How the Seventies Changed America (July/August 1991 | Volume: 42, Issue: 4)

How the Seventies Changed America

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Authors: Nicholas Lemann

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4

That’s it,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to India, wrote to a colleague on the White House staff in 1973 on the subject of some issue of the moment. “Nothing will happen. But, then, nothing much is going to happen in the 1970s, anyway.”

Moynihan is a politician famous for his predictions, and this one seemed for a long time to be dead-on. The seventies, even while they were in progress, looked like an unimportant decade, a period of cooling down from the white-hot 60s. You had to go back to the teens to find another decade so lacking in crisp, epigrammatic definition. It only made matters worse for the seventies that the succeeding decade started with a bang. In 1980, the country elected the most conservative president in its history, and it was immediately clear that a new era had dawned. (In general, the 80s, unlike the 70s, had a perfect dramatic arc. They peaked in the summer of 1984, with the Los Angeles Olympics and the Republican National Convention in Dallas, and began to peter out with the Iran-contra scandal in 1986 and the stock market crash in 1987.) It is nearly impossible to engage in magazine-writerly games like discovering “the day the seventies died” or “the spirit of the seventies"; and the style of the 70s—wide ties, sideburns, synthetic fabrics, white shoes, disco—is so far interesting largely as something to make fun of.

 

But somehow the 70s seem to be creeping out of the loser-decade category. Their claim to importance is in the realm of sweeping historical trends, rather than memorable events, though there were some of those too. In the United States today, a few basic propositions shape everything: The presidential electorate is conservative and Republican. Geopolitics revolves around a commodity (oil) and a religion (Islam) more than around an ideology (Marxism-Leninism). The national economy is no longer one in which practically every class, region, and industry is upwardly mobile. American culture is essentially individualistic, rather than communitarian, which means that notions like deferred gratification, sacrifice, and sustained national effort are a very tough sell. Anyone seeking to understand the roots of this situation has to go back to the seventies.

The underestimation of the 70s’ importance, especially during the early years of the decade, is easy to forgive because the character of the 70s was substantially shaped at first by spillover from the 60s. Such 60s events as the killings of student protesters at Kent State and Orangeburg, the original Earth Day, the invasion of Cambodia, and a large portion of the war in Vietnam took place in the 70s. Although 60s radicals (cultural and political) spent the early 70s loudly bemoaning the end of the revolution, what was in fact going on was the working of the phenomena of the 60s into the mainstream of American life. Thus the first Nixon administration, which was decried by liberals at the time for being