The end of resentment: has the well of middle class anger that Richard Nixon tapped finally run dry?

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America - Book review

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

by Rick Perlstein

Scribner, 866 pp.

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The best way to convey Rick Perlstein's achievement in writing Nixonland is to observe that he has taken one of the most endlessly chewed-over periods of American history, the late 1960s and early 1970s, and one of the most thoroughly analyzed American politicians, Richard Nixon, and come up with a flesh and convincing perspective on both.

Perlstein made his publishing bones with a widely praised 2002 book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Nixonland picks up where the earlier book's narrative sections leave off, after Lyndon Johnson's crushing landslide victory over Goldwater in 1964. But it's more than a sequel. Much of Before the Storm focused on the history and internal dynamics of the conservative movement that ultimately conquered American politics in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. Nixonland is an exceptionally broad and thorough social, cultural and political history of eight tumultuous years. It should quickly become the standard history of this period. And it sings with outstanding storytelling and insight. Even readers who reject Perlstein's interpretation of the Nixon era cannot help but get carried along by such instant classics as his hour-by-hour account of how the chaotic 1968 Democratic Convention looked on network television (a pitch-perfect account from my own heat-seared memories of the event, which occurred before Perlstein's birth).

The book's hypothesis is straightforward. Perlstein sets for himself the goal of explaining why the LBJ landslide of 1964 was followed so quickly by the Nixon landslide of 1972. His explanation is that what looked like a durable center-left consensus in 1964 actually disguised fault lines that produced a culture-based "fracturing" of the country, characterized by the defection of much of the white middle class from the New DealGreat Society coalition. Richard Nixon, says Perlstein, was the perfect demiurge for this fracturing, as a man consumed by the very middle-class striver resentment of liberal elites and their political clients that he so successfully elicited in the electorate.

Perlstein uses a Nixon biographical detail to organize much of the book: the young Whittier College student's organization of an "outsider" social group, the Orthogonians, to rival Whittier's dominant Big Man On Campus group, the Franklins...