics had entered America.

In the post-Watergate post-Vietnam era American culture was dominated by an overwhelming zeitgeist of distrust and disdain for politics, politicians, and government institutions. The cultural issues that Nixon had tapped into (conservatives’ fear of sex, drugs, non-religious teaching in schools, and especially women and minorities gaining power) had become the major determinants into how working class citizens voted as opposed to traditional economic interests. The new right in America had a strategy for this new age of American politics: while once were thought of in the past as automatic votes for democrats, blue collar workers could now be peeled away from the Democratic Party towards voting for more conservative candidates by appealing to their social fears and resentments. The various reactionary fears of white America, from “law and order”, to sexual liberation, to gun control and taxes could congeal into an ideology that believed radicals and liberals were morally wrong in their attempts for progress, and that these attempts would lead to the downfall of “western civilization”. This ideology could be tethered together through common religious and economic interests until it formed something akin to modern conservatism. America seemed to be on a downfall so, in the mind of the conservative, they better prevent the country falling farther lest these reactionaries get pulled down out of the middle class.

Heading into Jimmy Carter’s first term this neoconservative movement was building coalitions to make it the strongest it had ever been. It had far outgrown Barry Goldwater’s conservative campaign in the 1960s and was now something akin to a revolutionary movement with cell structures organizing together in a vast web of tiny, interconnected groups. There’s a reason even Marxist writers like David Harvey call the conservative movement more Leninist than Leninists, because they took organizing ideas straight out of revolutionary texts and applied them to their own movement. At the grassroots level they agitated and organized the masses. On the political level they helped overturn campaign finance laws, found legal loopholes so that PACs could funnel in more money than ever before to neoconservative candidates, and began taking over senate seats. In the deeper levels of the state department the Neocon Donald Rumsfeld engineered an internal coup during the Ford regime (called the October Massacre) which replaced state department staples like Henry Kissinger with Neocons like Dick Cheney who immediately began doing everything they could to roll back detente and push a neoconservative vision of US foreign policy. In the bourgeoisie field of economics the ultra-rightist Milton Freedman had just won the noble prize for economics. And in the religious sphere, far right Christians like a Jerry Falwell dropped the facade of being apolitical and engaged in an all-out attack against anything they found distasteful, which shifted from civil rights to integrated public schooling to gay people.

This upsurge in Conservatism was a defense mechanism for big business. In 1950 the US accounted for 50% of the world’s GDP; by the 1970s it was 11% and by 1972 the US had its first trade deficit in nearly 100 years. This declining economic might, combined with a virtual civil war that took place from the late 1960s through the 1970s within the US between left wing groups and civil rights movements versus the US government, created a backlash which helped ignite this defense mechanism. The central nervous system of the ruling class funneled money into various conservative antibodies to fight against class uprising. These antibodies then spread the germ of conservatism throughout the working class to disintegrate class consciousness, Promote infighting within the laboring classes, and eventually infect the ruling class itself so that the bourgeoisie would be more ideologically ready to re-energize the class war that had been in some ways managed since the end of WW2 (at least in the first world). The ideology gave many alienated Americans, born into an exploitative and alienating system which they did not fully comprehend, easy scapegoats to deflect their anger towards; whether that be gay people, black people, women, or liberalism itself.

Internationally the enemy of this ideology was the communist movement and national liberation movements. These forces opposed US hegemony by closing off markets and resources to the capitalist powers by integrating into the Soviet orbit or the orbit of the non-aligned movement (it also doesn’t help soften the bourgeoisies’ view of socialism when the goal is the total liquidation of these capitalists as a class). Often, domestic issues were filtered through a lens of anti-communism. Abortion is a communist plot. Integration is a communist plot. Teaching evolution is a communist plot. Sex ed is a communist plot.

