Rick Perlstein is one of America’s greatest chroniclers of the origins of the modern American right wing. In “Before the Storm,” about the rise of Barry Goldwater, and “Nixonland,” about the backlash politics that drove Nixon into the White House, Perlstein has captured, in big set pieces and small details, the forces that came together to move the nation’s ideological center of gravity. Now, with “The Invisible Bridge,” Perlstein tells the story of another important figure in that shift – Ronald Reagan.

The title refers to a statement from Nikita Khrushchev to Richard Nixon: “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Nobody internalized this advice more than Reagan, who ignored American shortcomings like Vietnam or Watergate in favor of tightly wrapped fables, mesmerizing his audience with tales about a simpler time where America can never fail. It turned out, despite the enormous complications of the political moment, such stories were just what a large segment of the public wanted to hear. Reagan bridged the gulf between America’s perceptions and its reality, and transformed the terrain upon which we battle politically.

In an interview with Salon on the eve of the book’s release, Perlstein talks about the main themes of the book, how liberals underestimated Reagan, the similarities between reactions to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008, and the echoes of the impulse toward American exceptionalism in our present-day politics.

So this is a book about America’s loss of innocence and, simultaneously, America’s striving for a return to innocence. How do you reconcile that?

Well, that’s the narrative of the book, I would say. The story I’m telling is unfolding along that loss of innocence. But the baseline is this moment in 1973 when the Vietnam War ends, and that spring, Watergate breaks wide open, after basically disappearing from the political scene for a while. You have this remarkable thing, where Sam Ervin puts these hearings on television. And day after day the public hears White House officials sounding like Mafia figures. That same spring, you get the energy crisis, and you hear officials say that we’re running out of energy when heretofore, nobody knew you could run out. That’s a blindsiding blow to the American psyche. And then there’s the oil embargo, suddenly a bunch of Arab oil sheiks decide to hold America hostage, and succeed. So the way I characterize that is that we had this idea of America as existing outside of the rules of history, as a country that can’t do any wrong. Suddenly we begin to think of ourselves as just another country, not God’s chosen nation. I have a quote in the preface to the book by Immanuel Kant, who defined the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” basically the process of leaving childhood and becoming a grown-up. And that’s what we’re seeing in America in the 1970s.

This is a remarkable juncture, and you could see it in popular culture. Like “M*A*S*H,” and how it takes on militarism. People were insistently following the Watergate hearings, which were enormously complex. And America is really beginning to take on big problems, thinking about what it would mean to conserve energy, to create energy independence. Then everything takes a turn, Reagan is introduced, and he says don’t worry about this stuff. America is that shining city on a hill. A quote which he mischaracterized, by the way. But people wanted to believe him.

Why do you think that is? How did Reagan overcome the dominant culture of the time? Was it just easier for America to stop thinking about all the bad things that were happening?

Well, first it’s Reagan. The issue of Reagan’s intelligence is a controversial thing. Liberal friends love to dismiss him as dumb. Everyone has a Reagan story that allows us to dismiss him and his appeal. For example, people would make fun of the fact that while in office he would only read one-page memos. Well, so did FDR, because it’s a good management technique. But whatever you think about his intelligence, what’s unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that’s more fun, right? It’s more fun to feel good than feel bad. That’s part of our human state. And also that’s what leaders are for. Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan’s brand of leadership was what I call “a liturgy of absolution.” He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn’t want that? But the consequences of that absolution are all around us today. The inability to contend with climate change. The inability to call elites to account who wrecked the economy in 2008. The inability to reckon with the times when we fall short.

Right, on the back jacket of the copy I read, you have that quote from Barack Obama about America being the greatest country on Earth. It’s a straitjacket for national politicians who can no longer question America at some level.

My favorite discovery in this regard was when Samantha Power is chosen to be ambassador to the U.N.; she’d written a magazine article in 2003 in which she wrote American foreign policy needed a “historical reckoning” for crimes “committed or sponsored.” That’s the kind of reckoning we were having in the 1970s, with the Church committee. Marco Rubio brought this up in her confirmation hearing and asked her for examples of the crimes, and the response was that America is the greatest country in the world and has nothing to apologize for. So that’s where we’re at today.

One thing that struck me, you talk about Reagan envisioning himself as this hero figure, and I almost saw it that he entered politics to become the hero he never could become in Hollywood.

Yes, I have a 50-page chapter about Reagan in Hollywood; that’s an important part of the story. He came to Hollywood and was immediately embraced as a future star. At the time it was generally a slow process from bit parts to lead actor, but Reagan was a lead in his first movie. Then things almost immediately went south. He didn’t fight overseas, so he wasn’t able to become a hero there. He was the third highest-grossing actor in 1940, then he goes to making World War II training films. So after the war ends, he begins dabbling in politics, which was always a passion of his. And he saw success there that he wasn’t seeing in his Hollywood career, through becoming a popular speaker at liberal events, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, and then becoming the hero of his own story in this enormous Hollywood strike for technical workers. In what was a complicated story involving two separate unions – the Conference of Studio Unions and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees – Reagan decides the Conference of Studio Unions is the cat’s paw of the Communists. So now he’s starring in his own adventure movie, fighting the international Communist conspiracy in Hollywood. Which includes the FBI, guns, good guys and bad guys. And this becomes the touchstone of his political career, the same way that Nixon would always refer back to the Alger Hiss case. Reagan got the idea that the Communists would use Hollywood to indoctrinate the public into their form of governance, and that he could save the country from such an outcome.