REAGANLAND

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

A valuable road map that charts how events from 40 years ago helped lead us to where we are now.