Both candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign have trumpeted their zeal to reach across the partisan divide and forge consensus—Obama giving diffuse sermons about national unity, McCain claiming to be a maverick in order to sell himself to ‘independents’. The endless mantras of ‘change’ and ‘hope’ rely on the assumption that America is bitterly divided, as never before. The reality is, of course, that a vast majority of Americans are united in despising George Bush, and in feeling that their country has been hijacked by neo-cons and billionaires. But superficial as such campaign boiler-plate may be, it rests on a deeper-lying myth of a lost golden age in us politics, when the twin horsemen of divisiveness and faction were tightly corralled.

The purpose of Rick Perlstein’s insufferably long book is laid out on its first page: to explain how ‘the battle lines that define our culture and politics’ were set between Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory of 1964 and Richard Nixon’s mirror victory in 1972. Across its 800-plus pages, it provides a ponderous chronicle of the eight years supposedly responsible for today’s Red–Blue polarization, with Nixon appearing as both emblem of the transformation and chief culprit. ‘What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans’—on the one hand the ‘Silent Majority . . . the middle-class, middle American, suburban, exurban and rural coalition’, designated by Perlstein in the end as Republicans; on the other ‘the “liberals”, the “cosmopolitans”, the “intellectuals”, the “professionals”—“Democrats”’.

Perlstein is frequently cited these days by middlebrow political commentators in the us as someone with his finger supposedly on the pulse of history.A self-identified left-liberal Democrat—useless though such terms are as political locators in a talk-radio grading system that slots Teddy Kennedy in as a Spartacist—Perlstein contributed a long and rather laboured essay for the Summer 2004 issue of the Boston Review on what the Democrats should do. It added up to a vague call for return to some sort of fdr programme. Nixonland, then, offers historical grounding for these sympathies; appropriately enough, its title comes from words spoken by Adlai Stevenson on the campaign trail in 1956:

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving . . . This is Nixonland. America is something different.

Nixon, so Perlstein’s thesis runs, was the Capability Brown of American postwar politics, completely reshaping the landscape—though Ronald Reagan comes a close second in his divisive impact. Perlstein invites us to scrutinize the era through two lenses, rather like the spectacles Reagan wore at political rallies—one lens to focus on the crowd, the other to read the speech before him on the lectern. When looking closely at Nixon, Perlstein can be relatively clear-eyed, particularly on the formative years of this weird, messed-up Californian. It was at Whittier, a Quaker college, that Nixon made his essential discovery in the early 1930s. Whittier had its elite, ‘a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins . . . and who were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him.’ Nixon figured correctly that for every stylish Franklin there were a dozen Orthogonians. There was his Silent Majority, and he later made his political name playing the Orthogonian card, most famously against the upper-class State Department official Alger Hiss, whom the freshly elected Congressman from California accused of being a Communist spy and got sent to prison for perjury. Perlstein is also capable of evoking Nixon’s political antennae, supersensitive to the fears and resentments of those who felt threatened, patronized, passed over in a turbulent time.

Perlstein’s larger historical focus, however, is near glaucoma. His narrative chugs through the late 60s and early 70s, offering scenes that are drearily familiar from the scores of contemporary accounts cited in his many pages of footnotes. The result is prolix, bland and humdrum. The style is indescribable. Here is a sample, from his account of Nixon’s response to a newspaper column by Roscoe Drummond suggesting that he needed to de-escalate in Vietnam, otherwise ‘popular opinion will roll over him as it did lbj’:

At which Nixon thundered upon his printed news summary . . . ‘Tell him that rn is less affected by press criticism and opinion than any Pres in recent memory’. Because he was the president most affected by press criticism and opinion of any president in recent memory. Which if known would make him look weak. And any escalatory bluff would be impossible. Which would keep him from credibility as a de-escalator; which would block his credibility as an escalator; which would stymie his ability to de-escalate; and then he couldn’t ‘win’ in Vietnam—which in his heart he didn’t believe was possible anyway. Through the looking glass with Richard Nixon: this stuff was better than lsd.