[Because that is all pissing into the wind. There seems little likelihood those factors will influence US mass politics anytime soon, if ever. Chances are US society will remain driven by the atomism, selfishness and solipsism that have characterized it for many decades now. Re this, the following is from a review by George Packer of _The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics_ by Bruce J. Schulman that ran in the NY Times Sunday.]
In "The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics," Bruce J. Schulman ... [identifies the 1970s as the origin of a] "great shift" away from the public-spirited universalism that gave America the New Deal and the civil rights movement, and toward the sovereignty of the free market and private life. In other words, the 1980's began in the 1970's.
A similar argument appeared last year in "How We Got Here," by the journalist and current Bush speechwriter David Frum. But as a conservative Frum placed the emphasis on the decline of traditional moral values. What Schulman shows is how that decline went hand in hand with the freewheeling private enterprise that has remade American life in the past two decades. In this sense the change transcends the division between left and right: "This implosion of American public life and attempt to reconstruct the nation as a congeries of separate private refuges revealed itself across the traditional political spectrum and among all demographic groups." It was as much geographical as philosophical -- a movement of the nation's center of gravity away from the older consensus of the northeastern establishment, southward and westward to the Sun Belt, that freedom-seeking sprawl of subdivisions from Fort Lauderdale to Anaheim.
When Schulman, a historian at Boston University whose first book was "From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt," speaks of the "southernization" of American life, he isn't talking about Jim Crow and the blues. He means their milder reincarnations in the antiwelfare, Lynyrd Skynyrd-listening South that sloughed off its regional shame around the time Richard Nixon became president. Southernization was an attitude that spread north -- suspicion of government, antielitism, racial resentment, a highly personal religiosity.
If any one person can be said to have invented the 70's, it was Kevin Phillips. His 1969 book "The Emerging Republican Majority," which came out of his work on the Nixon campaign and explained how to effect a realignment of the parties, coined the term "Sun Belt" and described a new kind of American who would replace the core Democratic voters, the older northern urban ethnics: "The persons most drawn to the new sun culture are the pleasure-seekers, the bored, the ambitious, the space-age technicians and the retired -- a super-slice of the rootless, socially mobile group known as the American middle class."
This thinking was more visionary than Nixon's appeal to "the silent majority" that had brought him to power in 1968. Those middle Americans were defined by opposition to student protesters and black militants, but they represented an older set of values: patriotism and duty and self-restraint. The new Americans of the Sun Belt, Schulman explains, would make their peace with all the things that had scandalized the heartland in the 60's. The counterculture would become the mainstream. But this didn't mean the triumph of utopian idealism, the "beloved community" of civil rights workers and antiwar demonstrators. By the end of the 70's, the self-liberations that had originated in the 60's were merely "lifestyle choices," and they easily fused with the Sun Belt spirit of individualism.
The cultural part of the 60's revolution turned out to be continuous with the economic part of the Reagan revolution. What joins them is the apotheosis of the free individual. The very things that began with liberal universalist dreams of common humanity ended up in fragmentation and skepticism. Watergate, for example: at the time it appeared to be a great triumph for the antiestablishment left, a boon to reform Democrats in Congress, proof that the institutions of government worked. But it's now clear, as Schulman argues, that the "the ultimate lesson of Watergate remained 'you can't trust the government,' " and that it therefore "gave a boost to conservatism and conservative Republican politicians." Similarly, the tax revolt, which most Americans would date to 1978 with California's Proposition 13, turns out to have begun in the early 70's with an anticorporate, populist campaign for equity, not mindless cutting. And the brotherhood dreams of the early civil rights movement crumbled into "diversity."
The decade's odd figure out was Jimmy Carter. Victim of inflation and a crisis of confidence he himself diagnosed, he proposed a cure -- equal parts Baptist moralism and engineering expertise -- that was hopelessly out of sync with the times. Calling the energy crisis "the moral equivalent of war" was exactly the wrong appeal to make to an age far more inclined toward private self-fulfillment than collective self-sacrifice. Schulman's account of the Carter years is particularly illuminating in a book of shrewd historical analysis and clear anecdotal prose.
When he turns to popular culture, his historian's judgment is less sure. To claim that Jackie Kennedy's decision to marry Aristotle Onassis "signaled the end of the optimistic, liberal 1960's" or that " 'The Jeffersons' marked the crest of the civil rights movement, the summit of its material achievements and the beginning of the end of the integrationist ideal" is a kind of reductio ad absurdum itself. Sometimes trash is just trash. And in yoking together so many characters and events and trends, from the New Age to the New Right, under the single heading "privatism" leads Schulman into a kind of zeitgeist determinism, blurring important distinctions and forcing unlikely connections, with feminists labeled as entrepreneurs and Francis Ford Coppola shoehorned in with Evel Knievel as 70's rebels.
But his central argument is utterly persuasive. On or about November 1968, American character changed. In the case of most Americans of Schulman's generation, much has been given and little asked, and it's easy to think that nothing short of "the moral equivalent of war" will snap us out of our separate commercial trances.
[Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/10/reviews/010610.10packert.html]
Carl
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