World War 2 had made America the greatest power the world had ever known. While most of the industrialized nations were licking their postwar wounds the United States stood with barely a scratch. With the horrors of the Second World War and the Great Depression fresh in their minds, the United States leaders set about creating a more stabilized world capitalist order under the control of the United States. Under the Bretton Woods agreement the plan was hashed out. Through the Marshal plan we would rebuild Europe, with particular emphasis on Germany, and Japan. The resource rich third world would be prevented from industrializing and coerced into being a raw materials factory for Japan and Europe. The developing worlds agricultural technology would be hamstrung to open them up as a US agriculture market. The great enemies were now China and the USSR, with their vast resources, markets, and competing ideological vision of the future.

By the 1970s the USSR, China, and the communist movement itself showed no signs of stopping. Against all reasoning and facts pointing to the contrary, the neocons began spreading the belief that the USSR was actually more powerful than the United States in both military and nuclear capabilities. The threat of any forces that, to them, even slightly disrupted total US hegemony was too great to allow America to continue to exist even peacefully with communist states. America had grown too weak in the face of the defeat in Vietnam. They feared the loss of more markets and resources to the communist/non-aligned bloc. The capitalist system felt weak; it had felt this way since the 1968 world revolution, and as Sun Tzu says you should appear your strongest when you’re at your weakest.

Internally, the New Deal welfare state combined with America’s police state had been effective at combating any domestic uprisings from the laboring classes. Across the planet any movement seen contrary to the interests of the US ruling class were fought either overtly or covertly, and most were crushed. Yet, slowly but surely cracks and contradictions bubbled up. For every Indonesian genocide there was a Vietnam, Cuba, or China that more and more forced the United States to stretch itself too thin. America’s global political decisions had lead to the very decline in supremacy that it feared (the Vietnam war broke America’s economic back and ideological self-assurance. Our support of Israel, building it into the most powerful and reactionary force in the Middle East, lead to the OPEC oil shocks and subsequent energy crises. And finally America’s rebuilding of Germany and Japan to prevent them from falling to communism eventually gave way to them effectively competing with US corporations for markets both internally in America as well as across the globe). The methods of control that ruling classes had long used to suppress the poor in America (patriarchal social relations, racism, homophobia, Christianity) could not be overcome while capitalist class relations existed, although the US ruling class certainly tried under JFK’s “New frontier” and LBJ’s “Great Society”. The movements spawned to combat these systems of oppression along with the global economic downturn known as stagflation helped lead to the backlash reaction that we now know as modern conservatism.

Anti-socialism and anti-communism aren’t anything unique to conservatism. In fact it is baked right into the American capitalist system’s cake. Things designed to disrupt internal left wing movements like the red scares and COINTELPRO far outdated the conservative movement. Conservatism just cranked the heat up of this inherent feature of the American system to a relentlessly high temperature. To conservatives the only thing worse than communism was that which infringed on private property rights .The right to exploit was, to them, the greatest freedom of all. This freedom had been greatly infringed upon in the post-New Deal landscape. Unions, taxes, government regulations, welfare and jobs programs were, to these reactionaries, the same as socialism. And since socialism was against “freedom” these actions and institutions were therefore morally wrong. They had to be crushed.

When Carter came to power he tried to walk a fine line between appeasing both self identifying liberals and conservatives, but in the end only succeeding in angering both. When his hand was forced and he had to choose a side publicly it tended to lean conservative. For example, when pressed on whether he believed people who cannot afford abortions should be freely given them by the government, Carter responded along the lines of: “it is unfair that rich people can afford to do things and poor people cannot. But it isn’t the governments place to decide issues. This will only cause more issues”. His enlightened benevolence shtick often gave way to his real underlying neoliberal pathology. In fact, in a diary entry Carter wrote before a state of the union address, he said that he felt more at home and comfortable with the conservatives of the democrat and Republican parties than the liberals. In that very same state of the union address Carter said: “government cannot solve our problems. It cannot define our vision… or save our economy… or save our cities or provide energy”.

