Official Portrait of President Reagan, 1981 (Wikimedia Commons)

In Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980, Rick Perlstein completes his quartet of books that examines how these changes took place and how the foundation of the current political discourse in the United States was established. Taken together, the four volumes – Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the unmaking of the American consensus (2001), Nixonland: The rise of a president and the fracturing of America (2008), The Invisible Bridge: The fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan (2014), and now Reaganland – represent a landmark effort in historical writing, comparable to the work undertaken by Dominic Sandbrook on postwar Britain from Harold Macmillan to Margaret Thatcher.

Perlstein is a master of examining the events of the late 1970s through a variety of different lenses: popular culture, gender relations, religion, and politics. Linking these issues and themes together is the broader backlash to the changes wrought during the 1960s. For many in middle- and working-class white America, too much had happened too soon. Those who had cheered on the civil rights movement in the early 1960s and voted for Lyndon B. Johnson in overwhelming numbers in 1964 were now deeply concerned about the rapid rate of desegregation, about their children being bused across urban areas to sit in inner-city schools that they themselves had sought to escape. The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973, which all but legalised abortion, would provide a catalyst for the religious right, which would mobilise in unprecedented numbers for the 1976 and 1980 elections. Conservative minister Jerry Falwell Sr’s ‘Moral Majority’ (which, as it was often quipped, was neither moral nor a majority) would bring together a broad church of different Christian and Jewish groups to take a stand against abortion, gay rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment, a women’s rights issue that garnered much support earlier in the decade but now floundered under the conservative backlash. Intertwined with the rise of the religious right during this period were conservative think tanks, and quasi-academic institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which provided the intellectual firepower for the right and engaged in much of the heavy lifting for legislators through groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

At times, as in Perlstein’s other works, both the historical protagonists and the reader can get lost in the volume of information. Reaganland weighs in at 1,107 pages (914 pages of text, 193 pages of endnotes), not a light read by any standard. At times it seems that Perlstein is eager to cram in as much detail about the period as possible, throwing every possible colour and medium at his canvas as he brings in events and people and places both major and minor. Reagan is analysed, but so is William Loeb III, editor of the Manchester Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only state-wide paper. Jimmy Carter’s response to the 1979 Iranian Revolution is covered in depth, but so is the cartoon strip Doonesbury. Perlstein’s amusing knack of using the pop-culture moment and relating it to some aspect of politics or a politician is present again. In Nixonland, it was an exegesis on The Exorcist as a stand-in for America’s ills in 1973. In Reaganland, Perlstein deploys the newly released Superman as a backdrop in describing the rise and fall of John Connally, the Democrat-turned-Republican former governor of Texas who ‘was often photographed on his ranch, astride a horse. He grew up poor in the hinterlands, became a big man on campus in college, took a Hollywood screen test at the height of the Depression, and served as a governor in the booming Sun Belt.’ Casting Connally not just as a square-jawed Superman but as a kind of ‘shadow Reagan’ adds to the welter of information a counterfactual history, an alternative path to what happened in the election of 1980.

That election, like much of Reaganland, carries a familiarity to it. History does not repeat, but it does echo. A Democratic candidate who faces an insurgent progressive challenge. A Republican candidate who is not sticking to his script and uses language that horrifies his advisers. Carter’s primary battle against Ted Kennedy, who early polling numbers suggested would convincingly and historically seize the nomination from the sitting president, exposed fissures in the Democratic Party that have never entirely healed. Reagan’s battle against George H.W. Bush, scion of inherited wealth and darling of the east-coast conservative establishment, saw the final nail in the coffin of the type of ‘Rockefeller Republican’ that had dominated the party. While he became Reagan’s vice-president, and then president himself in 1989, the Bush family would have to reinvent themselves as old-fashioned Texans to win the White House again. And the growth of Political Action Committees, or PACs, would become a dominant feature in American politics.

Throughout Reaganland, we see names emerging of those who would play decisive roles in future presidential elections. Ralph Nader, who played a key role in the 2000 election campaign as the third-party candidate who arguably cost Al Gore the presidency, appears here as a strong consumer advocate, with almost rock-star levels of fame. Bernie Sanders, a ‘Marxist gadfly with a thick Brooklyn accent’, wins public office as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1980, the start of a winding political career that will catapult him onto centre stage in both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. And in the midst of New York urban redevelopment in 1976, a man The New York Times described as ‘tall, lean, and blond’, and who claimed himself to be ‘publicity shy’, emerged. While only thirty when Perlstein chronicles his forays into New York real estate, the Donald Trump present in these pages seems to be exactly the same character the world is grappling with today, enacting shady deals, boasting of wealth he did not actually possess, and adored and reviled in equal measure by the media.

Reaganland: America’s right turn 1976–1980 is a well-researched, entertaining, informative, and sometimes meandering tome. In the light of the 2020 presidential election, and the acres of paper spent on the Trump presidency, Rick Perlstein’s work is an important introduction to an era that may now be drawing to a close in a twilight of Twitter fights and declining American imperialism. The presidential election, and possibly the Trump presidency, will soon be over. Reaganland, and Perlstein’s body of work as a whole, shows us the foundation stones of the world in which it happened.