Jesse Walker on Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge

According to Rick
Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, the two great currents
of the ’70s were suspicion and nostalgia, a skepticism toward
American institutions and a yearning for American innocence. “There
were two tribes of Americans now,” he writes. “One comprised the
suspicious circles, which had once been small, but now were
exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the
1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the
imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and
expose dissembling leaders.” The other tribe “found another lesson
to be self-evident: never break faith with God’s chosen
nation.”

Perlstein is partly right, Jesse Walker argues. Americans in the
1970s were indeed torn between a drive to question authority and a
longing for an authority they could believe in. But the evidence in
Perlstein’s own book shows how hard it is to divide those forces
into two distinct tribes. Suspicion and nostalgia were woven up
with one another, tangled so tightly that they might be
inseparable.

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