Carter’s attempts to placate the conservatives were in vain, as the movement now was too rabid to ever be satiated without Ronald Reagan himself in the White House. When Carter gave the Panama Canal back to Panama in a strategic move (the Canal could not fit big container ships nor our aircraft carriers, and US control over it only served to anger the Panamanian government) Reagan seized his opportunity to mobilize his jingoistic supporters in opposition to this move, and through this his presidential campaign was reborn like a phoenix rising over the ashes. The whole saga of the canal was like a microcosm of Carter vs the Reaganites: Carter framing his cynical pragmatism as a moral move to right the past wrongs of America, and the conservatives seizing the opportunity to call Carter weak, say America was now a laughing stock, and refuse to accept that this country has ever been capable of doing something morally heinous.

Ronald Reagan was a perfect figurehead for the conservative resurgence. He started his political career as a communist hunting liberal who snuffed out alleged communists while president of the screen actors guild. When he went to work for GM as a host of their propaganda anthology show (a way for corporations to try out advertising and good PR in the new medium of television) Reagan underwent a professional indoctrination course in the ways of free market fundamentalism. Reagan had always been a man not afraid to believe his own lies and write his own narrative of history, and he had always done so convincingly. A natural politician who lived his life as if the cameras were always watching and rolling, Reagan’s gifts allowed him to be molded by the ruling class into the face of their most potent mass movement.

By 1978 the corporate boardroom vanguards began to realize it was in their best interest to take a stronger offensive. They had shot down a Consumer protection bill which had been designed to oversee and restrain corporations, and were surprised with how easily this had been achieved with relatively no push back. Their next offensive saw them lobbying to lower corporate gains taxes. Right wing economists began popping up more frequently and in a more positive light on television. Anti-Keynesian senators in both political parties were recruited into the movement (Some were naturally pro-austerity like the watergate babies. Others were pushed right through PAC donations that had been allowed to flood the political scene after a 1974 loophole unleashed PAC spending with little oversight). Soon unions were in their sights as well, and the largest anti-union lobbying effort in United States history began to take shape. More funding went to send academics, intellectuals, professors, judges, and other members of the intelligentsia to free market ideology indoctrination courses like the ones Reagan had gone through in his acting days. Mass mailing techniques developed during the Goldwater campaign were being perfected as well; algorithms were getting better and better at finding people who would be susceptible to certain conservative messaging, then “personalized” mail could be sent to those people making it seem like they were both noticed, valuable, and in dire need of supporting whatever conservative hot button issue was being pressed. The seeds that had been planted for decades were now sprouting.

When 1979 began America appeared to be in a state of barbarism. The conservatives had done extremely well in the 1978 midterms, upsetting many incumbent democrats. One such Democratic conservative was anti-busing segregationist Joe Biden (ranked as one of the 10 most conservative senators in the nation at the time), a man who said drug dealers should be treated like murderers. In fact, real murderers like the serial killers John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and the hillside stranglers had been murdering with reckless abandon, indicative of a deep sickness within the very core of American society. The famous Republican establishment politician Nelson Rockefeller was found dead of a heart attack, naked, next to his 25 year old mistress. The slasher and vampire film genres exploded, seeming to feed off the economic dread of the nation. Economic growth and productivity had slowed throughout the entirety of the 70s, inflation seemed to remain unabated, and credit card debt exploded by over 1000% since the 1940s. America was in a deep malaise, and 1979 could not have been a worse year for Jimmy Carter.

