Rick Perlstein,, _The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan_

THIS IS THE third in Perlstein's quartet of detailed histories (this one is 800 pages) attempting to answer the question, "Given Goldwater's crushing defeat in 1964 and Nixon's humiliating disgrace in Watergate, how did Reagan and the Republicans nonetheless prevail in 1980 and reorient American politics?"

The broad answers are not too surprising: on the one hand, ressentiment, especially in but not confined to the South, over the progress made by the civil rights movement; on the other, anxiety throughout the middle classes over cultural change (women in the workplace, legal abortion, shifting attitudes about sexuality and religion). Right-wing hawks' dismay over Henry Kissinger's attempts to relax Cold War tensions with the USSR and China also played a part, but otherwise it's the same basic formula for right wing political success that we see now.

The delight of Perlstein's books is in the grain of the detail. I was alive and paying (I thought) relatively close attention to events during the years covered here, 1972-76, but Perlstein has an uncanny ability to recreate the mood of any moment: the return of the prisoners of war from Vietnam, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and her brief career as a revolutionary, Squeaky Fromme, Fanne Foxe, Jaws, the dawn of the textbook wars, the impossible-to-foresee emergence of Jimmy Carter...it's all vividly, palpably here. 

And I had no idea the 1976 Republican convention was as dramatic as Perlstein shows it to have been, nor how obvious it was, even in defeat, that Reagan was the coming man.

The fourth volume--Reaganland--was published in 2020, and I will pick it up as soon as I feel brave enough to re-live the Carter years.