island in the sun.

words. 

"In recent years, there has been an onslaught of books, academic and popular, whose titles insist that the decade marked a major turning point: “The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics,” “How We Got Here: The 70s, The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—for Better or Worse,” “Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right,” “Pivotal Decade,” “Something Happened.” What happened, we now know, was the collapse of the American consensus, the postwar social contract, founded on a mixed economy at home and bipartisan Cold War internationalism abroad. The seventies turned out to be the decade when the country began its transformation from steady economic growth to spasms of contraction, from industry to information and finance, from institutional authorities to individual freedoms, from center-left to right. Global competition happened in the seventies, and so did populist politics, special-interest money, the personal computer, and the cult of the self. The obsessed-over sixties seem increasingly remote and sui generis, while the trademarks of the seventies are strangely persistent. Wages have remained largely flat since 1973. Gas prices never stopped outraging drivers. “The Happiness Project” updates “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” We’re still, or again, talking about the decline of American power and prestige. Ted Cruz today sounds a lot like Jesse Helms did back then.

In other words, the seventies were important because of what’s happened since.

 ...Jimmy Carter, appearing humorless and angry, was no longer capable of inspiration, and had never been particularly reassuring. These were not superficial defects in a leader, and at the Democratic National Convention of 1980 it was the soaring oratory of Edward M. Kennedy—the primary’s loser, though at one point he was far outpolling both Carter and Reagan—that gave delegates an indelible vision of a better country. If you listen to Carter’s Oval Office addresses on inflation, energy, and the nation’s “crisis of confidence,” the level of honesty is shocking, and deflating. No President has ever spoken that way since. The lesson he taught all his successors was not to tell the American people hard truths. Instead, Reagan set the tone. He forced American politics to be played on his turf—a rhetorical achievement that continues today.

 In other ways, though, the conservative agenda of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan never took. If we see the seventies not as an apocalyptic war between two Americas but as a time of profound uncertainty, in which conflict and contradiction were found just as often within as between Americans, it’s possible to imagine the country, at the end of the decade, turning for inspiration to a vision quite different from Reagan’s brand of denial. His vision was the one on offer—but a majority of the country didn’t vote for the destruction of blue-collar America in 1980, or the creation of a new plutocracy, or the rigging of legislation in favor of organized money. Most Americans still want their social programs kept intact, dislike being told how to conduct their private lives, and don’t want their country to go looking for foreign dragons to slay. What Perlstein calls the “cult of official optimism,” founded by Reagan, requires our leaders, including Barack Obama, to genuflect ritually before America the innocent. That rhetoric has grown extremely thin, however—not many Americans these days are optimistic. Reagan won, but the seventies never ended"

THE NEW YORKER: The Uses of Division: Rick Perlstein chronicles the fall of the American consensus and the rise of the right.