'How Richard Nixon created the red state-blue state divide'

Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, for example, spoke for many when he suggested that "if the right people had been in charge at Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president." Thompson was cheered on by intellectuals, rock 'n' rollers, college-educated professionals and die-hard Democrats.

Welcome to what Rick Perlstein calls Nixonland, the title of his massive study of how these two ideal American types — Nixon haters and Nixon lovers — began feuding in 1968 like the Hatfields and the McCoys and haven't stopped since. Put another way, Perlstein attributes today's red state-blue state divide to the troubled years that followed Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide victory and the ensuing overreach of the Great Society and the Vietnam War.

"The main character in 'Nixonland' is not Richard Nixon," Perlstein writes. "Its protagonist, in fact, has no name — but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason."

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