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.....
...But 70's teenagers became academics and journalists, and inevitably a small historical literature of the decade has begun to accumulate. It turns out that the 70's gave birth to the America in which we now live... (NYT review)
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I haven't read the book, but judging from the review I think I can tell where this is going.
These kind of journalistic histories, which are really more works of propaganda than anything else, present a popular cultural history that is entirely cut loose from its own material ground in economic developments and government policies.
>From reading the review you get the idea that the world we live in was
hatched out of our own psychological and social motivations as these
interacted with some universal public spirit. In other words it is a
degraded form of romanticism. In this sort of tale, war, poverty,
work, law, economy, and the material events of history had nothing to
do with how we arrived here today. We were apparently driven by a
morality play and the mysteries of free wheeling private enterprise
working magically to make everything in modern life, including life
itself, possible.
Well, nonsense. I lived and struggled with this history in the most materially determined way possible, and I am here to say this view is pure bullshit. And what's worse is it is the kind of bullshit that links up cultural and social memories in just the sort of way that makes it believable, as long as you forget everyday working life---exactly the material stuff of hands that actually creates and forms the concrete world.
The deepest problem with portraying the world in cultural and social thematic terms is such a history, if it isn't careful, cuts off the view of the material processes of those events and developments and creates what amounts to an illusion. The illusion is that we creat the conditions of our world through some immaterial fabrication of our own autonomous will and imagination and nothing more. It then follows that we are morally responsible for everything around us as individuals. If our lives are good then we are good people. If our lives are not so good, then we are bad people. That is, we are completely severed from our own concrete existence in economic, material, and political conditions and we exist instead, completely independent of them. This idea supposedly constitutes our theoretical freedom.
In this way, then the rise of the new South and its subsequent domination of US politics and policy today is seen to have been a development hatched out of thin air, presumably from out of the abstract will and creative powers of those great traditional American values that the South so wonderfully exemplifies.
Where to start? I hate these pop re-writes of history because they make me tell the same story over and over again. The LBO list has no idea how often I hear this crap from bright young professionals extruded out of the bowels of UC Berkeley's economics, history, political science departments, and law school. They roll into the shop with some updated spin of pretty much the same nonsense semester after semester. So in the last few years or I've put together my own rap which is delivered more as duty to Berkeley traditions than anything else. I know in advance they well go on their way and ignore it all. But at least they heard it once.
So here is the wheelchair shop version of the history of the Seventies and its relationship to neoliberalism and the global economy.
Remember first of all that Nixon's election in 1968 depended on a appealing to the lowest common denominator of blue collar and working class white voters through thinly veiled racism and class resentment towards the educated middle and upper middle classes. That appeal to in North was coupled with mass desertions from the old boy state networks of Dixiecrats in the South and together that was enough rhetoric to win against a completely discredited Democratic ticket. Remember the disastrous democratic ticket was literally shuttled out of the back door of the Chicago convention in a hail of tear gas, rocks, and bottles. The entire Midwest and parts of the East, South and West were still smoldering under race riots and marshal law after the King and Kennedy assassinations. Most of the western European governments were coming apart under leftwing demonstrations. The Mexico City Olympics were held under military guards who machine gunned protesting students at the university. The award ceremonies were held with black power statues of protest. There was also the Prague Spring, and of course the Vietnam war was staggering under the Tet offensive and going from one atrocity and counteroffensive failure to another. In short a fair portion of the world was coming apart.
During the same couple of years at the turn to the 70s there were underway a series of collapses and shifts of US economy in manufacturing, industry, and commerce. For example there was the OPEC oil embargo, the waves of Japanese imports in steel, autos, and consumer electronics beginning to flood US markets. The reactions from the US corporate giants to these developments along with declining war effort were a series of massive lay-offs and factory closings that resulted in creating the Midwestern and Northeastern rust belts.
Corporate manufacturers, industrial assembly, and consumer electronics production along with textiles and other industries moved to the US South and Southwest to cut costs. They were systematically lured by local governments with roll over policies on land, development, anti-unions laws, low wages, poor labor conditions, zero pollution standards, and massive tax breaks. The message was move south to exploit, pollute, develop, pillage and profit---and they did. The material consequence was that the entire region gained more economic and political muscle than it had had since the civil war.
During the same era developments in electronic, communications. computers, transportation, and more highly rationalized management and fabrication systems made it possible to conduct business from a central headquarters many thousands of miles removed from the physical sites of manufacturing, assembly, packaging and shipment.
