I am sure, in retrospect, that it was easy to make a case in the 1970s that the world was coming apart. The streak of assassinations (Kennedy, X, King, Kennedy again) made it seem like shooting a prominent leader would become a recurring feature of American life. The price of everything was skyrocketing at the same time that the economy was deteriorating – a process that we’d come to know as “stagflation,” generally driven by artificial cost increases on major commodities (in this case, OPEC’s production controls to help pay for the Yom Kippur war in 1973). The military was, quite frankly, in shambles – done into the ground by protracted conflict in Vietnam and the soul-sucking nature of the draft and its aftereffects. And it seems like an unnaturally large chunk of the prominent celebrities of the Depression-War-Postwar era died in the 1970s, which I can only guess was the logical result of people with shorter life expectancies becoming prominent as a result of mass media (e.g. film and radio on a national scale).
You only have to go back and look at the magazines from the time to see the general despair. People genuinely thought that offering amnesty to draft evaders would undermine military readiness (“Who in the hell is going to fight the next war? The Soviets will not be deterred by the peace symbol”, etc). People actually thought that busing was going to bring about racial Armageddon (read J.Anthony Lukas’s landmark Common Ground, but set aside about a month to do it). People were retreating wholesale into nostalgia (consider George Lucas, who created Star Wars because he couldn’t get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie, and who financed his project with the money made on American Graffiti. Just consider how highly rated Happy Days was and you’ll get the picture, never mind Grease).
Kevin Phillips is sharp as a tack, no doubt, and he has spent years disavowing the fruits reaped from his landmark The Emerging Republican Majority, but he will always wear a scarlet letter. Two of them, in fact: PP. “Positive Polarization.” There was a conscious, deliberate effort by Team Nixon – starting around 1966 and continuing through the downfall of the administration in 1974 – to portray America as “us and them.” Them, obviously, to consist of war protesters, blacks, feminists, campus radicals, drugged-out rockers, dirty hippies, etc etc – the great unwashed Other. And Us, to consist of…well…”real Americans.” What he created sold like nothing since Coca-Cola. To this day, forty years on, the pundits rant on and on about the need to win “real Americans.” The “heartland.” Those proud rural Caucasian sons of the soil who embody “real American values.”
Lil’ Kev sold the idea that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove made their millions on: that there is some mythical America back in Pleasantville around 1955 or so, before the Negroes got all riled up and the beatnik jazz appeared (background loop of “Take Five” here) and the foreigners and colored folk got into the rock and roll and mad the kids all want to smoke reefer and hate cops (change background loop to Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower”). His crime wasn’t in making people imagine that things were so great and wonderful and simple and perfect in some long-ago American Avalon cloudcuckooland…his crime was in making people believe that you could go back to it.
The irony is that all of a sudden, it’s 2008, the economy is going to hell, oil has smashed through the $100/bbl barrier, American forces are bogged down abroad, and there’s a sinking sense that everything’s turning to shit…and it’s all landing on people who came to power as the logical result of the Phillips plan. The GOP, as currently incarnated, is the apotheosis of the predictions in The Emerging Republican Majority – white, Southern, suburban, traditionalist – and right now, over two-thirds of the country thinks its standard-bearer sucks out loud.
The moral of the story is actually not political at all, and is in fact directed against myself. Said moral being: don’t get too caught up in nostalgia, because that perfect realm you remember wasn’t perfect then and is in any case unattainable now. There’s nowhere to go but forward, or else perish where you stand.