Dominic Sandbrook's "Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right"

This is a fine history of the 1970s written as a chronology starting with the last days of Nixon's presidency up to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. It provides a good picture of how the economic stagflation of the 1970s combined with the exhaustion from the cultural struggles of the 1960s gave rise to a shift to the right in American political life. As the author points out, even the Carter years were a rightward lurch compared to the aspirations of the liberals and the recent history of the 1960s. This is a rich sourcebook for facts, events, and dialog from that era which will help you recall the events (if you lived through them) or give you a sense of the times (if you were too young to have experienced them).

Here are some snippets from the book to give a taste of the cornucopia it offers:

All in the Family would never have been so popular had it not tapped into a rich vein of working-class discontent. Historians have often written of a white "backlash," especially in neighborhoods teetering between poverty and comfort, against black militants, long-haired hippies, radical protesters, women's libbers, and other groups that Archie Bunker regards with horror. Actually, the roots of the backlash went back even further: in the 1940s it was already apparent in cities like Detroit, where white working-class families felt threatened by black migration and industrial decline. But thanks to the impact of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, as well as the shock of violent crime, pornography, and feminism, it was in the second half of the 190s that backlash first dominated the headlines.

And this:

Racism was not the only element in Wallace's appeal. Running to regain the governorship of Alabama in 1970, he reminded audiences of the "rich folks" in the country clubs and "big old houses," sipping "those martinis with their little fingers up in the air" and calling for school integration. "And guess where their children go to school?" he sneered. "They go to a lily-white private school. They've bought above it all!" During his presidential campaign two years later, which was eventually cut short by an assassin's bullet, some of his biggest laughs cam when he poured scorn on the "hypocrites who send your kids half-way across town while they have their chauffeurs drop their kids off at private schools."

As I read that I thought of Barack Obama sending his kids to private schools in Washington DC while Jimmy Carter sent his daughter to a public school. Obama is a hypocrite. Carter, despite all the flaws in his ability to govern, was a guy who lived a simple life and didn't play the liberal hypocrite.

Here's another bit:

In Washington there was remarkably little political fallout from the collapse of Saigon. As national security adviser and then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger had been intimately associated with the war for more than six years, yet he insisted that the blame lay with the peace movement and, especially, the liberals in Congress for losing their nerve and cutting aid to Saigon when it mattered most. When Ford asked him to draft some thoughts on "the lessons of Vietnam," Kissinger's verdict was extraordinarily sanguine. It was "remarkable," he thought, "considering how long the war lasted and how intensely it was reported and commented, that there are not really very many lessons from our experience in Vietnam that can usefully be applied elsewhere." Thousands of Americans had not died "in vain," because they had "prevented Indonesia from falling to Communism and probably preserved the American presence in Asia." It had been a "high price," Kissinger admitted, "but we gained ten years of time and we changed what then appeared to be an overwhelming momentum. I do not believe our soldiers or our people need to be ashamed."

It was testimony to Kissinger's colossal self-belief that even after the collapse of Cambodia and Vietnam, he refused to draw more sweeping lessons. What he called a "high price" -- $140 billion in American money fifty-eight thousand American lives, and at least two million Vietnamese lives -- struck most observers as downright obscene. At the very least he had been guilty of serious mistakes, notably his failure to adapt American strategy to reflect events on the ground and his insistence on subordinating Indo-Chinese affairs to superpower diplomacy. And contrary to everything he had ever said, Indochina had never really mattered to American security. Vietnam and Cambodia both fell to Communism, but instead of the dominoes tumbling in rapid sequence, the two promptly turned on each other. The key American allies in the region were never seriously imperiled by the loss of Vietnam. It had all been for nothing, after all.

And this bit about Reagan is surprising because it goes counter to the hagiography about the fierce right wing Reagan that is now so revered:

The one thing for which Hollywood had not prepared Reagan was how to run anything; there was a serious point in his joke that he had "never played a governor." But once he had settled in, he proved a surprisingly disciplined and efficient executive. Like Roosevelt, he was secure enough to surround himself with aides who knew more than he did, and happily delegated as much as possible to the experts, a striking contrast with insecure micromanagers like Nixon and Carter. Even Garry Wills, one of his most incisive critics, notes that Reagan's team was "extraordinarily efficient" and that he governed "competently, popularly, routinely."

What was really striking about Reagan's governorship, though, was its moderation. For all his attacks on government insiders, compromise came as easily to him as it did to any Capitol Hill veteran. Inheriting a budget deficit, he signed the biggest tax increase in the history of any state. He increased spending on state universities and student grants; he approved stricter regulations for home insurance, real estate, retailing, doctors, dentists, and auto repairs; he signed the nation's toughest water pollution controls; he agreed to a welfare deal that gave higher payments to eight out of ten recipients; he blocked the Dos Rios dam and trans-Sierra highway projects, saving vast tracts of wilderness from development. Most remarkably, he signed the nation's most progressive abortion law, permitting more legal abortions than in any other state before Roe v. Wade, a fact that most conservatives liked to forget. He might not have been one of the nation's greatest governors, but all in all he was a pretty good one. "Reagan had committed the very sin he inveighed against," write Garry Wills -- "government."

And this:

The paradox was that, in some ways, feminists had good cause for celebration, from the unprecedented visibility of females judges and athletes to rising female admissions to law and medical schools. Yet there was a palpable sense of disappointment that in an age of diminished expectations, feminists would be forced to settle for much less than they had hoped for, Robin Morgan wrote of a sense of "impatience and despair"; other activists wrote position papers asking, "Will the women's movement survive?" or threw themselves more deeply into cultural separatism.

