I picked
this book up to take a break from a very long book about the Holocaust that I’m
reading that has been difficult to get through. This book sort of picks up
where the last one I finished, Stayin’ Alive:
The 1970’s and the Last Days of the Working Class, left off, though it’s
not as good as the latter, which was 11/10 amazing. This book covers political,
economic, and social issues and is part of the Oxford History of the United
States collection, which I can officially vouch for since about a year ago I read
the Glorious Cause, the part of the
series that addresses the Revolutionary War. Very informative, undergraduate
level books that give you a good sense of the times.
There is
some overlap with Stayin’ Alive early
on, discussing the economic state of the country, which faced a “Great
Recession” from 1973-1975, a term I used to think had only ever been applied to
our recession in 2008. This book further drives home the point that busing was
a critical political issue across the nation, as whites did not want to bear
the costs of integration. They also just didn’t want to integrate. It’s amazing
to see the development of the private schools as white parents pulled their
kids out of integrated public schools all across the nation and sent them to
whiter, private schools. In Boston, for example, in 2003, minorities were 86
percent of public school students. It reminds me of another form of racialized
secession, like in the Civil War. It is toxic that segregation continues and it
seems like stronger forces are needed to integrate, but to do so in a much more
friendly and reasonable way.
The book
also discusses the parallel revolutions that occurred. First, the sexual
revolution in the late 1960’s freed women and men to have premarital sex with
more partners, especially as birth control became more common. However, a
counter-revolution occurred, reaching its peak in the 1990’s of politicized
Christianity, “The Moral Majority.” People got divorced more and had more
children out of wedlock.
At the
same time, money was being funneled into politics like never before. The
average cost of winning a seat in the Senate in 1976 was just $600,000 but by
1990 it was $4 million and I assume much higher today. What was the trigger for
this? Libertarians often argue that there’s so much money in politics because
government is so big that it is worthwhile for corporations to buy it out but I
wonder if there were similar increases during massive increases in federal
government spending during World War One, the New Deal, or the Great Society. I
would think they’re wrong because the period 1976-1990 is marked by a dramatic
reduction of taxes, federal employees, and the size of government. I bet it has
to do with campaign finance law, specifically the laws passed in 1974 that I
can’t remember the name of (Buckley-Valeo?).
In the
last book I read, I came away with the impression that Nixon was the basis of
modern Republican campaigning strategy. Likewise, it seems like Gerald Ford was
the basis of Republican high-level staffing from 1974-2009. He hired guys like
Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Powell in his administration and those guys would
go on to do very big things in the Republican party. The continuities in the
Republican party are very consistent. For example, Republicans, at least since
Nixon, love the strong man. When Khmer Rouge soldiers kidnapped the American
crew of the ship Mayaguez, President
Ford sent a rescue team after them and it was a huge failure. They lost more
men than had originally kidnapped and didn’t even rescue the hostages. Ford
eventually got them back by negotiating, but despite the failure, or maybe
because of it, Ford had a huge surge in popularity, people admiring his show of
steel. Maybe it’s all Americans, and not just Republicans.
Despite
praising FDR in his inaugural address, Reagan was no FDR. He would cut income
taxes multiple times, doing the bulk of the work in getting the top bracket’s
rate from 70% in 1981 down to 35% by 2004. Reagan also maintained Nixon’s
electoral victories all across the country, winning the business owners in the
East, White identity-politics voters (what’s this code for?) in the South, and
small-government types in the West who wanted more land in private rather than
federal hands. Despite lowering taxes, Reagan ran up deficits by spending $2
trillion during his eight years on the military, and though a smaller
percentage of the budget than during the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, “Defense”
was taking up 25% of the federal budget. What made Reagan such a special Cold
Warrior was that he believed the Cold war could be won. I had thought this was
a standard opinion but the author points out that most experts, including CIA
officials, failed to predict the demise of the Soviet Union, and many were fine
with a perpetual state of Cold War. All Reagan had to do was conceive of an end
and will it.
