Lunchtime Must-Read: Mark Schmitt: Righting the GOP: Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge

Mark Schmitt: Righting the GOP: Rick Perlstein’s *The Invisible Bridge*: “Perlstein’s subject is always political movements and political culture…. [Perlstein] rests too much agency in Reagan, the individual, when the whole point of the Perlstein project is to trace the lines of the conservative counterrevolution, undistracted by the charms and psychodrama of its front men. The book works best when it does exactly that, just as the 1976 Reagan campaign… the movement–in the form of its issues and its direct-mail operations–was more successful than the man…. There is a great book within *The Invisible Bridge*, but it would be about 500 pages… about the structure and strength of the conservative movement, the continuities between Nixon’s politics and Reagan’s, the failure of liberals and Democrats (and organized labor, whose disintegration during the decade goes mostly unmentioned) to speak to the economic and cultural panic of the decade…”