Stu Levitan welcomes Rick Perlstein to Madison Bookbeat to discuss his new book, Reaganland.

In the presidential campaign of 1964, Lyndon Johnson so thoroughly crushed Barry Goldwater that political commentators declared Goldwater conservatism dead and buried. But just 16 years later, the man who became a political campaigning for Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, won even more electoral votes against incumbent president Jimmy Carter than Johnson had against Goldwater.

How and why that happened is the business that has occupied Rick Perlstein for almost half his life, through a literary tetralogy encompassing more than 3000 pages – Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001); then Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008); then ” (2014), and now Reaganland. We still might not know where we’re going, but thanks to Rick Perlstein, we now know where we’ve been