Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

the Libertarian Party convention, the forty-year-old heir to a Kansas-based oil-refining fortune named David Koch, whose father was a founder of the John Birch Society, successfully campaigned for the 1980 vice-presidential slot by pledging to donate “several hundred thousand

Though in the college town of Burlington, Vermont, a Marxist gadfly with a thick Brooklyn accent named Bernie Sanders won an unlikely mayoral victory. Although, on the other side of the country and

Ed Davis—the sheriff of Los Angeles County who published a pro–death penalty open letter declaring “all-out war against you who have been literally getting away with murder,” proposed “hang ’em at the airport” as a solution to hijacking, and complained that the “federal government was out to force me to hire four-foot-eleven-inch transvestite morons” when he was sheriff of Los Angeles

George McGovern, John Culver, Frank Church, and Birch Bayh were also interviewed. All had lost—a

Wisconsin, one of the New Right’s favorite congressmen, Robert Kasten, knocked off one of the founders of the modern environmental movement, Senator Gaylord Nelson. And with the exception

all the targets of the National Conservative Political Action Committee’s “hit list,” George McGovern, John Culver, Frank Church, and Birch Bayh, with eighty years of experience among them, went down—hard.

news producer overseeing ABC’s coverage refused to intercut footage of the landing with inspirational music. Roone Arledge found someone from his sports division to do it