Over two decades (and more than 3,000 pages), historian Rick Perlstein has published definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in American politics: Before the Storm (2002), Nixonland (2008), and The Invisible Bridge (2014). Now, the saga’s final installment, Reaganland—covering the years from Jimmy Carter’s election to his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan—has been released.
Perlstein’s body of work explains the nation’s journey from rejecting Barry Goldwater as a dangerous ideologue to embracing Reagan, who had much the same agenda. New Right organization and a pallid Democratic Party at war with itself led to this outcome, and the result helped produce the world we live in now.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention, Perlstein joined Prospect executive editor David Dayen for a discussion about the lessons of the 1970s and the rise of the conservative movement, as well as where it finds itself today.
