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A review by jaygabler
Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein
dark
informative
slow-paced
4.0
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 sit down 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."
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 sit down 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."
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racial slurs