FOR DECADES, liberal scholars and journalists have been trying to figure out how it came to this. How did we end up with a deeply polarized society, in which conservative leaders, ideas, and policies have defined national politics? After all, from the fall of Joe McCarthy through the end of the 1960s, a national consensus in support of liberalism seemed to have become entrenched. Conservatism appeared atavistic, on the wrong side of the tide of history. Boy, was that wrong.

Nixon did it, sort of, says Rick Perlstein, in his epic Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. For Perlstein, Nixon was the central figure in a national agony of violence, recrimination, and division that occurred between 1964 and 1972, whose “sides have hardly ch...

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