Was the Reagan Revolution Really Reagan’s?
HOW BROAD WAS the California tax revolt of the 1970s? Broad enough to stretch from Ronald Reagan to the Black Panthers. The Panthers’ position is mentioned only briefly in Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland—just a single sentence meant to get across how widespread dissatisfaction with the state’s property taxes had gotten. But if you start poking around at that spot, you’ll find a deep rabbit hole just waiting for you to explore it. With “most tax increases,” proclaimed the Panther slate in Oakland’s 1973 municipal elections, “the poor always suffer and Black people, in particular, suffer most.” The candidates went on to decry everything from the property tax to the business license tax, and along the way they complained about how much money was spent on police pensions and downtown businesses. They also grumbled that black Oaklanders were being taxed without representation, since the levies were imposed “by the all-white Oakland City Council.”
Reaganland is 914 pages long, not including its extensive endnotes, and nearly every one of those pages could send you down an equally fascinating rabbit hole. This is the fourth and probably final volume in Perlstein’s series of books on recent American history, and like its predecessors it is both informative and entertaining. Perlstein is an engaging storyteller with a talent for juggling multiple narratives, and he is able—not always, but usually—to write empathetically about people he fundamentally disagrees with, a useful skill for a liberal historian describing a country’s turn to the right.
That shift is Perlstein’s big subject, a fact he signals by subtitling the book . The combination of title and subtitle might prompt a double take, since Reagan did not become president until 1981. For the bulk of , the man in the White House is not Reagan but