Many of these infrastructure developments were created by military and government contractors in order to produce material and conduct the war in Vietnam half way around the world. This was the real booty of Vietnam. These systems taken together made almost any economic infrastructure portable. They laid the foundation for moving whole economies to remote and cheaper labor and material resource markets while keeping control of these sites from some other and quite distant location. On the west coast steel manufacturing evaporated during the decade and was complete supplanted by Japanese suppliers. It was also about this period that Japanese offshore lumber processing ships took over the Northwestern lumber milling industry and turned the forests of Washington, Oregon and Northern California into nothing more than tree farms. Meanwhile iron, coal, bauxite, copper and other western ore mining took a hike to South America.
A significant amount of the economic base shifted south and west and with it came the ability of these regions to shape virtually all economic, political, and social policies at the federal level. As Nixon said, once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
Starting with the Nixon administration the key means to destroy the Kennedy-Johnson era reforms in welfare, health-care, and education was to dismantle their centralized DC bureaucracies and regionalize their programmatic oversight---sending federal programs back to state and regional level bureaucracies. This re-empowered the far more conservative and reactionary local regions and state governments particularly in the South and West and that handed them virtually all day to day administrative control over what remained of the New Deal programs and the War on Poverty.
The Nixon administration moves to decentralized federal government control over the welfare state, in the name of states rights and local control became a concrete fact of life. In many ways the Carter and Reagan administrations simply continued on these developments adding refinements and rhetoric of their own.
The background behind proposing and passing Proposition 13 in California was to complete the reactionary task of destroying the welfare state by starving it to death at the state level. Many states followed suit. Since most federal programs were now administered in regional offices, their own political fate could no longer be argued and supported day to day through easy access to congressional committees and the rest of the central federal bureaucracy. Along with bureaucratic shifts came a long series of funding changes that increasingly shifted the programmatic financial burden onto the states and regions and specifically away from the central federal budgets and administration.
In short, the US welfare state and US progressive social and economic reforms didn't fail. And, the thousands of committed social reformers and progressives working in federal government programs to make life better for ordinary people didn't just somehow sink into meaningless depressed oblivion.
These programs and staffs were systematically dismantled and destroyed in detail---specifically through central planning at the executive branch. This should put the lie to the current neo-liberal propaganda that central planning doesn't work. In addition, these bureaucratic maneuvers from the executive branch were legitimatize and bribed through Congress with billions of dollars in pork barrel kick back schemes to the states---everything from military bases to freeways and free federal land, which of course helped fuel the already booming re-industrialization of the South in Texas, Georgia and Florida in particular.
Big government liberalism didn't fail, become unworkable, or fade away as some noble but tragic experiment. It was thoroughly and systematically brutalized, exterminated, cut to pieces, shoveled into holes, covered over with lye and then buried under a stone dead mass of twenty years of political propaganda and financial starvation.
The same federal central planning and policies, along with technology developments in communications, computers, and transport together with their more refined managerial and planning systems that made whole economies portable during the Seventies, have continued unabated and been added to ever since. From the Seventies economic development shifts to the US South and West, the next moves were directly off shore to Asia and across the border to Mexico and the rest of Latin America. There is a continuous trace from the rust belt Midwest and Northeast to the the strip malls and industrial spawl of the US South, Southwest, and West right on through to the factory slums of Mexico and Southeast Asia.
The sense of origin and continuum from the Seventies era to events today is derived almost completely from these concrete and material developments.
It is ludicrous to suggest as most of the neo-liberal and rightwing propagandists do that these historical developments of political economy were anything other than the result of central government planning that carried out long term national level strategies. The primary motivations were and still are to maximize corporate profits by escaping the costs of improving the lives and working conditions of the bulk of the US population; escape the costs of political resistance and organization, and unionization in particular; escape the costs of rational and sustainable uses of natural resources; escape the costs of following environmental pollution regulations; and escape the costs of a mirid of other federal, state, and local regulations on industry and commerce that were specifically put into place to halt a long list of exploitive and destructive practices and abuses.
I follow this long speech up with the more recent left diatribes on the IMF, WTO, WB, and various UN commissions and other international bodies that conduct more or less the same neoliberal policies today around the globe. This sets up the explaination for Seattle, London, DC, Praque and so forth. Then I remind them of the US State dept and US military is the ultimate arbitrator in any debate over substantive change---hence everything from Vietnam and the Central American wars, to the Gulf War, and Yugoslavia. In other words, the power and conviction of US neoliberal policies, their rightness, the fact that there is no alternative issues directly from the barrel of a gun.
Chuck Grimes