The year essentially gave Carter’s presidency the kiss of death. Circumstances both out of Carter’s hands and exacerbated by the president killed his chances of a second term. First was one of postwar America’s original sins coming back to haunt it. In 1953 the democratically elected government of Iran, led by Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown by the CIA and Britain’s MI6 for the audacity of nationalizing Iran’s own oil fields. In his place America put the Shah, a brutal puppet whose opulence was only matched by his cruelty. Under the Shah Iran was consistently ranked one of the worst human rights violators on the face of the Earth. In 1979, after watching his secret police gun down and massacre over 100 protestors from his helicopter, the Shah was chased out of the country and deposed. The new religious fundamentalist who took over the country, the Ayatollah khomeini, and his followers demanded the Shah be returned for his crimes. Instead, the US sheltered him and Iran took American hostages as blackmail. The entire experience humiliated the Carter administration. Carter’s failure to free the hostages angered conservatives so much that my Reaganite father still talks about it to this day. Even before holding American hostages, Iran had also began decreasing the amount of oil exported to the United States. The subsequent shortages and energy crisis further humiliated Carter and disillusioned Americans to his regime. The final blow was the three mile island nuclear reactor crisis, which sprayed radioactive waste throughout the United States. Carter, at the behest of the scientific community, had insisted nuclear energy was safe and such a scenario was impossible. Evidently it was not, and all the conservative talking points about Carter seemed to ring truer than ever: he made America weak, he was incompetent and made us look stupid, and he was a liar. His failures opened up opportunities to an internal challenger within the Democratic Party: Ted Kennedy heir of the Kennedy dynasty. Kennedy was somewhat of a last gasp of the New Deal and Keynesianism, yet his checkered past which had resulted in the death of a young female at Chappaquiddick, as well as his seeming lack of direction or charisma, did not propel him far enough to snatch the democratic nomination from incumbent Carter; much in the same way that Reagan could not fully snatch the nomination from unpopular Gerald Ford in the previous presidential election.

[Zack Zeller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally finished Rick Perlstein’s hulking volume on just four years of the nation. In much the same way as a 1:1 scale map of the world would be rendered useless by the scope of its design, the sheer comprehensive nature of Reganland was somewhat of a blight upon the text to anyone (me) who’d be looking for an intellectual, albeit overview, of the rise of American conservatism. That said, Perlstein’s research should be admired and I’m sure Reganland hits the mark for any policy wonk who wants to know which esoteric senator in 1978 ordered what for lunch one afternoon on the Hill.

While at times a slog, it does provide a fascinating breakdown of how the Trumpian cancer that’s now metastasized to the bones of our country once began as the ur polyp, Ronald Regan.

[Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're as fascinated by the Carter era as I am, you'll dig this book. It's an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) history of five turbulent years that's told in a very approachable voice. I am interested in reading Perlstein's other books now, and I hope he follows up with a history of the Reagan years someday.

[Breann Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think this is the best perlstein

[Joseph Leake]

I don't know where to shelve this — a massive book that I've read only a portion of, and intend to dip into periodically rather than read cover-to-cover. (Incredibly detailed and granular historical investigations — 1,000 pages devoted to just a five-year period! — are in my opinion ideal for the "periodic dipping" kind of reading: fall in anywhere, and keep it as your "currently reading" for as long as the mood takes you.) I'm going to say that labelling this one as "Read" is preferable to "Want to Read," since I use the latter category for books totally new to me.

Non-partisan fairness is a precious — and essential — thing for any book that gets into history, politics, and culture. This one is decently fair, but still tends towards preferential treatment in what I've read thus far. You would conclude from the book that right wingers of the time were uniquely calculating and sectarian; in fact, though, there was plenty of this to go around (as there usually is).

One last point, admittedly an exceedingly minor one in the context of the book as a whole, but important to me: the canned critique of Star Wars as a conservative cultural artifact goes wide of the mark. The popularity of this film, ranging across an array of values and ideological perspectives, cannot be explained this way; explaining that popularity takes us into extra-political realms, whatever secondary political-historical contexts it might be seen in.

EDIT: my wife tells me that my wording in this review is too politic, so here's some revised language:

There were conniving, underhanded, right-wing culture-warriors operating at the time. There were also conniving and underhanded culture-warriors on the left. That this was the case should come as a surprise to no one, just as the fact that it's the case now should come as a surprise to no one.

Political partisanship is one of the naïvest things I have ever encountered. The more an author avoids it, the more credibility they have. I wish Perlstein were more unbiased, but he's not nearly as bad as some.

