Rick Perlstein: “Ronald Reagan absolved America almost in a priestly role not to have to contend with sin. The consequences are all around us today”
From climate change to foreign affairs, Reagan pushed America toward easy lies, just as reckoning seemed possible
DAVID DAYEN

Rick Perlstein is one of America’s greatest chroniclers of the origins of the modern American right wing. In “Before the Storm,” about the rise of Barry Goldwater, and “Nixonland,” about the backlash politics that drove Nixon into the White House, Perlstein has captured, in big set pieces and small details, the forces that came together to move the nation’s ideological center of gravity. Now, with “The Invisible Bridge,” Perlstein tells the story of another important figure in that shift – Ronald Reagan.

The title refers to a statement from Nikita Khrushchev to Richard Nixon: “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Nobody internalized this advice more than Reagan, who ignored American shortcomings like Vietnam or Watergate in favor of tightly wrapped fables, mesmerizing his audience with tales about a simpler time where America can never fail. It turned out, despite the enormous complications of the political moment, such stories were just what a large segment of the public wanted to hear. Reagan bridged the gulf between America’s perceptions and its reality, and transformed the terrain upon which we battle politically.

In an interview with Salon on the eve of the book’s release, Perlstein talks about the main themes of the book, how liberals underestimated Reagan, the similarities between reactions to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008, and the echoes of the impulse toward American exceptionalism in our present-day politics.

So this is a book about America’s loss of innocence and, simultaneously, America’s striving for a return to innocence. How do you reconcile that?

Well, that’s the narrative of the book, I would say. The story I’m telling is unfolding along that loss of innocence. But the baseline is this moment in 1973 when the Vietnam War ends, and that spring, Watergate breaks wide open, after basically disappearing from the political scene for a while. You have this remarkable thing, where Sam Ervin puts these hearings on television. And day after day the public hears White House officials sounding like Mafia figures. That same spring, you get the energy crisis, and you hear officials say that we’re running out of energy when heretofore, nobody knew you could run out. That’s a blindsiding blow to the American psyche. And then there’s the oil embargo, suddenly a bunch of Arab oil sheiks decide to hold America hostage, and succeed. So the way I characterize that is that we had this idea of America as existing outside of the rules of history, as a country that can’t do any wrong. Suddenly we begin to think of ourselves as just another country, not God’s chosen nation. I have a quote in the preface to the book by Immanuel Kant, who defined the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” basically the process of leaving childhood and becoming a grown-up. And that’s what we’re seeing in America in the 1970s.

[. . .]

To use a recent example, a CNN reporter was taken off the beat for daring to say that the Israelis cheering on the bombing of Gaza were scum. You saw this in the wings of the period I’m writing about. “The Dick Cavett Show” had on Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and some other radicals, and that show was censored. In that time we see this push-me/pull-me process of America struggling with the idea that it can begin to reckon critically with the present and past. Sadly, I feel that we lost the struggle at that time, and I think the biggest reason is Ronald Reagan.