> And an
> essential source of energy during that period was precisely the factors
> SA describes as discouraging. (Except for a minor confusion over TINA,
> which was a slogan of the '80s, not the '50s and '60s, he describes
> pretty accurately what it felt like to live through those two decades.
> The System Works! was broadcast everywhere; it delivers! And the better
> things got, the more hopeful theworld looked, the more pissed off with
> it a growing minority of the population felt.
Okay, but I think your evocation of TINA is exactly the point. In the 60's, yes, the message was that we've never had it so good. But at the same time, the world was also very clearly open to vast amounts of experimentation. There was the unappealing Soviet model - but also Swedish socialism, British Labourism, East European revisionist Communist, a Maoist paradigm that some took to be a model, Cuba, etc. You could take your pick - or try to think of something new. Even in the US, conventional liberal academic opinion had it that we had moved beyond capitalism to something new and Galbraithian, though not socialism, of course. (This phenomenon, "postcapitalism," has been written about by the intellectual historian Howard Brick).
All of this was the legacy of the Depression era, I would argue, when all the orthodoxies broke down. It was, as you say, only in the 80's that it seemed all those possibilities had been closed off and all that was left was la pensée unique.
That's why when people were horrified by the Vietnam war and went to marches, sometimes it turned them into socialists. How many people became socialists after Iraq war demos?
SA