Perlstein's critique of Star Wars is basic, obvious, and myopic, as assessments of art centered on politics almost always are.

(Despite these critiques, the book is worth reading for its deep dive into the subject: you will learn a lot.)

[Alex Gruenenfelder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is around 1100 pages. It Is a behemoth, one I couldn't put down. It tracks the rise of Jimmy Carter, his subsequent fall from grace, and the rise of Ronald Reagan. "Reaganland" is an epic that fans of political history will eat up like candy.

"Reaganland" brings the workings of campaigns to life, and how messaging developed. Evangelicals and populists had helped Carter get to victory, but then they took it from him just the same. Parallels to the age of Trump are constant, even if not identical. These constituencies can be traced alongside the rise of conservative strategists, like those in Young Americans for Freedom, bringing fake news to prominence as a tool necessary to "save Western civilization".

The rise of social issues, through Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant, helped tank evangelical support for Carter, for the ERA, and for basic civil rights measures for gays. Policies for electoral reform, like these fights for equal rights, were once bipartisan: the New Right worked to break apart this bipartisanship. The rise of ideology was a big sign of this era. Be it the conservatives or Ralph Nader, the goal of these ideologues was a higher moral good, rather than conventional politics. Some of these people good, others bad, but all majorly impacting the world of policy. As Perlstein describes what unified the New Right and propelled them to victory, "Each discontent reinforced the others."

You'll learn names like Richard Viguerie, dubious political actors who come up constantly in every event, and see familiar ones like Roger Stone and Donald Trump – both of whom indulge in some of the shady behavior we will later associate so much with them. Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and David Koch make brief appearances to show the changes of the world. The New York mayoral election between Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, and Mario Cuomo is depicted too. It all paints a picture of the changing political climate that would propel Reagan to victory, and shows how quickly these things truly do change.

Nobody comes off well in this book. Jimmy Carter comes off as an arrogant and direct man far better at campaigning than given credit for. Ronald Reagan is a runaway train for his own interpretation of a militaristic Christianity, kept under vague control. Ted Kennedy is the entitled and Chappaquiddick-haunted inverse of his presidential brother. Jerry Brown comes across as a flip-flopper with a celebrity lifestyle and few values. John Anderson is an intellectual who was beloved by the middle and yet began to hug the fringes. Dianne Feinstein and John Connally both sound like bad people. All of those in this story are vastly narcissistic.

The lens of history is harsh, and Perlstein's certainly is, which is partially what makes "Reaganland" such a page-turner. It was a time of genuine chaos. People were literally robbing and destroying gas stations because of the energy crisis. It reads like fiction sometimes. I cannot recommend it more highly.

[Jay Gabler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly long book. Let me put that statement in context.

I'm writing this as a history buff who just finished two — yes, two — audiobook biographies of Ronald Reagan. Each was about 30 hours long, and covered the entire 93 years of his life. This audiobook is over 45 hours long, and it only covers four years. For context, that's almost two minutes per day of the Carter administration.

So when you settle in with this one, you're opting in to an exhaustively detailed account of how the various organs of reactionary America advanced in the late '70s, changing the national conversation and ending any hope for Democrats' dreams of national healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, or even a second Carter term.

It's a lot, but it does add crucial context to simplistic stories about Reagan prevailing merely due to stagflation and his sunny personality — let alone due to the hostage crisis, which Perlstein argues was an issue on which the public broke for Carter rather than Reagan. The picture that emerges puts Watergate squarely at the zero point of the national trend that ultimately produced President Donald Trump.

The hot take on Watergate circa 1976 was that the Republican Party was in shambles, and might even disappear altogether. Instead, the party's right wing saw an opportunity to exploit distrust in the mainstream party establishment and ultimately oust them in favor of a candidate who embraced the culture wars — "each discontent reinforced the others," writes Perlstein — and leveraged racial animus to consolidate the "Southern Strategy" as America's new political roadmap.

One of this very long book's final sentences is a quote from Reagan's 1981 inaugural address: "Government is the problem."