Laura Kalman's Right Star Rising, Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive

...The new narcissist," he argued, "seeks not to inflict his own certainties on others but to find a meaning in life...

...What they mean by this may come as a bit of a surprise...

...Postwar liberalism, she says, was defined by the idea that "high wages and regulated capital" sustained American prosperity...

...I think we're in an era where everybody is a kind of spectator," one of the Lordstown workers said in the wake of the failed strike there...

...Even the mundane public relations outreach of federal agencies was politically charged in a way hard to imagine today...

...After the 1970s, there was no going back...

...Now as then, the American economy is in turmoil...

...Although the image of class mobility might not be based in reality, it was nonetheless filled with the passion of forgetting, the vertiginous joy of fantasy, a crazy excitement that became part of the appeal of the Right...

...What happened to this sense of the importance of class...

...Why this new interest...

...This past summer, three new histories of the 1970s came out—Laura Kalman's Right Star Rising, Judith Stein's Pivotal Decade, and Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive...

...How to make sense of a period known best by what it was not...

...But they garnered tremendous attention from national media in the early part of the decade—coverage of the problem of the "blue collar blues" in publications such as the New York Times and books like The Hidden Injuries of Class that became major national bestsellers...

...In "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening," he described a world in which exhibitionistic discussions of sex and hemorrhoids substituted for the political idealism of the 1960s...

...In some ways, Stein's focus on liberalism's difficulties in confronting the recession might go too far in the opposite direction—making conservatism appear to be an accidental choice, instead of something deeply rooted in American politics...

...It may overlook some of the other deep problems in which liberalism was entangled by the end of the 1970s, such as the central role of the Democratic Party in Vietnam...

...She does not tell a story that is simply about the meteoric rise of conservatism...

...This economic breakdown, she argues, is the key to the rise of conservatism...

...The disappearance of the union world of the mid-twentieth century, with its emphasis on contracts and collective bargaining, could someday, he argues, open up the possibility for a more expansive, creative vision of class...

...Carter himself admitted as much, warning that government could not "eliminate poverty...

...It can lead to a deeper reckoning, a rejection of old images, a new confrontation with the world as it is...

...Despite this gesture, the overall image of the 1970s that these books afford is one of disillusionment, a "collective sadness," as Michael Harrington put it...

...The working class, of course, did not really disappear...

...Norton), released in paperback this year...

...For Kalman and Stein, the story of the 1970s is about those twin poles of twentieth-century politics, liberalism and conservatism...

...Reagan's victory, she suggests, was as much a "repudiation of Carter" as it was a "triumph of conservatism...

...The labor movement's disillusionment with Carter can be summed up in International Association of Machinists president William "Wimpy" Win-pisinger's succinct response when a journalist asked him what the president could do to redeem himself in the eyes of labor: "Die...

...Of special note is rock journalist Nik Cohn's odyssey through the disco clubs of Brooklyn, accompanied by his Virgil—a black dancer named Tu Sweet—which formed the basis for the New York magazine story on disco that was later made into the movie Saturday Night Fever...

...She focuses on the post-Nixon years, the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, to argue that from battles over inflation to the energy crises to the legacy of civil rights, America was overwhelmed by conflict over the right way forward...

...The country is embroiled in nasty and unpopular wars...

...But Stein's work also suggests the problems today of idealizing the postwar order...

...They produced no iconic leader, no Roosevelt, Reagan, or Martin Luther King, Jr...

...The strikes of the early 1970s helped to establish the idea that a major part of what would happen in the 1970s would be determined by the actions of the working class...

...The Miners for Democracy campaign, the fight for industrial safety at Farmington, West Virginia, the United Farm Workers crusade for grape pickers, the public sector organizing drives, the uprising at Lordstown, Ohio—all these were about more than material improvement...

...Although these fights moved from the street to the courtrooms, they did not disappear...

...But Nixon nonetheless wrote that it was "vital that we continue to recognize and work with [workers] and that we not attack unions which represent the organized structure of the working man...

...The struggles over racial integration continued through the decade, climaxing in the fierce conflicts over school busing in Northern cities and in the debates over affirmative action in higher education...

...Stein suggests that historians of the Right have told a "Whiggish" story, in which the success of the postwar conservative movement in 1980 can be traced backward to the labors of William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater in the 1950s and 1960s...

