As with many presidents, the image of Reagan that survives has been burnished in his absence into something that, in his own time, he was not. Many want to cling to an idea of Reagan as a unifying president, to contrast with the divisiveness of our own time. But he frequently made statements and took positions that were designed to offend liberals and delight his base. Yes, he was “optimistic,” but his professed belief in American greatness excluded the possibility of wrongdoing, and did not grapple with its critics. He insisted that the “Vietnam Syndrome”—a hesitancy to commit to overseas military involvements—resulted from a Communist plan to “win in the field of propaganda here in America what they could not win on the battlefield in Vietnam.” Though he spoke favorably of immigrants—who were choosing the country he cherished—his story of the nation was fundamentally based in the experience of white Christianity. When the miniseries Roots aired on ABC over eight consecutive nights in 1977, proving a sensation in its telling of slavery’s history, Reagan commented, “I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.”
What Reagan could offer is what Perlstein describes as a “liturgy of absolution.” The United States of the 1970s, as described throughout the book, seemed to be falling apart. Carter had called for limits and restraint; he worried about American narcissism and immorality. To Reagan, the United States could only be a solution to the world’s problems. Americans were a generous people with nothing to feel guilty about. Announcing his candidacy for the election of 1980, he insisted that “the crisis we face is not the result of any failure of the American spirit.” In 1976, Carter made people feel that the United States could get better. In 1980, Reagan did the same. But each held very different groups responsible for the country’s problems.
Over the course of four books, Perlstein had chronicled the transformation of the Republican Party into a conservative party, and the transformation of the country that it required. In some ways, this history shows how short a step it was from all this to Trump. How could the United States elect a paranoid and vulgar man who trafficked in racial division, and who made criminal behavior standard operating procedure in the White House? Well, it elected Nixon. How could it elect an intellectually shallow entertainer, who was seemingly incapable of speaking truthfully on a consistent basis? Well, it elected Reagan. And as powerful as the right grew, its entrepreneurs in media and politics stoked culture war divisions to cultivate a powerful sense of grievance.
Why then did Trump’s election strike Perlstein as a mystery in 2017? Trump lacks Goldwater’s consistency, Nixon’s cunning, and Reagan’s ability to craft a story of progress rather than decline. One of the shocks of his victory was that the intellectual architecture that had been seen as important to conservatism’s rise—the generously funded think tanks and the support of supposedly respectable publications like National Review—had proved inessential. Perhaps the closest that the book comes to a thesis that addresses both past and present is about three-quarters of the way through. “William F. Buckley had supposedly affected a purge of [conspiratorial] lunacy from the conservative movement following Goldwater’s loss,” writes Perlstein, “on the theory that conservatism could never prosper unless it was considered respectable. The purge didn’t take; conservatism was prospering nonetheless.”