Philip Jenkins - Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America

Decade of Nightmares

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Copyright 2006 by Philip Jenkins

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jenkins, Philip, 1952
Decade of nightmares: the end of the sixties and the
making of eighties America / Philip Jenkins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-517866-1
ISBN-10: 0-19-517866-1
1. United StatesHistory1969.
2. United StatesHistory19611969.
3. United StatesPolitics and government19451989.
4. United StatesSocial conditions1945.
5. Social problemsUnited StatesHistory20th century.
6. Culture conflictUnited StatesHistory20th century.
7. ConservatismUnited StatesHistory20th century.
8. Political cultureUnited StatesHistory20th century.
I. Title.
E839.J46 2006 973.92dc22 2005020159

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Liz

Imagine a Rip van Winkle who fell asleep in 1970 or 1974 and reawakened in the mid-1980s. Studying the torrent of media images, he tries to make sense of the new world, to understand which side emerged victorious from the social conflicts of his day.

He is startled by how thoroughly conservative interests seem to have triumphed. Ronald Reagan is an immensely popular president who has won a second term by a landslide. Across the political landscape, so many of the controversies of the 1960s have been carried definitively by the right. In foreign affairs, the confrontational anti-Communist rhetoric harks back to the time of John Foster Dulles or Barry Goldwater. Even Goldwater, in fact, is attacking the CIA for going too far in attempting to overthrow the leftist regime in Nicaragua. Americas leaders speak the hard-core language of captive nations and slave states, of the need to roll back Communism. The United States is ostentatiously building up its military, with a strong emphasis on nuclear arms, and is contemplating space-based warfare. As in the 1950s, Americans are alarmed by threats from enemies within, and not only from spies and subversives. Islamist terrorists threaten devastating attacks on U.S. soil. Domestically, a ferocious drug war is making dramatic inroads into civil liberties, and few are willing to speak publicly against the simplistic Just Say No ideology. Many states have restored capital punishment, which most thought gone for good in the early 1970s. News stories about raids on crack houses are intercut with arrests of domestic terrorist cells. The imagery suggests a nation under siege.

With some obvious exceptions, sixties values went down to defeat. The revolution failed.

Matters would be more ambiguous if our sleeper woke up in 2006. Initially, he might conclude that the radical movements of his own time had succeeded. Everywhere, he sees signs of impressive feminist advances. Abortion is freely available. Women hold senior positions in business and government, and one prominent woman is widely discussed as a likely future president. The extent of racial change is just as evident. Two successive secretaries of state have been African-American, and in a Republican administration. The slightest hint of the kind of segregation that was once commonplace now meets with massive public condemnation, not to mention lawsuits. Openly gay characters proliferate in the media, while gay marriage is a leading political issue. The Democratic candidate in the most recent presidential race was a former leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Yet, looking closer, the sleeper sees that the tone of political debate is strikingly conservative. In the 2004 presidential election, issues of family and sexual morality, of abortion and gay marriage, proved very contentious, and mobilization around these themes gave conservatives a decisive electoral edge. Even among liberal politicians, few advocate the kind of welfare policies that were popular in the 1960s, and free enterprise capitalism rules unchallenged. It was a recent Democratic president who proclaimed that the era of big government is over, and boasted of eliminating welfare as we know it.damaging charge was rather that he had exaggerated his credentials as a war hero. And, astonishingly, Communism really has been rolled back, without provoking a global holocaust.

Also conservative is the new social consensus on crime and deviant behavior. Liberals and conservatives vie to impose the harshest penalties on offenders, who are imprisoned with little recourse to the alternative kinds of correction proposed a generation before. In comparison with the late 1960s, this looks like a deeply punitive society, by far the most prisonoriented of any advanced state. And far from drug use having become accepted and normal, an absolute consensus now forbids discussing any relaxation of legal prohibition. Whether dealing with drugs or sexuality, foreign policy or military action, this new society frames its problems in terms of moral absolutes, of dangerous, evil outsiders who can be identified and combated.

Most would agree that the decade of the 1960s transformed American life, and to that extent, the decade deserves its legendary status.

But just as evidently, the reform currents of the 1960s were challenged and in some important ways reversed in the following years. A modern American transported to the early 1970s would be looking at a radically different society, not just in terms of dress and hairstyles but also in social and political commonplaces. For better or worse, the world of the mid-1980s

Depending on our values, we can view this movement in different ways. Idealizing the 1960s, many baby boomers see the change in terms of a fading idealism. The elegiac movie