It took Perlstein over 800 pages to write a history of four years because so many disturbing things happened during those years. The President spied on American citizens for political gain, got caught, and then repeatedly lied to the nation. His successor almost immediately pardoned him. Left-wing extremists kidnapped a beautiful young heiress, who then seemingly joined forces with her abductors in waging guerrilla war against the capitalist war machine.
White conservatives in Boston violently protested busing, and white conservatives in West Virginia violently protested multicultural textbooks. In response to US and European support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC issued an oil embargo that resulted in skyrocketing gas prices and shortages. The economy suffered from both inflation and a recession, defying the expectations of Keynesian economists everywhere. New York City went bankrupt. And thanks to suspicious journalists and emboldened politicians, Americans discovered that assassinating foreign leaders was a viable option in the CIA playbook. Weird and frightening times.
But were those years in American history uniquely weird and frightening?
Several periods in American history are suitable for the Perlstein treatment. Imagine a Perlstein book on the years immediately following World War I. Coming on the heels of the Great War, which killed millions of people, and the Russian Revolution, which brought communists to power in a nation that spanned nine time zones, European-style unrest seemed to have landed on American shores.
A general strike in Seattle and several bombings set off by anarchists, including one on Wall Street that killed dozens, led to the deportation of over 500 anarchists, socialists, and communists. Which all happened the same year that several members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to fix the World Series, besmirching the beloved national pastime.
In the half-decade that followed, the Ku Klux Klan grew by the hundreds of thousands in urbanizing northern cities, the secretary of the interior was the subject of sensational congressional hearings about how he accepted bribes from oil companies in exchange for cheap leases on land in Wyoming, and the small town of Dayton, Tennessee attracted the gaze of the nation when it put a biology teacher on trial for teaching evolution. Weird and frightening times.
The point is not to claim that things never change. But to rely on weird and frightening events to explain historical change in a weird and frightening nation like the United States — made all the more weird and frightening by the deeply embedded engines of capitalism and evangelical Christianity — is not the most effective way to frame an historical argument. Perlstein needs a better theory.
The years during and after the 1960s were a transformative period in American history because the cluster of social norms that had long governed American life began to give way to a new openness to different ideas, identities, and articulations of what it meant to be an American. The radical political mobilizations of the 1960s — civil rights, Black and Chicano Power, feminism, gay liberation, the antiwar movement, the legal push for secularization — destabilized the America that millions knew.
Add to that the world-changing power of an increasingly deregulated capitalism, and the forces of modernity, long bubbling beneath the surface of American culture, were unleashed. In response, conservative, traditional, normative Americans fought back with a vengeance.
Perlstein hints around the edges of this more encompassing theory of recent American historical transformation. He writes about how the suspicious circles were invested in “unsettling ossified norms.” And yet such analytical clarity gets lost in Perlstein’s manic narrative about Americans collectively losing their minds.
Perhaps this is by design. Perlstein’s unspoken assumption seems to be that sane people would never have elected Ronald Reagan their president. Americans did it twice.
