Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

A HISTORIAN ONCE CALLED HIS book about the 1970s It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. Certainly it seemed so compared to the 1960s, when new revolutions seemed to burst forth every month. But in fact enormous things were happening. They just weren’t always the sort of things that made for bold, clear headlines. Corporations withdrew their support for the liberal state and politicians embraced capital gains tax cuts; fundamentalist ministers inched their way into partisan politics and conservatives crept ever closer to control of the Republican Party; the Democrats fell into ideological confusion and the electorate became increasingly finicky—such things were, in a word, complicated: the sort of developments that rewired the invisible structures that order a society.