...She tells the story of Howard Jarvis and the battle for Proposition 13, which repealed property taxes in California...

...You can't change anything...

...One of the first books about the time (published in 1982 by journalist Peter Carroll) had the somewhat defensive title It Seemed Like Nothing Happened...

...You're just so small...

...He tells the story of the death (by a thousand cuts) of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act (pushed by Senator Hubert H. Humphrey and Representative Gus Hawkins), which joined the civil rights and labor movements in an attempt to craft a solution to the recession of the 1970s through an expansion of the public sector (the original version of the act would have promoted investment in housing, mass transit, day care, and health care—an "economics of abundance" to replace the "economics of scarcity," as Humphrey put it...

...What made the recession of the 1970s different from other economic slowdowns earlier in the postwar period...

...Work has killed millions," Terkel intones in the opening voice-over, sounding like a trailer for a slightly didactic conspiracy thriller...

...In a way, the idea that the state could not be relied on to carry out its promises was in fact borne out by the real failures of liberalism in the decade...

...The feminist and gay rights movements, after all, only crested in the 1970s...

...Less than two years later, we've already hit the 1970s, and the Jimmy Carter comparisons are starting to fly...

...The working-class rebellion of the early 1970s, he reminds us, brought the radicalism of the New Left, the civil rights movement, and the counterculture into organized labor...

...These insurgencies, Cowie notes, dissolved with the onset of recession in 1973 and 1974...

...Even Richard Nixon thought—as few Republican presidents would after him—that it was of the greatest political importance to craft a message that could speak to working-class people...

...What Kalman captures especially well— and what makes her account most original—is the interaction between the growth of the movement and the decline of the liberal state...

...It has long seemed easy to dismiss the decade as a time caught between the militant, heady exuberance of the 1960s and the revival of materialism and the market that defined the 1980s...

...Cohn's entire story was later revealed to have been fabricated, invented out of thin air...

...Kalman tells a story of Washington politics...

...Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson Cowie The New Press, 2010, 488 pp...

...She describes Phyllis Schlafly's anticommunist antifem-inism, Anita Bryant's maudlin homophobia, and Jerry Falwell's attempts to craft a Moral Majority...

...The book that gives the best sense of the way that it felt to live through the decade—the confusion, desperation, and anxiety, but also at times the exhilaration—is Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive...

...Serious analysis and committed activism had been replaced by political posturing that had more to do with shoring up a shaky sense of self...

...Just as the Great Depression shattered the confidence of believers in laissez-faire, the stagnation of the 1970s eroded the elan of Keynesian liberalism, making it impossible for anyone to trust in it in the same unquestioning way...

...The wacky Southern California economist Arthur Laffer, inventor of the Laffer Curve of supply-side economics, makes an appearance here, along with his menagerie of exotic animals (a terrapin and a ferret among them...

...One "crisis" after another—the energy crisis, the New York City fiscal crisis, the Iranian hostage crisis—opened up political possibility for the Right...

...He analyzes the defeat of labor law reform in 1978 under the onslaught of the organized business community—the "one-sided class war" denounced by UAW president Doug Fraser in his famous resignation from a joint labor-management group in the wake of the bill's defeat...

...But this journalistic fraud was animated by a giddy, manic energy...

...But by the 1970s, the United States had lost its postwar industrial dominance...

...The long march from the dawn of the New Deal to its rejection has apparently happened in the amount of time it took to hit the midterm elections...

...Earlier in the postwar period, deficit spending seemed the way out of a downturn...

...So does Judith Stein in Pivotal Decade, but with a special emphasis on economic policy...

...Many historians have treated the 1970s as the moment when conservatism finally crossed into the mainstream of American politics...

...The conservative movement—which had been slowly and carefully building throughout the postwar period—won its first substantial victories during the decade...

...The result, they suggest, was a deepening political pessimism throughout the entire society—a loss of confidence in the potential to act collectively to transform society for the better that has shaped American liberalism as much as American conservatism today...

...In his 1979 best-seller The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch, wrote about the ways in which modern capitalism had created a society in which the "logic of individualism" had been carried to its conclusion in a "war of all against all," rendering political engagement impossible...

...These books, however, emphasize the internal tensions and dilemmas that confronted American liberalism in the decade, more than the rise of the Right...