The culture
war of the 1960’s continued to be fought through the 1980’s and 1990’s through
issues like abortion, AIDS, gay marriage and service in the military, music
censorship, teaching evolution in schools, black power, sexual freedom, and drug
use. By the time we look at the 1990’s it feels like its become the preeminent
issue in domestic policy, and today the “culture war” affects foreign policy through
support of Palestine or Israel, admission of Muslim refugees, and the debates
on immigration. If The 1960’s set the “war” in motion, then by the 1990’s it
was the strongest force in politics, really only growing stronger as I reflect
on the politics of my own life until today, in 2018. It seems like all the
biggest issues now that our country faces are social issues about who is to be
accepted and who is not to be accepted and what behavior will be tolerated,
relating to racial issues, gender issues, religious issues, and more. The 1960’s
and 70’s were a sort of pivoting from issues of class and with the fall of the
Soviet Union in the early 90’s, social issues became everything by the end of
the Clinton administration. IT seems like the cultural conflict remains
unsettled today, though the left-wing made serious gains in LGBT rights and
continues to push forward on legalization of Marijuana. However there is little
progress on racial issues, which have seemed to remain at the status quo,
though the fighting it worse, like trench warfare.
America
hit its stride economically in the 1980’s and 90’s with tons of optimism in the
power of capitalism from the bounce back in the 80’s and the fall of Communism
in the early 90’s. In 1999 (as the dot com bubble inflated), teenagers were
asked how much money they expected to earn at 30 years old, with the median
answer being $75,000, or three times the median salary at the time. It must
have been a rude awakening for the economy to crash down on those teenagers not
even ten years later. I bet that had a very big impact on their outlook on the
world.
The book
then discusses the Clinton years, which appear similar to the Carter years in
that Clinton conceded economic policy to conservatives in the Republican Party,
but different in that Clinton was a more clever politician than Carter. Clinton
was actually able to play the middle successfully where Carter failed but he
was still punished brutally by the Republicans even though he was doing their
bidding. He was basically a corrupt womanizer, but in politics what else is
new? The Republican leaders like Gingrich were doing the same and Dennis Hastert
was a child molester. Despite huge economic success, Republicans remained
energized and unwilling to give an inch, winning the House in 1995 for the
first time since 1955. Democrats remained willing to give up everything they
had fought for over half a century for, approving personal income tax cuts as
well as cuts to the capital gains tax, which almost exclusively benefits high
earners. Clinton and other Democratic leaders continued to bleed the labor
unions, once their strong allies and the backbone of the party, with NAFTA,
proposed by Bush 41 and confirmed by Clinton, it helped corporate bosses move
more jobs out of the United States. By 2001, only 13.5% of American workers
(and 9% of those in the private sector) were members of unions. No major
political party represented the economic interests of the working class, so
they identified with the party that represented their social/cultural
interests. Generally, this was the more conservative Republican Party.
Despite
what looked like big success, Americans in general did not feel more successful,
even if the stock market was quadrupling in value in just a decade. This was
because the real buying power of wages, despite a 90 cent increase in the
minimum wage in 1996, continued to decline. Since the 1970’s, the decline in
standard of living for White, working class men was especially bad, as wages declined
while people of color and women entered the workforce and unions declined,
creating intense competition in the labor market. It was ironic then that a lot
of standard-of-living items got better. By 2001, any American that wanted color
TV had it, the vast majority had microwaves, washing machines, cable TV, and
AC, and the majority had personal computers and cars or trucks. These items
became cheap enough for most Americans to buy, though almost all wage/income
increases went to those who were already the richest. In 2001, the United States produced 22 percent of the world’s output,
while Great Britain produced only 8% of world output at the height of its
empire in 1913.
This
book was a very good read though it took me a little bit to get through the first
chapter. It’s well-written and helped bring me up to speed on why our country was
the way it was going up to 9/11, which was when as a child I started to develop
consciousness of history/politics going on around me. To really complete my
reading from the late 60’s onward I need something on the Bush and Obama
administrations now. But for now I’m reading the Chernow biography of George Washington
and I feel kind of complete on recent American history for the time being.
Anyway, this book was great and very approachable. 8/10 would recommend.
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