Bøker av Rick Perlstein

From the bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge comes the dramatic conclusion of how conservatism took control of American political power.Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too old to make another run. His comeback was fueled by an extraordinary confluence: fundamentalist preachers and former segregationists reinventing themselves as militant crusaders against gay rights and feminism; business executives uniting against regulation in an era of economic decline; a cadre of secretive ';New Right' organizers deploying state-of-the-art technology, bending political norms to the breaking pointand Reagan's own unbending optimism, his ability to convey unshakable confidence in America as the world's ';shining city on a hill.' Meanwhile, a civil war broke out in the Democratic party. When President Jimmy Carter called Americans to a new ethic of austerity, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted with horror, challenging him for reelection. Carter's Oval Office tenure was further imperiled by the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, near-catastrophe at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant, aviation accidents, serial killers on the loose, and endless gas lines. Backed by a reenergized conservative Republican base, Reagan ran on the campaign slogan ';Make America Great Again'and prevailed. Reaganland is the story of how that happened, tracing conservatives' cutthroat strategies to gain power and explaining why they endure four decades later.

The New York Times bestselling dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s.In January of 1973 Richard Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War and prepared for a triumphant second termuntil televised Watergate hearings revealed his White House as little better than a mafia den. The next president declared upon Nixons resignation our long national nightmare is overbut then congressional investigators exposed the CIA for assassinating foreign leaders. The collapse of the South Vietnamese government rendered moot the sacrifice of some 58,000 American lives. The economy was in tatters. And as Americans began thinking about their nation in a new wayas one more nation among nations, no more providential than any otherthe pundits declared that from now on successful politicians would be the ones who honored this chastened new national mood. Ronald Reagan never got the message. Which was why, when he announced his intention to challenge President Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, those same pundits dismissed himuntil, amazingly, it started to look like he just might win. He was inventing the new conservative political culture we know now, in which a vision of patriotism rooted in a sense of American limits was derailed in Americas Bicentennial year by the rise of the smiling politician from Hollywood. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of Americas greatest city, The Invisible Bridge asks the question: what does it mean to believe in America? To wave a flagor to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?