Meanwhile, most women still worked in what Ms. called "the pink-collar ghetto" of sales, secretarial, and catering jobs, with few opportunities to progress to senior levels. At the end of the decade women's incomes still amounted to just 57 percent of men's. Even more disturbing, though, was what sociologists called the "feminization" of poverty: by the dawn of the 1980s, thanks to low pay, fewer jobs, divorce, and child-care responsibilities, women accounted for two out of three poor Americans, with 100,000 mothers falling beneath the poverty line every year. In different circumstances, this would surely have been the ultimate feminist issue. Unfortunately, many activists seemed more concerned with university hiring policies and the iniquity of the word "chairman."

And:

Crucially, Proposition 13 also played into the hands of new intellectual movement regarded with utter scorn by many economists, but nonetheless increasingly popular on the Republican right. For almost four years The Wall Street Journal's iconoclastic young columnist Jude Wanniski had been telling readers that only massive tax cuts could jolt the economy out of the cycle of stagflation. "The national economy is being choked by taxes -- asphyxiated," he wrote in December 1974. "it is simply absurd to argue that increasing unemployment will stop inflation. To stop inflation you need more goods, not less." What because known as supply-side theory, Wanniski claimed, offered a simple answer to the nation's ills. Since the key to the economy was not demand but supply, the quickest route to prosperity was for the government to cut high marginal tax rates. This would increase the incentives for individuals to save and invest, ensuring high levels of production and output. Not only would low taxes raise output; they might encourage such incredible growth that government revenues would actually go up. Everyone would come out ahead; all you had to do was slash taxes.

Wanniski had picked up the rudiments of supply-side theory from this friend Arthur Laffer, formerly a junior professor at the University of Chicago and a controversial budget forecaster in the Nixon administration. ... The supply-siders, said liberal Princeton economist Alan Blinder, were armed "with neither theory nor evidence, just boldfaced assertions." And if anything, conservative economists were even more scathing. Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon and Ford, thought that Laffer's predictions were "extreme to the point of bizarre," while economists had recognized the importance of supply "since the first parrot had gotten a Ph.D. in economics for learning to say 'supply and demand.'" "I'm for cutting taxes," agreed Alan Greenspan, "but not for Laffer's reasons. I don't know anyone who seriously believes his argument."

And:

Meanwhile, as oil prices continued to rise, Carter contemplated the prospect of severe shortages. On April 5, tight-lipped as ever, he appeared on television again. "Our nation's energy problem is serious," he began gloomily, "and it's getting worse." His solution horrified liberal Democrats: all price controls would be lifted by September 1981, giving the oil companies additional revenue for exploration and development. At the same time, he asked Congress for a windfall tax of 50 percent on extra oil revenue, to be spent on mass transit, alternative-energy sources, and relief for poor families. Decontrol, he admitted, was "a painful step, and I'll give it to you straight: Each of us will have to use less oil and pay more for it." But as so often, he wanted the public to embrace the spirit of sacrifice: "I ask you to drive 15 miles a week fewer than you do now. At least once a week take the bus [to work], go by carpool or, if you work close enough to home, walk."

Newsweek called it a "prime-time TV summons to the Age of Limits," while Carter's policy chief Stuart Eizenstat, thought it "one of his most courageous and most important decisions." But most liberals were appalled. The plan was "seriously flawed" and "a self-inflicted wound," declared Ted Kennedy, accusing Carter of putting the oil companies above the ordinary consumers of the industrial states.

And this about the oil shortages:

Carter was right: this was a genuine crisis of confidence. But the president seemed powerless to reverse it; indeed, he had become a symbol of failure, "Jimmy Hoover." In many ways it was an apt comparison. Both Hoover and Carter were former engineers who had vaulted over the party stalwarts to claim the presidency. Both had been deeply shaped by their rural Protestant backgrounds; both saw themselves as above ideology and believed that technocratic efficiency could solve the nation's problems. But both struggled to work with their party's leaders in Congress, and both ran into trouble when their policies offended the old guard. Above all, both were much more similar to their successors than is usually realized: just as Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation paved the way for the New Deal, so Carter's fiscal conservatism and Cold War revivalism anticipated Reagan. But that was not, of course, what Carter's critics meant. they meant merely that he was a failure.

And:

In some ways, Carter's problem was that he was ahead of his time, his blend of fiscal conservatism and southern populism anticipating Bill Clinton's appeal a decade later. But there was also more continuity with Ronald Reagan than is usually realized. It was Carter who insisted that big-government liberalism be consigned to history, launched the great wave of deregulation, and began cutting welfare budgets. It was Carter who lectured the Soviet leaders about human rights, began sending aid to the insurgents in Afghanistan, and asked for more defense spending to meet the challenge of a renewed Cold War. If, by some fluke, Carter had won in 1980, he would probably have take the election as a mandate for confrontation abroad and conservatism at home. His reelection would not have been a victory of liberalism over Reaganism; it would have been the victory of Reaganism lite.

As you can see from the above, this book is rich with detail and food for thought. It is an excellent review of that decade and the politics that lies at the heart of the rampant right wing politics of today. It is a good era to study if you want to learn some lessons to help unwind the 40 years of rampant right wing politics.