...Most people think of the nasty combination of high unemployment and inflation known as stagflation, but Stein argues that the crisis in American manufacturing set it apart...

...Kim Phillips-Fein is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (W.W...

...There was a vast withdrawal from public life, as people drew inward to focus on personal preoccupations: religion, meditation, yoga, diet, exercise...

...These books all make the case that the 1970s marked the birth of the post-New Deal country that we live in today...

...This was an assessment largely shaped by contemporaries...

...Like Kalman, Stein offers a welcome corrective to many recent works on the history of the Right...

...Milton Friedman said much the same thing in the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Capitalism and Freedom, trying to explain why the same ideas that bombed in the Goldwater campaign had flourished in the late 1970s: "Only a crisis— actual or perceived—produces real change...

...Not that they were entirely turned back, and not that they disappeared—the individuals and the institutions created in the earlier moments continued to shape American history...

...There is, of course, nothing inherently despairing about a loss of faith...

...Kalman hits the high points of 1970s conservatism...

...The defeat of labor in the 1970s, then, marked the end of a whole way of understanding and thinking about American politics, one that placed the collective agency of working-class people at its center...

...She teaches twentieth-century American history at New York University's Gallatin School...

...His vision of class was opportunistic and shallow, and he was more interested in recasting class in terms of the culture of white masculinity than in genuine economic solidarity...

...The recession of the 1970s transformed the militancy of the early part of the decade into a frightened nostalgia, as the assembly-line jobs that had once been seen as oppressive suddenly came to appear as the final bastion of economic security...

...The result was Ronald Reagan...

...The 1970s were unusual, he suggests, because they marked the last moment when the labor movement and the idea of the working class had sway in American political culture...

...Cowie has also put together a companion Web site for the book, with choice cultural artifacts from the 1970s—the OSHA clip mentioned at the start of this essay can be found there...

...But in contrast to the 1960s, the political dynamism of the 1970s came from the Right...

...The movie, Cowie says, tells the story of a young man who turns his back on the ethnic violence and shrinking economic possibility of his working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, disappearing into the anemic and yuppified world of Manhattan...

...As she puts it, "like Ford in 1976, Carter did not deserve to win...

...For a brief moment, it seemed as though the recession of the decade might be met with a full employment bill and real labor law reform...

...Today, the Tea Party movement rages against the idea of government doing anything, promising all freedom to the individual, even as cities shut down their fire houses and turn off their street lamps...

...Yet just as the milieu of the 1930s had little in common with the United States in 2009, these comparisons seem to gloss over the complex mood and spirit of the 1970s, which seem so remote from anything in our contemporary scene...

...In the second half of the book, Cowie takes in a wide array of sources to trace the dissolution of the idea of class...

...This sense of diminished possibility, this constriction of hope, may be the real legacy of the 1970s for our own day...

...Since that time, American politics has been seen in terms of culture wars and its economy as one of striving yet isolated entrepreneurs...

...Tom Wolfe was more direct...

...The labor movement of the 1970s took on the broader political structure of postwar society, demanding racial and sexual justice as well as a deeper transformation of the world of work...

...For Cowie, this suggests the way that the whole idea of a newly mobile, individualistic working class in the 1970s was "a deception from the very start...

...One short film for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for example, was narrated by Studs Terkel and featured documentary-style interviews with workers maimed and sickened on the job, along with footage from strikes for worker safety...

...Early in 2009, we were back in the 1930s, with Barack Obama a virtual reincarnation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

...You watch the world around you...

...in the 1970s, though, it sparked inflation...

...They marked the end of postwar abundance, the vanishing of the "affluent society...

...Faced with widening trade deficits, neither political party did anything to protect industry (for Stein, this was the crucial error...

...The dreams of the two great periods of social reform in twentieth-century America—the 1960s and, in a more distant way, the 1930s—seemed to come to disappointment in the 1970s...

...As a result, it was an era of engagement...

...You watch the wars...

...They were years of reckoning with limits, losses, defeats—or at least, years when that kind of hard-edged accounting seemed possible...

...Kalman shows how former football star Jack Kemp became the unlikely champion of Laffer's ideas, latching onto them as a cheerful alternative to traditional conservatism's emphasis on cutting the budget...

...In the final pages of his rich book, Cowie raises the idea that perhaps the loss of the old working-class ideal is not simply to be mourned...

...According to Stein, the decade was the only one in the twentieth century (other than the 1930s) in which Americans ended poorer than they began...

...In the world of popular history, there has never been a consensus on how to interpret the 1970s...

...Right and center, maybe, but who could say the same of the Left today...

...Cowie knows this well...

...There were many reasons for people on the Right and Left alike to turn away from liberalism by the early 1970s, its failure to honestly confront the economic problems of the decade being only one among them...

...But without the economic stagnation of the 1970s, conservative ideas would never have gained political traction...

...You watch the corrupt politics...

...What really defines the 1970s, for these three authors, is the challenge the old ideals of New Deal liberalism faced during the decade, in particular the ideas of the progressive working class and the possibilities of government activism...

...Austerity seems the politics of the foreseeable future...

...For many years, the 1970s were seen as a fundamentally apolitical time...

...American pundits love to make historical comparisons, so much so that the present can at times feel like a dizzying pastiche of Greatest Hit moments in the national past...

...On the contrary, she shows how the various weaknesses that plagued liberalism in the 1970s made conservative success possible...

...In the early 1970s, conservatives still seemed a fringe movement...

...On the other side, the conservative movement (and the growing business lobby in Washington) was armed with the arguments it had rehearsed throughout the postwar period blaming labor unions and government spending for inflation and slow economic growth—old medicine suddenly made to seem new and exciting by the dearth of policy ideas on the other side...

...But Cowie, as a labor historian, has a different perspective...

...Death and taxes may be inevitable, but being taxed to death is not...

...Accustomed to the rapid growth of the 1960s, the "New Democrats" of the 1970s did not understand how profoundly the terrain had shifted...

...In early 1980, Gerald Ford could confidently tell the New York Times that a "very conservative Republican can't win in a national election," not-so-coyly suggesting that perhaps he might be an alternative choice for the GOP...

...Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve Bank sent interest rates up over 20 percent, prioritizing the fight against inflation over any effort to regain economic growth...

...These were the days of Watergate, the Church Committee's revelations about the FBI and CIA, Roe v. Wade, the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 following ten years of antiwar activism, and the largest strike wave since the end of the Second World War...

...But they somehow stopped moving forward, and a new conservatism took their place...

...We are no closer to independence from oil than we were when Carter, in his famous 1979 "crisis of confidence" speech, admonished us that "owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning...

...Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein Yale University Press, 2010, 384 pp...

...You watch the taxes...

...Cowie's book captures the contradictory nature of 1970s politics better than almost any other ever written about the period...

...Strong stuff, this, for a Jew facing an eight-hour drive back to Atlanta...

...Michael Harrington described the decade by saying that the country was moving "vigorously left, right and center at the same time...

...He also pays attention to various different cultural sources—everything from Rocky to Easy Rider to the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen— to illustrate the ways that narratives of individual freedom and escape from class came to replace a faith in the potential power of working-class institutions...

...The Left did not crawl away and die once the 1960s ended...

...should they die in an accident after making the fateful choice not to answer the call, they would be doomed to roast in hell...

...But this makes its vanishing from American politics all the more tragic...

...The book opens with an account of Kalman's visit to Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church, where she hears him thunder that all those not saved should be wary on their car rides home...

...Laura Kalman's Right Star Rising rejects this image of the decade, to show a country consumed by politics...

...And the centrist Democrat in the White House again finds himself taunted relentlessly by conservatives who seem, against all odds, to be on the march...

...The triumphant narratives of American history seem to collapse when it comes to the 1970s...

...Kalman says less about the legacy of the antiwar movement, which did largely demobilize at the end of the Vietnam War, although many who had participated in it would go on to join the nuclear freeze and Central American justice movements of the 1980s...

...Or—as was the case in the 1970s—such a loss can end in a bitter retreat into a new world of dreams...

...Liberal intellectuals and policy makers were confused and frustrated by the recession...

...Almost every work of history about the 1970s written since then has been devoted to demonstrating that important things did in fact happen during these years—something more than bell bottoms, Pet Rocks, Jane Fonda's hair, and the break-ins of Nixon's Plumbers, that is...

...The recession of the 1970s, like the depression of the 1930s, became not only an economic crisis but a political one...